10
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, sometimes 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).
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 Post-War 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 climate 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).
Another precaution was taken to facilitate matters: He took with him a camera provided by the Americans. The device was of high quality, a Robot of German manufacture (with a capacity of sixty exposures). Rolls of film would be easier to get through the border than kilos of paper. With the colossal volume of documents that he was now handling, this solution should make his work easier (“otherwise, it was no longer possible,” Fritz was to explain a few years later). For the Americans, this method offered many advantages: Instead of sending manuscripts difficult to decipher because of his cramped handwriting, Fritz would now type his comments and photograph them.
After Fritz left, a feeling of excitement and frenzy continued to permeate the atmosphere in the OSS offices. Dozens and dozens of Kappa messages were cabled to Washington and London daily until the end of the month. Allen Dulles gave these dispatches the name “Kapril” (a contraction of Kappa and April) to clearly distinguish them from their predecessors—a useful and necessary precaution, for some recurring subjects, such as the deliveries of Spanish tungsten to Germany, generated kilometers of cables every time.
Washington, April 16, 1944
On April 16, two days after Fritz’s departure for Berlin, his material reached the highest authorities in the United States. For the first time since January 10, President Roosevelt got on his desk that day a report with the Boston heading, analyzed and commented on. The OSS thought that “George Wood’s” latest visit to Bern was important enough to justify sending a “Memorandum for the President” to the White House. So much for the prejudices and doubts of the experts. A copy was also sent to Secretary of State Cordell Hull, to Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall, to the commander in chief of the U.S. Navy, Admiral Ernest J. King, to the supreme commander in Europe, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, as well as to the highest British authorities. The document was drafted by Colonel G. Edward Buxton, one of General Donovan’s right-hand men.
Of all that had just been revealed by “George Wood” in Bern, neither the file on Japan nor the one on Hungary went to the president; nothing of all that, but rather what Fritz told Allen Dulles sitting by the fire, spontaneously, about the atmosphere prevailing in Germany, the state of mind of the leaders of the Reich and the evolution of the feelings of ordinary people. “Eighty percent of the German people feel opposed to the Nazis and is waiting for the day of delivery,” Fritz had told his American friends, immediately adding, “yet active revolutionary action cannot be expected for the time being. Himmler controls by his spies and terrorists every one of the various police organizations and the key positions of the armed forces so thoroughly that the forces of opposition that exist even within the police do not risk a plot.” Fritz had added an observation that was very troubling to the Americans: “The communist organization and propaganda have been strengthened in the last few months. As parts of the Nazi SA and even the SS have changed over to the communists, Russia disposes of a good organization in order to control the revolution by their elements, when the situation is ripe.”
The Allies were fond of this kind of information, because they had no way of knowing what was going on inside the country. Germany in early 1944 resembled an impenetrable fortress. Only a very few people, one of whom was Fritz Kolbe, enabled the veil to be lifted a little. Apart from him, there were Hans-Bernd Gisevius and his friends in the Abwehr, an occasional businessman, and a few boatmen who sailed on the Rhine and whom OSS agents questioned in the cafés of Basel.
The memorandum to President Roosevelt stated, in part:
The enclosed dispatch from Bern and the accompanying evaluation of its source should, it is believed, be brought to your attention as early as possible. This cable is the evaluation by our principal Swiss intelligence representative of two hundred enemy documents (four hundred pages) that have just come into his hands…. A cable has been sent to the author, requesting him to review it carefully to see whether he wishes, on reflection, to modify any of its language and to report here by cable immediately. It would seem that the author, thanks to the sudden receipt of more than 400 pages of material all at one moment, finds himself in a position where he can see the whole picture rather than any single part.
