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

  Back in his hotel room Fritz did not go to bed immediately. He sat at the small dimly lit table facing his bed and wrote down his last will and testament, which he intended to give to the Americans before he left. These few lines (a page and a half) were to be given to the appropriate person, “in the event of …”

  “If I leave this life in one way or another,” wrote Fritz, “I would like little Peter to be placed in good hands…. Peter should be brought up in my spirit. Do not instill in him hatred of the enemy nor hatred of those who may assassinate me, but rather the unconditional will to fight and to defend our ideals…. No one can deny that my action is guided by ideals. Does existence have any meaning when you no longer have freedom, as is now the case in Germany?”

  Fritz then gave a list of people to whom his son might be entrusted: If he wishes, Peter may stay with the Lohff family in Swakopmund in SouthWest Africa, or else return one day to Berlin to stay with one of Fritz’s close friends (“Walter Girgner, Lankwitz, Leonorenstrasse,” or “Leuko,” a nickname for Kurt Weinhold, his friend the engineer at Siemens). Maria Fritsch (“nicknamed ‘little rabbit,’ assistant to Professor Sauerbruch”), might possibly “become a good mother” for him. “In any case,” Fritz added, “I would have married her eventually.” Peter might also be raised by Ernst Kocherthaler: “This man,” he wrote, directly addressing his son, “may in particular take care of your needs and finance your education.” Fritz than asked Peter to “pay attention to Grandma Kolbe,” Fritz’s mother. “She is old but she has a surprisingly good and just sense of reality.” And Fritz added a sentence about his brother Hans, “with whom I have sometimes quarreled, but who is still a good brother.”

  The recommendations to Peter then became very precise: “About your future profession, my dear Peter! I have always thought that you might become a sports doctor if that is something that would interest you. Perhaps your gift for mathematics will enable you to become an engineer. That would suit me, or you might be a lawyer. In any case, try above all to become an upright man, keep your youthful enthusiasm, and keep your heart pure! Respect women. The finest of them all was your mother. Always think of that when you’re with a girl. And always fight for truth and justice. Even when that seems hopeless to you. Go to meet the enemy with the same weapons that he has and do not forget the goal: our final victory [Endsieg].”

  In conclusion, Fritz paid homage to his own father (“I feel united with him in the respect for what is right”), and asked his son to do the same with him (“ask my friends about my motives”). The will concludes with a moving appeal to Peter: “I remain your papa. Speak to me at night, as I have done to you so often in the last few years.”

  Bern, Friday, August 20, 1943

  The next day they met as agreed in Gerry Mayer’s apartment at eight in the morning. Fritz was probably free of professional obligations and at liberty to stroll around Bern. Despite the risk of being seen, he had agreed to this morning meeting in the midst of the American diplomatic district. He may have been discreetly deposited by a taxi. Gerry Mayer and “Mr. Douglas” (Allen Dulles) were there. Fritz had figured out that the mysterious Douglas was not a simple assistant in the legation, but he did not yet know his real name. Ernst Kocherthaler was probably present.

  At the request of the two Americans, Fritz had used Thursday to gather some pieces of information from his diplomatic colleagues in Bern about the German espionage network in Switzerland. This network, Fritz explained, was divided into two departments, the collection of intelligence organized by Himmler’s services (SD, Sicherheitsdienst), and counterespionage (KO, Kriegsorganisation) under the Abwehr. The Americans certainly already knew that, but they took notes all the same.

  Fritz then gave some names of diplomats who he thought were spies in disguise (for example, “legation adviser Frank”), but he did not seem very sure of himself. Fritz then stated with certainty that “the Germans have well-placed men in each of the enemy legations in Bern,” but in this case too, he gave no names (probably because he didn’t know any).

  “Who might possibly work for us?” the two Americans asked him. Kolbe believed that “the Chief Commercial Attaché, Consul General Reuter, a Nazi by necessity rather than by conviction, was approachable. Reuter was a bachelor and liked the ladies. A second man mentioned was Kapler, Consular Secretary, who had lived in the United States for ten years and was also a lukewarm Nazi.”

