93 Facts About Richard Sorge

Richard Gustavovich Sorge was a German-Russian journalist and Soviet military intelligence officer who was active before and during World War II and worked undercover as a German journalist in both Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan.

Richard Sorge was tortured, forced to confess, tried and hanged in November 1944.

Richard Sorge was posthumously awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union in 1964.

Richard Sorge was born on 4 October 1895 in the settlement of Sabunchi, a suburb of Baku, Baku Governorate of the Russian Empire.

Richard Sorge was the youngest of the nine children of Gustav Wilhelm Richard Sorge, a German mining engineer employed by the Deutsche Petroleum-Aktiengesellschaft and the Caucasian oil company Branobel and his Russian wife, Nina Semionovna Kobieleva.

Richard Sorge's father moved back to Germany with his family in 1898, after his lucrative contract expired.

Richard Sorge described his father as having political views that were "unmistakably nationalist and imperialist", which he shared as a young man.

However, the cosmopolitan Richard Sorge household was "very different from the average bourgeois home in Berlin".

Richard Sorge enlisted in the Imperial German Army in October 1914, shortly after the outbreak of the First World War.

Richard Sorge initially served on the Western Front and was wounded at the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915.

Richard Sorge was seriously wounded again in April 1917, shrapnel severed three of his fingers and broke both his legs, causing a lifelong limp.

Richard Sorge was declared medically unfit for service and discharged from the army.

Richard Sorge spent the remainder of the war studying philosophy and economics at the universities of Kiel, Berlin and Hamburg.

Richard Sorge later joined the Independent Social Democratic Party and moved to Berlin, but arrived too late to participate in the Spartacist uprising.

From 1920 to 1922, Richard Sorge lived in Solingen, in present-day North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany.

Richard Sorge was joined there by Christiane Gerlach, the ex-wife of Kurt Albert Gerlach, a wealthy communist and professor of political science in Kiel, who had taught Sorge.

Richard Sorge continued his work as a journalist and helped organize the library of the Institute for Social Research, a new Marxist think tank in Frankfurt.

Richard Sorge caught the attention of one of the delegates, Osip Piatnitsky, a senior official with the Communist International, who recruited him.

However, in 1929, Richard Sorge was invited to join the Red Army's Fourth Department by department head Yan Karlovich Berzin.

Richard Sorge remained with the department for the rest of his life.

In 1929, Richard Sorge went to the United Kingdom to study the labour movement there, the status of the Communist Party of Great Britain and the country's political and economic conditions.

Richard Sorge was instructed to remain undercover and to stay out of politics.

Richard Sorge was instructed to join the Nazi Party and not to associate with any left-wing activists.

Richard Sorge's cover was his work as the editor of a German news service and for the Frankfurter Zeitung.

Richard Sorge met German Ursula Kuczynski and well-known American left-wing journalist Agnes Smedley, who worked for the Frankfurter Zeitung.

Richard Sorge introduced Sorge to Hotsumi Ozaki of the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun and to Hanako Ishii, with whom he would become romantically involved.

Richard Sorge recruited Kuczynski as a Soviet agent and became romantically involved with her.

In January 1932, Richard Sorge reported on fighting between Chinese and Japanese troops in the streets of Shanghai.

Richard Sorge returned to Moscow, where he wrote a book about Chinese agriculture.

Richard Sorge married Ekaterina Maximova, a woman he had met in China and brought back with him to Russia.

In May 1933, the GRU decided to have Richard Sorge organize an intelligence network in Japan.

Richard Sorge first went to Berlin to renew contacts in Germany and to obtain a new newspaper assignment in Japan as cover.

Richard Sorge attended so many beer halls with his new acquaintances that he gave up drinking to avoid saying anything inappropriate.

Richard Sorge was so successful at establishing his cover as an intensely Nazi journalist that when he departed Germany, Joseph Goebbels attended his farewell dinner.

Richard Sorge went to Japan via the United States, passing through New York in August 1933.

Richard Sorge was told by his GRU superiors that his mission in Japan was to "give very careful study to the question of whether or not Japan was planning to attack the USSR".

Richard Sorge was warned by his commanders not to have contact with either the underground Japanese Communist Party or the Soviet embassy in Tokyo.

Richard Sorge was an idealistic Sinophile who believed that Japan, which had started its modernisation with the Meiji Restoration, had much to teach China.

