Richard Sorge (; 4 October 1895 – 7 November 1944) 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.  Stalin declined to intervene on his behalf with the Japanese.

He was posthumously awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union in 1964.

Early life

Sorge was born on 4 October 1895 in the settlement of Sabunchi, a suburb of Baku, Baku Governorate of the Russian Empire (now Baku, Azerbaijan). 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. His father moved back to Germany with his family in 1898, after his lucrative contract expired. In Sorge's own words:

Sorge attended Oberrealschule Lichterfelde when he was six. He described his father as having political views that were "unmistakably nationalist and imperialist", which he shared as a young man. However, the cosmopolitan Sorge household was "very different from the average bourgeois home in Berlin". Sorge considered Friedrich Adolf Sorge, an associate of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, to be his grandfather, but he was actually Sorge's great-uncle.

Sorge enlisted in the Imperial German Army in October 1914, shortly after the outbreak of World War I. At 18, he was posted to a field artillery battalion with the 3rd Guards Division. He served on the Western Front and was severely wounded there in March 1916. Shrapnel severed three of his fingers and broke both his legs, causing a lifelong limp. He was promoted to the rank of corporal, received the Iron Cross and was later medically discharged. While fighting in the war, Sorge, who had started out in 1914 as a right-wing nationalist, became disillusioned by what he called the "meaninglessness" of the war and moved to the left.

During his convalescence he read Marx, Engels and Rudolf Hilferding and eventually became a communist, mainly by the influence of the father of a nurse with whom he had developed a relationship. He spent the remainder of the war studying economics at the universities of Kiel, Berlin and Hamburg. In Kiel, he witnessed the sailors' mutiny which helped spark the German Revolution and joined the Independent Social Democratic Party. He subsequently moved on to Berlin, but arrived too late to participate in the Spartacist uprising.

Sorge received his doctorate in political science (Dr. rer. pol.) from Hamburg in August 1919. By this time he had joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), and was engaged as an activist for the party in Hamburg and subsequently Aachen. His political views got him fired from both a teaching job and coal mining work.

Soviet military intelligence agent
Sorge was recruited as an agent for Soviet intelligence. With the cover of a journalist, he was sent to various European countries to assess the possibility of communist revolutions.

From 1920 to 1922, Sorge lived in Solingen, in present-day North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. He was joined there by Christiane Gerlach, the ex-wife of Kurt Albert Gerlach, a wealthy communist and professor of political science in Kiel, who had taught Sorge. Christiane Gerlach later remembered about meeting Sorge for the first time: "It was as if a stroke of lightning ran through me. In this one second something awoke in me that had slumbered until now, something dangerous, dark, inescapable...".

Sorge and Christiane married in May 1921. In 1922, he was relocated to Frankfurt, where he gathered intelligence about the business community. In the summer of 1923, he took part in the Erste Marxistische Arbeitswoche ("First Marxist Work Week") Conference in Ilmenau. Sorge continued his work as a journalist and also helped organize the library of the Institute for Social Research, a new Marxist think tank in Frankfurt.

In 1924, he was made responsible for the security of a Soviet delegation attending the KPD's congress in Frankfurt. He caught the attention of one of the delegates, Osip Piatnitsky, a senior official with the Communist International, who recruited him. That year, he and Christiane moved to Moscow, where he officially joined the International Liaison Department of the Comintern, which was also an OGPU intelligence-gathering body. Apparently, Sorge's dedication to duty led to his divorce. After several years he became enmeshed in the factional struggles in the Communist movement that occurred between the death of Vladimir Lenin and the consolidation of power by Joseph Stalin, being accused of supporting Stalin's last factional opponent, Nikolai Bukharin, alongside three of his German comrades. However, in 1929, Sorge was invited to join the Red Army's Fourth Department (the later GRU, or military intelligence) by department head Yan Karlovich Berzin. He remained with the Department for the rest of his life.

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. He was instructed to remain undercover and to stay out of politics. In November 1929, Sorge was sent to Germany. He was instructed to join the Nazi Party and not to associate with any left-wing activists. As cover, he got a job with the agricultural newspaper Deutsche Getreide-Zeitung.

China 1930
In 1930, Sorge was sent to Shanghai. His cover was his work as the editor of a German news service and for the Frankfurter Zeitung. He contacted another agent, Max Christiansen-Clausen. Sorge also met German Soviet agent Ursula Kuczynski and well-known American left-wing journalist Agnes Smedley, who also worked for the Frankfurter Zeitung. She introduced Sorge to Hotsumi Ozaki of the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun (a future Sorge recruit) and to Hanako Ishii, with whom he would become romantically involved. Sorge recruited Kuczynski as a Soviet agent and became romantically involved with her.

Shortly after his arrival in China, he was able to send intelligence regarding plans by Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist government for a new offensive against the Chinese Communist Party in the Chinese Civil War, based largely on information gathered from German military advisors to the Nationalists.

As a journalist, Sorge established himself as an expert on Chinese agriculture. In that role, he travelled around the country and contacted members of the Chinese Communist Party. In January 1932, Sorge reported on fighting between Chinese and Japanese troops in the streets of Shanghai. In December, he was recalled to Moscow. His performance as an agent in Shanghai had been judged as successful by Berzin, having ensured that he and his agents had escaped detection and expanded the Soviet intelligence network.

Moscow 1933
Sorge returned to Moscow, where he wrote a book about Chinese agriculture. He also married Ekaterina Maximova ("Katya"), a woman he had met in China and brought back with him to Russia.

Japan 1933

In May 1933, the GRU decided to have Sorge organize an intelligence network in Japan. He was given the codename "Ramsay" ("Рамзай" Ramzai or Ramzay). He first went to Berlin, to renew contacts in Germany and to obtain a new newspaper assignment in Japan as cover. In September 1931, the Japanese Kwantung Army had seized the Manchuria region of China, which gave Japan another land border in Asia with the Soviet Union (previously, the Soviet Union and Japan had shared only the island of Sakhalin). At the time, several Kwantung Army generals advocated following up the seizure of Manchuria by invading the Soviet Far East, and as the Soviets had broken the Japanese Army codes, Moscow was aware of that and caused a "major Japanese war scare" in the winter of 1931–1932. Until the mid-1930s, it was Japan, rather than Germany, that was considered to be the main threat by Moscow.

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 Berlin, he insinuated himself into the Nazi Party and read Nazi propaganda, particularly Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf. Sorge attended so many beer halls with his new acquaintances that he gave up drinking to avoid saying anything inappropriate. His abstinence from drinking did not make his Nazi companions suspicious. It was an example of his devotion to and absorption in his mission, as he had been a heavy drinker. He later explained to Hede Massing, "That was the bravest thing I ever did. Never will I be able to drink enough to make up for this time". Later, his drinking came to undermine his work.

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. Sorge was so successful at establishing his cover as an intensely-Nazi journalist that when he departed Germany, Joseph Goebbels attended his farewell dinner. He went to Japan via the United States, passing through New York in August 1933.

Sorge arrived in Yokohama on 6 September 1933. After landing in Japan, Sorge became the Japan correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung. As it was the most prestigious newspaper in Germany, Sorge's status as the Tokyo correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung made him, in many ways, the most senior German reporter in Japan. Sorge's reputation as a Nazi journalist who detested the Soviet Union served as an excellent cover for his espionage work. His task in Japan was more challenging than that in China: the Soviets had very little intelligence capacity in Japan, so Sorge would have to build a network of agents from nothing, under much tighter surveillance than he had faced in Shanghai. Sorge was told by his GRU superiors that his mission in Japan was to "give very careful study to the question of whether or not Japan was planning to attack the USSR". After his arrest in 1941, Sorge told his captors:

This was for many years the most important duty assigned to me and my group; it would not be far wrong to say that it was the sole object of my mission in Japan.... 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....

