Three weeks after his return to the front near Baranovichi, south-west of Minsk, in March 1916 Sorge was wounded for a third time. This time his injuries were nearly fatal. Both his legs were shattered by shrapnel and three fingers partially amputated. His injuries left him with a pronounced limp for the rest of his life. After an agonising journey across occupied Russia he was brought to the university hospital in Königsberg, the historic capital of East Prussia recently recaptured from the tsar. He was promoted to the rank of corporal, received the Iron Cross second class and a medical discharge from the army. He also learned that two of his bothers had been killed in combat.35
The Russian shell that shattered Sorge’s legs and his military career also destroyed his last illusions. ‘I was plunged into an intense confusion of the soul,’ he wrote. A powerful revulsion for ‘claims of spirituality and idealism trumpeted forth by nations at war’ grew in him, as well as ‘the notion … that a violent political change was the only way of extricating our selves from this quagmire’.36
Like many of his contemporaries, Sorge had undergone a violent rebirth. It isolated him in an inner world divorced from his family and class and placed in doubt the very foundations of the society in which he had grown up.37 Another German infantry corporal who was also recovering from his wounds in the military hospital of Beelitz-Heilstätten near Berlin at the same time was similarly tormented. ‘There followed terrible days and even worse nights. In those nights hatred grew in me hatred for those responsible,’ wrote Adolf Hitler in his 1925 memoir Mein Kampf. ‘In the days that followed, my own fate became known to me … I for my part decided to go into politics.’38 The anger and revulsion which drove a generation of young war veterans into radical politics on both left and right had an identical wellspring.
Immobile and in traction in his hospital bed, Sorge began to read his way towards truth. A ‘very cultured and intelligent nurse’ in the Königsberg hospital brought him books that were the building blocks of his socialism – Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, Friedrich Engels’s Anti-Dühring, Rudolf Hilferding’s 1910 tract Finance Capital. Her father, a doctor, gave Sorge his first ‘detailed account of the state of the revolutionary movement in Germany, of the various parties, factions, and groups that had been established, and of international phenomena in the revolutionary movement. For the first time I heard of Lenin and of his activities in Switzerland … Already, I regarded myself as an apostle of the revolutionary labour movement.’39 Sorge also devoured Kant and Schopenhauer, the ancient Greek philosophers and Hegel – ‘a ladder to Marxism’. For the first time in many years, and ‘despite the seriousness of my injuries and the excruciating pain involved in their treatment, I was happy’.40
After weeks learning to walk again, Sorge was able to move back to Berlin with his mother in the late summer of 1916. In October he enrolled in the economics faculty of Berlin University. As he studied, Germany’s war effort and economy began to fall apart. ‘The highly vaunted German economic machine crumbled in ruins; I myself, like countless other members of the proletariat [sic] felt the collapse through hunger and constant food shortages. Capitalism had disintegrated into its component parts: anarchism and unscrupulous merchants. I saw the downfall of the German Empire, whose political machinery had been termed indestructible. The members of Germany’s ruling class, shaking their heads in helpless despair over these developments, split morally and politically. Culturally and ideologically, the nation fell back on empty talk of the heritage of the past or turned to anti-Semitism or Roman Catholicism.’41
News of the Bolshevik coup in Russia in November 1917 cemented Sorge’s growing socialist convictions. ‘I decided not only to support the movement theoretically and ideologically but to become an actual part of it.’42 A lifetime later, in a Japanese prison as a convicted communist spy, he remained convinced that ‘my decision of some 25 years ago was correct … the only fresh and effective ideology was supported and fought for by the revolutionary labour movement. This most difficult, daring, and noble ideology strove to eliminate the causes, economic and political, of this war and any future ones by means of internal revolution.’43
The British journalist Murray Sayle noted a striking similarity between Sorge and another great Soviet spy, Kim Philby, whom he had interviewed in Moscow in 1967. Though of different generations, Philby and Sorge were ‘psychic twins’, wrote Sayle, ‘two textbook examples of the rare species we might call Homo undercoverus – those who find the dull, unclassified lives that the rest of us lead simply not worth living. The parallels between the two are eerie. Both were born to peripatetic parents, far from what was to pass for home … Both enjoyed privileged educations which turned them, at least outwardly, into convincing representatives of their respective upper classes … Both became Communists as impressionable students, both at times when Communism was high fashion among young intellectuals. The decisive influence in each case was war.’44
Sorge was formally discharged from the army in January 1918. He immediately headed for Kiel, headquarters of the German Imperial Navy and a known hotbed of socialism. By luck or judgement, he found himself at the epicentre of Germany’s brewing revolution.
