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

  Despite a few false notes, Allen Dulles managed to draw out of Fritz’s letter a series of interesting indications on certain very sensitive matters. German agents stationed in Ireland were providing a series of precise observations about military sites in England (air bases, arms factories, munitions dumps). Other passages reported a reinforcement of the Atlantic Wall in France. It clearly appeared that the preparations for a vast invasion of the continent, “between April and June 1944,” were known to the Germans. But the leaders of the Reich were ignorant of the location of the future landing (“there is talk of Holland,” reported the spies based in Ireland), and nothing indicated that they knew its date.

  This was not all. For the first time, Fritz provided information about Japan (Scarlet in the Kappa cables) on the basis of facts collected by the German embassy in Tokyo. He revealed in particular that Tokyo was secretly encouraging its Berlin ally to make peace with Moscow. He also transmitted information on certain Japanese positions in the Pacific (Burma and New Guinea).

  Early in March, a postcard from Fritz arrived at OSS Bern through the usual diplomatic circuit. It pictured a bouquet of narcissus along with a few spring buds. At first sight, it was a warm birthday greeting addressed to Walter Schuepp, but he was born on April 28 and the card had been written on February 22—so it would seem that Fritz had been particularly early with his card. In fact, the greeting contained a hidden message. An assemblage of apparently incoherent letters had been typed on the right side of the card: D xzrfgx aqh ADX Thfokf tlhjlnlva hcy Htvkpz Alml Gsyfji Oxsuch Wkmybdcebzp. Was this simply bad typing? Fritz apologized. “A child was playing at typing just as the card was about to be sent,” and Fritz added that “unfortunately [he] had no other card available.”

  This strange message was deciphered by the Americans through the code to which Fritz had given them the key during one of his previous visits to Bern. It said: “Yolland of OWI in Ankara is discussing defection to Germany with Consul Wolff in Ankara.” Fritz had not even taken the trouble to put the card in an envelope. He was confident in the indecipherability of his personal secret code. He was right. The card arrived at its destination without provoking the slightest suspicion. It had been mailed in Bern, as usual, by Willy Pohle or another of Fritz’s colleagues on a mission to the German legation in Switzerland.

  Fritz’s mail was now arriving regularly in Bern. His correspondence might be hidden in a pair of shoes or in clothing, but mailings always arrived for Ernst Kocherthaler’s brother-in-law in the diplomatic pouch. Another letter soon arrived for Walter Schuepp (it had been written on March 6, 1944), with, once again, dozens of excerpts from confidential cables. “Poor fellow who has to read all that! I had real good opportunities, and I didn’t waste any of them!” Fritz wrote. Among the several “pearls” of this springtime delivery, the Americans found the summary of a conversation between the German envoy in Bern, Otto Köcher, and Marcel Pilet-Golaz, the chief of the Swiss diplomatic corps. The latter considered probable, in case of a failure of the Allied invasion, an “Anglo-German agreement” aimed at preventing the installation of a Soviet regime in Germany. Numan Menemencioglu, the Turkish foreign minister, expressed exactly the same opinion (according to a cable sent from Ankara on February 12, 1944).

  Fritz Kolbe relayed certain rumors reporting tensions between the Allies. In a letter received in February, he had revealed that the German diplomatic service was interested in the anti-Soviet attitude of a certain “Dallas,” the key man in the American legation in Bern. This was, of course, Allen Dulles, whose remarks about the “excess of Soviet power” had reached the ears of Otto Abetz through Jean Jardin, former cabinet secretary to Pierre Laval who had been posted to Bern since the fall of 1943. In addition, in his letter of March 6, Fritz thought that he could say, on the basis of a recent cable from von Papen, that Roosevelt had been extremely critical of Stalin during the Teheran conference (November 28 to December 1, the first summit meeting among Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin). German diplomatic circles seemed not to exclude the possibility of a break between the Americans and the Russians, a prelude to a “compromise peace” between the Germans and the Anglo-American forces.