He was warned by his commanders not to have contact with either the underground Japanese Communist Party or the Soviet embassy in Tokyo. His intelligence network in Japan included the Red Army officer and radio operator Max Clausen, Hotsumi Ozaki and two other Comintern agents, Branko Vukelić, a journalist working for the French magazine, Vu, and a Japanese journalist, Miyagi Yotoku, who was employed by the English-language newspaper, the Japan Advertiser. Max Clausen's wife, Anna, acted as ring courier from time to time. From summer 1937, Clausen operated under the cover of his business, M Clausen Shokai, suppliers of blueprint machinery and reproduction services. The business had been set up with Soviet funds and became a commercial success. Ozaki was a Japanese man from an influential family who had grown up in Taiwan, then a Japanese colony. He was an idealistic Sinophile who believed that Japan, which had started its modernisation with the Meiji Restoration, had much to teach China. However, Ozaki was shocked by the racism of Japanese policy towards China, with the Chinese being depicted as a people fit only to be slaves. Ozaki believed that the existing political system of Japan, with the emperor being worshipped as a living god, was obsolete, and that saving Japan from fascism would require Japan being "reconstructed as a socialist state".

Between 1933 and 1934, Sorge formed a network of informants. His agents had contacts with senior politicians and obtained information on Japanese foreign policy. His agent Ozaki developed a close contact with Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe. Ozaki copied secret documents for Sorge.

As he appeared to be an ardent Nazi, Sorge was welcome at the German embassy. One Japanese journalist who knew Sorge described him in 1935 as "a typical, swashbuckling, arrogant Nazi... quick-tempered, hard-drinking". As the Japan correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung, Sorge developed a network of sources in Japanese politics, and soon German diplomats, including the ambassador Herbert von Dirksen, came to depend upon Sorge as a source of intelligence on the fractious and secretive world of Japanese politics. The Japanese values of honne and tatemae (the former literally means "true sound", roughly "as things are", and the latter literally means "façade" or roughly "as things appear"), the tendency of the Japanese to hide their real feelings and profess to believe in things that they do not, made deciphering Japan's politics difficult. Sorge's fluency in Japanese enhanced his status as a Japanologist. Sorge was interested in Asian history and culture, especially those of China and Japan, and when he was sober, he tried to learn as much as he could. Meanwhile, Sorge befriended General Eugen Ott, the German military attaché to Japan and seduced his wife, Helma.  Ott sent reports back to Berlin containing his assessments of the Imperial Japanese Army, which Helma Ott copied and passed on to Sorge, who passed them on to Moscow (Helma Ott believed Sorge to be working merely for the Nazi Party). As the Japanese Army had been trained by a German military mission in the 19th century, German influence was strong and Ott had good contacts with Japanese officers.

In October 1934, Ott and Sorge made an extended visit to the puppet "Empire of Manchukuo", which was actually a Japanese colony, and Sorge, who knew the Far East far better than Ott, wrote the report describing Manchukuo that Ott submitted to Berlin under his name. As Ott's report was received favourably at both the Bendlerstrasse and the Wilhelmstrasse, Sorge soon became one of Ott's main sources of information about the Japanese Empire, which created a close friendship between the two. In 1935, Sorge passed on to Moscow a planning document provided to him by Ozaki, which strongly suggested that Japan was not planning on attacking the Soviet Union in 1936. Sorge guessed correctly that Japan would invade China in July 1937 and that there was no danger of a Japanese invasion of Siberia.

On 26 February 1936, an attempted military coup took place in Tokyo. It was meant to achieve a mystical "Shōwa Restoration" and led to several senior officials being murdered by the rebels. Dirksen, Ott and the rest of the German embassy were highly confused as to why it was happening and were at a loss as to how to explain the coup to the Wilhelmstrasse. They turned to Sorge, the resident Japan expert, for help. 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 younger officers from rural backgrounds. They were upset at the impoverishment of the countryside, and that the faction was not communist or socialist but just anticapitalist and believed that big business had subverted the emperor's will. Sorge's report was used as the basis of Dirksen's explanation of the coup attempt, which he sent back to the Wilhelmstrasse, which was satisfied at the ambassador's "brilliant" explanation of the coup attempt.

Sorge lived in a house in a respectable neighborhood in Tokyo, where he was noted mostly for heavy drinking and his reckless way of riding his motorcycle. In the summer of 1936, a Japanese woman, Hanako Ishii, a waitress at a bar frequented by Sorge, moved into Sorge's house to become his common-law wife. Of all of Sorge's various relationships with women, his most durable and lasting one was with Ishii. She tried to curb Sorge's heavy drinking and his habit of recklessly riding his motorcycle in a way that everyone viewed as almost suicidal. An American reporter who knew Sorge later wrote that he "created the impression of being a playboy, almost a wastrel, the very antithesis of a keen and dangerous spy".

Ironically, Sorge's spying for the Soviets in Japan in the late 1930s was probably safer for him than if he had been in Moscow. 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. In fact, two of Sorge's earliest GRU handlers, Yan Karlovich Berzin and his successor, Artur Artuzov, were shot during the purges. In 1938, the German ambassador to Britain, Joachim von Ribbentrop was promoted to foreign minister, and to replace Ribbentrop, Dirksen was sent to London. Ribbentrop promoted Ott to be Dirksen's replacement. Ott, now aware that Sorge was sleeping with his wife, let his friend Sorge have "free run of the embassy night and day", as one German diplomat later recalled: he was given his own desk at the embassy. Ott tolerated Sorge's affair with his wife on the grounds that Sorge was such a charismatic man that women always fell in love with him and so it was only natural that Sorge would sleep with his wife. Ott liked to call Sorge Richard der Unwiderstehliche ("Richard the Irresistible"), as his charm made him attractive to women. Ott greatly valued Sorge as a source of information about the secretive world of Japanese politics, especially Japan's war with China, since Ott found that Sorge knew so many things about Japan that no other Westerner knew that he chose to overlook Sorge's affair with his wife.

After Ott became the ambassador to Japan in April 1938, Sorge had breakfast with him daily and they discussed German–Japanese relations in detail, and Sorge sometimes drafted the cables that Ott sent under his name to Berlin. Ott trusted Sorge so much that he sent him out as a German courier to carry secret messages to the German consulates in Canton, Hong Kong and Manila. Sorge noted about his influence in the German embassy: "They would come to me and say, 'we have found out such and such a thing, have you heard about it and what do you think'?"
On 13 May 1938, while he rode his motorcycle in Tokyo, a very-intoxicated Sorge crashed into a wall and was badly injured. As Sorge was carrying around notes given to him by Ozaki at the time, if the police had discovered the documents, his cover would have been blown. However, a member of his spy ring got to the hospital and removed the documents before the police arrived. 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. Unaware that his friend Berzin had been shot as a "Trotskyite" in July 1938, Sorge sent him a letter in October 1938:

Dear Comrade! Don't worry about us. Although we are terribly tired and tense, nevertheless we are disciplined, obedient, decisive and devoted fellows who are ready to carry out the tasks connected with our great mission. I send sincere greetings to you and your friends. I request you to forward the attached letter and greetings to my wife. Please, take the time to see to her welfare.

Sorge never learned that Berzin had been shot as a traitor.

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. Unlike Sorge, who believed in communism, Scheliha's reasons for spying were money problems since he had a lifestyle beyond his salary as a diplomat, and he turned to selling secrets to provide additional income. Scheliha sold documents to the NKVD indicating that Germany was planning from late 1938 to turn Poland into a satellite state, and after the Poles refused to fall into line, Germany planned to invade Poland from March 1939 onward. Sorge reported that Japan did not intend for the border war with the Soviet Union that began in May 1939 to escalate into all-out war. Sorge also reported that the attempt to turn the Anti-Comintern Pact into a military alliance was floundering since the Germans wanted the alliance to be directed against Britain, but the Japanese wanted the alliance to be directed against the Soviets. Sorge's reports that the Japanese did not plan to invade Siberia were disbelieved in Moscow and on 1 September 1939, Sorge was attacked in a message from Moscow:

Japan must have commenced important movements (military and political) in preparation for war against the Soviet Union but you have not provided any appreciable information. Your activity seems to getting slack.

