[1][2][3] Ludwig Lore was born to working class parents of ethnic Jewish extraction in Friedeberg am Queis in Lower Silesia (now Mirsk, Poland) on June 26, 1875.

[1][4][5] Lore attended gymnasium in "Hirschberg,[6] (now Jelenia Góra), also in Lower Silesia) and later graduated from Berlin University, where he studied under political economist Werner Sombart.

[5] Lore later moved to New York City where he joined the staff of the German-language socialist daily, the New Yorker Volkszeitung, becoming Associate Editor of the publication within a few years[8] and editor-in-chief during World War I.

[1] Under Lore the paper had more the feel of a tabloid magazine than a typical straight newspaper, an orientation which is said by American historian Paul Buhle to have "suited his personality and approach.

"[9] Lore did periodically participate in various electoral campaigns of the Socialist Party of America, such as traveling to Altoona, Pennsylvania to address a German-language street meeting in support of the November 1908 Presidential effort of Eugene V.

[13] Lore shared the platform a host of other prominent socialist leaders, who condemned the war in English, Russian, French, German, Polish, Italian, Hungarian, Yiddish, and Latvian for their international immigrant audience.

Lore was elected as a delegate to this gathering and was chosen as a member of the convention's Platform Committee — although he did not take part in the writing of the party's controversial anti-war statement, remembered as the St. Louis Manifesto.

On May 30 and 31, 1917, the Socialist Party organized an event in New York City touted as the First American Conference for Peace and Democracy, aimed at joining various anti-war groups into a common effort to bring a speedy end to the European conflagration.

James P. Cannon led the charges against Lore, which he summarized as (1) misconception of the strategy and tactics of the Communist International and (2) wrong analysis of the economic and political forces operating within the framework of present-day America.

[23] Lore was an independent thinker who was reluctant to take political orders,[24] a personal characteristic which made him unsuited for the increasingly centralized Communist movement of the late 1920s.

As editor of the Volkszeitung, Lore attempted what has described as a "balancing a feeling for a theoretical Marxist line with a more sensitive reading of American political culture," in which he "tried, and ultimately failed, to develop a communism that would meet the demands of the aging generation of radical German-Americans in the 1920s and 1930s.

"[27] By the end of the 1920s, the Volkszeitung had lost some of its radical edge, taking the form of a more vaguely "socialistic" labor and cultural publication, complete with wire service photos and non-political fare such as radio listings and classic literature.

[26] Lore sought to occupy political space in between social democracy and communism, a position roughly akin to that of the Independent Labour Party in Great Britain.

[1] For the Post, he wrote a daily foreign affairs column called "Behind the Cables," in which he often emphasized the threat to world peace implicit in the rise to power of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party in Germany.

During World War II, Lore appeared regularly on WEVD radio (established by the Socialist Party of America in 1927, taken over by The Jewish Daily Forward in 1932).

"[33] According to historians Haynes and Klehr, the exact date of Lore's termination by Soviet intelligence is not known and no record of him is said to be found in secret police archives after April 1937.

Bukharin, in his New York days, had eaten and slept in the apartment on 55th Street in Brooklyn, where Lore, his outspokenly anti-Communist wife and three wholly American sons still lived.

American historians John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, with former KGB officer Alexander Vassiliev, have credited Lore with the recruitment and handling of David A. Salmon (code-named "Willi"), one of Soviet intelligence's most important information assets in the US government.

[34] In the superheated atmosphere of the Great Purge the Trotskyists were believed by Soviet authorities to be engaged in an international terrorist conspiracy aimed at the overthrow of the Stalin regime and Lore's purported connection cast doubt upon his loyalty and reliability.

In addition, Lore was believed by his Soviet handlers to have been guilty of financial improprieties, taking the form of double-dipping for multiple monthly expense stipends.

Svetlana Chervonnaya, another Russian historian, asserts that Lore falsely claimed the high ranking functionary Salmon as his source so as to throw his Soviet handlers off the trail to the fact that he was himself rewriting information obtained from "lower level clerks at the Communications and Records Division.

"[44] After enhancing the mundane information which he received with his own interpretive content, Lore then pocketed the handsome monthly stipend which was purportedly destined for the top-ranking official Salmon, Chervonnaya charges.