Spy story

An anti-fascist spy who defied Hitler's Nazis, was betrayed by Stalin

Dr. Richard Sorge, a German communist who penetrated the innermost political and military circles of the Japanese and German governments for a decade from the mid-1930s, only ever had one good thing to say about the Nazis. His earliest party writing (a turgid pamphlet on The Accumulation of Capital and Rosa Luxemburg) "was", he jokingly said, "so clumsy and immature I hoped the Nazis burned every last copy".

Everything else Sorge did, like stealing the secret war plans of the two biggest anti-communist World War II Axis powers, was dedicated to the defeat of fascism.

Journalist Owen Matthews begins his spy tale with a young Sorge, head full of the nationalistic and romantic notions of war typical of his petit-bourgeois upbringing, tasting disillusionment on his first day of action in World War I when his German student battalion was machine-gunned to shreds in an advance from the trenches.

A radical political transformation of Sorge was incubated in hospital as he recovered from three partially-amputated fingers (and a shattered leg that gave him a permanent limp). It came courtesy of a left-wing nurse who provided him with works by Karl Marx, Federick Engels and Georg Hegel ("the ladder to Marx").