[4][5] 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.

[7] In Sorge's own words: The one thing that made my life a little different from the average was a strong awareness of the fact that I had been born in the southern Caucasus and that we had moved to Berlin when I was very small.

In Kiel, he worked as an assistant to the eminent sociologist Kurt Albert Gerlach and also witnessed the sailors' mutiny which helped spark the German Revolution.

In 1929, Sorge went to the United Kingdom to study the labour movement there, the status of the Communist Party of Great Britain and the country's political and economic conditions.

[21] Elsa Poretsky, the wife of Ignace Reiss, a fellow GRU agent, commented: "His joining the Nazi Party in his own country, where he had a well documented police record was hazardous, to say the least... his staying in the very lion's den in Berlin, while his application for membership was being processed, was indeed flirting with death".

In Germany, he received commissions from two newspapers, the Berliner Börsen Zeitung and the Tägliche Rundschau, to report from Japan and the Nazi theoretical journal Geopolitik.

The USSR, as it viewed the prominent role and attitude taken by the Japanese military in foreign policy after the Manchurian incident, had come to harbor a deeply implanted suspicion that Japan was planning to attack the Soviet Union, a suspicion so strong that my frequently expressed opinions to the contrary were not always fully appreciated in Moscow....[26]He was warned by his commanders not to have contact with either the underground Japanese Communist Party or the Soviet embassy in Tokyo.

[31] Using notes supplied to him by Ozaki, Sorge submitted a report stating that the Imperial Way Faction in the Japanese Army, which had attempted the coup, was composed of younger officers from rural backgrounds.

Claiming too many pressing responsibilities, he disobeyed Josef Stalin's orders to return to the Soviet Union in 1937 during the Great Purge, as he realised the risk of arrest because of his German citizenship.

[38] In 1938, Sorge reported to Moscow that the Battle of Lake Khasan had been caused by overzealous officers in the Kwantung Army and that there were no plans in Tokyo for a general war against the Soviet Union.

[37] The two most authoritative sources for intelligence for the Soviet Union on Germany in the late 1930s were Sorge and Rudolf von Scheliha, the First Secretary at the German embassy in Warsaw.

[39] Unlike Sorge, who believed in communism, Scheliha's reason for spying was money problems; he had a lifestyle beyond his salary as a diplomat, and he turned to selling secrets to provide additional income.

[15] Moscow received the reports, but Stalin and other top Soviet leaders ultimately ignored Sorge's warnings, as well as those of other sources, including early false alarms.

Stalin was quoted as having ridiculed Sorge and his intelligence before "Barbarossa": There's this bastard who's set up factories and brothels in Japan and even deigned to report the date of the German attack as 22 June.

[15] On 2 July, an Imperial Conference attended by the emperor, Konoe and the senior military leaders approved occupying all of French Indochina and to reinforce the Kwantung Army for a possible invasion of the Soviet Union.

[48] On 25 August, Sorge reported to Moscow: "Invest [Ozaki] was able to learn from circles closest to Konoye... that the High Command... discussed whether they should go to war with the USSR.

[15] On 14 September, Sorge reported to Moscow, "In the careful judgment of all of us here... the possibility of [Japan] launching an attack, which existed until recently, has disappeared...."[15] Sorge advised the Red Army on 14 September that Japan would not attack the Soviet Union until: This information made possible the transfer of Soviet divisions from the Far East, although the presence of the Kwantung Army in Manchuria necessitated the Soviet Union's keeping a large number of troops on the eastern borders...[50]Various writers have speculated that the information allowed the release of Siberian divisions for the Battle of Moscow, where the German Army suffered its first strategic defeat in the war.

By 1941, the Nazis had instructed SS Standartenführer Josef Albert Meisinger, the "Butcher of Warsaw", who was by then the Gestapo resident at the German embassy in Tokyo, to begin monitoring Sorge and his activities.

He thought that Sorge had been discovered to have passed secret information on the Japan-American negotiations to the German embassy and also that the arrest could have been caused by anti-German elements within the Japanese government.

A white memorial stone at the site bears an epitaph in Japanese, the first two lines read: "Here lies a hero who sacrificed his life fighting against war and for world peace".

[73] The first effort to present Sorge in a positive light occurred in the summer of 1953, when the influential publisher Rudolf Augstein wrote a 17-part series in his magazine, Der Spiegel.

[74] Meissner's book, which was written as a thriller that engaged in "orientalism", portrayed Japan as a strange, mysterious country in which the enigmatic and charismatic master spy Sorge operated to infiltrate both its government and the German embassy.

[76] At the book's climax, Sorge agreed to work for the American Office of Strategic Services, in exchange for being settled in Hawaii, and he was in the process of learning that Japan is planning on bombing Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, but his love of women proved to be his undoing as the Japanese dancer Kiyomi rejected his sexual advances.

Meissner avoided any mention of SS Standartenführer Josef Albert Meisinger, the "Butcher of Warsaw" who was stationed at the German embassy as the police attaché to Japan.

[79] Meissner portrayed the Auswärtiges Amt in the traditional manner, as a glamorous, elitist group that operated in exotic places like Japan serving Germany, not the Nazi regime.

[79] Kirst's book Die letzte Karte spielt der Tod was a novel that offered a considerably more realistic picture than Meissner's romanticised portrayal of Sorge.

[80] Kirst's book depicted Sorge as a "lonely, desperate" man, a tragic, wounded individual with a reckless streak who engaged in maniacal binge drinking, nearly suicidal motorcycle riding across the Japanese countryside, and though he wanted love, he was incapable of maintaining lasting relationships.

[80] Unlike Meissner, Kirst had Meisinger appear as one of the book's villains by portraying him as an especially loathsome and stupid SS officer, who fully deserved to be deceived by Sorge.

In his 1981 book, Their Trade is Treachery, the author Chapman Pincher asserted that Sorge, a GRU agent himself, recruited the Englishman Roger Hollis in China in the early 1930s to provide information.

As detailed by former MI5 staffer Peter Wright in his 1988 book Spycatcher, Hollis was accused of being a Soviet agent, but despite several lengthy and seemingly thorough investigations, no conclusive proof was ever obtained.