A Spy at the Heart of the Third Reich: The Extraordinary Story of Fritz Kolbe, America's Most Important Spy in World War II Read online

  Fritz wanted to get out of this dead end. He took evening classes to complete his secondary education. Once he had his diploma, he decided to take concentrated courses in a business school to learn economics and languages (English, French, and Spanish). By doing this, he counted on improving his status in the railway administration. The wager paid off: In 1922 he was put in charge of the freight department of a large Berlin station. In February 1922, he was promoted to the title of “chief station, freight, and currency administrator.” But he soon grew weary of counting locomotives, train cars, and boxes of freight.

  Finally he had the opportunity to join the Foreign Ministry in March 1925. The ministry had positions open in consular services. Fritz Kolbe applied, took a test, and was accepted. After a few weeks of an internal training course and after being declared fit to serve in all climates, including the tropics, he was sent to Madrid.

  The Spanish capital was beautiful, with a quality of life far superior to that in Berlin. The expenses of a long stay abroad—particularly moving costs—were, to be sure, far from negligible, but the ministry was generous and often advanced money if requested. Of course, inflation and the 1929 crisis had spared no one. Fritz Kolbe’s salary was paid in marks; he had deposited his savings in the “bank for German officials” and had lost everything at the end of the 1920s. But the cost of living was lower in Madrid than in Germany, the atmosphere less oppressive than in Berlin, and family outings in the Pyrenees or on the Catalan coast were a taste of paradise. As for the advantages of the job, they were significant: Fritz traveled throughout Spain and even into France. On several occasions, he had replaced the vacationing German consul in Seville. He had taken the opportunity to visit Andalusia and was amused often to be taken there for a native of Moorish origin.

  Madrid, December 1935

  A kind of intimacy developed, in their Spanish exile, between Kocherthaler, the upper-class German of Jewish ancestry, and Kolbe, the minor consular employee. By the end of 1935, the two men were no longer meeting in Madrid’s large cafés; it was too dangerous for Fritz, who was afraid that he was under surveillance, so they met at Kocherthaler’s home. One Sunday, toward the end of 1935, Fritz, Anita, and their young son Peter, then aged three, were invited to visit in the late afternoon. The family was rarely together; since 1933, Fritz was often alone in Madrid. Anita spent part of the year in a sanatorium in Germany, and little Peter in Berlin, living part of the time in his grandmother’s apartment and part of the time in a Red Cross shelter.

  The day they had tea with the Kocherthalers, Fritz put on his best flannel suit. Although they were in Spain, the tea and cakes were definitely German. The apartment was spacious. Old master paintings on the walls (a Goya, a Canaletto) and the many antiques decorating the apartment made it look like a museum.

  Ernst Kocherthaler had a passion for history and ancient mythology, with a particular predilection for Egypt. He explained to his guests that he was working on a project for a book on the theme of the “original God.” Fritz was a little distracted. He had just learned that he was being transferred to Warsaw and that he was going to leave Madrid early in 1936. He regretfully declined the invitation extended to him and his family to spend a few days vacation on Kocherthaler’s property in Malaga. Tea that day had a taste of farewell. Anita was pale and seemed only distantly connected to the conversation. She soon went to rest on a chaise longue. When Ernst sat down at the piano to play an andante from a Beethoven sonata, the apartment was suddenly filled with deep sadness. Fortunately, Ernst’s wife Martha, an elementary school teacher from Switzerland, cheered things up a bit. This was the first time that Fritz had met her. She too had been in the scouting movement as an adolescent and was passionately interested in discussing pedagogy.

  Unfortunately, Anita Kolbe was exhausted and asked to go home.

  2

  RETURN TO BERLIN

  Cape Town, October 20, 1939

  The port of Cape Town was crowded. Hundreds of Germans were leaving South Africa because they had become undesirable in the country. England and France were at war with the Reich. The member countries of the Commonwealth (India, Australia, and New Zealand) had joined the conflict on September 3. South Africa, after a few days’ hesitation and a serious government crisis, had decided to side with London on September 6. General Smuts, in favor of joining the war against Germany, had taken over as prime minister from General Hertzog, who had favored neutrality.

