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

  I believe we have a trace of this man KOLBE, and not a very satisfactory one at that…. It seems possible that Wood is identical with a “Wood” who joined the German Navy in 1917. In 1924 this person was known as “Captain Wood” when he was in command of German Coast defenses and was concerned with a Lieutenant der Marine who was known to belong to the German I.S. in passing false reports through an intermediary to the InterAllied Commission of Control in Germany. In 1927 he left the Navy as a result of an accident and went to Brazil as an aviator. He returned to Germany about 1930, when he was given employment in the German I.S. In the beginning of 1931 he was attached to the Kiel office of the German naval and military intelligence service where he held the rank of Oberleutnant z. See a. D.

  Dansey had mixed up some files. He was confusing Kolbe with a man of the same name whose physical description was similar (both were about 5′7” in height and suffered from fairly advanced baldness). Dansey’s word carried some weight, and this first expert opinion on Fritz Kolbe certainly troubled the Americans. Claude Dansey, for his part, detested the men of the OSS and Allen Dulles in particular. He thought of Switzerland as his private domain, so much so that it “had become a fierce proprietary obsession.” He was probably not displeased to be able to demonstrate that the Americans, those amateurs, had hit a snag.

  In reality, Dansey was furious. “The sight of the Berlin papers must have been a severe shock to him…. It was clearly impossible that Dulles should have pulled off this spectacular scoop under his nose. Therefore, he had not. The stuff was obviously a plant, and Dulles had fallen for it like a ton of bricks.” These are the observations of a far from unknown figure, Kim Philby. He was at the time the number-two in the British counterespionage service (Section V of the SIS), and was asked to review the Kolbe file by his chief, Felix Cowgill. Cowgill showed great interest in the potential of “674” (Fritz Kolbe). But he did not want to do anything that might antagonize his superiors. “Dansey and Cowgill,” according to Philby, “had contented themselves with skimming the paper cursorily in the search for implausibilities and contradictions to buttress their advocacy of the plant theory.” For them, the information provided by “Wood” was “chicken feed,” an enticing means of sending the Allies off on the wrong track.

  As for Philby, who was already working behind the scenes for the Soviets, his secret mission was to inform the Kremlin of any contact between the Germans and the Anglo-American forces. Through him, Moscow was probably aware, by the end of August 1943, of the existence of a German diplomat working in Berlin who wanted to work for the Americans.

  Kim Philby decided to keep an eye on the “George Wood” file. He hastened to send significant excerpts to the experts of Bletchley Park (specialists in decoding German communications), in order to see whether any information provided by the mysterious agent in Berlin might be of some use to Moscow. The heads of the British secret services had for their part decided that “George Wood” was an impostor, even if some of his information was noted with great interest. Who were Josephine and Hektor, they wondered, when they found out that important leaks from London had passed through Stockholm.

  But they could not accept that a volunteer agent like Kolbe could be serious. “On the whole, SIS prefers to have agents on its payroll, since the acceptance of pay induces pliability. The unpaid agent is apt to behave independently, and to become an infernal nuisance. He has, almost certainly, his own political axes to grind, and his sincerity is often a measure of the inconvenience he can cause,” explained Kim Philby. There was no lack of agents drawn by money, particularly in Switzerland, among Germans who had left the Reich for one reason or another.

  In his memoir, Kim Philby devoted a few pages to Fritz Kolbe (without mentioning his name or his alias, George Wood). He remembered with what lack of interest the existence of the agent in Berlin had been greeted in London.

  By the end of 1943, it was clear that the Axis was headed for defeat, and many Germans began to have second thoughts about their loyalty to Hitler. As a result, a steady trickle of defectors began to appear at the gates of Allied missions with offers of assistance and requests for asylum…. One day, a German presented himself at the British Legation in Berne, Switzerland, and asked to see the British Military Attaché. He explained that he was an official of the German Foreign Ministry, and had brought with him from Berlin a suitcase full of Foreign Ministry documents. On hearing this staggering claim, the Attaché promptly threw him out…. It was barely credible that anyone would have the nerve to pass through the German frontier controls with a suitcase containing contraband official papers.