The OSS then quoted at length a Kappa message written by Dulles on April 12:
Sincerely regret that you are unable at this time to view Wood’s material as it stands without condensation and abridgement. In some 400 pages, dealing with the internal maneuvering of German diplomatic policy for the past two months, a picture of imminent doom and final downfall is presented. Into a tormented General Headquarters and a half-dead Foreign Office stream the lamentations of a score of diplomatic posts. It is a scene wherein haggard Secret Service and diplomatic agents are doing their best to cope with the defeatism and desertion of flatly defiant satellites and allies and recalcitrant neutrals…. Already Canaris has disappeared from the picture, and a conference was hastily convoked in Berlin at which efforts were made to mend the gaping holes left in the Abwehr. Unable now to fall back on his favorite means of avoiding disconcerting critics by retiring to his bed, Ribbentrop has beat a retreat to Fuschl and retains a number of his principal aides at Salzburg. The remainder of the Foreign Office is strung out all the way between Riesengebirge and the capital. Practically impossible working conditions exist in the latter, and bomb shelters are being permanently used for code work. Once messages have been deciphered, a frantic search begins to locate the specific service or minister to which each cable must be forwarded; and, when a reply is called for, another search is required to deliver this to the right place….
The final deathbed contortions of a petrified Nazi diplomacy are pictured in these telegrams. The reader is carried from one extreme of emotion to the other, from tears to laughter, as he examines these messages and sees the cruelty exhibited by the Germans in their final swan-song of brutality toward the peoples so irrevocably and pitifully enmeshed by the Gestapo after half a decade of futile struggles, and yet at the same time also sees the absurdity of the dilemma which now confronts this diplomacy both within and without Festung Europa.
This message was considered exceptional by the heads of the OSS, because most official analyses up to that time had concluded that the Nazis were still solidly holding onto power. On April 3, 1944, General Donovan had sent a letter to President Roosevelt characterizing the morale in the capital of the Reich in these terms: “As though they were under the influence of morphine, with no sign of collapse and yet a general despair of ever gaining the victory now.” While it seemed that the war was likely to last for a long time, Dulles’s message of April 12 for the first time suggested that the end of the tunnel might be in sight.
On April 20, 1944, a new message from the OSS landed on President Roosevelt’s desk. He was informed that Allen Dulles was sticking with his analysis: Germany, he said, was at the end of its rope, even if nothing had yet been won by the Allies:
The message from Switzerland (transmitted to you on 12 April 1944) ‘should not be read as indicating that the morale of the Nazi Army is nearing collapse (excepting probably the so-called Grossdeutscher, Slav and other non-German elements.)’ Nor does our Swiss representative think that any important Nazi military officials are ready and willing to let us come in through the West unopposed. He believes, rather, that fierce opposition may be given to any invasion attempt. A collapse of Germany might follow, however, a few months after the establishment of a firm toe-hold in the West. He concludes: ‘the timing of the invasion attempt may be all-important. The German people are war-weary and apathetic, and even in Nazi circles the same kind of psychological depression can be seen as appeared last August and September. Yet if they could stabilize the Russian front once more, they may catch a second wind, and put up an even stronger defense against invasion.’
Washington/Bern, April 26, 1944
On Wednesday, April 26, 1944, Washington sent Allen Dulles an encouraging message: “Particular felicitations for the Japanese data. The military people are most appreciative…. Far Eastern information is the most highly desired next to any hot invasion material.” The American generals in Asia were now informed of the principal Kappa revelation concerning their theater of operations. A few days later, Colonel Alfred McCormack presented his final report on “George Wood,” overall cautious and reserved, but laudatory with respect to Japan: “They contain a certain amount of new information which, if true, is useful—notably the identification of a number of divisional commanders in Burma,” he wrote.
On the other hand, McCormack did not think the remainder of the Kappa material was of much use: “Because of the time lag between the date of origin and date of receipt here, information that might have been of interest had either been obtained from other sources or had become stale. As is usual with diplomatic communications, a good deal of the material is second-hand information upon subjects on which first-hand information is available, or it relays expressions of opinion made for diplomatic purposes or made by people whose opinions on the particular subjects are of no great consequence.”