  The German community of South Africa was under strict surveillance. Dozens of arrests had already taken place. Many preferred to return home rather than risking internment on the charge of “intelligence with the enemy.” But the German liners of the Woermann Linie were no longer authorized to drop anchor in the ports of the Union of South Africa. The great repatriation was thus taking place under a neutral flag. That evening the Bloemfontein, a ship of the Holland Africa Line sailing to Antwerp, was mobbed by people wanting to leave. On the deck of the Dutch ship could be seen Germany’s acting consul in Cape Town, Fritz Kolbe. He waved a final farewell to his son. Standing on the dock, the seven-year-old child was dressed in Bavarian style, with gray-green lederhosen and a baggy white shirt. He held the hand of a young woman, and then he hung onto the skirts of an older woman (perhaps his grandmother). The little boy seemed to be saying: “Why are you leaving me?” His gaze was firm and he held back his tears. Fritz knew that he would never forget that look.

  The ship headed for the open sea on a journey that, if all went well, would last about two weeks. But submarine warfare was raging between Germany and England, and crossing the English Channel would be dangerous. A naval escort had been provided for the end of the voyage. Anxiety prevailed on board. The passengers gradually went belowdecks. Many went to the radio room to listen to the latest news from Europe. Kolbe remained alone, leaning on the rail. He did not know when he would see his son again. “Was I right to leave?” he asked himself with a pang, but it was too late to reverse his decision. The port had already disappeared over the horizon.

  Fritz wondered how he could ever leave South Africa behind. As he watched the splendid shore of the bay drift by, he took with him images of flowering bougainvillea, and he caught a glimpse against the clear night sky of the flat summit of Table Mountain. When he had left Madrid at the end of 1935, he had felt himself to be Spanish. Now he had become an adopted Cape Towner. For the last time he identified the rocky peaks overlooking the sea, the Lion’s Head, the Devil’s Peak, the Twelve Apostle mountains—a landscape he had traveled through many times at the wheel of his superb automobile, a 1935 Horch 830 convertible. This was a luxury car ordinarily used by members of German high society, and acting consul Fritz Kolbe had used all his savings to buy it. Of all his possessions in Cape Town, his Horch was the only thing that he had insisted on shipping to Berlin (he did not yet know that he would soon have to give it up because of restrictions due to the war).

  Fritz thought again of the long drives he had taken in the region, and breathed one last time the warm wind coming off the African veldt. In July 1939, he and a friend had explored the vast territory of SouthWest Africa and the Kalahari Desert in an all-terrain vehicle. The former German colony of SouthWest Africa (Südwestafrika or Südwest) was a paradise for antelope hunting. Recalling it now, Fritz remembered the exquisite taste of the wild game, but already a smell of sadly European vegetable soup was rising from the ship’s kitchens.

  As the African coast slipped by that evening, Fritz Kolbe thought about the harshness of fate. Young Peter’s mother, Anita, had died in June 1937. She had never seen Warsaw (where Fritz had stayed for only three months), or South Africa. Fritz had remarried in the fall of 1937; his new wife was Lita Schoop, from Switzerland. Because the ceremony took place in Zurich, they had not received the copy of Mein Kampf now given to all newlyweds in Germany. It was a marriage of reason rather than love: Fritz had been looking primarily for a replacement mother for his son. The couple had come to live together in Cape Town early in 1938.
The marriage had not lasted long; they had already been separated for some time when Fritz left Africa. The tension in the couple, evident after only a few months of life together, continued to build during their time in South Africa. One day, Lita had even threatened to denounce her husband’s anti-Hitler convictions to the consul. Fritz’s immediate superior was a dedicated Nazi by whom Fritz took care to remain unnoticed. After that incident, Fritz had invited a friend home so that he could spend an entire evening feigning obeisance to the “party line” in the presence of his own wife. What an unbearable charade! Very soon afterward, he had slammed the door on the marital home in the upscale neighborhood of Camps Bay (a handsome detached house with a garden), taking his son with him. Lita and Fritz had not seen each other since then. He merely knew that Lita had decided not to return to Europe (he would later learn that she had been interned as a German citizen in a British camp in East Africa).

