A Spy at the Heart of the Third Reich: The Extraordinary Story of Fritz Kolbe, America's Most Important Spy in World War II

by Delattre, Lucas

  be “absolutely politically clean”: Newspaper article of July 1949. The quotation from Governor Robertson was underlined by Fritz Kolbe; personal archives of Fritz Kolbe.

  a member of the party: Letter from Fritz Kolbe to Rudolf Pechel, August 11, 1949. German Federal Archives, Koblenz, Rudolf Pechel file.

  But me he kept: Letter from Fritz Kolbe to Walter Bauer, November 15, 1949, personal archives of Fritz Kolbe.

  his house in Bavaria: In January 1948, the “Wilhelmstrasse” trial began against twenty-one former high-ranking diplomats, including Karl Ritter. He was sentenced in April 1949 to four years in prison for “war crimes” because of his decision-making responsibilities in the treatment of Allied prisoners of war. He was acquitted on other charges (notably of “crimes against humanity” in connection with the occupation of Hungary after March 1944). Karl Ritter had already served his sentence. He returned to his chalet in Bavaria and lived away from public life. (Fritz heard that Ritter was going back to Brazil in 1950 to marry a rich heiress. Morgan, “The Spy the Nazis Missed”).

  the new Germany: Personal archives of Fritz Kolbe.

  Federal Chancellery in Bonn: Fritz Kolbe had never officially left the ministry, as he had a life appointment; he was simply “on a leave of absence.” He was waiting for a new administration to be put in place. In 1950, the Foreign Ministry had still not been authorized by the occupying authorities to rise from its ashes. In September 1945, the Allies had officially put an end to the existence of the ministry, the embassies, and the consulates and other German representatives abroad. However, at the Chancellery in Bonn, a new diplomatic apparatus was being set up. “In late 1949 and early 1950, three months after the establishment of the federal government, the organization of the ministry and above all the attribution of positions was essentially settled…. The former Wilhelmstrasse diplomats occupied all the key positions in the ministry. Döscher, Verschworene Gesellschaft. The Allies did not try to influence appointments, except for the German embassies in Washington, London, and Paris. The Foreign Ministry of the new German Federal Republic was established in March 1951, and Chancellor Adenauer appointed himself head of the German diplomatic service.

  the chancellery in Bonn: Letter of application from Fritz Kolbe to Hans-Heinrich Herwarth von Bittenfeld, October 15, 1949, personal archives of Fritz Kolbe. Herwarth was chief of protocol at the Chancellery in Bonn. His past was spotless: because he was one-fourth Jewish, he had had to leave the Foreign Ministry in 1939. He was not a member of the Nazi Party and he owed his life to the protection he enjoyed in high places. To thank all those who had helped him during the war, he used his position of power after 1945 to distribute certificates of good conduct to his friends, most of whom were former Nazis. Döscher, Verschworene Gesellschaft.

  Chancellor Adenauer, Herbert Blankenhorn: Herbert Blankenhorn (1904–91) probably played a major role in blocking Fritz Kolbe’s career after the war. In March 1950, when Fritz was trying to get hired by the new German consul general in Washington, Ernst Kocherthaler wrote to Allen Dulles: “George is trying to get included into the staff of the new Consul General to Washington, Herr von Schlange-Schöningen, but I doubt that Herr Blankenhorn, who is Adenauer’s actual manager for foreign affairs, might tolerate him. Blankenhorn was one of Köcher’s assistants and Köcher attributed his personal catastrophe to George, who therefore is considered something like a traitor by this special group.” Letter from Ernst Kocherthaler to Allen Dulles, March 28, 1950, Allen W. Dulles Papers. Herbert Blankenhorn was the “strong man” of the new Foreign Ministry (director of political affairs from 1951, he was subsequently ambassador to NATO, Paris, Rome, and London). But he was not a man without a past: he had been in charge of culture and propaganda at the German legation in Bern between 1940 and July 1943. He had of course been a member of the Nazi Party. But above all he had worked every day with Otto Köcher, whose hatred for Fritz Kolbe dated at least from the early days of May 1945.

  this interview in Bonn: Letter to Fritz, May 20, 1950, Peter Kolbe collection. Ludwig Erhard (CDU) was Adenauer’s economics minister from September 1949 to October 1963.

  activity during the war: Personal archives of Fritz Kolbe.

  “my favor,” he explained: Ibid.