  In relaying this kind of information, was Fritz expressing political intentions, and was he acting on behalf of a high Berlin official who wished to remain anonymous? The OSS people naturally asked themselves this kind of question. Some cables communicated by Fritz could pass for disguised political messages, such as one from January 2, 1944, written by the German envoy in Bucharest, Manfred Freiherr von Killinger. He said that, according to a Rumanian source working in Rome, “the Pope was highly perturbed and had told him that the British and Americans were paving the way for Bolshevism in Italy.”

  However, the letter of March 6 helped reassure the American’s about “Wood’s” good faith. Fritz had put a second envelope inside the first, labeled “confidential/for Ernesto.” It contained four pages written in very small script. Reading with a magnifying glass, the Americans discovered a complete list of the German counterespionage service (the Abwehr) in Switzerland. Already fairly well informed on this subject, they could put this very valuable information together with what they knew from other sources and work out a nearly complete organization chart of enemy agents operating in their immediate vicinity. The most interesting was probably the information gleaned by Fritz that the Germans were unaware of the existence of the OSS office in Bern. In Berlin it was thought that the headquarters of American intelligence in Switzerland was located in Zurich.

  To please Fritz and thank him for his help, the Americans answered in a code that he had himself devised. They sent to Berlin a postcard with a mountain scene, mailed from the ski resort of Parsenn, near Davos. The message was the following: “I managed to make three ski jumps. As you know, I am not a beginner. The weather is fine.” The “three successful jumps” meant that the Americans had in fact received the last three letters from Fritz. “I am not a beginner” meant that they had managed to decipher his postcard of February 22. “The weather is fine”: the information was useful. This was the best postcard Fritz had ever received.

  10

  ONE MISUNDERSTANDING AFTER ANOTHER

  Washington, January–March 1944

  Although President Roosevelt had received in January 1944 some of the cables sent by Fritz, the Berlin spy continued to be subject to strong suspicion in American intelligence circles. “All the messages are probably authentic…. Although our investigation reveals no evidence to substantiate the suspicion, colleagues here still suspect that the whole thing may be a buildup to a sensational plant,” was still the finding of the experts of the Secret Intelligence department of the OSS on January 22, 1944. If this way of seeing persisted so long in Washington, this was because the Allies themselves frequently used subterfuge and deception in their war against Germany.

  On January 28, 1944, OSS headquarters in Washington decided to test the knowledge of the mysterious Berlin agent. It sent to its Bern office a strange message in the form of a guessing game. “What are the present relations between Himmler and Ribbentrop? … Is political intelligence collected by Himmler’s outfit? If so, what agencies are instrumental in collecting it? … Are the intelligence functions of the Auswärtiges Amt and the Sicherheitsdienst coordinated? … What distinction can be made between the Geheimstaatspolizei and the Sicherheitsdienst? … Please try to get Wood to reply to these questions the next chance you get. They are preliminary test queries to which we know the answers.”

  Allen Dulles paid no attention to this odd questionnaire and immediately threw the grotesque document into the wastebasket. He was gradually growing weary of all this suspicion and was impatient with the skepticism of his Washington colleagues, but minds barely changed at OSS headquarters; on the contrary, obstacles to the dissemination of Fritz Kolbe’s material proliferated. As time went on, the agency headed by General Donovan became an increasingly less flexible organization, and espionage experts expanded their power, so
metimes bureaucratic and nitpicking, over most ongoing operations. Beginning in late 1943, the OSS systematically asked for the opinion of the Military Intelligence Service before authorizing the dissemination of the Kappa/Boston papers to Washington decision makers. And the professionals of military intelligence were even more circumspect than their OSS colleagues. They turned the file over to the Special Branch, the department specializing in deciphering enemy messages, under the authority of Colonel Alfred McCormack, a former Chicago lawyer. Colonel McCormack’s men had the means to cross-check huge quantities of German communications intercepted around the world and had privileged access to the very valuable information gleaned by the British from the “Ultra” system. For several months, Colonel McCormack and his assistants worked with the seriousness and precision of entomologists on the Kappa material. They read and reread, paragraph by paragraph, all the cables given to them by the OSS. Hundreds of documents were studied and dissected. As a result, the dissemination of the documents was considerably slowed.

