Frankfurt, spring 1950
“We regret to inform you that the position referenced above has been given to someone other than you.” This brief letter from the economic administration of Frankfurt, dated February 4, 1950, put an end to Fritz’s hopes of finding a position in the consular services of the new Germany. He thought he still had possibilities at the future Foreign Ministry, whose rebirth was being actively prepared by the Federal chancellery in Bonn. In October 1949, Fritz had written to Hans-Heinrich Herwarth von Bittenfeld, chief of protocol at the Chancellery in Bonn, to ask him officially for his “readmission into the services of the Foreign Ministry.” This time, instead of putting forward his status as a former “Allied contact” during the war, he had merely said that he represented the interests in Germany of a company based in Switzerland (“Maurer & Co., Bern, exporters of woolen looms,” a company controlled by Ernst Kocherthaler). He had added a copy of a document that certified that he “was not affected by de-Nazification measures.” But he never received any response to his request.
Obviously, someone was standing in his way, but Fritz never found out who it was. The reasons for the obstacles he faced, however, were clear: The old networks of the Nazi period were resuming control of the ministry and were trying everything to keep this “traitor” away. The foreign policy adviser to Chancellor Adenauer, Herbert Blankenhorn, had served in the German legation in Bern. He proclaimed publicly that the new members of the German diplomatic corps had to be “new men … democratic and pro-Western,” but behind the scenes the reality was quite different.
Fritz Kolbe was without any question democratic and pro-Western. His only mistake was to have been those things before everyone else. A few months later, in May 1950, Walter Bauer spoke of the “Kolbe case” to Economics Minister Ludwig Erhard in person: “I told him that your hiring by the consular services was a problem because, apparently, they are unwilling to recognize your political activity since 1942. That deeply shocks me,” Bauer explained to Fritz Kolbe shortly after this interview in Bonn. What if Allen Dulles, or his brother John Foster Dulles, U.S. Secretary of State, got wind of this story? “You can imagine what impact that would have on the mutual trust between Germany and the United States!” Bauer pointed out. Apparently, Ludwig Erhard was aware of the problem and shared this point of view. In the course of his conversation with Walter Bauer, the economics minister had turned to his secretary of state and asked him to note down Fritz Kolbe’s name. The file was to be sent to the federal chancellery. The matter was to be cleared up. But that was the end of it, and the initiative had no consequences.
On June 1, 1950, Walter Bauer wrote to the deputy Walter Tillmans, one of the cofounders of the CDU, who had promised to help him. Walter Bauer had explained to him that Fritz Kolbe “had acted exclusively out of patriotism” and that it was “frightening” that his candidacy was blocked because of his pro-Allied activity during the war. On June 14, 1950, Fritz—still optimistic—wrote to Walter Bauer to tell him that Dr. Tillmans seemed to be having some success: “Several deputies are said to have spoken in my favor,” he explained.
Fritz Kolbe was wrong to hope. It did not take him long to understand the origin of the ostracism of which he was the target. In a letter of July 30, 1950, Walter Bauer wrote to Fritz to ask him for details on a specific episode of his biography: “I have been told that you went to the German legation in Bern shortly before the surrender to ask that Köcher turn over to you the legation’s gold. I have also been told that Köcher’s death is not unconnected to you. Can you tell me more about this?” The fatal misadventure had thus taken place in the last days of the war. Fritz had been wrong to play the role of emissary from the Americans to the envoy of the Reich, who had complained about him to several of his colleagues before committing suicide. Five years later, Fritz was considered not only a traitor but an assassin. The Americans could do nothing to help their former agent to get a position. In early August 1950, Allen Dulles met Herbert Blankenhorn in Bonn, but nothing concrete came out of the conversation. It was obvious that Fritz would never again have a position in the ministry.
