Jürgen Kuczynski and the search for a (non-existent) Western spy ring in the East German Communist Party in 1953

Jürgen Kuczynski, the East German Marxist intellectual and economic historian, is best known for his numerous publications on labour history. Far less has been written about his role as a leading figure in the German Communist Party in Britain between 1936 and 1944, and his work for the US Strategic Bombing Survey in 1944–5, activities which later came back to haunt him when he was the subject of a major inquiry launched by the Central Party Control Commission in 1953. Using newly available documents in London and Berlin, this article examines the investigation into Kuczynski as a case study for the inter-relationship between party purges, spy scares and the manipulation of individual biographies during one of the most volatile periods of the cold war.