Between 1933 and 1934, Richard Sorge formed a network of informants.

Richard Sorge's agents had contacts with senior politicians and obtained information on Japanese foreign policy.

Richard Sorge was interested in Asian history and culture, especially Chinese and Japanese, and when he was sober, he tried to learn as much as he could.

Meanwhile, Richard Sorge befriended General Eugen Ott, the German military attache to Japan and seduced his wife, Helma.

Ott sent reports back to Berlin containing his assessments of the Imperial Japanese Army, which Helma Ott copied and gave to Richard Sorge, who passed them on to Moscow.

In October 1934, Ott and Richard Sorge made an extended visit to the puppet "Empire of Manchukuo", which was actually a Japanese colony, and Richard Sorge, who knew the Far East far better than Ott, wrote the report describing Manchukuo that Ott submitted to Berlin under his name.

In 1935, Richard Sorge passed on to Moscow a planning document provided to him by Ozaki, which strongly suggested that Japan was not planning on attacking the Soviet Union in 1936.

Richard Sorge guessed correctly that Japan would invade China in July 1937 and that there was no danger of a Japanese invasion of Siberia.

Richard Sorge's report was used as the basis of Dirksen's explanation of the coup attempt, which he sent back to the Wilhelmstrasse, which was satisfied at the ambassador's "brilliant" explanation of the coup attempt.

Richard Sorge lived in a house in a respectable neighborhood in Tokyo, where he was noted mostly for heavy drinking and his reckless way of riding his motorcycle.

Richard Sorge tried to curb Sorge's heavy drinking and his habit of riding his motorcycle in a way that everyone viewed as almost suicidal.

An American reporter who knew Richard Sorge later wrote that he "created the impression of being a playboy, almost a wastrel, the very antithesis of a keen and dangerous spy".

Ironically, Richard Sorge's spying for the Soviets in Japan in the late 1930s was probably safer for him than if he had been in Moscow.

Ott, now aware that Richard Sorge was sleeping with his wife, let his friend Richard Sorge have "free run of the embassy night and day", as one German diplomat later recalled: he was given his own desk at the embassy.

In 1938, Richard Sorge reported to Moscow that the Battle of Lake Khasan had been caused by overzealous officers in the Kwantung Army and that there were no plans in Tokyo for a general war against the Soviet Union.

Unaware that his friend Berzin had been shot as a "Trotskyite" in July 1938, Richard Sorge sent him a letter in October 1938:.

Richard Sorge never learned that Berzin had been shot as a traitor.

Unlike Richard Sorge, who believed in communism, Scheliha's reason for spying was money problems; he had a lifestyle beyond his salary as a diplomat, and he turned to selling secrets to provide additional income.

Richard Sorge reported that Japan did not intend for the border war with the Soviet Union that began in May 1939 to escalate into all-out war.

Richard Sorge reported that the attempt to turn the Anti-Comintern Pact into a military alliance was floundering since the Germans wanted the alliance to be directed against Britain, while the Japanese wanted it to target the Soviets.

Richard Sorge supplied Soviet intelligence with information about the Anti-Comintern Pact and the German-Japanese Pact.

In July 1941, Richard Sorge reported that German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop had ordered Ott to start pressuring the Japanese to attack the Soviet Union but that the Japanese were resisting.

However, Richard Sorge was not the only source of Soviet intelligence about Japan, as Soviet codebreakers had broken the Japanese diplomatic codes and so Moscow knew from signals intelligence that there would be no Japanese attack on the Soviet Union in 1941.

Richard Sorge reported that Japan would attack the Soviet Union from the east as soon as the German army captured any city on the Volga.

Richard Sorge was able, through one of his lovers, Margarete Harich-Schneider, a German musician living in Japan, to gain the key to Meisinger's apartment since it had once been her apartment.

Much to his relief, he learned that Meisinger had concluded that the allegations that Richard Sorge was a Soviet agent were groundless, and Richard Sorge's loyalty was to Germany.

Richard Sorge befriended Meisinger by playing on his principal weakness, alcohol, and spent much time getting him drunk, which contributed to Meisinger's favourable evaluation of Richard Sorge.

Meisinger reported to Berlin that the friendship between Ott and Richard Sorge "was now so close that all normal reports from attaches to Berlin became mere appendages to the overall report written by Richard Sorge and signed by the Ambassador".