  Time passed quickly. Allen Dulles proposed that they move on to technical details: How could they organize future collaboration between Fritz and his new “friends” in Bern? They needed a password, in case Fritz were to travel to the capital of another neutral country, which would enable him to contact the Americans again. “Let’s take the figure 25900, since that’s your date of birth,” proposed Dulles, who went on: “If you come back here you only have to introduce yourself as Mr. König.” They brought up the possibility of reestablishing contact in Stockholm, in case Fritz were to be sent there as a courier. At another point, the name “Georg Sommer” was suggested, for no better reason than that it was the middle of the summer. Finally it was decided that when Fritz tried to establish contact with the Americans, he would use the name “George Merz.” And then, if by chance the Americans wanted to contact Fritz in Berlin, the agent would claim to be “Georg Winter” (“Anita Winter,” if it was a woman).

  For the moment, they left it at that. Would they ever see one another again? Before taking his leave, Fritz gave the Americans an envelope from his hotel (the Hotel Jura) containing the two pages of his will—he had made a copy that he kept with him. He asked them if he could dictate the text of a telegram for his son in Swakopmund. The Americans strongly discouraged him from exposing himself in that way: “It’s madness, don’t do it.” Fritz did not insist.

  When they left him, the two Americans gave Fritz a relatively large sum of money: two hundred Swiss francs. Fritz accepted the money to “cover his present and future taxi fares,” but also to buy cigars and chocolate, which would give great pleasure to his superiors at the ministry in Berlin. In Dulles’s view, this money should serve to maintain relations with Gertrud von Heimerdinger, who held the key to Fritz’s future trips to Bern.

  The three men separated around 10:30. “Come back soon and bring us as many cables as possible”: this was, in substance, the farewell message of the two Americans to their new friend from Berlin. When he left Mayer’s apartment, Fritz Kolbe had a feeling of great success. The Americans were taking him seriously and were counting on him. It was up to him to feed their curiosity.

  Fritz did not have much time to wander around the center of Bern, look in the shop windows, or go into the stores. Knowing that he did not have the right to keep foreign currency, he had given most of the two hundred Swiss francs to his friend Ernst Kocherthaler. With the rest, he had made some purchases so that he could bring back a few small gifts to Berlin. He took a train around noon. The same route as the preceding Sunday, in the opposite direction. The express for Berlin left Basel in the middle of the afternoon. Fritz’s passport was stamped by German customs at the Basel station at 4:46. The trip was fast, but he had had the feeling of being observed during the journey from Bern to Basel. The man watching him had looked neither Swiss nor German. Was it an American? “Don’t they trust me?” he asked himself anxiously. After crossing the German border, he felt lighter. As on the way there, there were few checks on the train. He arrived in Berlin the next morning at 7:41 (track 9, Anhalter Bahnhof, according to the timetable in force since November 1942). The first thing Fritz did when he got off the train was to buy a newspaper. That morning, there was an editorial by Goebbels in the Berliner Lokalanzeiger about the debacle in Sicily and Allied bombing of Peenemünde, the manufacturing site for the V-2. “Sometimes,” wrote Goebbels that August 21, “as we are moving toward final victory [Endsieg], we may find ourselves in the midst of a sunken lane where we can no longer see the goal of our march. But that does not mean that it is lost.”

