Richard Sorge in Peking, 1937
Posted: December 9th, 2021 | 1 Comment »Just been rereading Hans-Otto Meissner’s 1955 book The Man with Three Faces about the Soviet spy in China and Japan, Richard Sorge. I’d forgotten about Sorge’s 1937 visit to Peking, which might have made a good chapter in my recent collection Destination Peking. Anyway, Sorge visits to deliver microfilm and see Colonel “Alex” Commander of the Soviet Fourth Bureau’s courier service. He was undercover as a Frankfurter Zeitung jounralist writing an article on Peking.
What interests me of course is that Meissner temptingly mentions Sorge investigating the ‘crowded side streets of Peking’, presumably the hutongs….Anyone got that article?
The University of Frankfurt (the western one, on the Main, not on the Oder) has started to digitize their holdings of the Frankfurter Zeitung und Handelsblatt. Unfortunately, they rae still at the beginning, with vols 58 to 62, covering the years from 1914 to 1918 currently online.
https://sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/periodika/periodical/titleinfo/6198103