Richard Sorge, a source of inspriation for Ian Fleming's James Bond, in an undated photo. (AKG-Images/Ullstein Bild)

Richard Sorge had just returned to Tokyo on June 22, 1941, when he heard the report, being shouted by newsboys in the street, that Germany had invaded the Soviet Union. Sorge, a prominent German journalist, notorious womanizer, and heavy drinker, had earlier been driving through the countryside with his latest paramour, a beautiful German pianist. Now, sitting at the bar at the Imperial Hotel, he sank into a black mood and became belligerently drunk.

Subscribe Today

• Did you enjoy our article?
• Read more in World War II magazine
• Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!!
 

 "Hitler's a f – - -ing criminal," he shouted in English. "A murderer. But Stalin will teach the bastard a lesson. You just wait and see!" Neither the Japanese barman nor Sorge's drinking companion could calm him. From a public telephone in the lobby he dialed the German embassy. "This war is lost!" he shouted to the startled ambassador Eugen Ott, a longtime friend.

Sorge's rage was fueled in part by hatred of war (he had served in the German army in the First World War and was grievously wounded) and by his belief that Hitler's attack would lead to disaster. But there was another, more potent, reason for his anger. For Richard Sorge—the German journalist, Nazi Party member, and part-time press officer in the German embassy—was in fact an officer in the Soviet foreign military intelligence service, the GRU, and the most important Soviet spy in Asia. And just weeks earlier, his warnings to Moscow of the imminent German attack had been ignored. 

On a dispatch he sent the GRU on June 1, which read, "Expected start of German-Soviet war around June 15 is based on information Lt. Colonel Scholl brought with him from Berlin…for Ambassador Ott," Sorge's superiors in Moscow had written, "Suspicious. To be listed with telegrams intended as provocations." An earlier warning from Sorge was contemptuously dismissed by Stalin as coming from "a shit who has set himself up with some little factories and brothels in Japan."

Sorge nonetheless continued his espionage work—and after the shock of the German attack proved him right, Moscow began heeding his reports. Within a few months, the activities of this man, who many regard as the most important spy of World War II, would provide information that enabled the Soviets to halt the Nazi blitzkrieg at the gates of Moscow, and altered the course of the war.

He seemed custom-made for the role. Richard Sorge was born in 1895 in southern Russia. His mother was Russian, his father a German engineer. The family moved to Germany a few years later, where the boy was raised in an upper-middle-class home. But his Russian origins exerted a lifelong influence. In 1914, Sorge enlisted in the German army. While recuperating from shrapnel wounds that shattered his legs and left him with a lifelong limp, he seduced—and was seduced by—a nurse. She and her father, a physician and a Marxist, introduced Sorge to radical ideas. He spent the next few years studying economics and political science, and Marxist ideology.

At the end of the war, radicalism of all stripes was rampant in Germany, and Sorge veered leftward. He earned a PhD in 1919 and in the same year joined the German Communist Party. Sorge plunged into leftist propaganda work among some German coal miners with whom he had taken a job. He also plunged into an affair with the wife of one of his former professors.

Sorge was both handsome and charismatic, irresistible to women and admired by men. Such was the case with the Gerlach household. Years later Christiane Gerlach described her first sight of Sorge: "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 also charmed the professor, Christiane's husband, who agreed to an amicable divorce, and Sorge and Christiane married in 1922. It lasted only a few years. 

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to