At the same time, the British began to take an interest in the “George Wood” file. An investigation in London in April revealed that only 4 percent of the information supplied by Wood was false or incorrect. On May 12, 1944, David Bruce, chief of the OSS in London, transmitted to Allen Dulles “special congratulations” from his British colleagues for the material on Japan. On his own initiative, Kim Philby of MI6 had sent a copy of Fritz’s documents concerning the order of battle of Japanese troops to Alistair Denniston, the head of Bletchley Park, the agency charged with deciphering enemy messages. Denniston’s services were enthusiastic and asked for more. Soon the heads of the Army, Navy, and Air Force “all three howled for more,” as Philby was to write in his memoirs. Claude Dansey, the number-two in MI6, was absolutely furious that one of Dulles’s agents was having such success in London. But he calmed down when Philby explained that he had done everything possible to conceal the American origin of “Wood.” “Not even our own circulating sections, let alone the departments, knew that OSS were involved. They regarded it as ourstuff, they were asking us for more. It seemed that the credit would be ours.” From that moment on, Dansey rubbed his hands and congratulated his young colleague (Philby was then thirty-two). Philby’s career progressed, and his reputation grew in the British intelligence community. No one knew that he was working for Moscow. Philby was later to recall fondly in his memoirs: “Our German friend proved to be an intrepid operator, and paid several more visits to Bern with his useful suitcase.”
In Washington, as in London, they were beginning to abandon the hypothesis of a ‘trap” in the course of the spring of 1944. In the last delivery from “George Wood,” there was much information that was harmful to German interests. Dulles’s German informant was finally becoming a source worthy of belief.
In a message sent on April 26, 1944 to one of the heads of the OSS (Whitney H. Shepardson, known as “Jackpot”), Dulles wrote:
I appreciate danger of becoming so enamored with one’s own sources that one falls into such traps. While possibility you suggest should never be excluded my present views are:
1. As yet no evidence of plant in material itself.
2. Having critically examined hundreds of these documents internal and external evidence has persuaded me of their genuineness.
3. Local intermediary is I believe above question though of course he might be fooled also.
4. Have analyzed entire scheme under which material procured and transmitted and it is logical and feasible.
All of foregoing while persuasive is not conclusive and agree with you on importance of continuing critical examination. So far only disturbing element has been some evidence of recklessness on Wood’s part but this is quite usual in conspirators.
Berlin, late April 1944
When Fritz returned to Berlin, the city was bathed in magnificent sunlight. The official forecast for the third week of April predicted “weather fit for the Führer [Führerwetter].” The capital was nearly empty, notably on Hitler’s birthday, April 20, a holiday in Nazi Germany. Goebbels’s propaganda machine poured forth factitious celebrations, overblown pronouncements, and unshakable convictions. Everything was “fanatical,” “heroic,” or “tragic.”
Fritz was bitter, almost enraged. For the first time he felt useless. The role of spy no longer suited him. He wanted to take some action. He may well have anticipated that he would be criticized after the war for having been the agent of a foreign power. Armed resistance was much nobler, but he had just grasped that the Americans would not help him go down that path. In Bern, he had proudly presented to Allen Dulles a plan that was very dear to his heart: the creation of a “people’s militia” [Volksmiliz] assembling Germans opposed to Nazism, with himself as troop leader. He had anticipated enlisting all his friends in these shock troops. But, most important, he wanted to mobilize everyone he knew in the Social Democratic networks and those close to the old unions. The idea behind the plan was to revive the defense leagues of the Weimar Republic. In Fritz’s plan, “his” militia would be able to control a certain number of nerve centers in the capital of the Reich (the airports, and some lakes in the vicinity of Berlin, such as the Wannsee and the Schlachtensee) in support of a large-scale parachute operation carried out by the Allies. The members of the brigade were to recognize each other by an armband with the initials VM (for Volksmiliz). The network would have been mobile, Fritz having thought of distributing bicycles to its members. “We would need machine pistols, ammunition, food rations, signal flares, helmets, and bracelets with the insignia VM,” he had told Dulles. For communications, a secret code had been worked out (the password was to be George 25900). Walter Bauer’s office at Unter den Linden 28 was to be the headquarters of this small underground army.
