Born in Moscow as Vaslav Korskayev, he had emigrated to Poland with his parents when he was five, and to Germany two years thereafter, just before the outbreak of the Great War. The painful years of his childhood had taught him two things: to hate, and to form no lasting allegiances except to himself.

The natural antipathy between Germans and Russians first of all caused him to hate himself—to hate his mother tongue, to hate his accent, to hate his name, to hate the heritage of his Russian blood. Everywhere he went he was reviled and treated with contempt, made fun of, laughed at, and used by bullying German youths as an object of scorn and derision. He tried hard to fit in, to be like the other children, to speak the new language correctly. But he was different, and they made sure he knew he was an outcast and would never be “one of them.”

Very soon, as a result, he learned to hate the German people as well. He hated them for their arrogance, for their Aryan pride, for the puffed-up superiority they felt over all other peoples and races. But he learned too that to survive he had to pretend to become one of them, to play the game. He vowed that by the time he was twenty he would speak more flawless German than any native Austrian or Bavarian. He would beat them at their own game. He would have his revenge, though he had to achieve it silently. He would disguise himself as the consummate German and have the last laugh on them all.

After the war, he changed his name to Emil Korsch, became a German citizen, and, after his parents’ death, in the confused political climate of the early twenties, managed to secure forged identity papers that transformed him into a native German, born and raised right here in Berlin. He was aware of the revolution in his motherland, but was so torn with twisted and confused loyalties that he never took seriously the idea of returning to Bolshevik Russia and became a German Fascist instead, joining the Oberland group and eventually becoming one of the brownshirted Nazi SS agents.