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

  Hitler knew that the Hungarian leaders were having discussions with the Allies. This was what motivated his decision to invade Hungary. The Americans knew, through Kolbe, that the Germans were closely following their negotiations with the Kállay government. But they did not take precautions to neutralize Lieutenant Colonel Hatz. If they had taken into account information provided by “George Wood,” they might have enabled Hungary to escape a catastrophe: Beginning in late March 1944, the country was placed under the thumb of the SS. A merciless system of repression was put in place. The opposition was sent to concentration camps. Systematic deportation of the Jewish population began.

  After the occupation of the country by the Germans, the Americans continued to be very well informed, through Fritz Kolbe, of what was going on in Hungary. In the Foreign Ministry, Ambassador Karl Ritter was the principal contact for Edmund Veesenmayer, the Reich’s proconsul in the Hungarian capital. But it would appear that all of that did no good. In Washington, “George Wood” was not yet considered a totally trustworthy source.

  In early spring 1944, everyone in Berlin was savoring something of a respite in Allied bombing. In late March, Fritz learned that he would soon have a mission to Bern. The prospect of resuming contact with the Americans filled him with both enthusiasm and anxiety. Border controls had been reinforced during the last few weeks. The Nazi leaders were more than ever suspicious of people in contact with foreign countries (particularly with neutral countries). They knew from their intelligence services that leaks from Hitler’s headquarters were spreading through neutral countries. Fortunately for Fritz, no one thought of suspecting him in particular, but it was now not infrequent for diplomatic couriers to be subject to a body search when they crossed the border. Sometimes they even had to disclose the contents of their briefcases.

  Fritz feared that his trips to Bern had attracted the attention of the Gestapo. Always well informed, the surgeon Ferdinand Sauerbruch had warned Fritz that the chief of protocol of the Foreign Ministry, Alexander von Dörnberg, was interested in his comings and goings in Switzerland. “Something is in the air,” Fritz told himself with foreboding. The intuition had an even firmer basis because he was now part of an active resistance group. For the first time, he was participating in clandestine meetings attended by influential men. More and more often, he met Count Alfred von Waldersee, a former major in the Wehrmacht and an anti-Nazi, who was in the process of going into business through family connections in the Ruhr. Through Ernst Kocherthaler, he had met Walter Bauer, who was close to Carl Goerdeler and resolutely determined to take action.

  An economist and an intellectual, Walter Bauer was a former student of Husserl and Heidegger at the University of Freiburg. He had worked for a large coal company in Prague controlled by a Jewish family. When the company was “Aryanized,” the Nazis had offered to make him its head, but he had refused and resigned from his position. Having become independent, he remained active in industry, but he spent a great deal of time in Protestant church circles opposed to the regime. Fritz greatly admired him. He was a self-made man. He had completed his high school studies in evening courses after having been brought up, like Fritz, in the school of the youth movement. The two men were about the same age.

  Walter Bauer’s office, at Unter den Linden 28, was a place for meetings and discussions. Fritz was there very often. Those who frequented the address were not unknown: you could meet Goerdeler, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and other eminent figures among the anti-Nazi Christians. Fritz had no direct contact with these major figures of the time, but he came to recognize them. He probably did not always feel at ease in the midst of this intellectual community used to wide-ranging debates. Similarly, he chose to remain in the background at the Wednesday Club when Professor Sauerbruch honored him with an invitation to address it in 1944. “Those people intimidate me,” he said in explanation to the surgeon. What he didn’t tell Sauerbruch was that he found the members of the Wednesday Club “too old” for his taste.