Wartime intelligence

Sorge supplied Soviet intelligence with information about the Anti-Comintern Pact and the German-Japanese Pact. In 1941, his embassy contacts made him learn of Operation Barbarossa, the imminent Axis invasion of the Soviet Union and the approximate date. On 30 May 1941, Sorge reported to Moscow, "Berlin informed Ott that German attack will commence in the latter part of June. Ott 95 percent certain war will commence". On 20 June 1941, Sorge reported: "Ott told me that war between Germany and the USSR is inevitable.... Invest [the code name for Ozaki] told me that the Japanese General Staff is already discussing what position to take in the event of war". 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. Other Soviet agents who also reported an imminent German invasion were also regarded with suspicion by Stalin.

It has been rumoured that Sorge provided the exact date of "Barbarossa", but the historian Gordon Prange in 1984 concluded that the closest Sorge came was 20 June 1941 and that Sorge himself never claimed to have discovered the correct date (22 June) in advance. The date of 20 June was given to Sorge by Oberstleutnant (Lieutenant-Colonel) Erwin Scholl, the deputy military attaché at the German embassy.  On a dispatch he sent the GRU on 1 June, which read, "Expected start of German-Soviet war around June 15 is based on information Lt. Colonel Scholl brought with him from Berlin... for Ambassador Ott". Despite knowing that Germany was going to invade the Soviet Union sometime in May or June 1941, Sorge was still shocked on 22 June 1941, when he learned of Operation Barbarossa. He went to a bar to get drunk and repeated in English: "Hitler's a fucking criminal! A murderer. But Stalin will teach the bastard a lesson. You just wait and see!" The Soviet press reported in 1964 that on 15 June 1941, Sorge had sent a radio dispatch saying, "The war will begin on June 22". Prange, who despite not having access to material released by the Russian authorities in the 1990s, did not accept the veracity of that report. Stalin was quoted as having ridiculed Sorge and his intelligence before "Barbarossa":

In late June 1941, Sorge informed Moscow that Ozaki had learned the Japanese cabinet had decided to occupy the southern half of French Indochina (now Vietnam) and that invading the Soviet Union was being considered as an option, but for the moment, Japanese Prime Minister Konoe had decided on neutrality. On 2 July 1941, 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. At the bottom of the report, the Deputy Head of Soviet Army General Staff Intelligence wrote, "In consideration of the high reliability and accuracy of previous information and the competence of the information sources, this information can be trusted". In July 1941, Sorge reported that German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop had ordered Ott to start pressuring the Japanese to attack the Soviet Union but that the Japanese were resisting the pressure. On 25 August 1941, 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. They decided not to launch the war within this year, repeat, not to launch the war this year". On 6 September 1941, an Imperial Conference decided against war with the Soviet Union and ordered for Japan to start preparations for a possible war against the United States and the British Empire, which Ozaki reported to Sorge. At the same time, Ott told Sorge that all of his efforts to get Japan to attack the Soviet Union had failed. On 14 September 1941, 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...." Sorge advised the Red Army on 14 September 1941 that Japan would not attack the Soviet Union until:
 Moscow had been captured.
 The Kwantung Army had become three times the size of Soviet Far Eastern forces.
 A civil war had started in Siberia.

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. To that end, Sorge's information might have been the most important military intelligence work in World War II. However, Sorge was not the only source of Soviet intelligence about Japan, as Soviet codebreakers had broken the Japanese diplomatic codes and so Moscow knew from signals intelligence that there would be no Japanese attack on the Soviet Union in 1941.

Another important item allegedly reported by Sorge may have affected the Battle of Stalingrad. Sorge reported that Japan would attack the Soviet Union from the east as soon as the German army captured any city on the Volga.

Sorge's rival and opponent in Japan and East Asia was Ivar Lissner, an agent of the German Abwehr.

Arrests and trials

As the war progressed, Sorge was in increasing danger but continued his service. His radio messages were enciphered with unbreakable one-time pads, which were always used by the Soviet intelligence agencies and appeared as gibberish. However, the increasing number of the mystery messages made the Japanese begin to suspect that an intelligence ring was operating. Sorge was also coming under increasing suspicion in Berlin. 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. Sorge was able, through one of his lovers, Margarete Harich-Schneider, a German musician living in Japan, to gain the key to Meisinger's apartment since it had once been her apartment. Much to his relief, he learned that Meisinger had concluded that the allegations that Sorge was a Soviet agent were groundless, and Sorge's loyalty was to Germany. Sorge befriended Meisinger by playing on his principal weakness, alcohol, and spent much time getting him drunk, which contributed to Meisinger's favourable evaluation of Sorge. Meisinger reported to Berlin that the friendship between Ott and Sorge "was now so close that all normal reports from attachés to Berlin became mere appendages to the overall report written by Sorge and signed by the Ambassador". The Kempeitai, the Japanese secret police, intercepted many messages and began to close in against the German Soviet agent. Sorge's penultimate message to Moscow in October 1941 reported, "The Soviet Far East can be considered safe from Japanese attack". In his last message to Moscow, Sorge asked to be sent back to Germany, as there was no danger of a Japanese attack on the Soviet Union, and he wished to aid the Soviet war effort by providing more intelligence about the German war effort. Ozaki was arrested on 14 October 1941 and immediately interrogated. As the Kempeitai trailed Sorge, it discovered that Ott's wife was a regular visitor to Sorge's house and that he had spent his last night as a free man sleeping with her.

Sorge was arrested shortly thereafter, on 18 October 1941, in Tokyo. The next day, a brief Japanese memo notified Ott that Sorge had been swiftly arrested "on suspicion of espionage", together with Max Clausen. Ott was both surprised and outraged as a result and assumed that it was a case of "Japanese espionage hysteria". 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. Nonetheless, he immediately agreed with Japanese authorities to "investigate the incident fully". It was not until a few months later that Japanese authorities announced that Sorge had actually been indicted as a Soviet agent.

He was incarcerated in Sugamo Prison. Initially, the Japanese believed, because of his Nazi Party membership and German ties, that Sorge had been an Abwehr agent. However, the Abwehr denied that he had been one of their agents. Under torture, Sorge confessed, but the Soviet Union denied he was a Soviet agent. The Japanese made three overtures to the Soviet Union and offered to trade Sorge for one of their own spies. However, the Soviet Union declined all of the Japanese attempts and maintained that Sorge was unknown to them.
In September 1942, Sorge's wife, Katya Maximova, was arrested by the NKVD on the charges that she was a "German spy" since she was married to the German citizen Sorge (the fact that Sorge was a GRU agent did not matter to the NKVD), and she was deported to the gulag, where she died in 1943. Hanako Ishii, the Japanese woman who loved Sorge and the only woman whom Sorge loved in return, was the only person who tried to visit Sorge during his time in Sugamo Prison. During one of her visits, she expressed concern that Sorge, under torture by the Kempeitai, would name her as involved in his spy ring, but he promised her that he would never mention her name to the Kempeitai. The Kempeitai was much feared in Japan for its use of torture as an investigation method. Sorge ultimately struck a deal with the Kempeitai that if it spared Ishii and the wives of the other members of the spy ring, he would reveal all. Ishii was never arrested by the Kempeitai Sorge told his Kempeitai captors:

That I successfully approached the German embassy in Japan and won the absolute trust by people there was the foundation of my organisation in Japan.... Even in Moscow that fact that I infiltrated into the centre of the embassy and made use of it for my spying activity is evaluated as extremely amazing, having no equivalent in history.

After the arrest of Sorge, Meisinger used the increased spy fear of the Japanese to fraudulently denounce "anti-Nazis" as "Soviet spies" to the Japanese authorities. He was responsible for the persecution, the internment and the torture of the "Schindler" of Tokyo, Willy Rudolf Foerster. Foerster was forced to sell his company, which had employed a sizable number of Jewish refugees from Germany and the countries occupied by Germany. He and his Japanese wife survived, but after the war, the same former German diplomats, who had denounced and persecuted him as an "anti-Nazi", would discredit him.

Death

Sorge was hanged on 7 November 1944, at 10:20 Tokyo time in Sugamo Prison and was pronounced dead 19 minutes later. Hotsumi Ozaki had been hanged earlier in the same day. Sorge's body was not cremated because of wartime fuel shortages. He was buried in a mass grave for Sugamo Prison inmates in the nearby Zoshigaya Cemetery.

Sorge was survived by his mother, then living in Germany, and he left his estate to Anna Clausen, the wife of his radio operator, Max Christiansen-Clausen.