“What do you think, Mr. Douglas?” Fritz had asked Allen Dulles, his eyes glowing with enthusiasm. The American had not answered immediately. He had puffed on his pipe in silence, then he had quickly changed the subject. The only thing that had seemed to interest him in the whole story was the identity of the conspirators in the “people’s militia” led by Fritz Kolbe. Fritz, a little disconcerted by his proposal’s lack of effect, provided a list of his “comrades in arms”: Walter Bauer, Paul Löbe, Alfred Graf Waldersee. Allen Dulles had advised Fritz to do nothing that might put his life in danger: “We need you where you are. Keep telling us what you find out at the Foreign Ministry; that is really where you are most useful for us.”
Very disappointed by this rejection, Fritz had returned to Berlin with the feeling that he had been “dropped.” But he had nonetheless decided to continue the game of espionage, since he had no other means of acting. Perhaps, he told himself, I just have to wait a little longer and have the patience to convince the Americans of the need for a joint action in Berlin. He was not ready to give up his idea of a “people’s militia.”
On his return to the capital of the Reich, Fritz Kolbe was informed (probably by Gertrud von Heimerdinger) that he would have no opportunity to return to Switzerland for a long time. New arrangements had been made to reduce to a minimum the list of people authorized to travel abroad. He also learned that the Swiss authorities were now making difficulties over granting him a visa. Fritz wondered what had happened. It was impossible to know for sure. Perhaps his nocturnal visits to certain dens of iniquity had been observed. In the worst case, the Swiss were aware of his contacts with the Americans and wanted to avoid any problem with the authorities of the Reich. After a few moments of anxiety, Fritz finally learned that the Swiss authorities had generally become fussier and that the restrictions applied to everyone.
Fritz was trapped in Berlin. If he couldn’t go to Bern, he would have liked to go to Stockholm or Lisbon, but those trips were not authorized either. He would have liked to send messages through Albert Bur in Alsace (proposed password: “foie gras of Strasbourg”), but this system didn’t work. That did not keep him from continuing to work for the Americans. He took some time to learn how to use the camera he had been given and continued working on paper until the fall of 1944. To send documents to Bern, he always had alternative solutions. Some of his friends were still carrying the diplomatic mail to Bern—such as Willy Pohle and a certain Hans Vogel. On other occasions, Professor Sauerbruch went to Switzerland (for example, at Pentecost in 1944).
On several occasions, Fritz asked for help from another of his acquaintances, Wilhelm Mackeben, who lived in a chalet in Bavaria, in the Allgäu region near Lake Constance. Mackeben traveled extensively around Europe as an “independent sales representative.” He was a former Foreign Ministry official, politically conservative but very opposed to the Nazis. After some service in Latin America, he found himself working for Karl Ritter beginning in September 1939. It was there that Fritz had met him. But the NSDAP had finally gotten his head in 1942, when he had been forced to leave the ministry. During the spring of 1944, Mackeben agreed to get Fritz’s mail to Switzerland. Apparently he still enjoyed a special status that allowed him to go through customs without being checked. He did not know what he was carrying. In any event, Fritz trusted him enough to give him Ernst Kocherthaler’s address. Mackeben was delighted to meet him because he was a “useful contact,” with connections in many parts of Europe. On the way there, Fritz’s messages were hidden in the lining of a piece of clothing or the sole of a shoe. On the way back, the Americans’ answers were concealed in packages of coffee, cigars, or cigarettes.
