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

  Stratford, Connecticut, spring 1954

  In April 1954, Fritz traveled to the United States to negotiate the terms of a new employment contract. Through his friend Harry Hermsdorf, he had learned that a small Connecticut company, the Wright Power Saw & Tool Corporation, was looking for a sales representative in Europe, based in Switzerland. This company made various models of power and chain saws with pneumatic motors. It is not impossible that Allen Dulles had intervened to help Fritz secure this position.

  In a letter to Rudolf Pechel, Fritz described this new experience in a few words: “I am in the technical department, where the saws are repaired. It is necessary to know things of this kind in order to do my work in Europe. But I ask myself countless questions: all this technical jargon, and everything is in English!” In a letter to Ernst Kocherthaler, Fritz wondered who on earth would buy these chain saws: “The market is not good.” To get a good understanding of the material that he was going to be promoting in Europe, Fritz had to spend two months training in the forests of Connecticut. The chain saws were too heavy for him. The woods were infested with snakes.

  The contract was signed in June 1954. Fritz was paid a salary of $250 a month. On this trip to the United States, he had made a detour to Washington to visit Allen Dulles. The highs and the lows of his career did not prevent him from maintaining his good humor: Peter Sichel, who put him up during his stay in the capital, recalls that “Fritz amused himself by climbing the trees in the garden to show me what he could do.” Fritz crossed the Atlantic on a steamer to return to Europe. He was carrying some chain saws in his luggage.

  EPILOGUE

  On July 20, 1961, a plaque was dedicated at the Foreign Ministry in Bonn honoring the diplomats who had resisted Hitler. The head of the German diplomatic service at the time, Heinrich von Brentano, delivered a speech on “the force of conscience inspired by God.” Ten names were engraved on the large stone panel—including Ulrich von Hassell, Adam von Trott zu Solz, Friedrich-Werner Graf von der Schulenburg—but not that of Fritz Kolbe. If he had been executed before 1945, his name might have been added to the official list of the “just.”

  Allen Dulles had been able to do nothing to secure the readmission of Fritz Kolbe into the service of the ministry, even though he had very good personal contacts with Chancellor Adenauer. There remained the possibility of a rehabilitation “as a matter of honor.” This idea had germinated in the mind of Ernst Kocherthaler who found the injustice done to his friend intolerable. In November 1964, Kocherthaler—who had only two years left to live—wrote to Allen Dulles to ask for his support in an approach he was in the process of making to Eugen Gerstenmaier, president of the Bundestag and former member of the Protestant Church opposed to Nazism. In early spring 1965, after reading the file that Kocherthaler had sent him, Gerstenmaier signed a brief document aimed at “exonerating Fritz Kolbe from the suspicions weighing on him.”

  It is not certain whether Fritz had wanted to get a document like this. In a long letter to Ernst Kocherthaler dated January 10, 1965, Fritz revealed his deepest feelings:

  The members of the resistance are honored once a year, on 20 July. But a good member of the resistance is one who is dead. Whoever had ears to hear and eyes to see knew what the Nazi madness meant, even before 1933. Those who didn’t want to see or understand anything continued their successful careers in the ministry…. My aim was to help my poor nation end the war sooner and to cut short the suffering of the people in the camps. I don’t know if I succeeded. But what I did manage to do was to make the Americans see that there were people in Germany who were resisting the regime without asking for anything in return. People who acted purely out of conviction. No one has the right to give me good marks for my conduct during that period. No one can withdraw from me or grant to me my honor.

  Fritz Kolbe died from gallbladder cancer on February 16, 1971 in Bern. A dozen people attended the funeral. Among them, two unknown men laid a wreath on behalf of Richard Helms, director of the CIA. Shortly before his death in 1969, Allen Dulles had written: “I always felt it was unfair that the new Germany failed to recognize the high integrity of George’s purpose and the very considerable part which he played in the eventual overthrow of Hitler and Hitlerism. Some day I hope that any injustice will be righted, and that his true role will be properly recognized in his own country.”