2
Among the Revolutionaries
‘To betray, you must first belong. I never belonged’1
Kim Philby
Karl Marx had always believed that Western Europe, not backward Russia, would be the birthplace of socialist revolution.2 Russia was a country ‘surrounded by a more or less solid intellectual Chinese Wall, erected by despotism’, wrote his friend and supporter Engels.3 Yet in November 1917 it had been Russia that showed the world the path to revolution. Germany would soon follow.
Both Russia and Germany’s revolutions were led by mutinous sailors. Battleships, with their harsh discipline and stark class divisions, proved a fertile breeding ground for resentment and revolutionary violence. In June 1905 the crew of the battleship Potemkin rebelled against their officers and murdered eight of them. In November 1917, Bolshevik sailors of the cruiser Aurora fired a blank round across the Neva River that signalled the storming of the Winter Palace. In August of the same year an abortive revolt of 350 crewmen of the German dreadnought Prinzregent Luitpold had ended in two executions and the imprisonment of the revolutionary ringleaders. But the mutiny also spurred the formation of secret sailors’ councils on a number of the capital ships of the Imperial German fleet, and sowed the dragon’s teeth of future rebellion.4
Soon after arriving in Kiel in late summer of 1918, Sorge joined the Independent Social Democratic Party, a newly formed and far more radical offshoot of Germany’s official leftist opposition, the Social Democratic Party of Germany, or SPD. He established a student section of the party with two or three others, acting ‘as head of the training group in the district where I lived’, and working as an ‘agitator, party recruiter, and instructor in Marxist dogma’.5 We know from later accounts that Sorge was a charismatic and convincing speaker; he evidently honed his skills addressing audiences of revolutionary sailors in Kiel. ‘One of these lectures I can recall even today,’ he wrote in 1942. ‘I was called for early one morning, secretly led away to an unknown destination, which proved to be sailors’ underground barracks and there asked to conduct a secret meeting behind closed doors.’6
These back-room lectures on Marxist theory burst spectacularly into real-life revolution in the autumn of 1918. On 24 October, as Germany’s land forces were crumbling into mutiny and retreat, Admiral Franz von Hipper ordered the German Imperial Navy to sea for a final battle against the Royal Navy in the English Channel. In the Schillig Roads off Wilhelmshaven, where the fleet had formed up for battle, sailors on three ships from the Third Navy Squadron refused to weigh anchor while the crews of the battleships SMS Thüringen and Helgoland declared outright mutiny. The revolt was temporarily checked when the squadron commander ordered torpedo boats to train their cannon on the rebels. But by 1 November several hundred sailors gathered in the Union House in Kiel under the
auspices of the Independent Social Democratic Party. Sorge was one of the young volunteers on hand to distribute revolutionary leaflets. Two days later, despite attempts by the Kiel police to arrest the ringleaders, the movement had grown to thousands, who gathered on Kiel’s Grosser Exerzierplatz under the slogan ‘Frieden und Brot’ – peace and bread. A squad of soldiers ordered to disperse the demonstrators opened fire, killing seven and seriously injuring twenty-nine. The enraged sailors beat the commander of the loyal soldiers nearly to death.7 Fresh troops brought in to quell the growing mutiny refused to obey orders. By the evening of 4 November, Kiel was firmly in the hands of 40,000 rebellious sailors, soldiers and workers. They issued a fourteen-point manifesto demanding the freeing of prisoners, freedom of speech, the end of censorship, and the establishment of workers’ councils.8
The revolt quickly spread as delegations of sailors from Kiel dispersed to all of the major cities in the Reich. By 7 November, the first anniversary of the Bolshevik coup in Russia, revolutionaries had seized all Germany’s large coastal cities as well as Hanover, Brunswick and Frankfurt am Main. In Munich, a workers’ and soldiers’ council forced the last King of Bavaria, Ludwig III, to abdicate. Bavaria was declared a Räterepublik – ‘Council Republic’ – and the hereditary rulers of Germany’s principalities all resigned, leaving only Kaiser Wilhelm II as the final symbol of the old order.