The first time that Mackeben went back and forth between Berlin and Bern was in May 1944. A letter from Fritz dated May 10 reached Dulles through him. In this letter, Fritz provided a list of the principal spies working for Germany in North Africa (Tangiers, Tetouan, Casablanca). It contained the names of several diplomats, members of consular services, and journalists of every nationality (including Frenchmen, Italians, and even a former Norwegian consul). The letter contained more than just information. Fritz for the first time expressed irritation. He asked why the Americans had still not followed his advice and bombed, for example, a Siemens capacitor factory in Gera (Thuringia), the petrochemical factories of Leuna, or a communications center of the Navy command in Eberswalde (northeast of Berlin). He was also surprised to learn that nothing had been done to interrupt the flow of tungsten from Spain to Germany (“Wood comments cable speaks for itself and adds: ‘are you still asleep?’”).
“If you are satisfied with me, send me some Nescafé. If you no longer want me to send you information, send me a pair of scissors,” Fritz had added, clearly sulking a little, no longer sure whether the Americans still needed him. “If you have things to ask me, send me cigarettes and put something in them please, because I’ll smoke them myself,” he added in one of the coded messages he liked to use. The letter ended with these words: “I will not fail to seize any coming opportunity to write to you, even if I have to set to work in the early morning hours after an air raid. Sorry for my disjointed writing. I’m so overwhelmed that I no longer know what I’m doing. My fiancée complains that I am neglecting her. And yet I love her!”
The Americans’ answer, slipped into a package of cigarettes, tried to be reassuring: “Try to come to see your former father-in-law in Zurich. Find a pretext connected with the settling of your divorce.” But Fritz did not receive the message. In late May, when Mackeben was getting ready to return to Germany with the “cigarettes” intended for Fritz, Ernst Kocherthaler received a terse telegram from Berlin: “Please no cigarettes,” signed “Georg.”
Berlin, May 31, 1944
There was a meeting that evening in Berlin of the Wednesday Club at Sauerbruch’s. The Grunewald neighborhood was half in ruins, but Sauerbruch’s house on Herthastrasse was still standing. The speaker was General Beck, who was delivering a presentation on Marshal Foch,
“our great French adversary,” whom he was honored to have known personally. Despite his reservations about the Versailles treaty and “the mistakes of French policy in the Rhineland after 1918,” General Beck delivered a very laudatory speech about the old adversary of the armies of von Klück and Moltke. Of course, he said in substance, Foch can be criticized for having been impulsive, stubborn, and sometimes a little rigid in his approach to the offensive. But Beck was full of admiration for this man, who had always acted within the limits of what was possible and whom he described in conclusion as “a great man and a great general.” The applause was warm. Then the eight guests went to the table and the conversation quickly changed to other subjects. “Sauerbruch always serves sparkling wine. And since we never have much in our stomachs, the atmosphere soon gets lively,” in the words of one of the people present that evening, the philosopher Eduard Spranger.
Some members of the Wednesday Club knew that General Beck was involved with a group of conspirators who intended to eliminate Hitler, overthrow the Nazi regime, and negotiate a separate peace with the Western powers. If the plan were to succeed, Ludwig Beck was supposed to become head of state in place of the führer. Ulrich von Hassell, who was also at Sauerbruch’s that evening, was the prospective foreign minister. It was here in Ferdinand Sauerbruch’s house that Ludwig Beck had met for the first time a young and brilliant officer who was supposed to become secretary of state in a future ministry of war after the coup d’état: Colonel von Stauffenberg, chief of staff of the Army Supply Services. Count von Stauffenberg had been treated in Munich by Professor Sauerbruch for serious wounds suffered in Africa. Struck by a mine explosion, he had lost an eye, his right hand, and two fingers of his left hand. Stauffenberg did not take part in the meetings of the Wednesday Club. But most of its members knew him well and knew that he represented, along with Carl Goerdeler (future chancellor in the event the coup was successful), a central element in the resistance to the regime.