  However, Fritz felt perfectly at ease with a seventy-year-old man, Paul Löbe, a major figure in the SPD and a living embodiment of the Weimar Republic. The circumstances of their meeting are impossible to specify (probably in January 1944, maybe at Walter Bauer’s office, perhaps at the home of friends from prewar Social Democratic circles). Paul Löbe was the last president of the democratic Reichstag. Replaced in his parliamentary seat by Hermann Göring in 1932, he had been sent to a concentration camp in Silesia when the Nazis came to power. Abused and tortured, he had finally been released after several months’ detention. A former typesetter, he had survived on three hundred marks a month (one-third of Fritz’s salary) by proofreading for a Berlin publisher. Fritz was impressed by Löbe’s simplicity, an eminent figure who had remained close to the people and knew how to work with his hands. Even though it is impossible to say whether the two men met often and whether they had thorough discussions, Fritz felt that they were close, and even more, thought of him as a comrade in arms.

  Bern, spring 1944

  Everywhere in Europe in the spring of 1944, people were beginning to think about the shape of post-Hitler Germany. In Berlin, around Ludwig Beck, Carl Goerdeler, Julius Leber, and a few others, a government program was put in place and the organizational structure of a future government already existed on paper. In Bern, the Americans of the OSS engaged in the same kind of exercise. Allen Dulles had prepared for his superiors in Washington a list of German personalities likely to be given a principal role after the fall of Nazism. He mentioned the names of various figures exiled in Switzerland. Most of them had impeccable democratic credentials, like Otto Braun, former Social Democratic leader in Prussia, and the liberal economist Wilhelm Röpke. But there was also the name of an OSS informer, Hans-Bernd Gisevius, viceconsul of the Reich in Zurich, a former member of the Gestapo who had become a confirmed anti-Nazi in the Abwehr. If he had known of the existence of this list, Fritz Kolbe would probably not have found it unusual to be included, but his name was not there.

  Among the Germans in exile in Switzerland there was a ferment of ideas and a proliferation of plans for the future. Ernst Kocherthaler, for example, wrote page after page during this period. On his own initiative, he wrote a series of brief analyses of postwar priorities for Allen Dulles. How could Germany be de-Nazified? It would be necessary above all, he said, “to create democratic universities” and help the Germans resist the attractions of communism, knowing that “only a minority among them understand the individualism of Western civilization.” Kocherthaler also wrote about the economic problems of Europe and the world following the conflict. He suggested turning to the creation of a “world economic government” acting “in a spirit of cooperation rather than competition.”

  During this period, Ernst Kocherthaler sent Allen Dulles a memorandum titled “The Jewish Question in PostWar Europe.” In it he wrote:

  In Spring 1944 most of the European Jews are killed or have emigrated overseas. Between 3 and 5 million have been exterminated. In the Ukraine and Poland only those who have joined the guerrillas have survived. Of the German Jews some are still spared in Theresienstadt (Czechoslovakia)…. With some minor exceptions, Hitler’s program of extermination had full success in Central and Eastern Europe and partial success in Western Europe…. In the process of liquidating the remains of Nazi ideology, the anti-Semitic question is important. A whole generation of youth has been fed with a vision of a Jew who has been given in Nazi religion the place of the devil…. It is therefore important for the future of the fight against Nazi ideology in Germany and German-occupied countries, that the returning Jews should be well chosen and return only gradually. For the rest, a home state anywhere in the world would offer the only solution. In Palestine mass immigration of Jews would provoke a conflict with the Arabs and the Moslems all over the world, since Pan-Islamism has been strengthened during the war…. A Jewish home must therefore be found where only a thin indigenous population would have to be expropriated. Regions with good cl
imate and rich enough to be suitable for economic development seem to exist, best of all in Madagascar. Here a Jewish state under French sovereignty could occupy half the island.

  Fritz was far removed from this kind of thinking when he arrived in Bern on April 11, 1944, for his fourth visit since August 1943. Worn out by the train trip made in ever more difficult conditions, he had above all experienced the terror of being arrested. Arriving in Switzerland without being searched, he had felt so relieved after the last customs inspection that he dropped the key to the diplomatic pouch in a toilet in the Basel railroad station (the attendant had agreed to retrieve it for a handsome tip). Forced to spend some time with a colleague from the German consulate in Basel who had come to collect a package of dispatches, Fritz had sat with him at a table in the railroad station restaurant. He had quickly drunk several glasses of schnapps before leaving for Bern.

