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

  “You really believe all this talk? You think that Moscow is easy to capture? Believe me, I know Russia, and everything you tell me is very pretty but not very realistic!” remarked Karl Ritter, who trusted Walther Hewel enough to tell him frankly what he thought. Hewel, who respected Ritter, and retained some degree of independent thinking, had a contemplative air. “But after all, what does it matter?” Ritter continued. “Right now, let’s talk about urgent matters. I would like to have details about what is to be done with prisoners of war. We’ve settled the question of political prisoners, who have to be liquidated. Do you have figures on the number of political commissars in the Red Army already killed? And where are we in reference to ordinary prisoners?”

  Walther Hewel turned to an OKW officer to ask for more information. The officer took from his briefcase a recent circular and read a few passages: “Bolshevism is the mortal enemy of Germany. For the first time German soldiers are facing an enemy trained not only as a soldier but as a political agent in the service of Bolshevism. He has learned to fight against National Socialism with all available means: sabotage, demoralizing propaganda, assassination … The Bolshevik soldier has thereby lost the right to be treated as an ordinary combatant according to the provisions of the Geneva Conventions.”

  “What does that mean exactly?” asked Karl Ritter, whose mission was to translate the führer’s orders into carefully chosen terms. “Well,” answered the OKW officer, “that means, for example, that a prisoner who shows the slightest inclination to disobey orders should be shot without warning.”

  In the antechamber of the railroad car, Fritz listened aghast to this incredible dialogue. He knew that horrors had taken place since the beginning of the war in Poland and Russia, but until now he had not known that transgression of the laws of war was coldly encouraged by the highest leaders of the state and the army. The fact that his own boss, Karl Ritter, was associated with this kind of wrongdoing only increased his indignation. He strained his ears to continue to capture the conversation when he heard that an aide de camp had informed Ritter of his presence. “Kolbe is here!” exclaimed Ritter. “But what is he doing here, not saying anything? Send him in right away!” Fritz was led into the room. He made a Hitler salute to everyone and handed Ritter a thick sheaf of documents from his briefcase. Ritter did not have the time to consult these papers right away. He quickly dismissed his assistant and made an appointment with him for the following day after asking briefly about news from his Berlin office.

  It was noon. Fritz was taken to an attractive hunting lodge ten kilometers away that was used as a residence for employees of the Foreign Ministry. On the edge of a forest and overlooking a large lake, it had been built for the 1936 Olympics as a residence for competitors in the ice boat event. The inn provided comfortable conditions unknown in Berlin. There were bouquets of flowers on the tables, fine wines, and plentiful supplies of liquor and cigarettes. A French chef selected by the occupation forces in Paris had been installed in the kitchen (“the food is much better at Ribbentrop’s than at Hitler’s,” Fritz told himself that night as he savored a dish of game with berries). A Volksempfänger radio broadcast through static the latest Wehrmacht reports and popular songs, such as “Das kann doch einen Seemann nicht erschüttern” (“That can’t frighten a sailor”) and “Lili Marlene.”

  In the following days, Fritz had a lot of free time. He took advantage of it to go for long runs around the lake that the windows of his room looked out on. Ten days at Hitler’s headquarters; Fritz had not expected to stay that long. Busy with countless different tasks, Karl Ritter took time to write answers to the dispatches brought from Berlin and have them signed by Ribbentrop (who always signed in green ink).

  One of Ritter’s missions was to assist the admiralty in choosing combat zones for submarine warfare. It was also his responsibility to draft Berlin’s official reactions in the event of a “blunder,” notably when a neutral country complained about German aggression. Among the dispatches that Fritz had brought from Berlin were vigorous protest notes from Washington following attacks without warning by German U-boats against American ships. On each occasion, President Roosevelt had increased the intensity of expression of his anger. In a message to Congress in June, he had denounced the sinking of the Robin Moor as “an act of piracy.” And in a fireside chat on September 11, referring to the Nazi leaders, he had said: “But when you see a rattlesnake poised to strike, you do not wait until he has struck before you crush him,” and noted that it was “the time for prevention of attack.”

  Walking by the lake, Fritz Kolbe was surprised that he did not feel comfortable. He should have been enjoying the magnificent country, but he had only one wish, to leave the “wolf’s lair,” its poisonous atmosphere, and its mosquitoes. He was finally authorized to return to Berlin with a satchel full of documents signed by the minister. Time was short. His return this time was on board a military plane, a Junkers Ju 52.

  Berlin, November 1941

  “Do you control Yourself? Are you the master of yourself? Do you stand free amid the world as I do / So you may be the author of your actions?” (The Death of Wallenstein, Act 3, Scene 2).