  8


  “GEORGE WOOD”

  Swakopmund, September 1943

  Meanwhile, little Peter Kolbe was living out his childhood in the distant land of SouthWest Africa. His happy, carefree existence was that of a “free child of Summerhill” before the fact. In Swakopmund, he lived in the house of “Granny Kahlke,” his adoptive grandmother, who was extraordinarily kind and did not have the strength to impose the slightest discipline on him. His adoptive parents, Otto and Ui Lohff, came to see him every weekend and on Sunday night returned to Walvis Bay, thirty kilometers away, where they lived during the week. Peter spent his time playing in the dunes and riding his bicycle along the huge Atlantic beaches. He would ride his bicycle far from the city, often alone in wild nature, with a small supply of dried meat (biltong, still well known in present-day Namibia). One of his favorite pastimes was to watch whales in the ocean. Desert animals were never far off. One day in the distance he saw a lion that had come to cool off at the edge of the water. He loved this landscape, “hard as locust wood, with dry river beds, and cliffs roasting in the sun.” At night, he devoured the novels of Karl May (the adventures of the Indian Winnetou). He read very late, hiding a flashlight under the sheets. Sometimes at night he also quietly left the house to go fishing on the seashore, after making sure that his grandmother was peacefully snoring. On one wall in his room, there was a photo of a boy playing a drum, dressed in the uniform of the Hitler Youth. The picture had been hung there by Granny Kahlke, who naïvely idealized the führer ten thousand kilometers away.

  Events in Europe seemed very distant. The Germans in South Africa did not have the right to own a radio. News circulated by word of mouth. A few radios listened to in hiding made it possible to get scraps of information from the Reich. Peter Kolbe remembers that he jumped for joy every time a U-boat sank an Allied ship (the event was announced on German radio by the striking of a gong, and there were as many strokes as ships that had been sunk). All that did not keep him from going to soccer matches where German friends a little older than he played against British sailors on shore leave.

  Peter had no news from his father. Gradually, he forgot him, even though, at the insistence of his guardians, he occasionally sent him an impersonal letter to tell him that he was making progress in the German school and that he behaved well in class. Because he played an important role in the local economy, Peter’s adoptive father Otto Lohff was spared from being sent to a camp by the South African authorities, unlike most of the Germans who had remained in the commonwealth. Almost every one of Peter’s classmates had an interned father, while their mothers continued to take care of the family farms.

  One day in September 1943, when Peter (age eleven) came home from school, he encountered two South African plainclothes police at his grandmother’s house. For a German family at the time, it was not uncommon to receive a visit of this kind. The authorities in Pretoria collected all the information possible about this population, which was by definition suspect. After questioning Granny Kahlke for a long time, one of the policemen turned to the child and asked him a few precise questions: “What is your name? Who is your father? Where is he? Who is your mother?” Terrified by this unexpected interrogation, Peter believed that he had been identified as a bad boy. He had broken a window in a nearby house with a slingshot a few days earlier.

  But the interrogation had no consequences. After a few weeks, Peter and his adoptive grandmother managed to forget this unpleasant episode. It was only much later, after the war, that Fritz’s son realized that this episode had a connection to his father’s clandestine activities in Berlin and Bern. Allen Dulles, with the help of his British and South African colleagues, had wanted to verify the statements of Fritz Kolbe. It was necessary to confirm the existence of the son, see if the address was correct, ask him about his life, verify the dates, and cross-check the information with counterespionage experts.

  Bern and London, late August 1943

  By August 20, 1943, in Bern, Allen Dulles and Gerry Mayer had in fact launched as precise an investigation as possible into their visitor from Berlin. No stone could be left unturned, all indications had to be assembled, and every hypothesis written down. A long labor of verification began. In order to do this, they asked for help from their colleagues in counterespionage (department X-2 of the OSS). All the data on the new agent were centralized in London, the European headquarters of the organization, and the Americans had no hesitation in calling on their British colleagues in MI6, who had a substantial lead over them on Germany thanks to their own network and their exceptionally abundant archives. The British also put at the Americans’ disposal their transmission lines between Switzerland and London, because the security of their communications was better. It was through the British coding department in Switzerland that all the documents dealing with Kolbe’s biography reached London; these sensitive details had above all to be kept out of German hands.