  In Bern, Allen Dulles’s views were diametrically opposed to those of Kim Philby. “‘If you have to pay an agent, you might as well not use him,’ he would tell recruits…. A potential agent should at the very least be driven by some other motivation—hatred, passion, or revenge.” Nothing could be more desirable than a community of interest between the agent and his case officer. Conversely, a venal agent was capable of betraying everyone, as the history of Colonel Redl on the eve of the First World War in Austria-Hungary had demonstrated. “Strong faith is more important than high intelligence. Moral force is the only force that can accomplish great things in the world,” was a maxim in the Dulles family, steeped in Presbyterian culture. Unlike most of the British, and particularly his colleagues in the secret services, Allen Dulles believed in the existence of “two Germanys,” one good and one bad. From the beginning, the head of the OSS in Bern had analyzed the challenge of the world war as a struggle for the conquest of German souls. With a little luck, Fritz Kolbe would turn out to belong to the “good Germany,” but his good faith had to be ascertained by means of a thorough investigation.

  Dulles’s opinions about Germany were rather heavily influenced by his daily conversations with a German who had emigrated to Switzerland and whom he had hired in late 1942 and made into one of his closest collaborators in Bern. Gero von Schulze-Gaevernitz (b. 1901) had much that Dulles would find attractive: broad culture, a cosmopolitan spirit, a great capacity for friendship. This financier, devoted to sports and philosophy, who divided his time between skiing and reading Seneca, was the son of a German economist who had been a Democratic Party deputy in the Weimar Republic. Dulles had known him well in Berlin in the 1920s.

  The Gaevernitz family had always been in favor of an alliance among Germany, Britain, and the United States in order to stand in the way of Soviet Russia. But they were equally opposed to Nazism. Although connected to the most influential circles in the country (his sister had married a member of the Stinnes family), the young Gero had left Germany to take refuge in Switzerland in 1933. His mother was Jewish. He himself, who had lived for several years in the United States, had renounced his German citizenship and defined himself as a “liberal Christian.” He would not accept the slightest compromise with the Hitler regime.

  “Gaevernitz was deeply motivated by the conviction that Germany had never been so thoroughly permeated by Nazism as many were inclined to believe and that there were people in Germany, even in high positions in both the civilian and military administration, ready to support any workable undertaking that would get rid of Hitler and the Nazis and put an end to the war,” Dulles stated in one of his memoirs.

  At the OSS in Bern, Gero von Schulze-Gaevernitz worked on most of the files concerning Germany. He regularly received informers or emissaries who had come from Berlin. Kept busy by his contacts at the highest levels, he was not directly concerned with Fritz Kolbe, and it is not certain whether Dulles informed him in detail about this extremely unusual case. However, by chance in a conversation on Tuesday, August 31, 1943, it turned out that Schulze-Gaevernitz knew Ernst Kocherthaler well.

  Dulles immediately took notes, because he knew nothing about this mysterious figure who, as an intermediary for Fritz Kolbe, represented an important piece in the puzzle he was putting together. According to Gaevernitz, Kocherthaler was a man who could be trusted. “A man of excellent
reputation and of considerable business standing in Switzerland,” he explained. “Von G. spoke highly of K…. [who] was at one time with Warburg & Co, Hamburg … According to von G. K. is Jewish, or partly Jewish, by race, Christian by religion and in fact very active in religious circles. Known to the Visser’t Hooft group in Geneva and has apparently done some work with respect to the establishment of a Christian University in Switzerland for the postwar education of German teachers.” Allen Dulles noted that Gero “seemed completely confident of [K.’s] consistent anti-Nazi position,” and he transmitted these details to his colleagues in London in order to assist the ongoing investigation.

  Berlin, late August 1943

  Back in Berlin on Saturday, August 21, 1943, Fritz was greeted by one of the most terrible bombardments that the capital of the Reich had ever experienced. Between August 20 and 23, the Charlottenburg, Steglitz, and especially Lankwitz neighborhoods were very heavily damaged. Sunday evening, he was in fact in Lankwitz at his friend Walter Girgner’s when a huge roar of engines was heard: It was the RAF planes. Fritz was in the middle of recounting his trip to Bern and his meeting with the Americans. Also present was Hans Kolbe, Fritz’s only brother.

