Richard Sorge
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Richard Sorge (Russian: Рихард Зорге) (October 4, 1895 - November 7, 1944) was a revolutionary, a journalist, working in Germany and Japan, and a spy for the Soviet Union in Japan before and during World War II. His NKVD codename was "Ramsay."
Sorge was born in Adjikent, Baku, Azerbaijan which was part of Imperial Russia at the time. He was one of the nine children of the German mining engineer Wilhelm Sorge and his Russian wife Nina. His family moved to Germany when he was three years of age. His uncle had been a secretary for Karl Marx.
In October 1914 Sorge volunteered to serve during World War I. He joined a student battalion of the 3rd Guards, Field Artillery. During his service in the Western Front he was severely wounded in March 1916 when shrapnel broke both his legs and cut off three of his fingers, causing him a lifelong limp. He was promoted to corporal, received an Iron Cross and later medically discharged.
During his convalescence he read Marx and adopted communist ideology. He spent the rest of the war studying economics in universities of Berlin, Kiel and Hamburg. In 1920 he graduated with a Ph.D. in political science. He also joined the KPD, the German Communist Party. His political views, however, got him fired from both a teaching job and coal mining work. He fled to Moscow where he became a junior agent for Comintern.
In 1921 Sorge returned to Germany with a young lady that he met at a night club. Her name was Christiane Gerlach, and they soon married and moved to Solingen, in present-day North Rhine-Westphalia. In 1922 the Communists relocated him to Frankfurt, where he gathered intelligence about the business community. After an attempted communist coup in October 1923 he continued his work as a journalist.
In 1924 he moved to Moscow where he officially joined the International Liaison Department of the Comintern, also an OGPU intelligence gathering body. Apparently his dedication to duty led to his divorce. In 1928 he was transferred to GRU duties and in 1930 sent to Shanghai to gather intelligence and foment revolution. Officially, he worked as the editor of a German news service and for the Frankfurter Zeitung. There he met Hotsumi Ozaki through Agnes Smedley's introduction. Ozaki was a Japanese journalist working for the Asahi Shimbun, who later became an informant to Sorge. In January 1932 Sorge reported on fighting between Chinese and Japanese troops in the streets of Shanghai. In December he was recalled to Moscow.
Sorge was decorated and remarried. In 1933 he was sent to Berlin with the code name "Ramsay" ("Рамзай" (Ramzai, Ramzay)), to renew contacts in Germany so he could pass as a German journalist in Japan. He arrived in Yokohama on September 6, 1933.
In 1933-1934 Sorge built a network to collect intelligence for the NKVD in Japan. His agents had contacts with senior politicians and through that, to information of Japan's foreign policy. He also recontacted Hotsumi Ozaki who developed a close contact with the prime minister Fumimaro Konoye. Ozaki copied secret documents for Sorge.
Officially Sorge joined the Nazi party and worked with the local embassy and ambassador Eugen Ott as an agent for the Abwehr. He used the embassy for double-checking his information. Stress also increased his drinking.
Sorge supplied the Soviets with information about the Anti-Comintern Pact, the German-Japanese Pact and warned of the Pearl Harbor attack. In 1941 Sorge informed them of the exact launch date of Operation Barbarossa. Moscow answered with thanks but Stalin largely ignored it.
Before the battle for Moscow, Sorge transmitted information that Japan was not going to attack the Soviet Union in the East. This crucial information allowed Georgy Zhukov to redeploy Siberian troops for the defense of Moscow.
The second most important piece of information he passed along concerned the Battle of Stalingrad - the turning point in the war which is considered one of the bloodiest and largest battles in history. Richard Sorge alerted Moscow that Japan would attack the Soviet Union from the East as soon as the German army captured any city on the Volga, thus effectively disrupting oil supplies from Baku and also ammunition and food supplies sent by the allies from the Persian Gulf through Iran, Soviet Azerbaijan and up the Volga river.
The Japanese secret service had already intercepted many of his messages and begun to close in. Ozaki was arrested on October 14, 1941 and interrogated. Sorge was arrested in October 18, 1941 in Tokyo. Sorge was not exchanged for Japanese prisoners of war, because the Soviet government as well as Sorge himself denied that he was spying for USSR. He was incarcerated in Sugamo Prison.
Richard Sorge was hanged on November 7, 1944, 10:20 a.m. Tokyo time. Hotsumi Ozaki was hanged on the same day. The Soviet Union did not acknowledge Sorge until 1964. It was argued that Sorge's biggest coup led to his undoing, because Stalin could not afford to let it become known that he rejected his intelligence data about the German attack in 1941. However, it should also be mentioned that nations seldom officially recognize their own spies.
On November 5, 1964 Richard Sorge was posthumously awarded the honorary title of Hero of the Soviet Union.
In 1961 a movie called Qui êtes-vous, Monsieur Sorge? (Who Are You, Mr. Sorge?) was produced in France in collaboration with West Germany, Italy and Japan. This movie was very popular in the Soviet Union as well.
An interesting but rather little-known conspiracy theory of the Cold War held that Richard Sorge had only been "mock-executed" by the Japanese and had actually been returned to the Soviet Union where he continued to work for the KGB. Though many mysteries of the Cold War have been solved since the fall of communism in the USSR, no proof of this theory has emerged. In one of his novels, M.E. Chaber (pen-name of Ken Crossen), an American writer who penned the Milo March detective series, has his hero meet an unnamed Russian master-spy who, the books hints, is none other than Richard Sorge.
See also
See Related
An excellent fictional account of Sorge's activities is Letze Karte spielt der Tod by Hans Hellmut Kirst. That book was published in English as The Last Card (New York: Pyramid Publications, Inc., 1967) and Death Plays the Last Card (London: Fontana, 1968).External links
- The 2003 Japanese movie [Spy Sorge] about Richard Sorge's life includes some scenes shot in Kitakyushu, including one at the West Japan Industrial Club in Tobata ward, and another (a press conference) at the Mitsui club in Moji-ko.
- 1998 book ['"Stalin's Spy: Richard Sorge and the Tokyo Espionage Ring"'] by Robert Whymant.
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