Richard Sorge was arrested shortly thereafter, on 18 October 1941, in Tokyo.

The next day, a brief Japanese memo notified Ott that Richard Sorge had been swiftly arrested "on suspicion of espionage", together with Max Clausen.

Richard Sorge thought that Sorge had been discovered to have passed secret information on the Japan-American negotiations to the German embassy and that the arrest could have been caused by anti-German elements within the Japanese government.

Under torture, Richard Sorge confessed, but the Soviet Union denied he was a Soviet agent.

However, the Soviet Union declined all of the Japanese attempts and maintained that Richard Sorge was unknown to them.

In September 1942, Richard Sorge's wife, Katya Maximova, was arrested by the NKVD on the charges that she was a "German spy" since she was married to the German citizen Richard Sorge, and she was deported to the Gulag, where she died in 1943.

Richard Sorge ultimately struck a deal with the Kempeitai that if it spared Ishii and the wives of the other members of the spy ring, he would reveal all.

Richard Sorge was responsible for the persecution, internment and torture of the "Schindler" of Tokyo, Willy Rudolf Foerster.

Richard Sorge was hanged on 7 November 1944, at 10:20 Tokyo time in Sugamo Prison and was pronounced dead 19 minutes later.

Richard Sorge's body was not cremated because of wartime fuel shortages.

Richard Sorge was buried in a mass grave for Sugamo Prison inmates in the nearby Zoshigaya Cemetery.

Richard Sorge was survived by his mother, then living in Germany, and he left his estate to Anna Clausen, the wife of his radio operator, Max Christiansen-Clausen.

Richard Sorge kept his own teeth, belt and spectacles and had made a ring of his gold bridgework, which she wore for the rest of her life.

Richard Sorge argued that Sorge was not a Soviet agent but a heroic German patriot opposed to the Nazi regime whose motivation in providing intelligence to the Soviet Union was to bring down Hitler, rather than to support Stalin.

Augstein attacked Willoughby for his book The Shanghai Conspiracy that claimed that Richard Sorge had caused the "loss of China" in 1949 and that the Richard Sorge spy ring was in the process of taking over the US government.

Augstein argued that Willoughby and his fans had completely misunderstood that Richard Sorge's espionage was directed against Germany and Japan, not the US.

Such was the popularity of Augstein's articles that the German author Hans Hellmut Kirst published a spy novel featuring Richard Sorge as the hero, and Hans-Otto Meissner wrote the book Der Fall Richard Sorge that was a cross between a novel and a history by blending fact and fiction together with a greater emphasis on the latter.

Meissner's book, which was written as a thriller that engaged in "orientalism", portrayed Japan as a strange, mysterious country in which the enigmatic and charismatic master spy Richard Sorge operated to infiltrate both its government and the German embassy.

Meissner presented Richard Sorge as the consummate spy, a cool professional who was dressed in a rumpled trench coat and fedora and was a great womanizer, and much of the book is concerned with Richard Sorge's various relationships.

Richard Sorge had Sorge rant about his equal dislike for both Stalin and Hitler and had him say that he supplied only enough information to both regimes to manipulate them into destroying each other since it suited him to play one against the other.

Richard Sorge finally seduced Kiyomi but lost valuable time, which allowed the Kempeitai to arrest him.

Meissner had Richard Sorge constantly breaking into offices to steal information, which he did not do, as security at the German embassy was sloppy, and Richard Sorge was trusted as an apparently dedicated Nazi journalist and so breaking into offices would have been unnecessary.

The ultimate "message" of Meissner's book was that Richard Sorge was an amoral, egoistical individual whose actions had nothing to do with ideology and that the only reason for Germany's defeat by the Soviet Union was Richard Sorge's spying, which suggested that Germany lost the war only because of "fate".

Kirst further noted that Richard Sorge was betrayed by his own masters as after his arrest, and the Soviet regime denounced him as a "Trotskyite" and made no effort to save him.

Partsch concluded that the two rival interpretations of Richard Sorge put forward in the novels by Meissner and Kirst in 1955 have shaped Richard Sorge's image in the West, especially Germany, ever since their publication.

Richard Sorge was one of those selected for "hero spy" status.

The 2003 Japanese film Spy Richard Sorge, directed by Masahiro Shinoda, details his exploits in Shanghai and in Japan.