  Beginning in February 1944, “Wood’s” information no longer circulated beyond a very closed circle, limited to the world of intelligence and counterespionage. President Roosevelt stopped being informed of the content of the Boston reports. Among political appointees, only Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle remained on the list of recipients. Berle was a brilliant economist close to Roosevelt, charged with coordinating all the “special files,” but he was primarily concerned with the problems of Latin America. It may be asked justifiably whether he was in the best position to grasp the content of the material supplied by Kolbe.

  By searching hard enough for a flaw in the “George Wood” documents, Colonel McCormack finally found one. “It’s a bad fish,” he said on reading a German diplomatic cable from Rome, received in Bern in late February 1944. This document mentioned a decree of Marshal Kesselring, commander-in-chief of all Wehrmacht forces in southwestern Europe. The text was as follows: “The Commanding Officer of the Southwest front has decreed that in the event of the evacuation of Rome, all the electric plants with the exception of those supplying Vatican City, all railroad and industrial plants outside of the city, all bridges over the Tiber, and gas and water tubes attached to 5 of these bridges, are to be demolished. The order does not exclude any bridge.” On reading this cable, Alfred McCormack immediately thought that it was a fake. He believed that the Germans had every interest in getting this kind of information to the Allies in order to slow down their offensive in the ongoing Italian campaign. He observed that other elements of information coming from Italy contradicted the tenor of this message. Finally, he judged that Marshal Kesselring did not have the authority necessary to make a decision with such weighty consequences. The order of destruction (even partial) of a city like Rome should logically come from the führer and from him alone. The British, questioned by McCormack, also found the message suspect.

  As a consequence, for many more months, everything that came from “George Wood” was read with redoubled caution. In Washington and London, people always anticipated a trap. An OSS procedural notice dated March 24, 1944 said that the reports (except those of counterintelligence import) were to be “disseminated with the explanation that they are unconfirmed and that we are desirous of comment on their authenticity.” At the same time, however, Washington sent a request to Allen Dulles: could his source not provide elements of information about Japan and the Far East?

  Washington’s request was a call for help. Throughout the duration of the war, the American espionage network in Asia remained very weak. There was no equivalent to Fritz Kolbe in Tokyo, and Washington did not have a mole in the upper reaches of the Japanese administration. Allen Dulles was probably pleased to note that they were appealing to him, the man in Bern, to collect data from around the world. But how could he transmit the request to Fritz Kolbe in Berlin? He decided to send him a message on a postcard. A classic mountain scene would once again serve the purpose. The signature was a woman’s. The message in German on the reverse was innocuous enough not to arouse the suspicion of the censors, stating that one of her friends prior to the war had kept a shop selling Japanese trinkets, toys, etc., and had found a considerable market for them. Now her friend could get them no more. In view of Germany’s close alliance with Japan, was it possible to find any of this Japanese material in Germany, or to get it through Germany? Her friend wanted more of it. When he received this card mailed from Zurich, Fritz immediately understood what was involved and he began to assemble cables coming from Tokyo. He carefully stored them in his safe for transmission to Bern when the opportunity arose.

  Berlin, March 1944

  The scene took place in or around March 1944. We are not sure whether Fritz was at home that afternoon or in Maria Fritsch’s apartment in the Charité hospital, his favorite refuge. In any event, he was not at the ministry. His colleagues had seen him at work between eight and noon, as they did every morning, but he had left his office at lunch, pleading a minor illness in order to get permission to leave for a few hours. He had taken with him in his briefcase a confidential memorandum on Hungary that he intended to summarize for the Americans. The document had been prepared by Heinrich Himmler’s services. It was a detailed presentation of the anti-German activities of Miklós Kállay, the prime minister of Hungary. The Reichsführer SS had sent the file to Ribbentrop. As a matter of course, the envelope (stamped geheime Reichssache) had found its way to Karl Ritter, who had turned it over to Fritz Kolbe for filing. This was not the first time that Fritz had dared to risk taking documents from Wilhelmstrasse. Working at home or at Maria’s, he could concentrate better on reviewing important documents. Of course, this was strictly forbidden. If he had been found outside the ministry in possession of secret files, he would immediately have been turned over to the Gestapo. But no one ever checked the contents of his briefcase.

