Richard Sorge
Soviet spy in Germany and Japan (1895－1944)
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 subsequently tortured, forced to confess, tried, and eventually hanged in November 1944.
He was posthumously awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union in 1964.
Early life
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.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q44580. VIAF identifies the subject as 51715274. The Library of Congress control number is n81033660. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1895, 1944, 1940 and 1941.
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This entry incorporates text from “Richard Sorge” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.