Richard Sorge

In May 1921, he married Christiane, but the couple divorced after a few years.

He later married Yekaterina Maximova ("Katya").

He was born on October 4, 1895, in Sabunchi, a suburb of Baku (at that time a part of the Russian Empire), to Wilhelm Richard Sorge and Nina Semionovna Kobieleva as the youngest of their nine children.

His father was a German while his mother was a Russian. He worked with the ‘Caucasian Oil Company’ as a mining engineer. After his father’s contract expired, the family moved to Germany where he was brought up in a cosmopolitan upper middle class household.

He joined the German Army in October 1914, following the outbreak of ‘First World War’ on July 28, 1914. He was posted in the ‘3rd Guards Corps’ at a field artillery battalion. He was 18 at that time.

In March 1916, he got badly injured when three of his fingers were cut off by shrapnel while serving the Western Front. The incident also broke his legs that caused permanent damage making him limp throughout his life. He became a corporal after a promotion and was awarded the ‘Iron Cross’.

While recovering from injury he got involved in a relationship with a nurse. Greatly motivated by her father, Sorge went through the works of Marx and turned a Communist.

The Soviet intelligence inducted him as an agent and Sorge visited many European nations as a journalist to examine possibilities of communist revolutions.

In 1922 after relocating to Frankfurt, he was delegated to collect intelligence regarding the business community.

In 1923 he participated in the ‘Erste Marxistische Arbeitswoche’, a Marxist conference in Ilmenau in Thuringia, Germany. While working as a journalist, he helped in setting up library of the ‘Institute for Social Research’.

Officially he was inducted in the Comintern’s ‘International Liaison Department’ in 1924 after he relocated to Moscow.

In 1929 he became associated with the ‘Fourth Department’ of the ‘Red Army’ and continued the association throughout his life.