Richard Sorge

Soviet spy in Germany and Japan (1895－1944)

Fame58.5
Momentum1.1
Journalists rank#247

Source-basedStable

Fame58.5
Momentum1.1
Journalists rank#247
Wikipedia46.6K

Lived 1895–1944, aged 49

JournalistsJournalist

Wikipedia
53 languages
Cross-language footprint
Era
1895–1944
Aged 49
Awards
3
recognised works

Summary

Updated 2026-06-08

A German journalist filing dispatches from Tokyo who was actually a Soviet spy — and who told Stalin, in September 1941, that Japan wouldn't attack from the east. The intelligence freed divisions to stop the Wehrmacht at Moscow. He was caught a month later, hanged three years after that, and disowned by the regime he'd saved.

Biography

About

Richard Sorge was born in 1895, a German-Russian who became a Soviet military intelligence officer working under the codename "Ramsay." He went undercover as a German journalist, first in Nazi Germany and later in the Empire of Japan. In 1940 and '41, from Tokyo, he passed word of Hitler's coming invasion of the Soviet Union — then, in mid-September 1941, sent the message that mattered most: Japan would not open a second front in the near future. A month later Japanese authorities arrested him for espionage. He was tortured, forced to confess, and tried. Stalin refused to intervene. Sorge was…

Gallery