5
Berlin, February 1943
In early 1943, Fritz Kolbe awaited a call from destiny. He did not know what to do and yet he wanted to take action. He sensed a reason for existing. He was no longer satisfied with “peddling his principles without taking the trouble to, or even dreaming of, put them into practice…. Great things are not done only on impulse, and they are a sequence of little things combined into a whole.”
Others than he had for a long time been attempting the impossible. Resistance networks had been set up. Kolbe had no precise knowledge of the existence of these little groups, even though he was vaguely aware of the fact that “actions” were being plotted here and there. Allied bombs were now threatening all of Germany. The reign of violent death had been decreed everywhere. Sirens were now heard night and day in Berlin. At the Foreign Ministry, their sinister wail was blended, oddly, with the sound of a large gong that was used during every air raid (after the war, Fritz would not be able to hear the sound of a gong without shivering in fear).
During this time, far from the bombs, another war was going on, much less noisy, much more discreet, and yet decisive: the intelligence war. Fritz was waiting only for the opportunity to join it. He imagined it in a rather fuzzy way, not knowing what the “great game” looked like. What he knew boiled down to two or three simple ideas: neutral countries (like Switzerland, but also Sweden, Ireland, Portugal, and Turkey) were, as between 1914 and 1918, hotbeds of espionage. If you had good information in wartime, you had more power than an ambassador. Whether you were a banker, an industrialist, or even an obscure nonentity, you had every likelihood of influencing the course of events.
The time was, less than ever, one for hesitation. Fritz Kolbe felt in the air a call for the impossible and the incredible. Eager to act, he felt prepared to commit unprecedented deeds. “Treason? So be it,” he said to himself after a point that cannot be precisely located (probably late 1942 or early 1943). Fritz described this personal transformation in a document written just after the war: “I had reflected inwardly on this question (treason or Verrat) and I had ended by overcoming it. Hitler had come to power through force and deception and had plunged Germany and the entire world into war. From my point of view, no one was obligated to loyalty and obedience to the Hitler regime.”
From the beginning, Fritz had thought that the only way of acting effectively was through intervention from outside. The Allies had the power necessary to get rid of the regime. This force, he told himself, must be supported by well-placed elements at the heart of the system.
This prospect was beginning to give him the strength to act, because he, the solitary minor official, could now make himself useful, if he was able to make contact abroad, to gather trustworthy friends around him, and above all if he was lucky. From chess, Fritz had learned two lessons: A straight line is not necessarily the shortest path between two spaces, and a pawn used advisedly can sometimes transform a game.
While Allied bombs were raining on Berlin, a strange feeling of serenity took hold of Fritz Kolbe. He was happier and happier, and ever more relaxed, as though he were flourishing because of the inner anger that inhabited him. Taking advantage of the air raids, he spent a good deal of his time chatting with his colleagues, in the corridors of the ministry or in its underground bunker, one of the safest in the city, located under the Adlon Hotel a few steps from Wilhelmstrasse, not far from the Brandenburg Gate. With bombing becoming more frequent, the Adlon had been transformed into a kind of salon that favored encounters. It was one of the only shelters in Berlin where one did not have to fight to get in. No crush or excessive panic; these were civilized people, though of course you had to be careful to avoid indiscreet ears. “The enemy is listening to you” (Feind hört mit!) could be read on matchboxes of the time—an expression that had to be taken literally in all circumstances. However, it was easier to exchange confidences there than elsewhere, even if in an undertone.
Berlin, spring 1943
Thanks to his perpetual comings and goings during this time between his office, underground shelters, and the Charité hospital, Fritz Kolbe had some encounters that would soon have a decisive effect on his plans. He met up again with Karl Dumont, formerly posted to Madrid, who was now in charge of relations between the Foreign Ministry and the Wehrmacht’s weapons procurement organization. Long-standing friends, Dumont and Kolbe completely trusted each other.
A little later, probably in the spring or summer of 1943, he met Count Alfred von Waldersee at Professor Sauerbruch’s. Major Waldersee was almost the same age as Fritz (he was born in 1898). He had been posted to France and then fought in the battle of Stalingrad, from which he had had the good fortune to be evacuated because of a wound. Waldersee had close ties to the aristocratic and military circles that were the most ferociously opposed to Hitler. His friends, Fritz knew, had no hesitation in using the words “assassination attempt,” “coup d’état,” and even “revolution.”
We know almost nothing about this connection, except that Count Waldersee made the first move toward Fritz, with the obvious aim to get firsthand information from the Foreign Ministry. Waldersee seems to have been important for Fritz, and presented him in various documents written after the war as a close friend, even an accomplice. A minor official a friend to an aristocratic officer: war, like sports, breaks down many social barriers.
Since late 1942, Fritz had also been in contact with a surgeon from Alsace, Professor Adolphe Jung, whom he had met at the Charité hospital. Professor Jung was one of Professor Sauerbruch’s colleagues. He had had to leave annexed Alsace to serve in the hospitals of the Reich, which were flooded with patients and wounded soldiers and suffering from a severe shortage of qualified personnel. He lived in a small room in the Charité’s surgical clinic, just below Maria Fritsch.
