The Honest Spy

by Andreas Kollender

  “I completely agree, Herr Ambassador.”

  “This stays between us, naturally.”

  “I am always discreet.”

  Von Günther eyed him. “I know that, Kolbe. You could have gone far—you maybe still can. It’s time you finally joined the Nazi Party. It opens doors for a fellow like you. You could get Norway—say, a lovely posting in Oslo. Consul. Ambassador. Who knows?”

  Fritz pulled the stack of files toward him. It had hundreds of secret documents vital to the war effort, bearing the signatures of Hitler, von Manstein, Jodl, Himmler, and Goebbels. The cardboard covers alone made his hands itch. Ever since it had become clear to him that he couldn’t keep going on as he had been, a charge of tense excitement had been running through his whole body, making him sometimes feel as though he might explode at the slightest touch.

  “Ah, Kolbe,” von Günther whispered with a sigh. “The women in Norway! The Führer would have no objections. Join the Nazi Party. It’s only a piece of paper and a signature. Just pick up a pen.”

  Von Günther had started in on him early. His suggestion of a position in Norway caught Fritz completely off guard. He could get Katrin there, far away from the bombing raids and Nazi terror. A signature was all it would take. The form would be pushed along; he’d receive a number, a membership certificate, and invitations to various gatherings.

  When von Günther had previously brought it up, Fritz had told him that he had to think it over. But Walter Braunwein had tried to talk him into it too. “You can be just as reserved when you’re a Party member, old buddy,” he’d said. Fritz still hadn’t done it; he hadn’t picked up the pen.

  He’d tried avoiding von Günther for days, but soon ran into him in the hallway outside the Visa Department; von Günther had raised his eyebrows high on his forehead. He told Fritz he would have to consider just how much one individual mattered when compared to a mass movement—the way things stood, he could do very little for Fritz. Fritz had groped for some grand intellectual rationale, but it all came down to one simple conclusion: he could not join the Party of Adolf Hitler. It was as simple as that. Talking about it did nothing to change his mind.

  Von Günther’s words pulled him back into the present. The ambassador was now talking about the invasion of unoccupied southern France, where certain matters remained unresolved diplomatically. But he didn’t want to make Fritz work late again.

  What if I did work late, though? Fritz thought. The reality was, he told his boss, the job had to get done one way or another. He still had a few unfinished matters left on his desk.

  “Well, I’m happy that you’ll get a little peace and calm soon,” von Günther said. “Neutral Switzerland. So beautiful and out of the way. Has Frau Hansen seen to your paperwork?”

  “All taken care of, Herr Ambassador. It still might take a little while, though.”

  “I was at our Bern office once. Von Lützow is our man there, as you surely know. A little soft, but decent and dependable. When you have time, go see the promenade of shopping arcades—Lauben, they call them there; they’re really quite charming.” He stubbed out his cigarette until no more wisps of smoke rose up.

  “It’s about greatness, Kolbe. We live in horrible times, but horror produces greatness. There are awful deeds that must be carried out, just awful—yet great they are too. The Führer is the only one who’s been able to create a practical plan inspired by the abstract notion of greatness. That’s what we must grasp now. It is complicated. It is dreadful, yet intoxicating.” Von Günther pressed the tips of his thumb and index finger together and moved his hand through the air as if sewing with a needle. “The end result will be stunning. All the sacrifices will have been worth it.” He spread his fingers as if tossing something into the air. “And we? We are doing our part.”

  “Yes sir, Herr Ambassador.”

  “Greatness. Chin up. I come from the very bottom, Kolbe. Seven siblings. A sick mother. And where am I now?” Von Günther spread his arms. “It’s about sacrifice. The system makes mistakes. That’s intrinsic to any system. Mistakes will always happen when the goal is to motivate the political, social, and military masses. Blind obedience, for example—that’s a mistake. The system should allow a little more freedom to develop, yes. I don’t claim to know everything. It’s tough going on intuition in times like these, to be sure, something I thoroughly regret at times.”

  “Yes sir, Herr Ambassador.”

  Fritz grabbed on to the sides of his stack of files. The stack was heavy, the paper bending under its own weight.

