On July 20, 1961, a plaque was dedicated at the Foreign Ministry in Bonn honoring the diplomats who had resisted Hitler. The head of the German diplomatic service at the time, Heinrich von Brentano, delivered a speech on “the force of conscience inspired by God.” Ten names were engraved on the large stone panel—including Ulrich von Hassell, Adam von Trott zu Solz, Friedrich-Werner Graf von der Schulenburg—but not that of Fritz Kolbe. If he had been executed before 1945, his name might have been added to the official list of the “just.”
Allen Dulles had been able to do nothing to secure the readmission of Fritz Kolbe into the service of the ministry, even though he had very good personal contacts with Chancellor Adenauer. There remained the possibility of a rehabilitation “as a matter of honor.” This idea had germinated in the mind of Ernst Kocherthaler who found the injustice done to his friend intolerable. In November 1964, Kocherthaler—who had only two years left to live—wrote to Allen Dulles to ask for his support in an approach he was in the process of making to Eugen Gerstenmaier, president of the Bundestag and former member of the Protestant Church opposed to Nazism. In early spring 1965, after reading the file that Kocherthaler had sent him, Gerstenmaier signed a brief document aimed at “exonerating Fritz Kolbe from the suspicions weighing on him.”
It is not certain whether Fritz had wanted to get a document like this. In a long letter to Ernst Kocherthaler dated January 10, 1965, Fritz revealed his deepest feelings:
The members of the resistance are honored once a year, on 20 July. But a good member of the resistance is one who is dead. Whoever had ears to hear and eyes to see knew what the Nazi madness meant, even before 1933. Those who didn’t want to see or understand anything continued their successful careers in the ministry…. My aim was to help my poor nation end the war sooner and to cut short the suffering of the people in the camps. I don’t know if I succeeded. But what I did manage to do was to make the Americans see that there were people in Germany who were resisting the regime without asking for anything in return. People who acted purely out of conviction. No one has the right to give me good marks for my conduct during that period. No one can withdraw from me or grant to me my honor.
Fritz Kolbe died from gallbladder cancer on February 16, 1971 in Bern. A dozen people attended the funeral. Among them, two unknown men laid a wreath on behalf of Richard Helms, director of the CIA. Shortly before his death in 1969, Allen Dulles had written: “I always felt it was unfair that the new Germany failed to recognize the high integrity of George’s purpose and the very considerable part which he played in the eventual overthrow of Hitler and Hitlerism. Some day I hope that any injustice will be righted, and that his true role will be properly recognized in his own country.”