After hounding the American occupation authorities, Sorge's Japanese lover, Hanako Ishii (石井 花子 Ishii Hanako, 1911 – 1 July 2000), located and recovered his skeleton on 16 November 1949. After identifying him by his distinctive dental work and a poorly-set broken leg, she took his body away and had him cremated at the Shimo-Ochiai Cremation Centre. She kept his own teeth, belt and spectacles and had made a ring of his gold bridgework, which she wore for the rest of her life. After her death, her own ashes were interred beside his. 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".

The Soviet Union did not officially acknowledge Sorge until 1964.

It was argued that Sorge's biggest coup led to his undoing because Stalin could not afford to let it become known that he had rejected Sorge's warning about the German attack in June 1941. However, nations seldom officially recognise their own undercover agents.

Posthumous recognition

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 virtues, falsely 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 be 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 praised 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, changed 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 supplied only enough information to both regimes to manipulate them into destroying each other since 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 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 information, which he did not do, as security at the German embassy was sloppy, and Sorge was trusted as an apparently-dedicated Nazi journalist and so breaking into offices would have been unnecessary. 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. Partsch wrote that Meissner gave Sorge almost-superhuman abilities at lockbreaking, as he broke into various offices, safes and filing cabinets with the greatest ease, but in reality, secret documents were all too often left out in the open in unlocked rooms, and Sorge was allowed to wander about the embassy without an escort. 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.

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. Kirst portrayed Sorge as an existential hero, a deeply-traumatized veteran of World War I, whose sleep was constantly disturbed by horrific nightmares of his war service, and when he was awake, he suffered from frequent panic attacks. 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. 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. As part of Kirst's portrayal of Sorge as a tragic man on the brink and as victim led him to portray Sorge's spying for the Soviet Union by forces beyond his control. Kirst was more forceful in his condemnation of National Socialism than Meissner as his book maintained that the regime was so monstrously evil that an existential man forever on the brink of a mental breakdown like Sorge ended up spying for the Soviet Union as the lesser evil.

Partsch noted that both books were very much concerned with Sorge's womanising, which neither author exaggerated, but presented the aspect of his personality in different ways. Kirst portrayed Sorge's womanizing as part of the same self-destructive urges that led him to spy for the Soviet Union, but Meissner depicted Sorge's womanizing as part of his callous narcissism and as his principal weakness, as his desire for Kiyomi finally destroyed him. In turn, that led to different depictions of the male body. Meissner portrayed it as the seductive instrument that entices female desire and led women into ill-advised relationships with Sorge, whose body is perfectly fit and attractive to women. Kirst, by contrast, correctly noted that Sorge walked with a pronounced limp because of a war wound, which had Sorge sarcastically say was because of his "gallantry" in his book, and Sorge's wounded body served as a metaphor for his wounded soul. Partsch further commented that Meissner's book was a depoliticised and personalised account of the Sorge spy ring, as he omitted any mention of Hotsumi Ozaki, an idealistic man who sincerely believed his country was on the wrong course, and he portrayed Sorge as a "Faustian man" motivated only by his vanity to exercise "a god-like power over the world" and gave Sorge "an overblown, pop-Nietzsche an sense of destiny".

The ultimate "message" of Meissner's book was that Sorge was an amoral, egoistical individual whose actions had nothing to do with ideology and that the only reason for Germany's defeat by the Soviet Union was Sorge's spying, which suggested that Germany lost the war only because of "fate". Meissner followed the "great man" interpretation of history that a few "great men" decide the events of the world, with everyone else reduced to passive bystanders. By contrast, Kirst pictured Sorge as a victim, as a mere pawn in a "murderous chess game" and emphasised Sorge's opposition to the Nazi regime as the motivation for his actions. Kirst further noted that Sorge was betrayed by his own masters as after his arrest, and the Soviet regime denounced him as a "Trotskyite" and made no effort to save him. Partsch concluded that the two rival interpretations of Sorge put forward in the novels by Meissner and Kirst in 1955 have shaped Sorge's image in the West, especially Germany, ever since their publication.

In 1954, the West German film director Veit Harlan wrote and directed the film Verrat an Deutschland about Sorge's espionage in Japan. Harlan had been the favourite filmmaker of Nazi Information Minister Joseph Goebbels and directed many propaganda films, including Jud Süss. Harlan's film is a romantic drama, starring Harlan's wife, Kristina Söderbaum, as Sorge's love interest. The film was publicly premiered by the distributor before it passed the rating system and so was withdrawn from more-public performances and finally released after some editing had been done.

In 1961, a movie, Who Are You, Mr. Sorge?, was produced in France in collaboration with West Germany, Italy, and Japan. It was very popular in the Soviet Union as well. Sorge was played by Thomas Holtzmann.

In November 1964, twenty years after his death, the Soviet government awarded Sorge with the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. Sorge's widow, Hanako Ishii, received a Soviet and Russian pension until her death in July 2000 in Tokyo. In the 1960s, the KGB, seeking to improve its image in the Soviet Union, began the cult of the "hero spy" with former Chekists working abroad being celebrated as the great "hero spies" in books, films and newspapers. Sorge was one of those selected for "hero spy" status. In fact, the Soviets had broken Japanese codes in 1941 and had already known independently of the intelligence provided by Sorge that Japan had decided to "strike south" (attacking the United States and the British Empire), instead of "striking north" (attacking the Soviet Union).

The Kremlin gave much greater attention to signals intelligence in evaluating threats from Japan from 1931 to 1941 than it did to the intelligence that was gathered by the Sorge spy ring, but since Soviet intelligence did not like to mention the achievements of its codebreakers, Soviet propaganda from 1964 onward gloried Sorge as a "hero spy" and avoided all mention that the Soviets had broken the Japanese codes. The Soviets, during the Cold War, liked to give the impression that all of their intelligence came from human intelligence, rather than signals intelligence, to prevent Western nations from knowing how much the Soviets collected from the latter source. A testament to Sorge's fame in the Soviet Union was that even though Sorge worked for the GRU, not the NKVD, it was the KGB, which had far more power than the Red Army, that claimed him as one of its "hero spies" in the 1960s.

In 1965, three East German journalists published Dr Sorge funkt aus Tokyo in celebration of Sorge and his actions. Before the award, Sorge's claim that Friedrich Adolf Sorge was his grandfather was repeated in the Soviet press. In a strange Cold War oddity, the authors stirred up a free speech scandal with patriotic letters to former Nazis in West Germany, which caused the Verfassungsschutz to issue a stern warning in early 1967: "If you receive mail from a certain Julius Mader, do not reply to him and pass on the letter to the respective security authorities".
 In 1971, a comic book based on Sorge's life, Wywiadowca XX wieku ("20th Century Intelligence Officer"), was published in the People's Republic of Poland to familiarise younger readers with Sorge.

There is a monument to Sorge in Baku, Azerbaijan. Sorge also appears in Osamu Tezuka's Adolf manga. 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. Hollis later returned to England, joined MI5 just before World War II began and eventually became the director-general of MI5 from 1956 to 1965. 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.

One of Aleksandar Hemon's first stories in English is "The Sorge Spy Ring" (TriQuarterly, 1997). The 2003 Japanese film Spy Sorge, directed by Masahiro Shinoda, details his exploits in Shanghai and in Japan. In the film, he is portrayed by the Scottish actor Iain Glen. In 2016, one of Moscow's Moscow Central Circle rail stations was named after Sorge (Zorge). A Russian television series, "Richard Sorge. Master Spy", was a twelve-episode series filmed in 2019.