  Back in Berlin, Fritz had plunged into Schiller and was meditating on these words of Wallenstein. Since his trip to the “wolf’s lair” and the astounding conversation that he had overheard between Karl Ritter and Walther Hewel, he had decided to leave Germany. He saw no other way to remain true to himself. He could no longer defend his country now that he knew it was guilty of such injustices and unspeakable abominations. What had happened since late 1939 exceeded in horror everything that had been seen between 1914 and 1918. Fritz was beginning to understand that the “war of extermination” conducted by the Nazis was leading to an apocalypse. Whatever the outcome—victory or defeat of Germany—nothing allowed the slightest hope for the future: either Germany won the war and multiplied its criminal power, or it lost and found itself outcast from the civilized world.

  On returning from his stay at Hitler’s headquarters, Fritz had heard of the activities of “mobile task forces” of the secret police headed by Reinhard Heydrich (the Einsatzgruppen) in the rear of the Russian front. The mission of the Einsatzgruppen was to massacre Jews, on the pretext of “forestalling the risk of spreading epidemics behind the front lines.” The foreign ministry had received very precise reports stating that men, women, and even children had indiscriminately been machine-gunned, had their throats cut, been burned alive, or sometimes murdered with blows of a pickax or a hammer.

  Fritz was beginning to think that if he continued to rub shoulders with evil he would end up being its accomplice. He had had enough of behaving like the good soldier Svejk. Playing the stupid and narrow-minded petty official led to nothing, except protecting himself. He sometimes saw himself in dreams in a foreign uniform, bearing arms, fighting against the men of the Wehrmacht. He immediately reproached himself for denying his own people. After all, German soldiers had not wanted, for the most part, to be involved in this kind of criminal adventure. The only ones who deserved to be eliminated were the leaders of the country. These questions tormented him. In that fall of 1941, it was not uncommon for him to wake up in the middle of the night with violent cramps in his stomach. In addition to the multiple pains he suffered from his constant excessive exercise, Fritz was beginning to hurt everywhere.

  By chance, since he had met Professor Sauerbruch’s assistant in the spring of 1940, Fritz had easy access to the Charité hospital. At the request of Maria Fritsch, the famous surgeon had agreed to treat Fritz’s knees and had prescribed a thermal cure at Bad Brambach in southern Saxony, where he had spent three weeks at the end of the summer of 1940.

  Fritz gradually developed the habit of going to the hospital once or twice a week for no medical reason. Located not far from the Foreign Ministry, the hospital was a veritable enclave in the city, with fifteen red brick buildings with neo-Gothic façades. There were even hot-houses for the cultivation and wintering of pla
nts and trees. Fritz went to see Maria on leaving his office and spent a good bit of time chatting with her at the hospital. One evening, he even played her an old song from the Wandervogel, accompanying himself on a guitar that happened to be sitting in a corner of the room. He sang well, with a warm voice, and the words of the song were a declaration of love. “Come, let’s go into the fields, the cuckoo is calling us from the pine forest / Young girl, let yourself go in the dance.” Maria had been unable to conceal her emotion.

  From that moment on, the two were inseparable. They met in the restaurants of Charlottenburg, then went to the cinema. Fritz felt all the more comfortable at the Charité because he had the feeling of being protected from prying eyes. At the Foreign Ministry, he knew that he was under surveillance and had to be constantly careful not to say one wrong word. This wasn’t true at the hospital, which was like an island protected from the outside world, even though it was in the heart of the capital of the Reich. The Gestapo did not penetrate there, and Fritz did not feel he was being spied on. On the contrary, he was the one in an observation post, trying to identify the figures who came to see Professor Sauerbruch. And there were many of them. You might encounter the surgeon in the company of a doctor in an SS uniform, and then the next day with a man who was under heavy surveillance by the regime.

  Fritz’s frequent comings and goings to see Maria Fritsch did not long go unnoticed by Sauerbruch. After hearing his assistant laugh during the evenings she spent with Fritz, the surgeon asked Maria to introduce her friend to him formally. The two men hit it off well. In this wartime period, lively minds like Fritz’s were welcome. He had a gift for diverting his audience by telling anecdotes from behind the scenes in the ministry or reporting the latest comical details about Ribbentrop’s life. And Sauerbruch adored gossip. He picked it up everywhere and spiced it up in his style in order to shine in Berlin salons. He liked Fritz a good deal and invited him home several times.

  One evening at the surgeon’s house toward the end of November 1941, Fritz noticed a clergyman dressed in black, noticeable by his wrinkled suit, his thick glasses, and his slightly dirty white collar. The unknown man had drawn his attention from the very beginning of the evening. He and Ferdinand Sauerbruch had carried on an apparently interesting conversation in low tones. Fritz had been unable to catch the slightest scrap of it, but he had immediately seen that the churchman was an enemy of the regime. Those things could soon be felt. It took only a glance or a way of pitching one’s voice to be identified. Fritz wanted to know more about this figure. He learned that this was the prelate Georg Schreiber, former Reichstag deputy under the Zentrum label, the pre-1933 Catholic party. A theologian, university professor, and also a political man, Schreiber had been a very influential figure during the Weimar Republic. In his special fields of political action (church questions, culture, education, foreign policy, and science), he was an unquestioned authority. Since the Nazis had come to power they had subjected him to constant affronts. Research institutes and other learned societies over which he had presided had been forced to close down. For the leaders of the Third Reich, Georg Schreiber was the embodiment of the despised “old system.”