  “Good night, Herr Ambassador.”

  “See you tomorrow, Kolbe.”

  Fritz clamped an arm around the files and pulled the door shut behind him. He sat down at his desk and pretended he was working until von Günther was gone.

  It was quiet in the Office. The blackout curtains made the windows so dark, it seemed as if the Foreign Office building stood alone in a world in which everything else had been completely destroyed. Fritz stepped out into the corridor and looked around, at the rows of shut doors, the well-worn carpet, the dim ceiling lights. The portraits of Hitler, Göring, Heydrich, Goebbels, and von Ribbentrop seemed to follow him with their eyes. Von Ribbentrop loomed over Fritz from his picture frame. High treason! I sentence you to death, Fritz Kolbe.

  Somewhere a door slammed, and Fritz jumped. Hanging his head, he went back into his office and pressed his back to the door. Remain calm. Completely calm. He shoved the files on the desk to the side, then he pulled them back to him and clicked on the lamp. He saw the swastika and the Reich Eagle. Four years, he thought. Four years of pretending and lies, of humiliation, of work. He was the inconspicuous civil servant Fritz Kolbe in the Foreign Office, Wilhelmstrasse 74-76, Berlin.

  He poured himself a cognac. He usually didn’t drink much, worried that if he got too drunk he’d end up venting all his raging hate. He took just a sip now and then to take the pressure off, to experience some inner calm, however artificial it might be. He waited about a quarter of an hour, then opened the door a crack and slipped back down the corridor, again under the gaze of Hitler and his cohorts. At the end of the hall, he looked left and right down the intersecting hallway and listened. His colleague Havermann was stepping out of his office.

  “Ah, it’s you, Herr Kolbe. Looks like quitting time,” he said. Havermann placed a hand on Fritz’s shoulder. He was saying something about music, then added that if anyone had a problem with what he’d said, they could “get in line.” He kept talking until he reached the exit, where he said that he needed to get home now to his wife and daughter. “Music makes everything better, Herr Kolbe.”

  Back in his office, Fritz turned the key twice to lock it. He sat down at his desk and placed his hands atop the stack of files. The cardboard covers felt like a cool, compact sand. “It’s your Papa here, Katrin,” he muttered. He flipped open the top folder.

  It was a letter. At the top of the page was written Reichsführer-SS and Chief of the German Police, Berlin, followed by the date and the Foreign Office’s date-received stamp from one of von Günther’s departments. My dear von Ribbentrop! the letter began. Heartfelt thanks once again for the lovely evening at your home. You and your wife really do have a knack for such things . . .

  Fritz read about the meal served at the von Ribbentrop home and about the construction of V2 rocket facilities. The letter closed with Heil Hitler. Heinrich Himmler’s signature was jagged, the h’s of his first and last names pressed hard into the paper.

  Concerning the deportation of Roman Jews . . .

  Concerning the development of the Messerschmitt Me 262 . . .

  A general had written from the Eastern Front that morale among the soldiers was low and did not show courage. One cannot tolerate this as it will eventually prove a danger . . .

  Fritz read about a meeting at Wannsee in January 1942, and about the practical implications of decisions made at that time regarding the Jewish Question. Eradication. Extermination. After that he lo
oked in a folder with Dear von Günther written on it. It contained long columns of numbers listing munitions expenditures resulting from the liquidation of the civilian population and the detaining of various Jewish groups.

  Fritz was horrified by the logic and consistency that was being applied across all branches of the Party in support of all the killing. “Jew-free” zones were declared once an area’s Jewish inhabitants had been deported or murdered. There was a plan to let Russian prisoners of war starve to death. The stationery was divided into three columns: men, women, and children; under these headings were four- and even sometimes five-figure numbers—a flood of horror and bloodshed.

  My dear von Ribbentrop, another letter said. A fabulous piece of work. We were able to recruit an agent right inside the British consulate in Ankara. Code name Cicero. An excellent investment of twenty thousand Reichsmarks.

  A diplomat from the embassy in Tokyo addressed von Ribbentrop as “Your Excellence” and with a tone of subservience reported that the will of the Japanese Volk and leadership to persevere could almost be described as German, notwithstanding the disparity in race that His Excellency does touch upon.