The German Empire was crumbling – but was this to be a bourgeois revolution or a radical Bolshevik one? Friedrich Ebert, leader of the moderate Social Democratic Party, demanded the chancellorship for himself – as well as the abdication of the Kaiser. If the Kaiser remained, warned Ebert, ‘social revolution is unavoidable. But I do not want it, indeed I hate it like sin.’9
On the afternoon of 9 November, the Kaiser abdicated. But it was not enough for the leaders of the Spartacist League, a radical socialist movement re-founded just a day before by its leader Karl Liebknecht, recently released from prison. From a balcony at the Berlin City Palace, Liebknecht proclaimed a German Socialist Republic. Yet Germany’s newly hatched provisional government, led by the centrist socialists of the SPD, did not fall – despite signing a humiliating capitulation to Allied forces on 11 November, 1918. Ebert promised elections, and was supported by key elements of the regular army. Liebknecht’s socialist revolution had temporarily stalled.
It was during these febrile days in Kiel that Sorge met Dr Kurt Gerlach, a professor of political science at the city’s College of Technology. Gerlach was both a communist and a very wealthy man, and held salons for radical students at his comfortable home. ‘Painters were talking about new art, poets were breaking with all the traditions,’ recalled Gerlach’s wife, Christiane. ‘A young student of my husband sat silently among the guests: Richard Sorge … It was soon clear that my husband favoured him over all the others. A friendship developed between the two of them; we called Sorge by his nickname Ika.’ Christiane was immediately attracted to the handsome, brooding young man. ‘In his clear, sharp eyes there lay infinite distance, and loneliness, everybody could feel that.’10
After two months of desperate jockeying for power between the SPD and the Spartacists, Liebknecht and his partner in revolution, Rosa Luxemburg, made their move. Once more, sailors from Kiel – many of whom would have listened to Sorge’s speeches – played a central role. In the first days of revolution in early November, Ebert’s provisional government had ordered a newly created People’s Navy Division – Volksmarinedivision – from Kiel to Berlin for its own protection. By Christmas it became evident that this had been a grave mistake. The radical Kiel sailors showed clear signs of Spartacist sympathies. After Ebert attempted to suspend their pay, they occupied the former Imperial Chancellery, cut the phone lines and put the Council of People’s Representatives under house arrest.
Seizing the moment, the Spartacists formally renounced all ties to the SPD and Ebert’s moderates. On 31 December 1918, Rosa Luxemburg drew up the founding programme of the revolutionary Spartacus League – though she vowed that her new party ‘will never take over governmental power in any other way than through the clear, unambiguous will of the great majority of the proletarian masses’.
The revolution quickly ran out of the control of its instigators. Over Luxemburg’s objections, the majority of the new party members rejected participation in the coming elections and favoured gaining power – like the Bolsheviks before them – via ‘pressure from the streets’.11 Luxemburg and Liebknecht warned that the workers were unprepared to take on the forces of the German state. Nonetheless Spartacist hotheads assembled at Berlin’s police headquarters to elect an interim revolutionary committee that called for a general strike and mass uprising. Half a million demonstrators answered the call, coming out onto the streets of Berlin with placards calling on loyal troops not to fire on their countrymen.