Reputation
Comments about Sorge by famous personalities include:
 "A devastating example of a brilliant success of espionage". – Douglas MacArthur, General of the Army
 "His work was impeccable." – Kim Philby
 "In my whole life, I have never met anyone as great as he was." – Mitsusada Yoshikawa, Chief Prosecutor in the Sorge trials who obtained Sorge's death sentence.
 "Sorge was the man whom I regard as the most formidable spy in history." – Ian Fleming
 "Richard Sorge was the best spy of all time." – Tom Clancy
 "The spy who changed the world". – Lance Morrow
 "Somehow, amidst the Bonds and Smiley's People, we have ignored the greatest of 20th century spy stories – that of Stalin's Sorge, whose exploits helped change history." – Carl Bernstein
 "Richard Sorge's brilliant espionage work saved Stalin and the Soviet Union from defeat in the fall of 1941, probably prevented a Nazi victory in World War II and thereby assured the dimensions of the world we live in today." – Larry Collins
 "The spies in history who can say from their graves, the information I supplied to my masters, for better or worse, altered the history of our planet, can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Richard Sorge was in that group." – Frederick Forsyth
 "Stalin's James Bond". – Le Figaro

In popular culture

There have been several literary and dramatic representations of Sorge's life:

 The German Letzte Karte spielt der Tod by Hans Hellmut Kirst, published in English as The Last Card (New York: Pyramid Publications, Inc., 1967) and Death Plays the Last Card (London: Fontana, 1968).
 The German film  (1955), directed by Veit Harlan and starring Paul Muller as Sorge.
 The French docu-drama Who Are You, Mr. Sorge? (1961), written by Yves Ciampi, Tsutomu Sawamura, and Hans-Otto Meissner, starring Thomas Holtzmann as Sorge.
 Wywiadowca XX wieku (20th-Century Intelligencer), a comic book that narrated Sorge's exploits, published in Poland in 1983.
 The American novel Wild Midnight Falls (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1968) in the Milo March series by M. E. Chaber, based on the supposition that Sorge was still alive and secretly active.
 The Russian novel Кио ку мицу! Совершенно секретно - при опасности сжечь! (Kio ku mitsu! Top secret - burn in case of danger!) by Ю. М. Корольков (Yu. M. Korol'kov) (Беларусь, 1987).
 The French L'Insensé by Morgan Sportes (Grasset, 2002) translated into Japanese as Sorge hametsu no fuga (Iwanami Shoten, 2005).
 The 1997 novel Stepper by Australian Brian Castro.
 "The Sorge Spy Ring", in the 2000 short story collection The Question of Bruno by Aleksandar Hemon.
 The later chapters of Osamu Tezuka's manga Adolf.
 The Japanese film Spy Sorge (2003), directed by Masahiro Shinoda and starring Iain Glen as Sorge.
 The Book The Man with Three Faces by German Hans-Otto Meissner, who wrote it based in his experiences as a diplomat in wartime. He met Sorge on some occasions.
 The Russian television mini-series Zorge (2019)

References

Bibliography

 . An early account by two leading British historians of the time. It is informed by their differing perspectives, Deakin being an authority on 20th century European history and Storry an authority on 20th century Japan.

 ; translation of Der Fall Sorge (Mǖnchen: Wilhelm Andermann 1955).

Further reading
 Kirst, Hans Helmut. Death Plays The Last Card': The Tense, Brilliant Novel of Richard Sorge—World War II's Most Daring Spy. Translated from the German by J. Maxwell Brownjohn. Collins Fontana paperback, 1968.
 Meissner, Hans-Otto. The Man with Three Faces: Sorge, Russia's Master Spy. London: Pan # GP88, 1957, 1st Printing Mass Market Paperback.
 Rimer, J. Thomas. (ed.) Patriots and Traitors, Sorge and Ozaki: A Japanese Cultural Casebook. MerwinAsia, 2009. (paperback, ). Contains several essays on the spy ring, a translation of selected letters Hotsumi Ozaki wrote in prison, and the translation of Junji Kinoshita's 1962 play A Japanese Called Otto.

External links

 The 2003 Japanese movie Spy Sorge about Richard Sorge's life includes some scenes shot in Kitakyushu, including one at the West Japan Industrial Club in Tobata ward, and another (a press conference) at the Mitsui club in Moji-ko.
 Sorge: A Chronology, edited by Michael Yudell.
 Richard Sorge Stalin's Spy In Tokyo
 The Spy Who Saved The Soviets

1895 births
1944 deaths
20th-century executions by Japan
Comintern people
Communist Party of the Soviet Union members
Executed Azerbaijani people
Executed communists
Executed German people
Russian people executed abroad
German communists
German expatriates in China
German expatriates in Japan
German journalists
20th-century German journalists
German male journalists
German male writers
German Marxists
German people convicted of spying for the Soviet Union
German people of Russian descent
GRU officers
Heroes of the Soviet Union
Japan–Soviet Union relations
Male journalists
People executed by Japan by hanging
People from Baku Governorate
People from the Weimar Republic
Recipients of the Iron Cross (1914), 2nd class
Recipients of the Order of Lenin
Russian communists
Russian Marxists
Russian people of German descent
Soviet people of World War II
Soviet spies
People executed for spying for the Soviet Union
University of Hamburg alumni
World War II spies for the Soviet Union
German Army personnel of World War I
War scare

Richard Sorge


The Railway Companies' Association was a co-ordinating body for British railway companies from 1867 until nationalisation in 1948. Its purpose was to protect the interests of the companies and their shareholders, chiefly against parliamentary interference. It was an early example of a lobby organisation.

History
The Association had its roots in a meeting of railway company chairmen, held at the Railway Clearing House (RCH) in March 1854, to discuss parliamentary matters of concern, but a properly constituted organisation developed only slowly. This was partly a result of the independent nature of the Victorian railway companies and the number of company chairmen and senior
officers who were Lords or MPs in their own right, and partly a reflection of the gradually increasing role of government in regulating railway company actions and the need for an 'industry' response.

By 1858 a United Railway Companies' Committee (URCC) had been formed, but it foundered after three years and was only re-constituted at a meeting on 26 June 1867, held at the Westminster office of the Midland Railway Company. The revived body's first achievement was to promulgate a standard format for the accounts of railway companies, drawn up by the Chief Accountants of five of the major companies. This was accepted by the Board of Trade and included as a Schedule in the Regulation of Railways Act 1868 (31 & 32 Vict., cap. 119).

The URCC was renamed 'The Railway Companies' Association' in 1869 or 1870. Its main task was to follow the progress of legislation which might affect railways, attempting to persuade MPs and Lords to vote in the 'railway interest', and giving evidence to parliamentary committees. It also promoted legislation designed to assist railway companies. This finally left the RCH free of a political role and able to concentrate on the commercial organisation of inter-company services.

Membership of the Association received a boost with the arguments over the passing of the Regulation of Railways Act 1873 (36 & 37 Vict., cap. 48). The perceived threats to profitability, through regulation of the rates which the 'monopolist' railways could charge, led to several moderately-large companies joining the major ones in the Association, finally giving it national coverage.

Chairmanship of the Association rotated amongst the Chairmen of leading railway companies. Much of the actual lobbying work of the Association devolved onto its parliamentary subcommittee, which consisted of Lords and MPs from the member companies' boards.

The Association had a small permanent secretariat, paid for by a precept of one or two shillings per £1,000 of the gross revenue of each participating company. The first Secretary of the Association was Kenneth Morison, who was also the first secretary of the RCH, but by 1873 the Honorary Secretary was Henry Oakley (knighted 1891), who was Secretary and then General Manager (1870-1898) of the Great Northern Railway. He remained in post at the Association for the rest of 19th century, and the Association's activities were presumably co-ordinated from Oakley's offices at King's Cross.

In the aftermath of the Regulation of Railways Act 1889 (52 & 53 Vict., cap. 57) and the industrial unrest of the 1890s, including the North Eastern Railway's unilateral recognition of the new trades union the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, the ad-hoc nature of the Association came under increasing pressure, leading to a restructuring. This involved giving the secretariat a permanent base, in three rooms at 53 Parliament Street, leased from October 1900, and appointing a full-time paid secretary, the first being the rising barrister William Guy Granet, appointed in
November 1905. Later secretaries included barristers W. Temple Franks (1905-1909) and Arthur Beresford Crane (1909-1929).

The Association's role was necessarily reduced during World War I when parliamentary interest in domestic transport matters was low, railways being managed for the war effort under the provisions of the Regulation of the Forces Act 1871, but it gained in importance when the newly established post-war Ministry of Transport decided to deal with the railway companies jointly through the Association. However, because the Railways Act 1921, during passage of which the Association lobbied for better compensation terms for shareholders, grouped British companies into four large concerns, another restructuring of the Association took place. The parliamentary members' council was abolished, severing the direct link with parliament, and the four new general managers constituted a standing committee of the Association. Briefings of independent railway-linked Lords and MPs continued however, for example in the companies' 1938 'Square Deal' campaign for reform of freight rates' legislation in the face of road competition (which was overtaken by the onset of war in 1939) and in the run up to the Transport Act 1947 which nationalised the railways. With all railways then under a single management within the British Transport Commission, the Association was wound up at this point.