  The SS report on Hungary illustrated the fears of the Hitler regime about the Reich’s satellite countries. Since the winter of 1942–43 and the rout of the Hungarian Second Army on the Don, Budapest had been plagued by doubt. “Every Hungarian soldier understands that he is being asked to sacrifice himself for interests other than his own…. If a nation begins to free itself from the hated yoke, the system as a whole is going to crack,” wrote Ruth Andreas-Friedrich in her diary on March 22, 1944.

  Since the summer of 1943, the authorities in Budapest had been trying to shake off the chains of their alliance with Berlin. The anti-Jewish measures were only laxly followed, a relatively independent press continued to appear, some opposition parties were not banned. But, above all, the Hungarian leaders were multiplying secret contacts with the Allies. In Ankara, Bern, and Lisbon, envoys from Miklós Kállay were holding discussions with diplomatic representatives from London and Washington. Starting in the second half of 1943, Hitler constantly put pressure on Admiral Horthy to change prime ministers.

  These details, and many others, were in the file that Fritz removed from the ministry that morning. He thought he had all the time he needed to study the memorandum far from prying eyes. But while working in a room where he thought he could be at peace, the phone rang. At the other end of the line, a colleague spoke to him in a panicstricken tone: “Where is the Kállay file? Ribbentrop is about to go to a meeting with Himmler. He needs the file right away.” Kolbe answered that the file was in his personal safe at the Foreign Ministry. He was the only one with a key. Oddly, he kept cool (afterward, he was astonished that he did not give way to panic). He ran back to the ministry. Fifteen minutes later, he was there, out of breath, his briefcase in hand. He rushed up the stairs four at a time and swept into his office like a whirlwind. There he managed to make it appear that he took the document out of his safe and finally handed it to a colleague standing near him stamping his feet with impatience. A few minutes later, he learned that Karl Ritter, furious, had for an hour been spewing out violent cries of rage against his subordinates and was close to having a breakdown over the incident.


  The “Kállay file” would not come into the hands of the OSS. This was a pity, because Fritz knew that the Americans in Bern were vitally interested in everything concerning developments in countries allied to Germany. He had already provided them, since late 1943, with information of the greatest importance about Hungary. Thanks to Fritz, the Americans knew that the Germans were aware of some of their secret conversations with envoys of the Kállay government. During the last week of 1943, Adolf Beckerle, German envoy in Sofia, had transmitted to Berlin an Abwehr report disclosing very confidential statements made by a lieutenant colonel of the Hungarian secret services well known to the secret services in Washington. The man’s name was Otto Hatz. He had disclosed to the Germans the complete contents of his discussions with an American diplomat in Istanbul. The document had come into the hands of the OSS through the good offices of Fritz. It was thus learned in Washington that some Hungarian interlocutors of the United States were playing a double game. Beckerle spoke of this Lieutenant Colonel Hatz as a “trustworthy man,” resolutely “pro-German.” In a Kappa cable sent to Washington in late December 1943, the OSS officers in Bern had pointed out that Trude (Otto Hatz) “is maybe pulling our legs.”

  This information of the highest importance was not used as it should be, and the Americans allowed themselves to be caught in a trap with terrible consequences. On March 16, 1944, a team of three American spies, equipped with a radio transmitter, was secretly parachuted into Hungary to prepare a reversal of alliances (the operation, christened “Sparrow,” was masterminded from OSS Bern). But the three agents were captured shortly after their arrival on Hungarian territory and sent to Berlin for interrogation. Furious at the secret dealings of some governing circles in Budapest with the Allies, Hitler had decided to strike a great blow. On March 19, 1944, Germany invaded Hungary and put an end to any inclination toward the emancipation of the country. In place of the Kállay government, a collaborationist government under the leadership of General Döme Sztójay was set up. The strong man of Hungary was now a German from the foreign ministry, the ambassador plenipotentiary, and SS Brigadeführer Edmund Veesenmayer, a career diplomat who specialized in carrying out the regime’s dirty work (posted to the Balkans since 1941, he had been in charge of eliminating the Jews of Serbia).