Richard Sorge

Richard Sorge was born in Baku in Azerbaijan, then part of Czarist Russia. His father was German and his mother was Russian. Sorge became a German citizen.

Shortly after World War I Sorge became a marxist and a member of the German Communist Party (KPD). He was recruited as a Soviet spy in the 1920s. Sorge had studied economics and taught at university, but his communist politics (and the premature death of his teacher) destroyed his academic career. Sorge worked as a journalist, when he was the head of a Soviet spy ring in Japan. Hitler's Germany was Japan's ally and Sorge went to Japan officially attached to the German Embassy. He was an accredited correspondent of the leading German journal Frankfurter Zeitung.

While in Japan, Sorge developed sources in the Japanese war cabinet and reported to Moscow in August 1941 that Japan was planning an attack on Pearl Harbor. In October 1941, as German troops threatened to capture Moscow, 700,000 Red Army troops were moved from the Far Eastern front to defend Moscow and halt the German advance. Soviet and Japanese forces clashed at the outset of World War II in the Battle of Khalkhin Gol, but upon learning that Japan was focusing on war with the United States and not the Soviet Union, defense of the Far Eastern border was no longer a necessary priority. Marshall Georgy Zhukov, who ultimately was to capture Berlin in 1945, commanded Soviet forces at Khalkhin Gol.

A number of Sorge's associates were arrested with him, among them Hozumi Ozaki and Kinkazu Saionji.

Sorge was awarded the highest honorary title of distinction in the USSR, Hero of the Soviet Union, posthumously. Many refer to Sorge as the man who saved the Soviet Union from a Nazi defeat early in the war.

External links

• Hearings on American aspects of the Richard Sorge spy case, based on testimony of Mitsusada... (1951)