Through the intermediary of their friend Hans-Bernd Gisevius in Switzerland, General Beck and Carl Goerdeler had sent several messages to Allen Dulles, in early April and early May 1944. In the name of their resistance organization, which included dozens of high-ranking officers and various political figures, conservatives, and old Social Democrats, these men were asking for help from the United States in case their coup were to succeed. They proposed to the Americans the capitulation of the Wehrmacht on condition that they be able to continue the war in the East against the Soviets. They were in favor of a massive landing of Western troops in Germany and asked particularly that several American airborne divisions be parachuted into Berlin. But Dulles’s reply had not been encouraging: “My orders are clear: the surrender of Germany will be unconditional and nothing can be done without the Soviets,” he had told them in substance.
The plot was nevertheless closely followed by the Americans. While the British refused to accept the very idea of a “German resistance,” Dulles transmitted to his superiors the names of the principal conspirators and the contents of their plans. He had for a long time now been in contact with another member of the conspiracy, who was also calling in vain for Allied help in overthrowing Hitler: the diplomat Adam von Trott zu Solz, who had gone to Bern several times in the course of 1943 and in early 1944. In the language of the OSS, the conspirators had become Breakers,General Beck was Tucky, Goerdeler was Lester, and Adam von Trott was 800.
Berlin, June–July 1944
Life in Berlin was more and more dangerous for Fritz. In late June, he sent another message to Bern in which he confessed: “The last few days have been very difficult for me. Suspicions seemed to be weighing on me, but then they seem to have been dissipated. In any case, I have heard nothing further.” He nevertheless continued to provide information. The quality of the “material” did not decline; quite the contrary. In late June 1944, he revealed that “the Germans are still expecting a landing in the Pas-de-Calais, even after 6 June, and are not withdrawing troops from the Belgian coast for that reason.” In early July, he provided a series of details on the V-1s and future V-2s: “The flight control mechanism is produced in Gdynia, at the Ascania works, on the Baltic (near Danzig). The jets are built by Krupp in Wuppertal, additional parts which are not named are manufactured by the Siemens factories north of Augsburg…. Both the V-1 and V-2 models are made in the lower Danube region, in the vicinity of St. Valentin.” Other electronic equipment intended for the V-2 is manufactured “in the Siemens factory in Arnstadt, in Thuringia, about forty-five kilometers west of Orlamünde.” “In comparison with the V-1, the V-2 travels through the stratosphere. It is radio controlled and therefore a more accurate weapon. In addition, it possesses a longer range. This new model will be in use by the Nazis within 60 days at the outside.”
Fritz helped the Americans to identify the fallback regions for all the advanced German industries: Thuringia and its deep underground shelters. Still in early July, Fritz gave the location of a factory where the first supersonic airplane in history was manufactured. He did not give its name, but it was the Messerschmitt 262. The factory was located in Kahla, in Thuringia: “near Orlamünde, between Rudolstadt and Jena. Factory in part underground. Already bombed in late June, but the damage is minimal, and the factory will soon enter the production phase.”
Fritz never forgot to speak of Berlin, where an American bombing raid on June 21, 1944 was particularly devastating:
The factory manufacturing diesel engines for submarines was destroyed. AEG is still operating in some of the factories of the city; the cable plant, however, is no longer running. The Hotel Continental and a block of houses around the hotel were destroyed by fire. The Friedrichstrasse railroad station was badly damaged and the Schlesischer railroad station was hit during the raid. The Osram factory was also hit but is still operating…. The Siemensstadt plant is almost at a standstill…. The AEG factory manufacturing precision instruments for submarines and the Knorr-Bremse plant, both of which are located at Treptower Park, were said to have been untouched.
Dulles was satisfied, as were his Washington colleagues. What they did not know was that Fritz Kolbe was also involved in seditious activities. The telegram from Fritz that was received on May 20 (“Please, no cigarettes”) had hinted that he was in danger. Sometime in the spring, he was supposed to go with Walter Bauer to a secret meeting in Potsdam with some civilian and military conspirators close to Count Waldersee. Because of an organizational error due to faulty internal communication, neither he nor Walter Bauer went to the meeting. Waldersee was also absent. This was lucky for them, because the list of people present at this secret meeting fell into the hands of the Gestapo. A few months later, all of them were to be executed.