  If Fritz Kolbe had decided to leave, this was purely out of loyalty to the head of the German legation in Pretoria, Rudolf Leitner, who had asked him to return with him. Even though the diplomat was a member of the party, Kolbe respected him as a human being. He was pleased to see him on board the Bloemfontein. The two men knew each other well: In 1936, when Fritz had briefly returned to Berlin after a short stay in Warsaw, Leitner had been his superior in one of the departments of the ministry (Kolbe had been recommended to him by Count von Welczeck, the former ambassador to Spain). Leitner, a good-natured Austrian Catholic, particularly appreciated Kolbe for his habits, “worthy of the finest Prussian administration.” Fritz was a veritable workhorse, having no hesitation in working overtime and spending the night at the office when necessary. As for Kolbe, he liked to chat with Leitner, particularly when he talked about America, where he had been posted for more than ten years. As the former consul in Chicago in the mid-1920s, he knew a huge number of amusing anecdotes about Al Capone and the hidden history of prohibition.

  When Leitner had been sent to Pretoria at the end of 1937, he had not hesitated to fight to have Fritz Kolbe appointed to the consulate in Cape Town. The mission he had assigned him was to restore order to the consulate’s finances, which were in a sorry state after several years of mismanagement. Kolbe had been appointed in spite of the initial hesitations of the powerful liaison office between the Foreign Ministry and the NSDAP, which controlled all foreign appointments. Leitner had had to use all his influence for Kolbe’s professional qualities to trump his politically questionable status in the eyes of the liaison office.

  Kolbe was something of a “protégé” of Leitner’s, and Fritz would have been very distressed to compromise him. If he had decided to stay in South Africa, as some of his friends had advised, he would have been interned until the end of the war—that was one thing—but above all he would have put his immediate superior in difficulty. In Berlin, Rudolf Leitner would have been criticized for having supported a “deserter,” which would have put an end to his career. Kolbe decided to return to the ministry, with an aching heart.

  It was a sad voyage. Fritz Kolbe had never felt so alone. He did not reply when an unknown traveler suggested they have a drink. He was suspicious, because the ship was full of informers, cheaters, and professional gamblers. Late at night, he could still be seen strolling on the promenade deck, lost in thought. He was trying to imagine Europe at war. He resigned himself to returning to a Berlin under the Nazi yoke.

  The capital of the Reich, he thought, must be gloomier than ever. Fritz had heard that the Gestapo had veritable carte blanche to eliminate whoever it wanted with no legal accountability. Patrols would harass passersby on the slightest pretext. Building managers were now in service to the party, ready to denounce the slightest suspect behavior. Fritz remembered the day in 1937 when he had had the misfortune to pass a Nazi leader’s car on a broad Berlin avenue. The eminent figure’s chauffeur (was it Göring, he wondered?) had given him a threatening look and followed him for a while, as if to record his license plate. Fritz anxiously anticipated a summons from the Gestapo. Nothing had happened in the end, but he had slept badly for two weeks.

  Even if the war was far from popular, a majority of Germans remained in favor of Hitler and thought that he “was going to come through it,” as always. How, he wondered, could millions of people see the approaching catastrophe without reacting? How could they accept the curfew and the obligatory food and clothing ration cards? Fritz told himself that it was probably already too late—military hostilities were right around the corner, and public opinion would unite behind the regime out of a patriotic reflex.

  The ministry to which Fritz was returning was, worst of all, under Ribbentrop—the man who had just signed a pact with Moscow after having denounced for years “the Russians, our sworn enemies.” Fritz had never seen him but had a fairly clear idea of him. The foreign minister had earned the nickname “Ribbensnob” since he had purchased the right to put a “von” before his surname. He was one of the most mediocre leaders of the regime, known for his pathological obsequiousness toward the führer and his brutality to his subordinates. It seemed that the atmosphere in the Wilhelmstrasse offices had seriously deteriorated in the last two years. Everyone was said to be at the mercy of outbursts of anger from the minister, who insulted his interlocutors, not hesitating to call them “idiots” or “wimps.” Generally speaking, Ribbentrop—a former sparkling-wine merchant—detested most career diplomats. He wanted to make the Foreign Ministry into a “powerful National Socialist instrument at the service of the Führer,” and to do this he had taken control of the ministry by placing reliable men in the key positions. Half of the five hundred high officials in the ministry were already members of the party, and one in ten belonged to the SS.