Frankfurt, July 1950
At the end of the war, Allen Dulles and Gerald Mayer had managed to persuade Fritz to write his memoirs, even though, for security reasons, there were no plans to publish them. Ernst Kocherthaler had taken down Fritz’s account and translated it into English in a seven-page document (“The Story of George”). “The important thing,” Kocherthaler had said in order to persuade his friend to speak out, “is for the Americans to know that there was a positive side to Germany.” Fritz had no doubts about it. He even thought that he had played the role of a “leader” in the German resistance, and he was flattered by the interest taken in him. But at the same time his pride led him to refuse to put himself forward. “What does Allen want to do with all this?” Fritz asked in May 1945. “Unlike other people, I don’t want to gain fame through my story,” he added in a letter to Ernst Kocherthaler in July. Observing that “memoirs of resistance to Nazism” were becoming a literary genre in their own right, Fritz had reasons for not associating himself with a huge enterprise of collective mystification.
The idea of publishing something about Fritz, however, remained alive in the mind of Gerald Mayer, who had left the world of intelligence for the movie industry (he headed the Paris office of the Motion Picture Association). In September 1949, Mayer suggested to Fritz that he write his story so that it could be made into “a film or a book.” Fritz would not hear of it and refused to go to Paris to discuss the plan, as Gerald Mayer had suggested. Mayer was not discouraged, and put Fritz in contact with an American journalist, Edward P. Morgan, who wrote for the magazine True. Fritz was at first reticent. “Who still cares about what happened then?” he said. “All that’s in the past.” Finally he agreed to see Morgan. The meeting took place in early 1950 in Fritz’s apartment near Frankfurt.
“In the last two years of World War II, ‘George Wood’ brought to the Allies no fewer than 2600 secret documents from Hitler’s Foreign Office, some of them of the highest importance. Eisenhower called him one of the most valuable agents we had during the entire war.” These lines introduced the article published in True in July 1950, under the title “The Spy the Nazis Missed.” This fourteen-page article was somehow typically American, with an alluring title, illustrations worthy of a detective story, and written in a lively style. Edward P. Morgan did not mention Fritz Kolbe’s real name, but the article circulated among German diplomats, who had no difficulty in identifying the figure. This was even more the case when the article was translated in full and published a year later in the Swiss weekly Die Weltwoche, with a darker title than the American version: “The Double Game of a Diplomat.” This publication in German, which Allen Dulles had unsuccessfully attempted to prevent, helped to destroy Fritz’s reputation: Instead of seeing him as a member of the resistance, most of his former colleagues considered him as an informer and a renegade.
Frankfurt, October 1950
Had Fritz been a traitor to his country? Confronting the wall of silence that faced him, he began to have reasons to question himself. Fortunately, he was not alone with his conscience. Some of his friends helped him to reflect on his past, to legitimate his action, and to preserve his personal dignity. One of them was a major intellectual, Rudolf Pechel, whom Fritz had probably met through Professor Sauerbruch. Pechel embodied the continuity of German thought: Since 1919, he had headed the editorial board of the Deutsche Rundschau, a prestigious monthly established in 1874, comparable to the Revue des Deux Mondes in France. Banned by the Nazis in 1942, it had been relaunched in 1946 by securing a British license. Fritz Kolbe became a permanent employee of the publication in October 1950. He was in charge of managing subscriptions and single-issue distribution, particularly in the Soviet zone, where the journal circulated in secret.
Although Fritz was cut off from his professional milieu, he found welcome spiritual comfort in this new work. Rudolf Pechel ha
d unquestionable moral authority. He was not a man of the left (he came out of the “revolutionary conservatism” of the 1920s), but he had been persecuted by the Nazis, who had sent him to a concentration camp from 1942 to 1945. The Deutsche Rundschau published accounts by victims of Nazism and works by prestigious authors (Carlo Schmid, Golo Mann, Wilhelm Röpke) who wrote high-minded essays on the major questions of the time: resistance, treason, democracy. Through the journal, Fritz Kolbe sharpened his ideas on the themes that constantly preoccupied him. The Deutsche Rundschau fought in defense of the honor of the members of the German resistance to the Third Reich. It regularly denounced the return by Nazis to key positions in the Federal Republic of Germany. It gave a platform to the conspirators of July 20, 1944, who explained why their “treason” had been a patriotic gesture.
