The spy who stole the war’s timetable in Tokyo
“The world war… exerted the deepest influence on my entire life. Whatever other factors may have affected me, it was solely because of this war that I became a communist.” — from his 1927 autobiography
A Soviet intelligence officer who worked under cover as a German correspondent in Tokyo. He warned of Operation Barbarossa and confirmed Japan's southward turn, enabling Siberian divisions to be thrown into the Moscow front. Executed in 1944; made a Hero of the Soviet Union in 1964.
Career Timeline
- 1925–29Comintern, then Red Army intelligence
- 1930–33The Shanghai network
- 1933–41Tokyo: the correspondent the German embassy trusted
- 1941.5–6Warns of Barbarossa; ignored
- 1941.9“Japan will not strike north”, the basis for moving the Siberian divisions
- 1941.10/1944.11Arrested; hanged in Tokyo
Related historical events
1941, the Signals from Tokyo
Born in Baku and raised in Berlin, Richard Sorge came back from the Western Front of the First World War three times wounded and a convinced Marxist. Moving from the German Communist Party into Comintern intelligence work, he arrived in Tokyo in 1933 under cover as a German newspaper correspondent, and over the next eight years built the Ramsay ring, reckoned among the finest espionage networks of the twentieth century. Carrying a Nazi party card, he won the personal confidence of Ott, the German ambassador to Japan, gaining access to the embassy's inner information, while Ozaki Hotsumi, an adviser to the Konoe cabinet, relayed the thinking of the highest levels of the Japanese government.
From the spring of 1941 Sorge repeatedly cabled Moscow warnings about German preparations for an attack on the Soviet Union. His May and June dispatches described the concentration of forces and the expected timing, but amid conflicting reports from many intelligence channels, Stalin and the intelligence leadership suspected a British provocation, and the warnings went unused.
His most decisive contribution came that autumn. In September and October 1941 Sorge signalled his judgment that Japan had decided to strike south rather than north against the Soviet Far East. Together with other sources, this reporting underpinned the decision to transfer Soviet divisions from the Far East toward Moscow, troops that went into the December counteroffensive before the capital.
7 November 1944, the Gallows at Sugamo
On 18 October 1941 the Japanese special higher police arrested Sorge. Ozaki and the other members of the ring were rounded up one after another, and under interrogation Sorge admitted that he had worked for the Comintern and the Red Army, while insisting that his work had been aimed not at hostility to Japan but at preventing war. The Soviet government denied knowing him, and no exchange of detainees ever materialized.
On 7 November 1944, the twenty-seventh anniversary of the October Revolution, Sorge was hanged at Sugamo prison in Tokyo. Prison records relate that at the last moment he called out, in Japanese, salutes to the Red Army, the international communist movement and the Soviet Communist Party. Ozaki Hotsumi was executed the same day.
For nearly twenty years the Soviet Union kept silent about his name. Only in 1964 was Sorge posthumously awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union; his face appeared on a postage stamp, and streets in Moscow and other cities took his name. His remains lie in Tama cemetery in Tokyo, where his Japanese companion Ishii Hanako tended the grave for decades.