  The shock waves of events in Germany had spread as far as South Africa. In the German consulate in Cape Town, Fritz Kolbe had observed a gradual deterioration of the climate. Afrikaner nationalism seemed to have grown wings thanks to Hitler, and the atmosphere had become electric. The Afrikaners imitated fascist spectacles commemorating their own history. One evening in the fall of 1938, on leaving the consulate, Fritz had encountered a small troop of Grey Shirts, a fascist league modeled on the SA. The young men had greeted him with a Hitler salute. Fritz had pretended to have forgotten something in the building in order to avoid having to talk to them.

  The militants of the Afrikaner cause, as always, had chosen the German camp out of hatred for the British. This had already taken place during the Boer War in 1899, and again in 1914. Since Hitler’s accession to power, the descendants of Dutch immigrants thought that once again the fate of the Afrikaner volk was in the hands of Germany and more or less openly praised all the victories of the Reich in Europe.

  Fritz had seen all kinds at the consulate. Sometimes they had talked to him as though he were a personal representative of the führer. The most moderate of his visitors argued in favor of South African neutrality: “After all, Hitler is no threat to our interests,” he often heard. Others openly wanted an alliance with the Reich and proposed returning the colony of SouthWest Africa to Germany in order to seal this agreement in the name of peoples oppressed by “British imperialism.”

  The worst had come when Fritz had had to organize a visit to Cape Town by an NSDAP delegation that had come from Berlin to meet with South African counterparts from the New Order (a movement founded by Oswald Pirow), who defended a “Christian nationalist” ideology based on the ideals of blood and soil. This had happened early in 1939. Fritz had been unable to get out of participating in an evening “among comrades” at the city’s German club. The reception, naturally accompanied by large quantities of German beer, had featured various songs drawn from the Nazi repertory.

  Lüderitz, October 22, 1939

  Lüderitz, a port of SouthWest Africa, was named for a tobacco merchant from Bremen who had set up a trading post there toward the end of the nineteenth century. Liners sailing to Europe called there twenty-four hours after leaving Cape Town. From the deck tha
t morning, Fritz watched the swarm of activity on the pier: herds of sheep, horses, and the transport of freight—impressive quantities of bales of wool, rifles, agricultural equipment, cases of schnapps. Europe was distant, but German was spoken here, and the architecture as well displayed its clearly German origins.

  The former colony of the Reich, half desert, had maintained majority German-speaking enclaves like Lüderitz and Swakopmund, populated by Catholic missionaries from the Rhineland, merchants from the Baltic Sea coast, and transplanted German farmers. The Nazis were naturally interested in this region, which they contemplated reconnecting to the Reich in the context of a vast colonial project. Berlin had already appointed the “shadow governors” of the future African empire. The agitation of the Afrikaners in South Africa was vigorously encouraged by certain German circles in the Südwest. Toward the mid-1930s, NSDAP cells had been set up throughout the territory. Swastika flags had been raised here and there. Leaders of the Hitler Youth had come from the Reich with the intention of training overseas imitators. Fritz knew by reputation the German consul general at Windhoek, Walter Lierau, who had arrived in 1939: he was the first diplomat of the Foreign Ministry to have been a member of the SS.

  Fritz thought about his son; this was the region where little Peter was going to live during his father’s absence, with his adopted family. The child was to live with Otto and Suzi Lohff, a German couple who lived in the town of Keetmanshoop, 250 kilometers in the interior, who were soon to move to Swakopmund, very close to another port, Walvis Bay. Otto Lohff worked for the Metje and Ziegler company, one of the largest German firms in SouthWest Africa, importers of supplies for construction and public works. Because the local economy needed him, he had not been interned by the South African authorities.