  A REMEMBRANCE OF FRITZ KOLBE

  In December 1945, Richard Helms started to turn over his responsibilities as Chief of the Berlin Base of the Office of Strategic Services, which later became the CIA, to me. Dick had held this position ever since Allen Dulles had returned to the United States in the late summer of 1945. Now Dick himself was going back and I, previously head of a special unit, would be in interim charge of the entire Berlin office until a new chief was named.

  Among the cases Dick turned over to me was a special one: Fritz Kolbe, alias George Wood. He briefed me on Fritz’s work during the war, and the necessity of protecting him both from German reprisals and the quite real risk of Soviet kidnapping. He praised Fritz’s ability to put us in touch with reliable people in Berlin, as well as Fritz’s eagerness to help the prosecution of Nazi criminals in Nürnberg. He told me that we had tried to dissuade him from doing this, since it might expose him to reprisals, but that Fritz was determined to even the score.

  I met Fritz shortly thereafter, in a sort of official turnover from one case officer to another, but I did not get to know him well—Harry Hersmdorf, an intelligence officer whose responsibilities largely concerned helping former members of the German resistance and their widows, had day-to-day responsibility for Fritz’s case. Harry was a big, generous, and charming man who quickly became a close friend to Fritz and his companion, Maria Fritsch. He established an easy camaraderie with Fritz and his circle of friends.

  Berlin was exciting and sad at the same time in this first harsh winter after the war. The city was almost totally destroyed, especially the center. Endless groups of women were involved in stacking up the stones and bricks that lay all over the landscape, at time creating virtual mountains. These Trümmerfrauen are an indelible memory to anyone who lived in Berlin during that period. We worked hard, but also played hard, spending evenings entertaining “reliable” Germans to get a better grasp of what had happened to them, personally and emotionally, in the long nightmare they had lived through. A good number of these Germans were friends of Fritz Kolbe, who usually accompanied them to my house, where they had a chance to be warm and have a good meal and plenty of alcohol, coffee, and cigarettes, the three things most highly valued at that period. This is how I got to know Eugen Gerstenmaier, who ultimately became a good friend, as well as Gertrud von Heimerdinger and Professor Sauerbruch. I entertained Sauerbruch quite frequently in my house as well, a complex man who consumed prodigious quantities of my cognac.

  I finally got to know Fritz better only when we decided that he had to leave Berlin for his own safety. He was altogether too foolhardy to be left there on his own, not realizing what a desirable target he was for the Russians. I finally drove him out of Berlin in a Jeep, disguised in the odd uniform worn by American civilians working for the occupation authority. He also had an official document to justify his drive through the Russian Zone to Helmstedt and ultimately to Frankfurt. It was a six-hour drive, and we had plenty of time to talk—that is how we became friends. I only saw him three or four times after that. The time I remember most fondly is greeting Maria and him on their arrival in New York, which coincided with my return to Washington on retiring from the Army to join SSU (Strategic Service Unit), one of the successor organizations of OSS, which ultimately became the CIA. I spent three or four days with the two of them, showing them around New York. They also visited Washington in 1954; we spent a lot of time together reminiscing about the war and discussing the evolution of Germany since the war.

  Fritz was the easiest man to establish rapport with. He was a straight arrow, looked you in the eye, and was neither shy nor aggressive. He
was happy in his skin, healthy, physically active and proud of it. He was no intellectual, no great thinker, but a great doer. To be active was everything; he simply had no end of physical energy, which needed an outlet. He had no pretense and when discussing his wartime activities, he regarded them his duty as a patriotic German. Like most great men, he was rather simple; he knew what he had to do and did not give it a second thought. Though he regretted not being able to get back into the German Diplomatic Service, he was not bitter about it. He felt that he had done his duty and he was willing to accept what fate had in store for him. He was not even much put out when the friend to whom he had entrusted his savings disappeared. Oddly enough, Fritz told me in 1954, his friend did turn up ultimately and returned the money.