  “me more about this?”: Letter from Walter Bauer to Fritz Kolbe, Fulda, July 30, 1950, personal archives of Fritz Kolbe.

  out of the conversation: Letter from Fritz Kolbe to Walter Bauer, August 4, 1950, personal archives of Fritz Kolbe.

  position in the ministry: “Perhaps it’s just as well that I was not rehired by the ministry, because I might have greeted people in the corridors by saying ‘Heil Hitler!’ to them,” Fritz is supposed to have said. “Der Mann, der den Krieg verkürzen wollte.” There is no document in the archives in which Fritz was told that he would not be rehired by the ministry.

  plans to publish them: “It seems that great things are afoot. Allen has asked me to speak at a little greater length about my motives…. You can imagine how little pleasure I take in continuing this exercise, which consists of talking about myself.” Letter from Fritz Kolbe to Ernst Kocherthaler, May 29, 1945, personal archives of Fritz Kolbe. In the books that he published after the war, Allen Dulles mentioned “George Wood” several times.

  (“The Story of George”): “Allen Dulles asked me for a ‘story’ about George. He says that you are too modest to write it yourself.” Letter from Ernst Kocherthaler to Fritz Kolbe, July 4, 1945, personal archives of Fritz Kolbe.

  in the German resistance: Letter from Fritz Kolbe to Toni Singer, September 30, 1946, personal archives of Fritz Kolbe.

  Ernst Kocherthaler in July: Letter to Ernst Kocherthaler, written in Wiesbaden, July 2, 1945, personal archives of Fritz Kolbe.

  enterprise of collective mystification: “Everybody and his brother, it seems, are writing their memoirs of the Hitler era.” Morgan, “The Spy the Nazis Missed.”

  film or a book: In the late 1960s, Gerald Mayer began working seriously with Fritz Kolbe on a proposed book. He had the CIA in Washington send him a complete file on the activities of “Wood” during the war. Fritz’s death in 1971 put an end to the work. “I have seen George Wood in Bern on several occasions. He looks very fit and I hope to be of help to him in the writing of his memoirs,” Mayer wrote to Allen Dulles on July 14, 1968. Allen W. Dulles Papers. In October 1972, Maria Fritsch wrote a memo in which she said that “death struck Fritz down at a time when he was ready to write his memoirs as he had hoped to do for a long time.” Private archives of Martin and Gudrun Fritsch, Berlin.

  for the magazine True: Correspondence between Gerald Mayer and Fritz Kolbe, September 1949 to January 1950, personal archives of Fritz Kolbe. True was an abundantly illustrated mass market men’s magazine owned by the Fawcett group. Edward P. Morgan later had a career as a political journalist and television commentator.

  Game of a Diplomat: Personal archives of Fritz Kolbe; Allen W. Dulles Papers.

  unsuccessfully attempted to prevent: “I am sorry about George’s article as I fear the publication in Switzerland at this time will do him a good bit of harm and this is really very tragic.” Letter from Allen Dulles to Ernst Kocherthaler, April 20, 1951, Allen W. Dulles Papers.

  major intellectual, Rudolf Pechel: Rudolf Pechel had been arrested in 1942 because of an article that had displeased Goebbels. He was born in Güstrow in 1888. He had been a naval officer before the First World War. Close to Moeller van den Bruck in the 1920s, he had later moved away from nationalism. During the war, he frequented the most active members of the German opposition (Carl Goerdeler, Wilhelm Leuschner). In 1947, Pechel wrote a book titled German Resistance (Deutscher Widerstand) in order to prove that there had been forms of rebellion in his country. He spent the end of his life in Switzerland, where he died in 1961.

  journal circulated in secret: German Federal Archives, Koblenz, Rudolf Pechel file.

  Golo Mann, Wilhelm Röpke: Carlo Schmid (1896–1979): major postwar Social Democratic lea
der, he was also an activist for Franco-German reconciliation and the construction of Europe. Golo Mann (1909–94): historian, son of Thomas Mann. Wilhelm Röpke (1899–1966): economist, one of the spiritual fathers of the “social market economy.”

  been a patriotic gesture: In their democratic and pro-Western declarations of faith, Rudolf Pechel, and Ernst Kocherthaler as well, were in sympathy with the Moral Rearmament movement founded by the American minister Frank Buchman, who promoted a “world without hatred, without fear, without egotism,” and who had committed himself to a “moral and spiritual reconstruction” of Europe, with the reconciliation of old enemies, particularly France and Germany, as a priority.

  acted as a patriot: “I am convinced to have acted as a German patriot in having proved to some Allied personalities I got acquainted with that even in Germany the front of goodwill has existed and still exists.” “The Story of George.”

