Richard Sorge - Red Army Spy

Red Army Spy

Sorge was recruited as a spy for the Soviet Union and using the cover of being a journalist he was sent to various European countries to assess the possibility of communist uprisings taking place.

From 1920 to 1922, Sorge lived in Solingen, in present-day North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. He was joined there by Christiane Gerlach who had been the wife of Dr Kurt Albert Gerlach, a wealthy communist who had also been Sorge's professor of political science in Kiel. Sorge and Christiane married in May 1921. In 1922, he was relocated to Frankfurt, where he gathered intelligence about the business community. In the summer of 1923, he took part in the "Erste Marxistische Arbeitswoche" (First Marxist Work Week) in Ilmenau, Thuringia, an event subsidized by Felix Weil. After an attempted communist coup in October 1923, Sorge continued his work as a journalist. At the same time, he helped with organizing the library of the Institute for Social Research, of which Kurt Albert Gerlach was meant to be the first director.

In 1924, he and Christiane moved to Moscow where he officially joined the International Liaison Department of the Comintern, also an OGPU intelligence gathering body. Apparently, his dedication to duty led to his divorce. In 1929, Sorge became part of the Red Army's Fourth Department (the later GRU, or military intelligence). He remained with the Department for the rest of his life.

In 1929 Sorge arrived in England to study the labour movements then prevalent in the region, the status of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and the country's political and economic conditions. He was instructed to remain undercover and not to become involved in politics while living in England.

In November 1929 Sorge returned to Germany where he was instructed to join the Nazi Party and not to associate with left-wing activists. To help develop a cover for his spying activities he obtained a post working for the agricultural newspaper, Deutsche Getreide-Zeitung.