  I have been approached a number of times in the last fifty years by authors and TV producers who wanted to do a book or film about this man, who without any doubt was one of the greatest, if not the greatest, source of “human intelligence” information in the Second World War. Very little came of all this, until Lucas Delattre contacted me three years ago. It was obvious from our first contact, and his visit to Bordeaux to make my acquaintance, that finally someone understood the need to tell this story. Fortunately Lucas also possessed the other qualities necessary to do the job: intellectual curiosity, a background in German history and culture, and the professional expertise of a newspaperman. It was fun to be of a little help to him, putting him in contact with the few survivors and answering whatever questions he had. It was also great to be reminded of the many people who had a hand in this operation and with whom I had worked at one time or another during and after the war. I had long forgotten Eduard Wätjen, Eduard Schulte, Gertrud von Heimerdinger, and Gertrud’s sister, who also worked on the courier desk at the Foreign Office. Neither of my old colleagues Harry Hermsdorf and Fred Stalder, who was transferred to my unit in Berlin from Bern after the war, were around to help with this story.

  Finally there is an interesting lesson to learn from Fritz’s story, which has been repeated many times since. Good intelligence sources are usually those who, for ideological reasons, do not agree with the policies of their government. They make contact with “the opposition” and volunteer their information. In this manner the Russians and we have gathered high-level intelligence over the last eighty years. Only rarely are “agents” recruited through subterfuge or the offer of money or blackmail. Ideology is still the great motivator and Fritz Kolbe is the ideal example of such a freedom fighter. The German government finally recognized the service he has rendered and dedicated a room to him in the German Foreign Office in Berlin.

  —Peter Sichel, former Station Chief, Central Intelligence Agency, New York, 2004

  NOTES

  Introduction

  stirrings of their conscience: A quotation from Winston Churchill, speaking in 1946 of the conspirators in the failed plot against Hitler on July 20, 1944.

  source of the war: Memorandum for the President, June 22, 1945, to President Truman from General Donovan, National Archives, College Park (entry 190c, microfilm 1642, roll 83).

  agent in World War II Richard Helms (with William Hood), A Look Over My Shoulder (New York: Random House, 2003), p. 37.

  done something against Nazism: See Peter Steinbach, Widerstand im Widerstreit (Paderborn, 2001).

  so-called simple people: Interview conducted by Dominique Simonnet, L’Express, December 28, 2000.

  Prologue

  head of the OSS: The Office of Strategic Services was established in June 1942 and placed under the command of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Its role was to take charge of “unconventional warfare”—in other words, to gather intelligence and organize clandestine operations against the Axis powers. William Donovan, a Wall Street lawyer and a Republican, but above all a man of action and a First World War hero, was chosen by President Roosevelt to head the agency, which he did until 1945.

  dated January 10, 1944: Memorandum for the President, National Archives (entry 190c, microfilm 1642, roll 18).

  extraordinarily difficult to obtain: The distinction was already being made between the interception of enemy signals (signals intelligence, or SIGINT) and espionage based on human sources (human intelligence, HUMINT).

  view to “liquidating” it: This German diplomatic cable had been transmitted to Washington on December 30, 1943, signed by Eitel Friedrich von Moellhausen, assistant to the Reich’s ambassador in Rome, Rudolf Rahn. See Robert Katz, Black Sabbath: A Journey Through a Crime Against Humanity (London: Barker, 1969). Thanks to Astrid M. Eckert, Berlin.

  “be the only winner”: Message from the Swiss bureau of the OSS in Bern to Washington headquarters dated January 4, 1944, based on a cable from Ambassador von Weizsäcker of December 13, 1943. “Weizsäcker reports that the Pope hopes that the Nazis will hold on the Russian Front and dreams of a union of the old civilized countries of the West with insulation of Bolshevism towards the East.” Memorandum for the President, January 10, 1944, National Archives.

  went over to the enemy: Message from the OSS Bern bureau, December 31, 1943, National Archives.

