page_title: Richard Sorge
section_title: Posthumous recognition
hierarchical_section_title: Richard Sorge / Posthumous recognition
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: + 00000001_Image_Ehrenplakette der DDR_Staatssicherheit_Dr. Richard Sorge_ Held der Sowjetunion
context_page_description: Richard Sorge was a German journalist and Soviet military intelligence officer who was active before and during World War II and worked undercover as a German journalist in both Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan. His codename was "Ramsay". A number of famous personalities considered him one of the most accomplished spies.
  Sorge is most famous for his service in Japan in 1940 and 1941, when he provided information about Adolf Hitler's plan to attack the Soviet Union. Then, in mid-September 1941, he informed the Soviets that Japan would not attack the Soviet Union in the near future. A month later, Sorge was arrested in Japan for espionage. He was tortured, forced to confess, tried and hanged in November 1944.
  He was posthumously awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union in 1964.
context_section_description: Initially, Sorge's reputation in West Germany in the 1950s was highly negative, with Sorge depicted as a traitor working for the Soviet Union who was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Wehrmacht soldiers in the winter of 1941–1942. The 1950s were a transition moment in the German memory of Nazi Germany, as its German supporters sought a version of history that presented them as victims, rather than as followers, of Hitler. They portrayed Nazism as an aberration in German history that had no connections to traditional Prussian values, portrayed the Wehrmacht as an honourable fighting force that had nothing to do with the Holocaust and presented the Soviets as guilty of crimes that were even more horrific than those committed by the Nazis. 
  That way of remembering the Nazi past in the 1950s caused Operation Barbarossa and Germany's war on the Eastern Front to be seen as a heroic and legitimate war against the Soviet Union of which Germans should unashamed.
  The first tentative efforts at changing the memory of the Nazi past started in the early 1950s, when German President Theodor Heuss gave a speech on 20 July 1954 that praisef the putsch attempt of 20 July 1944. He argued that "the men of July 20th" were patriots rather than traitors, which was then a bold gesture. 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. He argued that Sorge was not a Soviet agent but a heroic German patriot opposed to the Nazi regime whose motivation in providing intelligence to the Soviet Union was to bring down Hitler, rather than to support Stalin. Augstein also attacked Willoughby for his book The Shanghai Conspiracy that claimed that Sorge had caused the "loss of China" in 1949 and that the Sorge spy ring was in the process of taking over the U.S. government.
  Augstein argued that Willoughby and his fans had completely misunderstood that Sorge's espionage was directed against Germany and Japan, not the U.S.
  Such was the popularity of Augstein's articles that the German author Hans Hellmut Kirst published a spy novel featuring Sorge as the hero, and Hans-Otto Meissner wrote the book Der Fall Sorge (The Sorge Case) that was a cross between a novel and a history by blending fact and fiction together with a greater emphasis on the latter. Meissner had served as third secretary at the German Embassy in Tokyo and had known Sorge. 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. Meissner presented Sorge as the consummate spy, a cool professional who was dressed in a rumpled trench coat and fedora and was a great womanizer, and much of the book is concerned with Sorge's various relationships. Later on, Meissner presented Sorge as a rather megalomaniac figure and, in the process, changwd Sorge's motivation from loyalty to communism to colossal egoism. He had Sorge rant about his equal dislike for both Stalin and Hitler and had him say that he that supplied only enough information to both regimes to manipulate them into destroying each other sknce it suited him to play one against the other. At the book's climax, Sorge agreed to work for the American Office of Strategic Services, in exchange for being settled to settle 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. Sorge finally seduced Kiyomi but lost valuable time, which allowed the Kempeitai to arrest him.
  The American historian Cornelius Partsch noted some striking aspects of Meissner's book such as his complete exoneration of the Auswärtiges Amt from any involvement in the criminal aspects of the Nazi regime. Meissner had Sorge constantly breaking into offices to steal i
caption: Ehrenplakette Richard Sorge - Heroes of the Soviet Union
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