  “Wood has arrived with more than 200 highly valuable Easter eggs,” Allen Dulles wrote to his colleagues in Washington on April 11, 1944 (“What a bunny!” headquarters cabled back). Fritz’s visits now followed a well-oiled routine, always according to the same pattern. At night, they met secretly at Allen Dulles’s, on Herrengasse. The four protagonists of the summer of 1943 were still there: Dulles and Kolbe, but also Gerald Mayer and Ernst Kocherthaler. Among the surprises that Fritz pulled out of his bag on the night of April 11 were the famous “Japanese trinkets” requested in the postcard sent a few weeks earlier. And what trinkets! To Allen Dulles’s great satisfaction, Fritz had brought from Berlin several extremely interesting cables from Tokyo. One set of dispatches stood out from the rest. It was a long report on the principal Japanese military bases in Asia, written following an investigative mission carried out between January 28 and February 25, 1944. The cables were signed by Ambassador Heinrich Stahmer, but Washington would learn soon thereafter that the text was based on reports from General Kretschmer, the German military attaché in Tokyo, and his colleague Air Force General Gronau—which changed nothing of the exceptional quality of the document.

  The two men had traveled almost everywhere in Asia and all doors had been open to them. They had gone to Burma (Mandalay, Rangoon, Prome), to Formosa, Singapore, Saigon, Bangkok, to Indonesia (Macassar, Madium, Manado), to Eastern Malaya (Kuching and Labuan), and to the Philippines (Davao and Manila). At every stop on their excursion they had been given a guided tour of military installations. They had conscientiously recorded everything that they saw: the location of the various bases of the Japanese army, the strengths and weaknesses of each of them, the number of divisions stationed at each site, the names of the principal commanders of each base, the supply lines, the state of Japanese knowledge of Allied forces, the relations between the Japanese army and navy. Some cables from Heinrich Stahmer reported private conversations with Asian political leaders subservient to Tokyo: General Pibul Songgram, the Thai prime minister, seemed demoralized by the bombing of Bangkok and no longer to believe in the victory of the Axis powers. President José Laurel of the Philippines was confronted with huge economic difficulties.

  For the Americans, the value of this information was incalculable. Immediately transmitted to the translation and encryption teams of the OSS office, they would require a week of work before they could be transmitted to Washington. Not a crumb of the text was left out. In its English version, the final document was more than twenty pages long, divided into more than ten sections. The OSS transcribers were so overwhelmed that they left some words in German, not bothering to translate them.

  But Fritz was already talking about something else. He had other “pearls” to offer: a list of the principal members of the German espionage network in Sweden and a document of the same kind for Spain. The two documents provided many names and described in detail the reorganization measures in process (breaking up of structures intended to strengthen the secrecy of the system, since the Abwehr was now entirely under the control of the SS).

  “Talk to us about Berlin’s opinion of Allied plans to invade the European continent,” Dulles asked a little later that night. Fritz told everything he knew: “Although the Foreign Ministry thinks that the landing will take place soon, the Nazis have just sent a little more than twenty divisions from the West to the East, because the führer thought he was short of troops on the Russian front.” With respect to the location of the invasion, the German leaders “are thinking primarily of the Mediterranean—perhaps Corsica—or else Antwerp, or maybe Norway.” Reassuring! What was of concern, on the other hand, was that Ireland continued to play the role of a rear base for German espionage of England. Fritz set on the table a dozen fairly well informed cables about ongoing British military preparations. All of them were signed by Eduard Hempel, the Reich’s envoy in Dublin.

  The two Americans filled notebooks as they listened to Fritz. They asked him about the latest developments in the Reich’s armaments industry. Fritz mentioned the construction of new miniaturized submarines in the Baden region (“near Karlsruhe”). These submarines had a one-man crew and could threaten sea lanes used by the Allies. “The Army’s principal worry,” said Wood, “is the lack of fighter aircraft. The country cannot cope with the bombing raids, especially the daylight precision raids by U.S. planes, which are growing increasingly more successful, and this might lead to the downfall of Germany before the invasion even starts.”