Nomenclature
Modern commentators (Bonavia, Harris) drop the apostrophe in the name of this organisation, but Alderman includes it (when not abbreviating it to 'Railway Association'). Despite not having had opportunity to examine the Association's minutes, one feels sure that the Victorians would also have been grammatically correct and we have retained it here. The Association doesn't seem to have been referred to by its initials 'RCA'.

Records
The minutes of the Association were printed and distributed to the member companies, so several sets survive. They are available for consultation in The National Archives, together with other papers relating to the Association, and in the National Archives of Scotland.

References

Sources
 Alderman, Geoffrey, The railway interest, Leicester, Leicester University Press, 1973,
 Bonavia, Michael R., The organisation of British railways, London: Ian Allan, 1971,
 Harris, Michael, 'Railway Companies Association' in Simmons, Jack and Biddle, Gordon (eds), The Oxford companion to British Railway history: from 1603 to the 1990s, Oxford, New York: OUP, 1997, , page 414

Rail industry
History of rail transport in the United Kingdom
1867 establishments in the United Kingdom
1948 disestablishments in the United Kingdom
Organizations established in 1867
Organizations disestablished in 1948

Railway Companies' Association


The Unibus was the earliest of several computer bus and backplane designs used with PDP-11 and early VAX systems manufactured by the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) of Maynard, Massachusetts. The Unibus was developed around 1969 by Gordon Bell and student Harold McFarland while at Carnegie Mellon University.

The name refers to the unified nature of the bus; Unibus was used both as a system bus allowing the central processing unit to communicate with main memory, as well as a peripheral bus, allowing peripherals to send and receive data. Unifying these formerly separate busses allowed external devices to easily perform direct memory access (DMA) and made the construction of device drivers easier as control and data exchange was all handled through memory-mapped I/O.

Unibus was physically large, which led to the introduction of Q-bus, which multiplexed some signals to reduce pin count. Higher performance PDP systems used Fastbus, essentially two Unibusses in one. The system was later supplanted by Massbus, a dedicated I/O bus introduced on the VAX and late-model PDP-11s.

Technical specifications

The Unibus consists of 72 signals, usually connected via two 36-way edge connectors on each printed circuit board. When not counting the power and ground lines, it is usually referred to as a 56-line bus. It can exist within a backplane or on a cable. Up to 20 nodes (devices) can be connected to a single Unibus segment; additional segments can be connected via a bus repeater.

The bus is completely asynchronous, allowing a mixture of fast and slow devices. It allows the overlapping of arbitration (selection of the next bus master) while the current bus master is still performing data transfers. The 18 address lines allow the addressing of a maximum of . Typically, the top  is reserved for the registers of the memory-mapped I/O devices used in the PDP-11 architecture.

The design deliberately minimizes the amount of redundant logic required in the system. For example, a system always contains more slave devices than master devices so most of the complex logic required to implement asynchronous data transfers is forced into the relatively few master devices. For interrupts, only the interrupt-fielding processor needs to contain the complex timing logic. The result is that most I/O controllers can be implemented with simple logic, and most of the critical logic is implemented as a custom MSI IC.

Pinout

Type 1 lines are a normal multi-sender wired-OR bus with pull-up resistors at each end of the bus, typically on a terminator card.

Type 2 lines are selectively propagated by each card to the next slot – if the card wants to keep the request grant it will assert the SACK line and not propagate the request to the next slot. If a slot is empty, it is necessary to install a "grant continuity card" in the slot to propagate the four type 2 signals to the next card.

Type 3 signals are generated by the power supply and have only a single sender. They warn the devices on the bus when the power is about to fail, so those devices can execute an orderly shutdown, and disable operations to prevent spurious writes.

The two control lines (C0 and C1) allowed the selection of four different data transfer cycles:
DATI (Data In, a read)
DATIP (Data In/Pause, the first portion of a Read-Modify-Write operation. A DATO or DATOB operation completes this.)
DATO (Data Out, a word write)
DATOB (Data Out/Byte, a byte write)
During an interrupt cycle, a fifth style of transfer was automatically invoked to convey an interrupt vector from the interrupting device to the interrupt-fielding processor.

References

Computer buses
DEC hardware
PDP-11

Unibus


Ramayan is a 1954 Hindi religious film based on Valmiki's Ramayana, produced and directed by Vijay Bhatt for Prakash Pictures. The music directors were Shankar Rao Vyas and Hariprasanna Das and the lyrics were written by Ramesh Gupta, Pandit Indra, Neelkanth Tiwari, Baalam Pardesi. The film starred Prem Adib and Shobhana Samarth once again as Rama and Sita. The two actors had earlier acted in a trilogy of Bhatt's films based on the Ramayana, Bharat Milap (1942), Ram Rajya (1943) and Rambaan (1946). All three had been extremely successful, with the audience accepting them in the traditional roles. The other costars included  Shahu Modak, Durga Khote, and Umakant.

The story revolved around the latter part of the epic Ramayana, focussing on Rama and Sita's twin sons Luv and Kusha.

Cast
 Shobhana Samarth
 Prem Adib
 Shahu Modak
 Durga Khote
 Trilok Kapoor
 Umakant

Soundtrack
The music composers were Shankar Rao Vyas and Hariprasanna Das with Manna Dey singing songs like "Seete Seete Seete Rom Rom Ram Ka", "Tyagmayi Tu Gayi Teri Amar Bhavna" and "Ajab Vidhi Ka Lekh", which was composed by Hariprassana Das. The lyricists were Pandit Indra, Ramesh Gupta, Baalam Pardesi and Neelkanth Tiwari with songs sung by Manna Dey, Phulaji Bua, G. M. Durrani, Amirbai Karnataki, Wamanrao Sadolikar, Shahu Modak, Saraswati Rane, Yashwant, Madhusudan and Baby Tara.

Songlist

References

External links

1954 films
1950s Hindi-language films
Hindu mythological films
Films based on the Ramayana
Films directed by Vijay Bhatt

Ramayan (1954 film)


AB8, also known as SMC WR8, is a binary star in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC).  A Wolf-Rayet star and a main sequence companion of spectral type O orbit in a period of 16.638 days.  It is one of only nine known WO stars, the only Wolf-Rayet star in the SMC not on the nitrogen sequence, and the only Wolf-Rayet star in the SMC outside the main bar.

Discovery

AB8 was first discovered by Lindsay in 1961, when it was catalogued as entry 547 in a list of emission line objects in the SMC.  Sanduleak listed it as a confirmed member of the SMC, gave a spectral type of WR + OB, and identified it as one of only five stars that were not nuclei of planetary nebulae, but showed OVI emission in their spectra.  These would later be formally grouped as the WO class, the oxygen sequence of Wolf-Rayet stars.

In 1978, before the WO class was coined, Breysacher and Westerlund gave a spectral type of WC4? + OB. The definitive catalogue of Wolf Rayet stars in the SMC was published shortly after by Azzopardi and Breysacher, with AB8 the eighth out of a grand total of eight stars.  These are referred to as SMC WR stars, or SMC AB, or more commonly just AB.

Location

AB8 is located at the end of the wing of the Small Magellanic Cloud, two to three thousand parsecs from the main bar.  It is the brightest member of an open cluster discovered in 1958 and then listed as LIN 107.  It lies close to the massive NGC 602 cluster and is sometimes considered to be just a condensation within a large stellar association including NGC 602.  It is referred to as NGC 602c, where NGC 602a is the prominent main cluster.

Although the Small Magellanic Cloud lies mostly within the constellation Tucana, the wing extends into Hydrus.  The NGC 602 region, including AB8, lies within the borders of the constellation Hydrus.

