![]() ![]() In 1922, he was relocated to Frankfurt, where he gathered intelligence about the business community. Sorge and Christiane married in May 1921. In this one second something awoke in me that had slumbered until now, something dangerous, dark, inescapable.". Christiane Gerlach later remembered about meeting Sorge for the first time: "It was as if a stroke of lightning ran through me. 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. With the cover of a journalist, he was sent to various European countries to assess the possibility of communist revolutions.įrom 1920 to 1922, Sorge lived in Solingen, in present-day North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. Sorge was recruited as an agent for Soviet intelligence. His political views got him fired from both a teaching job and coal mining work. 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. Sorge received his doctorate in political science (Dr. He subsequently moved on to Berlin, but arrived too late to participate in the Spartacist uprising. In Kiel, he witnessed the sailors' mutiny which helped spark the German Revolution and joined the Independent Social Democratic Party. He spent the remainder of the war studying economics at the universities of Kiel, Berlin and Hamburg. ![]() ĭuring 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. While fighting 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 war and moved to the left. He was promoted to the rank of corporal, received the Iron Cross and was later medically discharged. Shrapnel severed three of his fingers and broke both his legs, causing a lifelong limp. He served on the Western Front and was severely wounded there in March 1916. At 18, he was posted to a field artillery battalion with the 3rd Guards Division. Sorge enlisted in the Imperial German Army in October 1914, shortly after the outbreak of World War I. 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. However, the cosmopolitan Sorge household was "very different from the average bourgeois home in Berlin". He described his father as having political views that were "unmistakably nationalist and imperialist", which he shared as a young man. Sorge attended Oberrealschule Lichterfelde when he was six. 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. His father moved back to Germany with his family in 1898, after his lucrative contract expired. 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. Sorge was born on 4 October 1895 in the settlement of Sabunchi, a suburb of Baku, Baku Governorate of the Russian Empire (now Baku, Azerbaijan). Early life House in Sabunchi, Azerbaijan, in which Sorge lived from 1895 to 1898 Sorge (left) and chemist Erich Correns during World War I in 1915 He was posthumously awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union in 1964. Stalin declined to intervene on his behalf with the Japanese. He was tortured, forced to confess, tried and hanged in November 1944. A month later, Sorge was arrested in Japan for espionage. Then, in mid-September 1941, he informed the Soviets that Japan would not attack the Soviet Union in the near future. ![]() Sorge is most famous for his service in Japan in 19, when he provided information about Adolf Hitler's plan to attack the Soviet Union. A number of famous personalities considered him one of the most accomplished spies. Richard 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. Iron Cross, II class (for World War I campaign)Ĭhristiane Gerlach (1921–1929), Ekaterina Alexandrovna (1929(?)–1943) Baku, Baku Governorate, Caucasus Viceroyalty, Russian Empire (now Baku, Azerbaijan) ![]()
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