  Schreiber had been protected by Sauerbruch on more than one occasion. The two men were personally very close. The prelate often came to rest at the Charité where he was treated for “abdominal troubles.” Fritz Kolbe was curious to meet a man of the cloth who had not compromised with the regime (it hardly mattered that he was a Catholic). He introduced himself.

  After exchanging a few banalities about life behind the scenes in the Foreign Ministry and current sports (two areas in which Schreiber was well versed), Fritz dared to bring up politics. “What did you think,” he asked, “of Clemens von Galen’s recent speech against the elimination of the mentally handicapped? Why aren’t there more men of the church like him who dare to denounce the crimes of the Nazis?” Schreiber, after making certain that no one was listening to their conversation, expressed his full support of the bishop of Münster. He revealed to Fritz that Professor Sauerbruch had information that the Nazis had already eliminated seventy thousand of the mentally handicapped since 1939 (including many children), and that they intended to kill “old people, the tubercular, the war wounded, and others unworthy to live (lebensunswerte Menschen), as they say.”

  This revelation startled Fritz. Now sensing that he could trust his interlocutor, he dared to ask the prelate to help him resolve his problems of conscience: “How can I continue to serve this regime? I want to leave the country, but that is not possible. If I stay, am I morally tainted by my status as an official? After all, I took an oath in the name of the führer, like all the others …” Georg Schreiber looked very serious and took him aside to answer him. The conversation lasted for more than an hour. No one knows exactly what Schreiber said that evening. In any event, Fritz retained the following message: “Do not leave Germany! Fight against the Nazis with the resources that you have. If you are in this post, this is because God willed it for one reason or another.”

  Berlin, 1942

  Germany could only be reborn—from the Nazis’ ashes. Fritz had known that since 1933. But for the regime to fall, Germany would have to lose the war. It took Fritz time to recognize that it was not shameful to be a “defeatist,” that a quick surrender was in fact in Germany’s best interests, but it took root in Fritz like a painfully obvious fact between late 1941 and early 1942. Not all his friends, far from it, could follow him into this way of seeing things. He himself sometimes began to doubt. Throughout all of 1942, he felt more alone and isolated than ever.

  “You must opt for a party in the war … I have / No choice. I must use force or else endure it,” Fritz repeated to himself as he read The Death of Wallenstein (Act 2, Scene 1). He made the following argument: One could not wish for a Nazi victory. In addition, the defeat of Germany was foreseeable once the United States had entered the war against Germany in December 1941 and Japan on its side took no steps to attack Russia and establish a second front in the Far East. Finally, the longer it took Germany to lay down arms, the weaker it would be at the end of the conflict. This situation of weakness would risk throwing it into the arms of the Communists.

  Since the early 1930s, Fritz had been almost as vehemently opposed to the Communists as to the Nazis. To be sure, he had for a time been attracted by the revolutionary language that cut through the perpetual compromises of the Social Democrats. After October 1917, he had not been impervious to the “great light in the East.” He had a few happy memories from that period of his life. For example, he still liked to sing, when he was in good company, songs of the radical left, full of mockery for the Social Democratic moderates: the “Revoluzzer” by Erich Mühsam was one of his favorite songs. But the dictatorial practices of the KPD had quickly snuffed any temptations in that direction. The possibility of the USSR invading Germany depressed him almost as much as that of Hitler attaining victory.

  Even though Schreiber had advised him against engaging in dangerous activities, Fritz continued to write anti-Nazi leaflets throughout 1942. He left letters with “defeatist” content, supposedly written by a “soldier back from the Russian front”—a role with unassailable credibility in Germany at the time—in telephone booths. Fritz contemplated taking even bolder steps. He and two of his friends came up with the idea of blowing up a railroad bridge at Werder am Havel, a small town about thirty kilometers southwest of Berlin. But the plan, for unknown reasons, was never carried out.

  This excited state, although dangerous, was pathetic and a little naïve. With the position he occupied and the information at his disposal, Fritz had long known that he could do much better: provide information to the enemies of his country. From his time as a Wandervogel, he knew that espionage was very much an act of war, and that he would “have to be very clever at passing news secretly from one place to another,” as Baden-Powell put it. He had been one of the boldest speaking out against the Nazis among the chatterers at the Café Kottle
r, and he had never lacked courage in writing anonymous propaganda against the regime, but this was something entirely different. Sharing intelligence with the enemy: these terrifying words frequently echoed in his mind, although he was unable to tell whether it was simple common sense or lunatic recklessness that had put such ideas into his head.

  For some time Fritz had already been acting on the edge of “high treason” (Hochverrat), by counterfeiting passports in South Africa and by distributing anonymous messages. These were very great risks. But in the event he were to provide information of a strategic nature to the Allies, he would be guilty of genuine “treason to his country” (Landesverrat), which meant not only a death sentence but also dishonor in the eyes of generations to come.