The stars

Spectrum
The spectrum of AB8 shows many strong emission lines of highly ionized carbon and oxygen that clearly identify it is a WO star although the exact subclass is unclear.  It has previously been classified as WO3, but it now considered to be the cooler WO4.  The emission lines dominate the spectrum, but the profile of many lines shows an absorption wing produced by a hot class O companion.  The profiles are variable due to doppler shifting produced as the stars orbit at high velocity.  The electromagnetic radiation of the primary is concentrated in the far ultraviolet, so the visual and ultraviolet spectra are dominated by the secondary star.  Classification of both stars is complicated by the line blending.  The first SMC WR catalogue considered it as "WC4? + OB".

AB8 has not been detected as an x-ray source.  This is unexpected because close pairs of hot luminous stars are expected to produce copious x-ray emission from colliding winds.  The colliding winds are detected via their impact on emission lines in the spectrum, but not the x-rays.

Orbit
The spectrum of AB8 shows radial velocity variation of the WR emission lines and narrower absorption lines with a well-defined period of 16.6 days.  The relative size of the spectral line Doppler shifts indicates the mass ratio of the two stars, which shows that the primary has about one third the mass of the secondary.  The shape of the radial velocity curves can be used to derive the eccentricity of the orbits which are almost circular.  Eclipses of the stars are not seen, although models of the system predict a wind eclipse that should produce a detectable brightness change.  Distinct changes in the spectral line profiles are seen varying in sync with the orbital phase.  An orbital inclination of 40° is derived to most closely match all the observations.

Properties
The total visual brightness of AB8 can be determined fairly accurately at absolute magnitude (MV) −6.1, 23,500 times brighter than the sun.  The components cannot be observed separately and the contribution from each component can only be estimated.  The O star dominates the visual spectrum and produces around 70% of the brightness, leading to MV −5.9, and −4.9 for the primary.

The effective temperatures of the stars can be calculated directly by modelling the atmospheres of both stars to reproduce the observed spectrum in detail.  This method results in a temperature of 141,000 K for the WR component and 45,000 K for the O companion.  The effective temperature is useful for modelling the atmosphere and comparison between stars, but a typical "observed" temperature at optical depth 2/3 can be significantly different for stars with a dense stellar wind.  In the case of the WR primary star, the optical depth temperature is 115,000 K.

The simplest way to measure the luminosity of a star is to observe its radiated output at all wavelengths (the spectral energy distribution or SED) and sum them together.  Unfortunately this is impractical for AB8 because the majority of the radiation occurs in the far ultraviolet.  A more common method is to measure the visual luminosity and apply a bolometric correction to give the total luminosity at all wavelengths, although the size of the bolometric correction is extremely sensitive to the effective temperature.  Modelling the atmospheres gives luminosities for the WR and O component of  and  respectively.  Deriving the relative luminosities of the two components from the profile of the OVI resonance line gives a luminosity of  for the primary, but this would imply an unreasonably low temperature.

The radius of a star with strong stellar wind is poorly-defined since any strong density discontinuity that might be defined as a surface is entirely hidden from view.  Commonly used definitions of the radius in such cases include: a temperature radius; an optical depth radius; and a transformed radius.  The differences are only significant in the case of the WR component.  The temperature radius is the radius of a uniform disc that would produce the known luminosity at the calculated effective temperature, and is .  The radius at optical depth 2/3 is .  The transformed radius is a value used in the modelling of the atmosphere and is .  The O component radius is .

The masses of each component in the AB8 system can be determined from the binary orbit.  With the assumption of an inclination of 40°, the derived masses are  and .  The secondary is more massive and visually brighter, but not more luminous.

Both components of AB8 have powerful stellar winds and are losing mass rapidly.  Wind speeds of 3,700 km/s for the primary and 3,200 km/s for the secondary are calculated, with mass loss from the primary a billion times higher than the sun, and 10 million times higher for the secondary star.  The WR wind is sufficiently dense that it obscures the photosphere of the star, leading to the unusual spectrum consisting almost entirely of emission lines broadened by the rapid expansion and turbulence of the wind.  The high wind speeds and closeness of the stars mean that where the winds collide the material is shocked to temperatures over 500 million K.

Evolution

A model has been developed to show the evolution of a binary system leading to the currently observed state of AB8.  The initial state has a  primary and  secondary.  The more massive primary leaves the main sequence after approximately 2.2 million years and overflows its roche lobe.  In around 100,000 years it transfers  to the secondary star.  The primary continues to lose mass rapidly for several hundred thousand years, while the secondary maintains approximately the same mass.  At a model age of three million years, the system matches the current observations.

The original chemical abundances of the two stellar components are assumed to be typical of the SMC, with metallicity 1/5th to 1/10th of solar levels.  In its current state, the WR component shows dramatically different abundances, with hydrogen and nitrogen entirely absent.  It consists of 30% carbon, 30% oxygen, and the remainder mostly helium. It may still be fusing helium in its core, but WO stars are expected to have depleted their core helium and started to fuse carbon or even heavier elements.  The O type companion is still a core hydrogen burning main sequence star.

In both the primary and secondary star, their cores will eventually collapse, resulting in a supernova explosion.  The initially-more massive primary will collapse first, as a type Ic supernova, within 10,000 years.  The secondary will live on as a single star, or possibly in a binary with a supernova remnant, for a few million years before it also explodes as a supernova, probably a type Ib.  Massive stars at SMC metallicity may produce low luminosity supernovae, or even collapse directly to a black hole without a visible explosion.

See also
WR 102
WR 142
LMC195-1
AB7
Large Magellanic Cloud
List of most massive stars

References

Stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud
Spectroscopic binaries
Wolf–Rayet stars
O-type main-sequence stars
Extragalactic stars
Hydrus
J01310412-7325038

AB8 (star)


Boston's High Spine is an architectural planning design that arose in 1961, designed by the Committee of Civic Design, part of the Boston Society of Architects.  The basic idea of the High Spine is to create a string of skyscrapers that runs from Massachusetts Avenue to the Fort Point Channel, traversing the southern Back Bay between Boylston Street on the north and Huntington Avenue and Columbus Avenue on the south. The spine then heads eastward, between the Boston Common and Downtown Crossing areas to the north and the Bay Village and Chinatown neighborhoods to the south, before heading into the Financial District. The majority of Boston's skyscrapers are located along this corridor. This path follows an area along and directly north of the Massachusetts Turnpike that was extended along the Boston and Albany Railroad tracks and includes some former rail yards. Development here avoided disruption of pre-existing, historical neighborhoods, and gave the city a distinctive skyline that acts as a visual reference for one's location within the city.

Buildings of the High Spine
Two peaks of the High Spine, the John Hancock Tower and the Prudential Tower are found in Boston's Back Bay between Massachusetts Avenue and Arlington Street. Others include One Dalton, 111 Huntington Avenue, 500 Boylston Street and the Berkeley Building, which are all visible from outside the city.

Skyscrapers in Boston

High Spine


The Russo-American Treaty of 1824 (also known as the Convention of 1824) was signed in St. Petersburg between representatives of Russia and the United States on April 17, 1824, ratified by both nations on January 11, 1825 and went into effect on January 12, 1825. The accord contained six articles. It gave Russian claims on the Pacific Northwest coast of North America south of parallel 54°40′ north (over what Americans had known as the Oregon Country) to the United States.

The Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1825 between Russia and Great Britain then fixed the Russian Tsar's southernmost boundary of Alaska at the line of 54°40′N, the present southern tip of the Alaska Panhandle, but Russian rights to trade in the area south of that Iatitude remained. The Oregon dispute between the United States and Britain over jurisdiction in the region was already underway as a result of the Adams–Onís Treaty between the U.S. and Spain over the latter's former claims north of the 42nd Parallel (today's Oregon-California boundary).

The 1824 treaty was signed by Karl Nesselrode (mentioned in the treaty as "Charles de Nesselrode", Russia's then foreign minister), Henry Middleton representing the U.S., and Pyotr Ivanovich Poletika (mentioned in the document as "Pierre de Poletica") representing the Russian Empire.