  Republic only in 1968: Article 20, paragraph 4 of the Fundamental Law of the FRG, added to the 1948 Constitution in 1968, stipulated that “all Germans have the right to resist against anyone who undertakes to remove the democratic order, if no other means is possible.”

  Lisbon, Stockholm, or Madrid: Mary Alice Gallin, German Resistance to Hitler: Ethical and Religious Factors (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1962). Hasso von Etzdorf was a conservative diplomat opposed to the Nazis during the Second World War.

  aim of saving lives: Bancroft, Autobiography of a Spy, p. 195.

  soldier would have done: In a speech delivered on July 20, 1964 for the twentieth anniversary of the plot against Hitler, Eugen Gerstenmaier pointed out that the Germans who resisted Nazism had had “constantly to weigh the balance between rebellion against the government and loyalty to the people and the army.” Hans-Jakob Stehle, “Der Mann, der den Krieg verkürzen wollte.” “They’ll die, that’s what they deserve,” Fritz had said to Adolphe Jung about the Germans. See Chapter 5.

  were particularly compromised: Among them was Werner von Bargen, former envoy of the Reich to Belgium, who shared responsibility for the deportation of Jews from Belgium during the war. Döscher, Verschworene Gesellschaft.

  was already too late: Ibid.

  Berlin in April 1948: According to Richard Helms and William Hood, Fritz Kolbe received a monthly pension from the CIA starting a few years later when he settled in Switzerland in the mid-1950s. A Look Over My Shoulder. According to Peter Kolbe, Fritz also received a pension from the Foreign Ministry in the last years of his life.

  employer terminated discussions: Letter from Ernst Kocherthaler to Allen Dulles, February 20, 1953, Allen W. Dulles Papers.

  life and never complained: “He was not plaintive in any sense. It was just those little things that an individual lets out, that shows that you were hurt by the fact that you have been thrown aside.” Richard Helms, interview with Linda Martin for The History Channel, September 2003. “Kolbe never expressed any feelings of bitterness or regret about his postwar fate.” Tom Polgar, letter to the author, May 13, 2002.

  see his son again: Handwritten document written by Maria Fritsch in October 1972. Collection of Martin and Gudrun Fritsch.

  him which never came: All these details come from an interview of Peter Kolbe in Sydney, November 2001.

  Hermsdorf of the CIA: Relations between Fritz and his third wife, Maria, seem to have gone through some rough times in the 1950s. In her private diaries of the time, Maria confided her romantic unhappiness. At the end of her life, she admitted never having fully penetrated Fritz’s personality: “he came from another planet,” she said. Interview with Gudrun and Martin Fritsch, Berlin, January 2002.

  the language very well: Even though he has never lived in Germany, Peter Kolbe speaks unaccented German and has a slight German accent when he speaks English.

  Africa in January 1954: Peter returned to Germany several times and relations with his father grew a bit smoother over time. He studied science in South Africa and Australia and became a geologist. After post-doctoral studies at MIT and a position with an American company based in Canada, he moved to Australia, where he took up a position as professor of geology and geochemistry at Sydney University, where he spent the rest of his career. With the passage of time, Peter Kolbe has inwardly reconciled himself with his father and is finally grateful to him for not bringing him back to Germany in September 1939.

  cement market in South Africa: Correspondence between Fritz Kolbe and his son, September 1953. “My father sent me letters in which he asked me for stacks of information about the economic needs of South Africa: concrete poles for telephone lines, wooden ties for railroad lines…. I found this completely ridiculous and I said to myself, what a loser!” Peter Kolbe, Sydney, November 2001.

  to join the Masons: Peter Kolbe joined a lodge in Durban, but set foot in it only once or twice.

  on February 26, 1953: “Without Kolbe, Allen Dulles would never have become head of the CIA,” according to Mary Bancroft, former informal collaborator and mistress of Allen Dulles, in an article by Barbara Ungeheuer in Die Zeit, May 1986.

  influential New York organization: The Council on Foreign Relations was established after the First World War by young disciples of President Wilson, among them Allen Dulles. The organization saw the light of day at the Hotel Majestic in Paris in May 1919, during the negotiations on the Versailles treaty. Over time, the forum became a nursery for the upper echelons of the American leadership.