  There was a deluge of bombs. None of the three friends had ever experienced anything like it. Like all Berliners, they could recognize by sound the different types of bomb (explosive or incendiary). But now they didn’t have the time to indulge in that exercise. Suddenly, lightning seemed to be striking them. The entire neighborhood seemed to be sinking beneath the earth in a deluge of fire. The two houses adjacent to Girgner’s were hit before their eyes. The three men took refuge in the cellar. At five in the morning, when the planes had left, Fritz and his friends came out of their hole and were stunned to see that an explosive bomb that had fallen very close to Girgner’s house had not detonated. They had had a narrow escape. The Lankwitz neighborhood was destroyed.

  Fritz went home on foot, passing through scenes of desolation, amid the cries of survivors and the heat of burning ruins. The rescue services were overwhelmed by events. He took more than an hour to get back to the Kurfürstendamm, not knowing whether the house he lived in was still standing. Gott sei Dank, he said to himself when he got there. The building was still there, and most important, there was still running water on every floor. He quickly took a cold shower and went to the ministry at nine o’clock.

  That same morning, his friend Karl Dumont came to see him in his office. Speaking in a low voice, he wanted to know everything about the trip to Switzerland. Of all Fritz’s colleagues in the Foreign Ministry, Dumont was the only one who was aware of Fritz’s real intentions. Since they had known one another in Madrid, there had been perfect rapport between the two men. Dumont had been absent because of illness the week before. He thought that his friend had failed and was ready to bury him in reproaches. At the moment, Fritz could not tell him the details of his trip, but he met him again in the late afternoon, at a time when the offices were already largely deserted, to give him a detailed report of his visit to Bern.

  Bern, September 1943

  By early September 1943, Allen Dulles had completed the first phase of his investigation of Fritz Kolbe. He had not yet eliminated the theory that it was a trap. He was waiting to see whether and how his informant would show himself again. It was a letter addressed to Ernst Kocherthaler, written in Berlin on September 16, 1943, that revealed that Fritz had not said his last.

  The letter contained reading material for the Americans: a few copies of cables, a new map of Hitler’s headquarters (the same as in August, with a few errors corrected), and the schedule for the daily train between Berlin and Rastenburg, the “wolf’s lair” in East Prussia. It also contained a few details about the results of the Allied bombardment of the ball bearing factory in Schweinfurt a few weeks earlier. Fritz took the liberty of suggesting other targets and provided a personal opinion about German secret weapons, which he erroneously claimed was “the greatest bluff ever practiced on the German people.”

  At the end of his letter, Fritz had hastily scribbled a few words in his unreadable handwriting: “I write these lines in wild haste, scanning the material with one eye and typing it with the other hand.” In conclusion, he took leave of his readers in Bern by sending them “greetings from Hektor” (an allusion to the Abwehr agent based in Stockholm), and signed “George M.,” for “George Merz,” the provisional pseudonym adopted during his August visit.

  How had this message reached Bern? Mystery. Given its content, it could not have gone through ordinary mail. It was probably mailed in Bern by a colleague of Fritz’s carrying the diplomatic pouch—a routine expedition that took place every week, exactly like the one Fritz had made in August. Every time a diplomat went abroad for a mission of this kind, he took out and brought back dozens and dozens of private letters and packages having nothing to do with his professional duties. These packages were placed in the train’s baggage compartment, were entitled to diplomatic immunity, and were not checked at the border. From Germany to Switzerland, people sent books, radios, phonographs … It is probable that if Fritz Kolbe had given a personal letter to a colleague on assignment to Bern, the “mailman” was totally ignorant of its contents.