  An SS general in Ukraine requested the support of regular Wehrmacht troops.

  Fritz stumbled upon a letter classified confidential, in which his superior was addressed as Von Günther, you old warhorse and munitions was again the big topic. Following that was a report from a General Gehlen in Military Intelligence about enhanced interrogations of Russian prisoners in the Caucasus region, signed Most sincerely yours, R. Gehlen, Foreign Armies East.

  Fritz read for hours. He was left speechless. The inhumane and asinine shouting of Hitler and his bootlickers would make any counterargument sound helpless and banal. He stared at his typewriter with its panzer-gray housing. It had a new key that could be found on no machines in the world but in Germany: SS, in runic script. Fritz tapped on it, then kept typing. He hit the return lever, the page ratcheting on to a new line. SS—just one stroke. He ripped the page from the roller, crumpled it up, and threw it into the trash basket.

  Since von Ribbentrop had taken over the Office, more and more senior positions in various departments were being taken over by SS men. Von Ribbentrop was an SS Gruppenführer himself.

  A few weeks earlier Fritz had, in accordance with regulations, taken on the job of ensuring that all secret files were incinerated in the sooty burn barrels down in the basement. Now, before burning these files, he locked them up in his safe, setting them alongside other secret files before rehanging a pastoral Allgäu landscape over the safe’s steel door. Only with original documents would he be able to convince the British Secret Service in Bern. They would not otherwise welcome him with open arms. Old Consul Biermann had told him about the British having a station there, so Fritz had called Eugen Sacher to ask him if he still had good connections among the British, maybe even someone higher up in the embassy. Eugen asked why he wanted to know, then changed the subject to the good old times in Spain, but Fritz interrupted him.

  “Do you, Eugen? Could you maybe find me a contact there?”

  Eugen was silent a long while. Fritz kept the phone pressed to his ear, giving his friend time.

  “What do you mean by that—a contact?”

  “Can you or can’t you, Eugen?” The tension made Fritz start giggling.

  Eugen complained what a stubborn dog Fritz always was. He did have rather decent contacts among the Brits, he said—he even knew someone from the embassy.

  “That’ll do,” Fritz said, and hung up before Eugen could respond. It wasn’t polite, but it was for the best, all things considered.

  He went into the bathroom, leaned on the sink, and took a good look at himself. His face remained calm; it didn’t contort into some blue-and-red grimace. The face he saw in the mirror was the face Katrin knew—a face he hadn’t seen in years.

  Fritz rode his old Wanderer bicycle through the dark ruins over to the Kurfürstendamm. In the beginning he had parked his bike at the main entrance to the Office but was then informed that von Ribbentrop forbade this. He’d parked it on Wilhelmplatz ever since, at the entrance to the U-Bahn station.

  The outside air and the pedaling did him good. Braunwein had set him up with a little apartment on the Kurfürstendamm, not far from Memorial Church. “Hey-ho!” he had said to Fritz, using that favorite greeting they’d shared since they were boys. “Welcome to your new domain, old buddy. Small, yet modest.”

  “Don’t tell me—just like me,” Fritz had said.

  He stood his bike in the hall and made his way up the dark stairs to the top floor.

  Inside his apartment’s two rooms he checked the cardboard and curtains that covered the windows and then turned on the lamps. He used to hate the blackouts. Whenever the block’s air-raid warden came into the apartment to check how sealed off it was, Fritz wanted to scream at him about how disgusting it was to shut out all light, but he always held his tongue. Now that his plans were coming to fruition, however, he viewed the blackout curtains as essential. He was now dark Fritz, secret Fritz. Deprivation of light and this dim somnolence better matched his life than did those grand Foreign Office windows on Wilhelmstrasse.

  He boiled water, waiting till it started to bubble, and poured himself tea. His flash cards lay on the table. He’d been doing them for years to stay sharp. He read a series of numerals, turned the card over, and then went through the alphabet matching the corresponding ciphers: A=1, H=8, O=15. He wrote down twenty fictitious names on a new card, read the names seven times, and turned the card over.