  United States, Henry Wallace: Memorandum for the President, January 11, 1944. The Germans knew the content of a conversation between Vice President Wallace and the Swiss ambassador to Washington, his brother-in-law. The conversation had to do with the tensions between the Western allies (Great Britain and the United States) and the USSR. The Germans apparently had a good source in the Foreign Ministry in Bern. This affair probably hastened the disgrace of Wallace, who was replaced on the November 1944 election ticket by Harry Truman.

  Chapter 1

  “will also be prohibited”: The “law for the protection of German blood and German honor” and the “law on German citizenship” had been adopted during an NSDAP congress in Nuremberg. They laid the foundation for the total and definitive exclusion of the Jews from German society.

  von Welczeck, the ambassador: Germany maintained embassies in the major capitals: Madrid, London, Paris, Rome, Washington, Moscow, Tokyo, and even Rio de Janeiro. Everywhere else, diplomatic representation did not have the title of embassy (Botschaft) but that of legation (Gesandtschaft), and the head of mission did not have the title of ambassador (Botschafter) but that of “envoy” (Gesandte).

  A legation is a diplomatic mission maintained by a government in a country in which it does not have an embassy. The head of the legation, like an ambassador, is accredited to the sovereign or the head of state.

  The Congress of Vienna (March 19, 1815) had distinguished two classes of diplomatic agents: ambassador (and legate or nuncio) and chargé d’affaires (accredited only to the foreign minister of the country). The Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle (November 21, 1818) added an intermediate class for resident ministers and extraordinary envoys. It is to this class that belongs a head of legation, who has the character of a plenipotentiary minister. He is addressed as “Minister,” or, by custom, “Your Excellency.” Thanks to Serge Pétillot-Niémetz, chargé de mission for the Dictionary of the Académie Française.

  Count Johannes von Welczeck (1878–1974), ambassador to Madrid, was a diplomat of the old school. He had joined the ministry before the 1914 war, a period when a diplomatic career was still restricted to rich aristocrats able to pay their own way.

  Biarritz, or Hendaye: German Foreign Ministry, Johannes von Welczeck file.

  figures in the Spanish capital: Ernst Kocherthaler was vice president of the petroleum traders association in Spain. He represented the interests of major oil companies: first Shell and then the Soviet oil conglomerates favored by Madrid since the late 1920s. He was born in Madrid in 1894. His father, who came from a family of modest Jewish merchants of Würtemberg, had amassed a considerable fortune by carrying on trade between Germany and Spain. The family had returned to settle in Berlin at the end of the nineteenth century. Ernst Kocherthaler had converted to Protestantism as an adolescent. He had studied law and economics in Berlin before joining the prestigious Warburg Bank in Ha
mburg. In the early 1920s, he attended international financial negotiations on the stabilization of the mark as an expert. On this occasion, he met the economist John Maynard Keynes, with whom he had become rather close. He had settled in Spain in the mid-1920s. Source: private documents of the Kocherthaler family (Sylvia and Gérard Roth, Geneva).

  of Jews in Germany: Hans-Jürgen Döscher, Das Auswärtige Amt im Dritten Reich (Berlin: Siedler, 1987).

  of a Baltic beach: The Kraft durch Freude organization was established in November 1933 in order to organize the free time of the masses, particularly through tourism and vacation camps.

  his perfectly polished shoes: “My father always had perfectly polished shoes.” Peter Kolbe, Sydney, November 2001.

  have a certain charm: “Fritz had a good deal of charm.” Gudrun Fritsch, interview in Berlin, January 5, 2002.

  become, immediately, a Spanish citizen: Source: private documents of the Kocherthaler family in Geneva. This episode of Kocherthaler’s renunciation of German nationality is also reported in Edward P. Morgan’s article, “The Spy the Nazis Missed,” True, July 1950.