  the Nazi Foreign Ministry: Allen W. Dulles Papers. On the death of Allen Dulles on January 30, 1969, all the obituaries in the American press mentioned the existence of “George Wood.”

  the Kappa-Wood material: Letter from General John Magruder to Allen Dulles, December 6, 1945, Allen W. Dulles Papers.

  raids on German cities: Speech of President Truman reprinted in the press release from Macmillan in presentation of the book by Allen Dulles on German resistance to Nazism, Germany’s Underground (1947). Allen W. Dulles Papers.

  by the United States: Among other sources, we may cite a letter from Fritz Kolbe to his son, dated May 1968, in which he criticizes Western consumer society and exhibits understanding for the rebellion of young people in France and around Europe, personal archives of Fritz Kolbe.

  had never dropped him: The two men remained in touch until the death of Allen Dulles. In the 1960s, they continued to meet in Bern or in the United States whenever the opportunity arose.

  Fritz secure this position: From the mid-1950s on, Fritz was not content to be merely a sales representative for a chain saw company. He also represented in Switzerland the interests of his friend Walter Girgner, owner of a large clothing company in Germany (Trumpf shirts), and accumulated assignments for sales canvassing in all areas (steel, machinery, textiles, etc.).

  were infested with snakes: German Federal Archives, Koblenz, Rudolf Pechel file, correspondence with Fritz Kolbe, April 1954.

  $250 a month: The contract is in the personal archives of Fritz Kolbe.

  what he could do: Peter Sichel, interview, Bordeaux, December 1, 2001.

  Epilogue

  that of Fritz Kolbe: See the illustrated volume 100 Jahre Auswärtiges Amt (1870–1970), published by the German Foreign Ministry in 1970, and Widerstand im auswärtigen Dienst, published by the ministry in 1994. The names of the martyrs of July 20, 1944 engraved in marble in the ministry were (and remain) the following: Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff, Eduard Brücklmeier, Hans-Bernd von Haeften, Ulrich von Hassell, Otto Kiep, Herbert Mumm von Schwarzenstein, Friedrich-Werner Graf von der Schulenburg, Adam von Trott zu Solz, Herbert Gollnow, Richard Kuenzer, and Hans Litter, to which was added a few years later Rudolf von Scheliha. All these diplomats were executed between 1942 and 1945.

  list of the “just”: Ludwig Biewer, director of archives for the Foreign Ministry.

  to his friend intolerable: “The ironic result of the story is that a valiant patriot could have been considered a traitor to his country, when he really was one of the few who helped tha
t in the decisive moments of German history a responsible American set of politicians could stop the Morgenthau policy and back Germany against Soviet Russia’s domination.” Ernst Kocherthaler, “The Background of the George Story.”

  years left to live: Ernst Kocherthaler died in Bern on September 6, 1966.

  suspicions weighing on him: Letter from Eugen Gerstenmaier, March 10, 1965, personal archives of Fritz Kolbe.

  to me my honor: Letter from Fritz Kolbe to Ernst Kocherthaler, January 10, 1965, personal archives of Fritz Kolbe.

  February 16, 1971 in Bern: “He did not die peacefully,” says his son, who was present for his last moments in a Bern hospital. His last words were to ask his son whether he “had been a good father.” His estate, inventoried by a Bern notary, included among assets 47,746 Swiss francs, a 1968 Opel Commodore GS, and a guitar. Fritz Kolbe’s personal indebtedness amounted to 7882 Swiss francs.

  director of the CIA: Richard M. Helms (1913–2002) was director of the CIA from 1966 to 1973. A former journalist, he had covered the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games for United Press and had interviewed Hitler. He joined the OSS in 1943 and continued his career in the CIA after the war. He succeeded Allen Dulles as chief of American intelligence in Germany after October 1945. After his return to Washington, Allen Dulles asked him to handle Fritz Kolbe’s immigration file between 1947 and 1949. He was appointed director of the CIA in 1966 under the presidency of Lyndon Johnson. In 1977, after refusing to testify before Congress on the role of the CIA in the 1973 coup d’état in Chile, he was given a suspended sentence of two years in prison and fined $2,000. The memoirs of Richard Helms, written in collaboration with William Hood, were published in the United States in the spring of 2003, with the title A Look Over My Shoulder.

  in his own country: Unused material for Great True Spy Stories (1967), Allen W. Dulles Papers.