It was a fatal miscalculation. The Volksmarinedivision, whose threatened disbandment had triggered the Christmas crisis, refused to join the rebellion. The demonstrators were met by regular troops – one unit even deploying a captured British Mark IV tank – as well as irregulars of the newly formed right-wing paramilitary militias. Known as Freikorps, these units had been recruited by reactionary officers who were passionately opposed to Germany’s capitulation in the war and to Bolshevism. They were to become both the future Weimar government’s most implacable enemies and the core of Hitler’s Nazi Party.12 Despite their ideological differences, the provisional government, fighting for its life, was quick to make a pact with the Freikorps. Deputy SPD leader Gustav Noske, who until recently had styled himself ‘People’s Representative for Army and Navy’, accepted executive command of the reactionary paramilitaries. ‘If you like, someone has to be the bloodhound,’ he said.13
In Kiel, Sorge and a group of his friends gathered arms – presumably easily concealed pistols – and hastened to Berlin to join the fight. They arrived too late. The Freikorps, deploying artillery, brutally cleared several buildings occupied by the revolutionaries and killed 156 of them. ‘The party needed assistance, but it was already too late to do anything when I arrived in Berlin,’ Sorge would later tell his Japanese interrogators. ‘We were forced to halt at the station and searched for arms but fortunately my weapon was not discovered. Any person who carried a weapon and refused to turn it over was shot. After being detained for several days inside the station, my comrades and I were sent back to Kiel. One could hardly call it a triumphant return.’14
While Sorge and his companions sat under arrest in Berlin-Hauptbahnhof, the Spartacist ringleaders went into hiding. On 15 January, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were discovered sheltering in an apartment of the Wilmersdorf district of Berlin. They were immediately arrested and handed over to the largest Freikorps, the Garde-Kavallerie-Schützen-Division. That night, both prisoners were beaten unconscious with rifle butts and shot in the head. Luxemburg’s body was thrown into the Landwehr Canal, while Liebknecht’s body was dumped anonymously in a city morgue.15
The German revolution was over – for the time being. Kiel had become too dangerous for Sorge, so he moved to Hamburg to study for a doctorate in political science. There he organised a socialist student group, and formally joined the German Communist Party. The party recognised the young Sorge’s skill as an agitator by appointing him ‘training chief of the party’s Hamburg area organisation guidance department’.16 During this period, he also began to write for the local Communist Party paper – a journalistic career which he would maintain, both as a cover and in practice, for the next twenty-three years.
It is not clear whether it was Kurt Gerlach or his wife Christiane who drew Sorge to Aachen, a city in western Germany, in early summer 1919. Gerlach, like Sorge, had moved away from possible police scrutiny in Kiel to teach at Aachen University, and had invited Sorge to follow him. Nonetheless, his arrival on the doorstep of the Gerlachs’ new home was clearly unexpected.
‘The doorbell rang one evening and I went to see who was there,’ recalled Christ
iane. ‘Outside stood Ika. It was as if a stroke of lightning ran through me. In one second something awoke in me that had slumbered until now, something dangerous, dark, inescapable. Ika never pushed. He did not need to court people, they rushed to him, both men and women. He had more subtle means of bending them to his will.’17 Christiane, like many other women to come, was taken by Sorge’s good looks and dark charisma. ‘Ika, tall, well built, with a full head of hair, gave an impression of strength,’ wrote another contemporary. ‘His features, although sallow, were attractive, with a strong, prominent forehead, which made his eyes seem very deep-set.’18 When she was interviewed in 1989, the ninety-one-year-old Babette Gross, widow of Willi Muenzenberg (one of the other extraordinary communist underground operatives of the inter-war period), sighed winsomely when she recalled that she had known Richard Sorge ‘when he was young and beautiful’.19
Gerlach secured his old protégé a teaching position at the higher school in Aachen. He also resigned himself to the budding romance between his wife and Sorge. This would prove to be another leitmotif of Sorge’s life: people loved him, even his victims, even men he had cuckolded and whose confidence he had betrayed.20
Communism certainly appealed to a didactic streak in Sorge; all his life he enjoyed lecturing and haranguing people. He also saw himself as a man of action, a leader, a teacher, an organiser. Sorge had arrived too late to fight in the Spartacist uprising of 1919. But when on 13 March 1920, right-wing officers Wolfgang Kapp and Walter von Lüttwitz attempted to overthrow the government by staging a military coup in Berlin, he was ready.
The first call for a general strike to resist the Kapp Putsch came from the SPD-led government. But in the industrial Ruhr the communists saw the general strike as an opportunity to complete the Spartacists’ unfinished revolution. In Aachen, Sorge sat on the general strike committee that brought thousands of miners onto the streets. Around 50,000 former and serving soldiers across the industrial Rhineland were organised into a ‘Ruhr Red Army’ and prepared to ‘win political power by the dictatorship of the proletariat’. There is evidence that Sorge also belonged to the party’s military committee in the Ruhr, which rallied physically fit young followers to do battle in the streets with the counter-revolutionaries. In the words of a friend, Sorge was ‘quite incapable of staying out of a fight others had joined’.21
An Impeccable Spy Page 3
