Richard Gustavovich Sorge (Russian: Рихард Густавович Зорге, romanized: Rikhard Gustavovich Zorge; 4 October 1895 – 7 November 1944) was a German 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. His codename was "Ramsay" (Рамза́й).
Sorge is known for his service in Japan in 1940 and 1941, when he provided information about Adolf Hitler's plan to attack the Soviet Union. Then, in mid-September 1941, he informed the Soviets that Japan would not attack the Soviet Union in the near future. A month later, Sorge was arrested in Japan for espionage. He was tortured, forced to confess, tried and hanged in November 1944.
He was posthumously awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union in 1964.
Sorge was born on 4 October 1895 in the settlement of Sabunchi, a suburb of Baku, then part of the Russian Empire (now Azerbaijan). He was the youngest of the nine children of Gustav Wilhelm Richard Sorge (1852–1907), a German mining engineer employed by the Deutsche Petroleum-Aktiengesellschaft (DPAG) and the Caucasian oil company Branobel and his Russian wife, Nina Semionovna Kobieleva. His father moved back to Germany with his family in 1898, after his lucrative contract expired. In Sorge's own words:
The one thing that made my life a little different from the average was a strong awareness of the fact that I had been born in the southern Caucasus and that we had moved to Berlin when I was very small.
Sorge attended Oberrealschule Lichterfelde when he was six. He described his father as having political views that were "unmistakably nationalist and imperialist", which he shared as a young man. However, the cosmopolitan Sorge household was "very different from the average bourgeois home in Berlin". Sorge considered Friedrich Adolf Sorge, an associate of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, to be his grandfather, but he was actually Sorge's great-uncle.
Sorge enlisted in the Imperial German Army in October 1914, shortly after the outbreak of the First World War. At 18, he was posted to a reserve infantry battalion of the 3rd Guards Division. He initially served on the Western Front and was wounded at the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915. After a period of convalescence in Berlin, Sorge was transferred to the Eastern Front and promoted to the rank of corporal. He was seriously wounded again in April 1917, shrapnel severed three of his fingers and broke both his legs, causing a lifelong limp. Afterward, Sorge was awarded the Iron Cross, Second Class for bravery. He was subsequently declared medically unfit for service and discharged from the army. After serving in the war, Sorge, who had started out in 1914 as a right-wing nationalist, became disillusioned by what he called the "meaninglessness" of the conflict and gravitated to the political left.
During his convalescence he read Marx, Engels and Rudolf Hilferding and eventually became a communist, mainly by the influence of the father of a nurse with whom he had developed a relationship. He spent the remainder of the war studying philosophy and economics at the universities of Kiel, Berlin and Hamburg. In Kiel, he worked as an assistant to the eminent sociologist Kurt Albert Gerlach and also witnessed the sailors' mutiny which helped spark the German Revolution. He later joined the Independent Social Democratic Party and moved to Berlin, but arrived too late to participate in the Spartacist uprising.
Sorge received his doctorate in political science (Dr. rer. pol.) from Hamburg in August 1919. By this time he had joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), and was engaged as an activist for the party in Hamburg and subsequently Aachen. His political views got him fired from both a teaching job and coal mining work.
Soviet military intelligence agent
Sorge was recruited as an agent for Soviet intelligence. With the cover of a journalist, he was sent to various European countries to assess the possibility of communist revolutions.
From 1920 to 1922, Sorge lived in Solingen, in present-day North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. He 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. Christiane Gerlach later remembered about meeting Sorge for the first time: "It was as if a stroke of lightning ran through me. In this one second something awoke in me that had slumbered until now, something dangerous, dark, inescapable...".
Sorge and Christiane married in May 1921. In 1922, he was relocated to Frankfurt, where he gathered intelligence about the business community. In the summer of 1923, he took part in the Erste Marxistische Arbeitswoche ("First Marxist Work Week") Conference in Ilmenau. Sorge continued his work as a journalist and also helped organize the library of the Institute for Social Research, a new Marxist think tank in Frankfurt.
In 1924, he was made responsible for the security of a Soviet delegation attending the KPD's congress in Frankfurt. He caught the attention of one of the delegates, Osip Piatnitsky, a senior official with the Communist International, who recruited him. That year, he and Christiane moved to Moscow, where he officially joined the International Liaison Department of the Comintern, which was also an OGPU intelligence-gathering body. Apparently, Sorge's dedication to duty led to his divorce. In 1925, he joined the Soviet Communist Party and received Soviet citizenship. Initially he worked as an assistant in the information department and was later the political and scientific secretary of the organizational department of the Marx–Engels–Lenin Institute in Moscow.
After several years he became enmeshed in the factional struggles in the communist movement that occurred between the death of Vladimir Lenin and the consolidation of power by Joseph Stalin, being accused of supporting Stalin's last factional opponent, Nikolai Bukharin, alongside three of his German comrades. However, in 1929, Sorge was invited to join the Red Army's Fourth Department (the later GRU, or military intelligence) by department head Yan Karlovich Berzin. He remained with the department for the rest of his life.
In 1929, 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. He was instructed to remain undercover and to stay out of politics. In November 1929, Sorge was sent to Germany. He was instructed to join the Nazi Party and not to associate with any left-wing activists. As cover, he got a job with the agricultural newspaper Deutsche Getreide-Zeitung.
In 1930, Sorge was sent to Shanghai. His cover was his work as the editor of a German news service and for the Frankfurter Zeitung. He contacted another agent, Max Christiansen-Clausen. Sorge also met German Ursula Kuczynski and well-known American left-wing journalist Agnes Smedley, who also worked for the Frankfurter Zeitung. She introduced Sorge to Hotsumi Ozaki of the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun (a future Sorge recruit) and to Hanako Ishii, with whom he would become romantically involved. Sorge recruited Kuczynski as a Soviet agent and became romantically involved with her.
Shortly after his arrival in China, he was able to send intelligence regarding plans by Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist government for a new offensive against the Chinese Communist Party in the Chinese Civil War, based largely on information gathered from German military advisors to the Nationalists.