It is rather a drab publication, a fourth edition of , issued by Verlag Neues Leben , in East Berlin. On one of the leading pages, it appears that the author has written an inscription for the buyer. Mit gutem Gewissen, Ruth Werner. With a clear conscience, Ruth Werner. What is going on here? Is this a hoax?
A Google search for the sentence is partially rewarding but also frustrating: it seems that this was something that Werner had declared when the book was first published. An occasion to celebrate her 75 th birthday in reproduces the sentence. The statement is, however, both anodyne and perplexing.
Of course, every memoirist faces difficulties β but was telling the truth one of these challenges? So why did I seek this particular book out? Because Ruth Werner aka Ursula Hamburger, or Kuczynski, or Beurton: agent SONIA was one of the most notorious Communist spies of the century. I direct readers to her Wikipedia entry to learn more about her life and career. Yet I was especially interested in what she had to say, because of my research into Communist subversion in the early part of World War II.
For Sonia managed to hoodwink an incompetent MI5 into letting her back into the United Kingdom, after her arranged marriage to Spanish Civil War veteran Len Beurton in Switzerland by which she gained British citizenship , in the winter of Soon thereafter, she became the primary contact for Klaus Fuchs, allowing the German Communist now also a naturalised Briton to give her atomic secrets for passing on to Moscow, and she started using radio equipment given to her by her London contacts or maybe constructed by herself to communicate information to her bosses in the Soviet Union.
Falling upon a signed copy of her memoir was quite a coup. Yet Sonia pulled off this massive espionage exercise when MI5 was completely aware of her political affiliations, and the probable intentions behind her marriage, as well as her relationship with her openly subversive brother, JΓΌrgen, who was interned early in , alongside some of his Comintern friends. Moreover, a couple of years later, in January , a wireless set was discovered at the cottage in Oxfordshire which she was renting from Neville Laski, the brother of the notorious Communist sympathizer, Harold Laski!
