Journalist, International Espionage Figure. Sorge, the son of a mining engineer, he was born in Baku, Russia (present day Azarbaijan). He moved to Germany and joined the German army during the First World War. He served on the Western Front where he received serious combat wounds. After the war he studied in Berlin, Kiel, and Hamburg. He became a journalist working for the "Frankfurter Zeitung." He also secretly joined the German Communist Party, and while working in Japan in 1933 began acting as a spy for the Soviet Union. He assembled a team of carefully selected spies with Hotsumi Ozaki, a journalist with the Asahi newspaper, and Yotoku Miyagi, a painter, who had access to senior politicians. He was able to obtain good information about Japan's foreign policy. He also posed as a loyal Nazi and worked as an espionage agent for the German embassy in Japan. This enabled him to find out information about Germany's intentions towards the Soviet Union. He was able to give Joseph Stalin advance warning about the Anti-Comintern Pact (1936), the German-Japanese Pact (1940) and Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor. His most important contribution was to advise Russia of Operation Barbarossa as early as December, 1940. Despite his efforts, however, Stalin did not believe that the Germany would attack at that time and did not take the necessary action. At the end of August, 1941, Sorge was able to tell Stalin that Japan would not attack the Soviet Union that year. Two months later he was arrested in Tokyo and held in prison for three years. The Soviet Union refused to exchange Japanese prisoners they held for Sorge, so he was executed by hanging by his captors. After the war, the Sorge Episode was often utilized by the Japanese government as anti-communist propaganda. Sorge was recognized as a Russian hero and there is a monument in his honor in Moscow. In Japan, the movie "The Spy, Sorge" is in production by Masahiro Shinoda, one of Japan's most famous film directors. "Suspicious: A Biography of Master Spy Richard Sorge" by Owen Matthews was published in 2019. Both Sorge and Ozaki are interred at Tama Cemetery.