![]() ![]() The upheaval of society in his native land appealed to his newly found revolutionary spirit and, after being discharged from the army in 1918, he made his way to Kiel with the idea of spreading the Marxist ideology. While Sorge was studying at Berlin University, the Bolshevik Revolution toppled the Russian government. The Bolshevik Revolution & the German Communist Party The loss of two brothers at the front only served to strengthen those convictions. As the German economy began collapsing around him, he also decided that capitalism was the bane of the people. Eagerly delving into history, economics, and philosophy, he became convinced that the war had no meaning. They persuaded the wounded soldier to pursue his studies, which he could do while on convalescent leave. Under their tutelage, he became filled with revolutionary zeal. ![]() It was there that he finally received his political awakening at the hands of a radical Socialist doctor and his daughter, a nurse. Sorge was wounded twice that year, and his second wound sent him to a field hospital in Königsberg. The slaughter on the Eastern Front continued into 1916. Here he was, fighting for his father’s country while destroying his mother’s. Once again, he felt anxiety about the war. As the Germans advanced, Sorge saw the complete devastation that had been visited upon both the countryside and the people. He arrived in Russia just in time to take part in an offensive that was tearing the heart out of the Russian Army. This time he was sent east, to the land of his birth. He was sent home on convalescent leave but soon volunteered to return to the front. In 1915, Sorge was wounded during the bloody fighting near Ypres in Belgium. As they talked about their own families and the persecution of the working class, Sorge began a slow transformation that would eventually lead him to his position of master spy for the Soviet Union. Some were Socialists and others were radical leftists. Sorge also met a different class of people-men he would never have spent time with in Berlin society. Knee deep in mud and shivering in the cold, damp air of late fall, he began to question the validity of the war. ![]() The hell of the trenches soon extinguished the patriotic flame that had brought Sorge from Berlin to the miserable life that was the Western Front. Enlisting in the Kaiser’s army, he was sent to Belgium after a mere six weeks of training. The enthusiasm with which Europe went to war stirred the patriotic sense of the continent’s youth, and Sorge was no exception. All that changed with the assassination of Archduke Franz-Ferdinand on June 28, 1914. Like many upper-middle-class teens in the early 20th century, he tended to find that many things in life had little or no purpose. For the next three years, Richard continued his education, growing somewhat bored with his studies. In 1911, Adolf Sorge died, leaving his family with enough money to continue living quite well. He excelled in many courses, such as history and political science, but tended to disregard any subject that did not interest him. Coming from an upper-middle-class family, Richard attended a Berlin school at which he learned the basics required of all German boys of social standing. The family then packed up and moved to the Lichterfelde section of Berlin. Sorge’s home life in Imperial Russia lasted for seven years until his father’s contract expired. Mother Nina was a pretty Russian woman from whom Richard inherited his Slavic features of high cheekbones and slightly slanted eyes. His father, Adolf, was a German petroleum engineer who cut an imposing figure with his bearded face and piercing eyes. Sorge was the youngest of nine children in a German-Russian household. The story of Richard Sorge, one of the great espionage masterminds of the Soviet Intelligence Service, began on October 4, 1895, in Adjukent, a small village near Baku in what is now the Republic of Azerbaijan. One of the Great Espionage Masterminds of the 20th Century The ever-distrustful Joseph Stalin had primarily put his faith in the word of one man, and had ordered division after division of his armies in the Far East to be transported as quickly as possible to the west to blunt the German advance. Now, however, new armies seemed to be springing out of the Russian soil as if by magic as the Germans prepared their final thrust toward the Soviet capital. Since June 22, the Red Army had lost millions of dead, wounded, and captured soldiers while the Wehrmacht had advanced to the very gates of Moscow itself. ![]() The Siberians are coming!” It was a cry that spread terror through the ranks of the German Wehrmacht in the winter of 1941. ![]()
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