  And the countries allied to Germany? “Rumania is disintegrating. Antonescu is in a very low state of mind, brought on by a report he received from Rumanian intelligence, stating that completely out of hand German troops were fleeing headlong back through Moldavia, looting and raping … bartering their arms for liquor.” Among the several cables from Bucharest (signed by the envoy Manfred Freiherr von Killinger), one mentioned the conspiratorial activities of a circle of pro-Allied Rumanian aristocrats gathered around Marthe Bibesco.

  Fritz then took out of his briefcase a thick sheaf of cables on Hungary. There were more than one hundred pages signed by Edmund Veesenmayer, the German proconsul in Budapest. The passage that interested Allen Dulles the most was brief and to the point: “Within the last 24 hours, I have had three long talks with von Horthy. As a result, I am more and more convinced that on the one hand the regent is an unmitigated liar and on the other he is physically no longer capable of performing his duties. He is constantly repeating himself, often contradicting himself within a few sentences, and sometimes does not know how to go on. Everything he says sounds like a memorized formula, and I fear that it will be difficult to convince him, let alone win him over.”

  Reading these words and adding up everything he had just learned (from Thailand through Rumania to Hungary), Dulles suddenly realized that the dynamism of the Axis had definitively been broken. He was stunned. It is impossible to say whether he paid any attention to another passage from Veesenmayer that gave a glimpse of the fate of the Jews of Hungary: “Today, decrees were issued which indicate the government is taking steps to deal with the Jewish situation. This is being done, in fact, with a degree of astuteness not common in this country. However, some of the designated punishments are inadequate, and I shall make sure that in actual practice they are more severe.” A little further on was another document: “3451 Jews have been arrested up to April 1st. The towns of Beregszasz, Munkacs, and Ungvar, where there is an especially large proportion of Jews, have been segregated. Councils of Elders have been established in the towns. We note that the populace seems quite happy when healthy Jews are apprehended. Poor Jews are the object of pity.”

  The information provided by Fritz was so copious that it all seemed to blend together. After speaking of the fate of the Jews, the subject of the effect of recent Allied bombing of Budapest came up: “The raid which occurred during daylight on April 3rd did the damage indicated below to important plants: The Donau Flugzeugbau AG airplane works at Horthy-Liget suffered severe damage. The ‘Zestörer’ Messerschmitt 210 is turned out here at the rate of 50 a month. Technical experts report that it is possible for
the works to be in operation once more by May 1st, at 60% of capacity.” Fritz added that a chemical fertilizer factory and a refinery in Budapest had been destroyed. In Bulgaria, “the city of Sofia is practically in ruins, except for a few suburbs,” wrote the envoy of the Reich, Adolf Beckerle, following the huge Allied bombing on March 30. But the German diplomat pointed out that the members of the regency council, Bogdan Filov and Prince Cyril, “are still with us.”

  And Yugoslavia? There too, Fritz had material to satisfy the Americans’ curiosity. Cables from Belgrade and Zagreb (Agram in German) described increasing connections between General Mihailovich’s Chetniks and the Germans. In Croatia, the population was showing increasing hostility to the Wehrmacht because of food shortages and because it suspected the Germans of “favoring Muslim autonomy.”

  Fritz was in Bern only long enough for three meetings. But he gave his American friends enough to work on for a month. When he was there, the nights in Bern were short. Arriving on Tuesday, April 11, he left for Berlin on Friday, April 14. As he left, the Americans politely let him know that his “literary” variations (of the type “survey of the world situation as seen by two Germans”) were not appreciated as much as original documents. “George” was not insulted. For his part, he suggested that they now communicate with him by sending coded messages in the London Times (which he received with one week’s delay), or else in the evening broadcasts of the BBC (password, “Peter, Peter,” his son’s name).