  In Bern, the “Fritz Kolbe” file had been created even before his departure for Berlin. As early as the evening of August 19, Allen Dulles and Gerry Mayer set to work and put down on paper everything they had remembered from their conversation with him. Allen Dulles wrote several memos between August 19 and 31, with the intention of drawing a profile of the man and evaluating his credibility. First of all a code name had to be found for Kolbe: after thinking of calling him “König,” “Kaiser,” or “George Winter,” it was finally decided that he would be “George Wood.” The reason for the choice of this name is a mystery. To ensure the protection of their agents, the Americans chose nicknames by chance, with no relation to the context. George Wood was the name of a celebrated lawyer in New York in the nineteenth century, and perhaps Allen Dulles thought of him. In addition, like all Dulles’s other sources in Bern, “Wood” was given a number: from then on he would be “674” (and sometimes “805,” two numbers being better than one). This too was a purely random choice.

  The first entry, dated August 19, is merely a summary description of the man. Date and place of birth of Fritz Kolbe; schooling; scouting (“Wood belonged to a German ‘Hikers’ club called Wandervogel which he claimed had been basically anti-Nazi”); career and postings; marriage; details about the son who had stayed in South Africa; second marriage with Lita Schoop (“a Swiss girl”), daughter of Ulrich Schoop, who lived in Zurich; very precise details about Lita’s brothers and sisters who also lived in Switzerland: One brother was married to an American, a sister was married to an Englishman serving in the British army. It was also noted that Fritz Kolbe had worked with Rudolf Leitner (“Botschafter, with ten years’ service in Washington”), and that he was a trusted subordinate of Karl Ritter (“once lukewarm towards Nazism and known to have proposed to the daughter of Ullstein, has now become thoroughly corrupt”). The document contained errors that would later gradually be corrected. Fritz’s date of entry into the Foreign Ministry, in particular, was wrong. The Americans had noted 1935 instead of 1925.

  A preliminary physical description of Fritz Kolbe, alias George Wood, was rapidly sketched:

  As to description, we generally agree. Gerry would put his height at 5′7” and adds baldish. What hair he has is clipped short and brownish. Typical Prussian-Slavic features. Eyes wide apart, blue grey, frank expression in eyes. Unworldly, but acquired ease in conversation through his travels. Shape of head round, ears not large but stood out from head. Gerry only differs from me here in the color of the hair, but that made no great impression on me, as he didn’t have much of it. As to the ears, we both agree that they were not abnormally large, but they certainly were abnormally prominent.

  As for Fritz Kolbe’s personality, the diagnosis was formulated in these terms: “Kolbe made the impression that he was somewhat naïve and a romantic idealist. He does not appear to be very intelligent or cunning. He wanted, for example, to send an en clair telegram to the housekeeper who is in charge of his son in South Africa, giving messages, addresses and so on, and he has also left with Dulles a letter addressed to his so
n ‘in case he is shot.’”

  OSS headquarters in London very quickly set to work on the first elements sent from Bern. Colonel David Bruce, chief of OSS London, didn’t know exactly what to do with this file. He immediately had it sent to the British. Lieutenant-Colonel Claude E. M. Dansey was approached in person. Vice-director of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), Sir Claude Edward Marjoribanks Dansey was not only the number-two of the British intelligence services, but he was also a man of extremely strong character. Universally detested by his subordinates for his brutal and contemptuous manners, he nevertheless had recognized mastery over everything that had to do with Germany. In order to observe the Reich, he had set up his own espionage network in Switzerland before the war (“organization Z”). The file that was submitted to him by the OSS contained four pages in all: two on Fritz Kolbe’s biography and two of official German cables summarized in English as examples of the “material” offered by Kolbe. One of these cables came from “Hektor,” an Abwehr agent based in Stockholm, and said this: “JOSEPHINE reports June 24th: Notable increase loading English West coast June 11th to June 21th Liverpool. June 14th to June 15th departure 2 Panzer regiments destination Middle East. During this period total 25,000 men embarked mainly for Middle East.” The other came from Dublin and spoke of an attempted escape of “Götz,” a German agent in Dublin.

  It took Dansey only a few days to produce a preliminary assessment of the file. The judgment was negative, pending further information.