  Another hypothesis can be suggested: Fritz knew a trustworthy person who, because he was a surgeon, could easily travel between Berlin, annexed Alsace, and sometimes even Switzerland. This was Albert Bur, a friend of Adolphe Jung’s, former chief surgeon of the hospital of Sélestat, dismissed in late 1941 for being a “Francophile.” Albert Bur lived in Obernai (Ober-Ehnheim in German). He was a specialist in photography and devoted a good deal of time to the emerging technique of color photography and its medical applications. In this connection, he frequented chemical industry circles, particularly the Agfa company. Fritz had naturally gotten on well with him. The two men shared a passion for sports: before the war, Bur had been president of the Sport Club of Sélestat.

  Doctor Bur was prepared to take risks for the Allied cause. He was in contact with French Resistance circles and with British agents active in France. His wife was an American born in Chicago. He naturally became an intermediary for Fritz in order to transmit information, in particular about “Josephine,” and even tried to convince him to travel secretly to London. This was too dangerous, in Fritz’s judgment, but he nevertheless decided to involve his friend closely in his plans. Thanks to his frequent travels, Albert Bur was a rare jewel.

  Bern, October 1943

  On October 10, 1943, the OSS in London received a mysterious telegram from Bern: Allen Dulles cabled cryptically that he “had just got some 200 pages of alpha and since they were no longer sure of beta, it would take weeks to handle. [He was] fully convinced of delta after yesterday’s gamma and from internal evidence.” The key to this strange message was not received in London until the following day. It was revealed that alpha meant German two-way secret Foreign Ministry cables, beta meant the security of the communications channel, and delta the particular value and authoritative quality of this material. Finally, gamma meant Wood’s cross-examination.

  Fritz Kolbe had arrived in Bern a few days earlier in the course of a new assignment as diplomatic courier. Fräulein von Heimerdinger had shown herself very capable in securing this second mission for her protégé. The small gifts brought back from Bern in August may have facilitated matters. A cigar here, a box of chocolates there; Fritz Kolbe had been generous. Why not do him a favor and let him breathe a little bit abroad? In Berlin in October 1943 it was impossible even to pretend to live normally. The bombardment by Allied planes was added to the increasing harshness of the regime. There was not only the constant fear of bombardment hanging over everything, but the slightest misstep could send you to the gallows. How many people had already been executed for making “defeatist” statements?

  The day before he was to leave for Bern, Fritz had narrowly escaped death. It was in the evening in the midst of an air raid. As a ministerial official, Fritz had a pass giving
him the right to move around during curfew. He was coming back from the Charité hospital on his bicycle (he had gone to say goodbye to Maria) and was on his way to his office to file some documents. Sirens began to wail; it was an RAF attack. One could see the approach of white flares from the magnesium incendiary bombs. Just at the moment when the alarm began, Fritz was at the corner of Unter den Linden and Wilhelmstrasse. An armed warden ordered him to stop and not to cross the street. Fritz got off his bicycle and showed his pass. The warden examined the document with his flashlight. At that moment, a projectile fell less than fifty meters from the two men, a little further down Wilhelmstrasse, knocking them violently to the ground. After a few seconds, they staggered to their feet, stunned, covered with debris, but unhurt. Fritz warmly thanked the warden for having stopped him at the corner. Had he continued on his way, he would have been at the point of the bomb’s impact, where there was now a large smoking crater. He took one of the Havana cigars he had bought in Switzerland out of his pocket, gave it to the warden as a token of thanks, and went on his way to the ministry. The warden smiled with pleasure.

  The next morning, he made preparations for departure. Fräulein von Heimerdinger, as she had the first time, gave Fritz a sealed envelope containing the diplomatic mail for Bern. After signing the registry indicating that he was now responsible for it, he went to his office to complete his packing with the personal documents intended for the Americans. This time, he had no wish to fasten documents around his thighs. It was a dangerous method and not worthy of him, he thought. But what else could he do? After returning from his first trip, in September, he had managed secretly to get hold of an official ministry seal, in exchange for a box of Swiss chocolates. Petty dealings of this kind were very common and attracted very little attention. The sealed envelope that had just been given to him could be slipped inside a slightly larger pouch containing the other documents. All he had to do was to properly seal the new envelope, even though it had become thicker than the original. Instead of a trunk with a false bottom, he had a pouch with a false top.