Concept
Rudolf Albert Hamburger (3 May 1903 – 1 December 1980) was a German Bauhaus-inspired architect. Many of his most important commissions were undertaken in Shanghai where he lived and worked between 1930 and 1936. Late in 1930, his wife Ursula Kuczynski was recruited to work for Soviet intelligence; he supported her espionage related activities in various practical ways until their divorce in 1939, after which he became involved with spying for the Soviets on his own account. By 1943 he had ended up in Tehran where British forces were present in large numbers. Imprisoned successively by American forces and British forces, when he managed to get away he made for the Soviet Union in order to seek asylum. Three days after arriving in Moscow he was arrested. He spent the next ten years in a succession of labour camps, and after a further two years in "internal exile" was able to leave the Soviet Union in 1955. He moved to Dresden and resumed his architectural career. Rudolf Hamburger is known to students of espionage as the first husband of Ursula Kuczynski, celebrated in some quarters as "Stalin's best female spy" ("Stalins beste Spionin"). Rudolf Hamburger was born at Landeshut, a small town on the southern edge of Lower Silesia. He was the second of his parents' three recorded children, all of them boys. In 1890 his father, Max Hamburger (1868–1952), had inherited from an uncle one of the several textile mills in the town. The administration offices and storage facilities were adjacent to the family home. During the 1920s the business employed 850 people. Max Hamburger was for many years chairman of the local chamber of commerce and, unusually for his class, a committed activist in liberal politics. Else Gradenwitz, the boy's mother, was a banker's daughter: she looked out for the women working in the factory and provided a kindergarten for their children. The grandparents all lived in Breslau and vacation stays in the city were frequent. In 1908, inspired by the "Krupp settlement" in Essen, the firm had built a model housing estate ("Siedlung") for the workers.