For his part, Fritz Kolbe had never doubted that he had acted as a patriot. But he needed to understand why the accusation of “treason” was sticking to him. The “right to resistance” against dictatorship was inscribed in the Fundamental Law of the new Federal Republic only in 1968. What he was reproached with, in the end, was perhaps with having supplied information that caused the death of hundreds of Germans. At the Nuremberg trial, the diplomat Hasso von Etzdorf had declared that he “had respected certain limits that mark the difference between a traitor and a patriot” and that he “had not sold Germany to foreign countries,” specifying that it would have been easy for him “to supply information of a military nature to Lisbon, Stockholm, or Madrid.” Hans-Bernd Gisevius, as well, had always been careful not to tell the Americans everything he knew, keeping some information to himself with the aim of saving lives. Fritz Kolbe had not had the same scruples. He had supplied industrial and military targets, aware that the Allied bombings would create many innocent victims. In the end, he had followed his job as a spy to its logical conclusion, acting as an American or British soldier would have done.
Frankfurt, September 1951
In September 1951, the daily newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau published a sensational investigation revealing that former Nazis were resuming power in the new German Foreign Ministry. It had been authorized to come back into existence a few months earlier under the direct authority of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. The outcry produced by this series of articles was so huge that a parliamentary investigative committee was set up in the Bundestag.
Less than a year later, in June 1952, this committee turned in its final report, demanding much more rigor in future appointments and recommending the suspension of four high officials in the Foreign Ministry who were particularly compromised. In a Bundestag debate in October, Chancellor Adenauer did not attempt to conceal the facts and recognized that the great majority of new German diplomats (66 percent) were former members of the NSDAP. He went on to say, however, that in his view, “it was not possible to do otherwise” and that the country needed people who had “experience and skill.” After being suspended for a year or two, the principal diplomats incriminated by the investigative committee were partially rehabilitated. Chancellor Adenauer appointed a new chief of personnel for the Foreign Ministry and gave him the mission of eradicating “the spirit of Wilhelmstrasse” from the ministry. The new appointee soon discovered that “it was already too late.”
Frankfurt, 1953
Fritz continued working at various odd jobs. The salary from the Deutsche Rundschau was not enough to live on, and the Americans had stopped paying him when he left Berlin in April 1948. In early 1953, he tried to secure a position as a correspondent for a German press agency in Switzerland. His application had been accepted, the contract was on the point of being signed, but at the last moment, for reasons that he never discovered, the employer terminated discussions. Fritz was no longer surprised by anything: His name seemed to have been placed on a blacklist.
Fortunately, life was not reduced to these repeated disappointments. Fritz remained a lover of life and never complained. In April 1953 his son had reached the age of twenty-one, the age required to get a South African passport and to be able to travel to Europe. Fritz had put money aside to finance the trip. The reunion took place on July 6, 1953, in the Dutch port of Hoek. Fritz and Maria had come to pick up Peter in a car. Maria remembered that “Fritz was eager to see his son again.” Peter, for his part, never thought that that was the case. The son’s feelings toward the father were mixed at the very least:
He was a complete stranger to me. I was surprised to see how small he was. He had an ideal, abstract image of me; he treated me like a child. He wanted me to put on a sweater so I wouldn’t catch cold and he absolutely insisted on carrying my luggage. I hated the way he had of wanting to repair the damage after such a long absence. He could have written to me after the war. But he didn’t, just giving me a few very distant signs of life. I had expected something from him which never came.
It wasn’t the presence of Fritz’s new wife that troubled him. Peter was meeting Maria for the first time, and they got on quite well together. He soon began calling her “Muschka.” “If she had not been there, things would have gone badly with my father,” Peter confessed fifty years later. Fritz could not stop lecturing his son, as though he wanted to recover the lost years of bringing him up. “You must do your duty every day without complaining,” he said, using as an example all the workers who got to their factories early in the morning as though eager to begin working. This frenzy of work was impressive. There were construction sites everywhere in Frankfurt, swarming with activity at all hours of day and night. Peter had never seen that in South Africa.