  He gazed at the framed photos that stood on the wall cabinet: Walter and Fritz on safari in South-West Africa, everything sunny; Käthe, Walter, Horst, and Fritz standing next to the car during their tour of the valley north of Cape Town. He had cropped the picture at his left shoulder because Katrin was standing next to him in the photo, and he wanted to keep anyone from learning of her existence, if possible.

  Then there was the image of his deceased wife at a street café on the Gran Via in Madrid, her black hair full of shine. The Biermanns in the Cape Town consulate yard, elegant and cheerful. His parents in their warm upholsterer’s workshop. One small frame in the back stood empty: the one that had held Katrin’s photo, which he’d since put away. She must be bitterly disappointed that he hadn’t written her a single letter. But his passage to Germany and those first few weeks in this hell had forced him to make certain that no censors, or henchmen, or anyone looking into either of them would have an easy time of it. He had to try, for her sake. He touched the empty center of the frame. “My dear Katrin,” he muttered. “I’ll explain it all to you one day.”

  He drank his tea and checked the card with the names—he had memorized them all correctly. Next to those he wrote aliases that he made up, read them seven times, and turned the card over.

  He gazed at the photos again, at his people. He’d struck up few new friendships. The less people knew about him, the more inconspicuous he remained, the better. There was still Consul Biermann and his wife. But the old man had been booted out.

  In their hypocritical thoughtfulness, the Nazis had at first assigned Biermann to a position in the Office. He was supposed to cultivate his old contacts in Spain; with all due respect to his personal connection with Molotov, others were taking over Moscow duties now. At first Fritz used to see him in the corridors of the Office, looking upright and stern, always in a gray three-piece suit and, after a few weeks, using a cane just like his wife. The more Biermann took part in conferences and meetings, the more stooped he became. Back in Africa he’d been energetic, but now he was an old man.

  Biermann’s pleasantly lucid voice got ignored during discussions held in the Office corridors. The young men in SS uniforms would cut him off midsentence and, laughing, leave him standing there. As they walked away, the old man would reach for their retreating backs, as if wanting to pull them back. Despite that, he didn’t admit defeat, and to show his defiance he balled up his fists w
henever he saw Fritz rushing from office to office with papers in his hands.

  After his first private meeting with von Ribbentrop, Biermann had come into Fritz’s tiny office in the Visa Department and closed the door. “I can’t believe what I’ve just experienced,” he said. “What an arrogant, ice-cold boor. Von Ribbentrop! Good God, to think he is the Foreign Minister. Why on earth does the Office, with such an illustrious history, need its own vile Jewish Department just like the Gestapo? It used to be that Berlin was swarming with foreign diplomats—and now? You have all these big-mouthed Fascist Italians, degenerate Austrians, and bored Spaniards, with occasionally a Japanese who probably feels as alien in Berlin as they would on another planet. What does Hitler need diplomats for, Herr Kolbe? We aren’t diplomats anymore. Everything international has gone national. It’s absurd.”

  The second one-on-one between Biermann and von Ribbentrop had occurred during that period of euphoria brought on by Germany’s invasion and total defeat of France in 1940. Fritz didn’t know exactly what had happened, and Biermann would not speak of the meeting. It was rumored that von Ribbentrop had launched into a rabid Hitler-esque tirade and then screamed at the old man. Biermann sat silently in his office the rest of the day. After that, he received a decoration and retired. There was nothing explicitly wrong with the man, von Günther had said, but he wasn’t up with the times.

  Months later, when Fritz’s despair was raging more wildly, he had ridden over to the Charlottenburg neighborhood at night despite the curfew and glared up at the Biermann residence. “I was counting on you!” he had shouted into the darkness.

  Fritz covered one side of the card and read the names out loud, then the aliases. He got two of them wrong. He pounded on the table with his fist, rattling his teacup. He read through the list of names once again and turned it over. He could see his face reflected in the glass-paneled book cabinet. Whenever he passed display windows on the Kurfürstendamm—some smeared with Jewish stars, others cracked and mended in makeshift ways—he saw a serious, forceful man who avoided his own glance. Back when this all began he had still hoped to lead a respectable life, but he quickly learned that such a life was not possible amidst this madness.