See also
List of treaties
Oregon boundary dispute
Alaska Boundary Dispute
Russian colonization of the Americas
Maritime Fur Trade

References

Russian America
Bilateral treaties of the United States
Oregon Country
1825 treaties
Treaties of the Russian Empire
Russian Empire–United States relations
Pre-statehood history of Oregon
1824 treaties
Bilateral treaties of Russia

Russo-American Treaty of 1824


Hippo is an unincorporated community located in Floyd County, Kentucky, United States.

A post office was established in the community in 1902 and named for local resident Bee Madison "Hippo" Craft. At the time "hippo," short for hypochondriac, was Southern slang for an irritable and complaining person, something Craft was apparently known for in town.

Their post office closed in June 1996.

References

Unincorporated communities in Floyd County, Kentucky
Unincorporated communities in Kentucky

Hippo, Kentucky


Achim Steiner (born 17 May 1961) is a Brazilian-born environmentalist who currently serves as the administrator of the United Nations Development Programme and vice-chair of United Nations Sustainable Development Group.

Before joining UNDP, he was executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme UNEP (2006–2016), and director of the Oxford Martin School (2016–2017). He has also served as director general of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and secretary-general of the World Commission on Dams.

Early life and education
The son of a German farmer who had emigrated to Rio Grande do Sul, Achim Steiner was born in Brazil in 1961 and holds German as well as Brazilian citizenship. He went to school in Carazinho and at Dover College. He obtained a bachelor's degree from Worcester College of the University of Oxford and a master's degree from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) of the University of London, specializing in development economics, regional planning, international development and environmental policy. He also studied at the German Development Institute and the Harvard Business School.

Career
Steiner started his career in 1989 at the  Rural Regional Development Department, GIZ, in Germany.  From 1991 to 1997 he worked for the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in Southern Africa and Washington, D.C. He was Chief Technical Adviser of the Mekong River Commission (1997–1998) before becoming Secretary-General of the World Commission on Dams. In 2001 he returned to IUCN as Director-General.

United Nations Environment Programme, 2006–2016
Acting on the nomination of Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the United Nations General Assembly in 2006 unanimously elected Steiner Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) for a four-year term. At the time, he was not nominated by a Member State, but prevailed over candidates such as Børge Brende of Norway and Rajendra K. Pachauri of India. His mandate was later extended twice, this time on the proposal of the Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

The Secretary-General appointed Steiner as director-general of the United Nations Office at Nairobi (UNON), where he served from March 2009 to May 2011. Within the UN system he also chaired the High-level Committee on Programmes of the United Nations System Chief Executives Board for Coordination  and the United Nations Environment Management Group. On 3 May 2016, Ban Ki-moon announced that the post of executive director of UNEP would be taken over by Erik Solheim in June 2016.

Oxford Martin School, 2016–2017
Upon leaving UNEP, Steiner was appointed director of the Oxford Martin School, a post he took up in September 2016. In addition to his role at the University of Oxford, Steiner was appointed Envoy of the Chair of the Platform on Disaster Displacement by the Federal Government of Germany in October 2016.

In late 2015, Reuters reported that Steiner was one of three candidates shortlisted to succeed António Guterres as United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, alongside Helle Thorning-Schmidt of Denmark, Jasmine Whitbread of the United Kingdom, and Filippo Grandi of Italy; the post eventually went to Grandi.

United Nations Development Programme, 2017–present
In April 2017, following consultations with the executive board of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Secretary-General António Guterres appointed Steiner as the programme's new Administrator. On 19 April 2017, the United Nations General Assembly confirmed him for a four-year term.

In November 2018, Guterres also appointed Steiner to co-chair (alongside Maria Ramos) the United Nations' Task Force on Digital Financing of Sustainable Development Goals.

Other activities
 Generation Unlimited, Member of the Board (since 2018)
 Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), Ex-Officio Member of the Committee of Cosponsoring Organizations (since 2017)
 International Gender Champions (IGC), Member (since 2017)
 OECD/UNDP Tax Inspectors Without Borders (TIWB), Co-chair of the Governing Board (since 2017)
 German Council for Sustainable Development (RNE), Member (2016–2017, appointed ad personam by Chancellor Angela Merkel)
 International Olympic Committee (IOC), Member of the Sustainability and Legacy Commission
 Agora Verkehrswende, Chairman of the Council
 Platform on Disaster Displacement, Chair of the Advisory Committee
 China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development (CCICED), International Vice-chair
 Earth Day Network, Member of the Global Advisory Committee
 The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB), Member of the Advisory Board
 European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), Member of the Environmental Advisory Council (ENVAC)

Honours and awards

Awards
 Slovak Republic's gold medal for Diplomatic Service
 Republic of Korea Order of Diplomatic Service Award
 2012 — The National German Sustainability Award
 2010 – Leadership Award for Principled Pragmatism – Tällberg Foundation
 2009 — Officer of the Order of Saint-Charles (Monaco)
 Shark Guardian of the Year 2008 – Shark Project
 2008 — Schubert Prize – Bruno H. Schubert Foundation
 2007 — Steiger Award – Umwelt

Honorary degrees
 Honorary Doctorate, International University in Geneva (IUG)
 Honorary Professor, Tongji University, Shanghai

References

External links

 Interview with Achim Steiner
 Official website of UNEP
 Biography at Oxford Martin School

Living people
Brazilian officials of the United Nations
Alumni of SOAS University of London
Alumni of Worcester College, Oxford
Alumni of the University of London
Harvard Business School alumni
United Nations Environment Programme
People associated with the International Union for Conservation of Nature
1961 births
German officials of the United Nations
People from Carazinho

Achim Steiner


South Cry is a Brazilian rock band formed in 2000 in the city of Cordeiro in Rio de Janeiro (state), Brazil. Although a Brazilian group, South Cry often writes songs in English and has three albums.

History
The band emerged in 2000, when three guys, from Cordeiro and the city of Bom Jardim, Rio de Janeiro, decided to get together to form a group of rock musicians. After a while, the band managed to record a demo called "Don't Drink My Tears" in a studio in Bom Jardim. The music was played on some radio stations of the region, having wide acceptance, and this encouraged the South Cry to develop their first album, called "Beyond Metaphor". This debut album was recorded in Bom Jardim, in the year 2001-2002. It was released in 2003 with many difficulties, because the band did not have adequate tools, having used borrowed equipment, and a poor production system. However the album was considered a surprise, having received rave reviews in magazines about music, like the Rock Brigade. After recording, the band got signed to a label, but that contract was only for distribution, not having involvement with projects for dissemination. Despite these difficulties, South Cry continued trying to publicize their work, performing and writing up a video clip of the band's first hit, "Virtual Freedom" independently.

After a period of hiatus with no new recordings, South Cry felt the need to write a new work. Then an uncle of Guill Erthal, guitarist, financed the recording of their second album, titled "Keep an Eye on Me" in a studio in the city of Rio de Janeiro in 2007. Despite not having a heavyweight producer, the second album (2008) made the group leverage its disclosure, managing to put songs on the radio celebrities, such as Radio Transamerica, of Brazil. First the song "Virtual Freedom" (from Beyond Metaphor) had been released, even before the recording of Keep an Eye on Me. Shortly thereafter, the songs "Rebel Angel" and " Whatever You Try" became part of the radio broadcast. Despite gaining notoriety, South Cry could not gain more disclosures for the second album.

In 2009, the American Jeremiah Thompson took over as manager of the band, creating the label Big Sky Rock. Thus, work began to be disclosed, even if timidly out of Brazil, in countries like the United States and Denmark. Soon after the band began looking for big producers, which would give visibility to a possible third disc. Many producers of weight were asked if interested in working with South Cry, then the winner of the Grammy Sylvia Massy was chosen to produce the third release. The album Blue Moon, the first non-independent, was recorded in mid-2010 at the famous Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas, which has hosted renowned artists such as U2, Bob Marley, Iron Maiden and the Rolling Stones. The album was released on November 21, 2010, and its release had begun in the United States and England, which has already put two songs among the top positions. The band plans to begin promotion in Brazil.

Discography
 Beyond Metaphor (2003)
 Keep an Eye on Me (2008)
 Blue Moon (2010)

References

External links
 Official Site
 MySpace
 Big Sky Rock

Brazilian alternative rock groups
Brazilian hard rock musical groups
Musical groups established in 2000
2000 establishments in Brazil

South Cry