Peter confessed that he was more interested by the trip to Europe than by the meeting with Fritz. After fourteen years of silence, the reunion seemed almost impossible. Peter was irritated by his father’s conduct toward women. Fritz played the role of seducer. He amused himself by trying to pick up women with his friend Harry Hermsdorf of the CIA. As for Fritz, he was sorry that his son was not conducting himself in a more docile manner. When they played chess, Fritz felt a fierce desire to win. He hoped that Peter would stay in Germany and was absolutely determined to find a position for him in the chemical or pharmaceutical industry. But Peter had no intention of staying in a country that was not his own, even though he spoke the language very well. At the end of three months, he decided to leave. He went from Frankfurt to Venice by bicycle, then took a boat, and was back in South Africa in January 1954.
Peter was not unaware of the fact that his father had worked for the Americans during the war, but he did not know any of the details of the story. “If something serious happens to you in life, speak to the American authorities and tell them that you are the son of George Wood,” was all Fritz had said. In June 1953, Peter had been to some parties in the American zone and had been able to see that his father had many friends in the CIA (Peter spoke English with them, pleased to see that his father did not understand everything they said). But at no time had it been possible to speak seriously with him about his past. Fritz preferred to talk about other things. He asked his son, for example, about the “prospects for the cement market in South Africa,” or advised him to join the Masons. Even in the presence of his own son, Fritz Kolbe hid himself behind a smokescreen.
Washington, 1953
Allen Dulles was appointed Director of the CIA on February 26, 1953. He had left the world of intelligence in late 1945 to resume his career as a Wall Street lawyer and to head the Council on Foreign Relations. General Eisenhower had been inaugurated as president of the United States in January 1953. With the return of the Republicans to power, the Dulles family was rewarded for its commitment and loyalty: John Foster, Allen’s older brother, was the new secretary of state. His younger sister Eleanor coordinated Berlin matters in the State Department. In a long portrait of Allen Dulles published in the New York Times Magazine on March 29, 1953, there were three paragraphs on one of the greatest “coups” of his career: During the war, Dulles had got hold of a German spy named “George Wood, the most valuable and the most prolifi
c source of secret intelligence out of Germany.” Some years later, in September 1959, Allen Dulles was presented in the magazine True as “America’s global Sherlock,” “the man who stole two thousand six hundred secret documents from the Nazi Foreign Ministry.”
Since the end of the war, the reputation of Allen Dulles had rested to an appreciable degree on his encounter with Fritz Kolbe. In December 1945, when Dulles had resigned to return to the practice of law in New York, General John Magruder, one of the heads of the OSS, had written these words of farewell: “It is with a deep sense of loss that I accept your resignation…. As you know, the head of the British Intelligence Service credits you with the outstanding intelligence job on the Allied side in this war. That recognition would have been due as a result alone of the steady flow of intelligence from Bern and especially the Kappa-Wood material …” In July 1946, President Truman had awarded Allen Dulles the Medal of Merit for his good and loyal services and had particularly congratulated him for three pieces of information sent from Bern: the location of the base in Peenemünde where the V-2s were made (May 1943), the launch sites for “rocket bombs” in the Pas-de-Calais, and the regular reports of the results of Allied bombing raids on German cities. Except for Peenemünde, this information had all come from Fritz Kolbe.
Fritz was more than a little proud to see his old friend from Bern occupying a position of the first rank in the United States. The two men remained in touch, and Allen Dulles sought out news of Fritz whenever he could. This purely friendly relation was no longer based on the feeling of being engaged in the same battles. As much as he was an anticommunist, Fritz equally detested imperial and triumphant America. He was hostile to nuclear deterrence, in favor of a “middle way between capitalism and socialism,” and had nothing but contempt for “the prosperity devoid of spirituality” embodied by the United States. He was not fascinated by the CIA and what it symbolized. Nothing makes it possible to determine his reaction to the coups d’état fomented by the CIA in Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954. There is no surviving statement from him about the protection provided by the CIA to former Nazis or even SS officers. But he remained very close to Allen Dulles, who had never dropped him.
A Spy at the Heart of the Third Reich: The Extraordinary Story of Fritz Kolbe, America's Most Important Spy in World War II Page 25