Fritz made the first move toward Dr. Jung. His approach was a little provocative. “Do you have courage? Are you daring?” he said at their first meeting (probably in late 1942). Jung said nothing, afraid of falling into a trap. Then Fritz revealed something, as though to test him: “Warn your friends in France. Otto Abetz, the German ambassador to occupied France, wants to arrest Cardinal Gerlier, the archbishop of Lyon.” Just in case, Jung decided to transmit the message through his brother, the manager of a large store in Strasbourg, but he was mistrustful. Who is this Fritz Kolbe? he wondered. Jung later wrote:
Because of my functions and in the milieu to which I was transplanted I was brought into contact with the most notorious anti-Nazi elements, and I had the opportunity in particular to meet K., a fierce enemy of the regime and a secretary in the Foreign Ministry…. When I arrived in the capital of the Reich, alone in enemy country, how could I know whom I was dealing with? When an individual uttered threats against the Nazi authorities, how could I know whether he was in good faith or whether he was only an agent provocateur for the Gestapo endeavoring to discover enemies of the regime? I knew nothing about him. He was German, and he had a very visible position in the Foreign Ministry. He told me that he was not a member of the National Socialist party. And yet, I said to myself, he keeps his official post! Shouldn’t I be doubly distrustful? I observed him during the visits he made to an employee of our clinic whose fiancé he claimed to be. He told me that he had lived abroad for a long time, had learned to like and admire the English, the Americans, and the French. He loathed militarism and uniforms. He was sensible, level-headed, and cautious, although bursting with energy. Gradually we came closer together. Suddenly, after a few months, we were decided. We had to help one another, we had to work together.
Fritz was charmed by this elegant Frenchman, who also knew the United States from having studied there. Transferred by force to the interior of the Reich in March 1942, Adolphe Jung had worked first in the Lake Constance region, and then joined Ferdinand Sauerbruch’s staff in Berlin. He had arrived in Berlin in October 1942. The appointment was a stroke of luck for him, enabling him to work with a leading doctor. At the Charité hospital, he treated chiefly Professor Sauerbruch’s private clientele.
From one air raid to the next, Fritz and Adolphe Jung got to know each other better: “In the shelter where we met during Allied air attacks,” Jung wrote after the war, “we usually passed each other by without speaking. If possible we stayed in separate compartments of the shelter. But what joy shined in our eyes when Allied successes saddened the pale faces of the Nazis surrounding us. K. tightened all the muscles of his face, struck his left palm with his right fist, and constantly repeated: ‘What are they doing? What are they waiting for? Berlin has to be bombed over and over! We’ll die, so what, but let them come!’ We were agreed, K. and I, that they had to come. But can I be blamed for confessing that just thinking about it made a chill run down my spine?”
When she heard Fritz use this kind of language, his lover Maria couldn’t stand it. “Now keep quiet, keep quiet. Are you mad?” she asked. Turning to Adolphe Jung, she exclaimed, “He’s mad, isn’t he? He doesn’t know what he’s saying! He laughs stupidly like that, to himself, when the sirens wail and warn us of another thousand bombers from the RAF or the U.S. Air Force, what is that all about?” “K. was not mad,” writes Jung, “but very intelligent, very aware of all the dangers. Perhaps he was sometimes a little too excitable, but that was his temperament. He was well served by a vigorous imagination which enabled him to find in a flash the right solution or the right reply in the most difficult situations. His hatred of Nazism was real. For the Germans he had only disdain. ‘They’ll die,’ he said, ‘they’ll get what they deserve.’”
In the spring of 1943, Fritz met an exceptional woman who was to be of great help in his plans. A little cold at first sight, slightly older than Fritz (she was approaching fifty), this woman looked like a rather austere old maid, which did not keep her from being refined and elegant. Her name was Gertrud von Heimerdinger, and she had a decision-making position in the diplomatic mail service (office 138, Wilhelmstrasse 74–76). She had the power to recommend one diplomat or another for a particular foreign post. Fritz had an intuition that she shared his opinions. He had a few very precise ulterior motives for approaching her. He had not given up his plan to go to Switzerland, and he counted on making her into an ally.
Gertrud von Heimerdinger was the daughter of a Prussian general who had served under Emperor Wilhelm II. That no doubt explained her rather austere appearance. But Fritz felt from their first encounter that she was a trustworthy person, cultured, belonging to the aristocratic milieu that detested Nazism because it was coarse, vulgar, and opposed to the elementary values she had learned at a very early age. Prussian aristocrats like her were both very conservative on some points and very liberal on others. They had nationalist convictions that did not keep them from being instinctively attached to the rule of law. Fritz was beginning to tell himself that women definitely had more character than men, in this Germany that had been cut adrift.
In the Adlon shelter, in the canteen, or in the corridors of the ministry, Fritz arranged to cross paths with Gertrud von Heimerdinger, and each time he said a few words to her, nothing more. The conversation did not go much beyond an exchange about the weather and similar banalities. One evening when he met her in the subway, he made a little friendly sign. The charm offensive finally had the desired effect: After a few months, there was a tacit confidence between them. Fritz very soon understood that Gertrud was well disposed toward him. There was nothing political in this.
During one of their encounters in the spring of 1943, Gertrud von Heimerdinger promised to help Fritz Kolbe secure a mission to Switzerland as soon as possible. As he had done regularly since 1940, Fritz repeated that he had to go there to settle the formalities of his divorce. His second wife, Lita Schoop, was of Swiss nationality, and his marriage had taken place in Zurich. “If I manage to get you out, you can take care of your personal affairs, and then you will escape from the bombing, at least for a few days,” Gertrud told Fritz. It seemed that she had decided to take him under her protection.
From that day on, Fritz could not stay still. Although his duty was to destroy the diplomatic cables that his boss had read, he began to collect conscientiously the most interesting among them. He put them in his safe, in order to make use of them as soon as the opportunity might arise.
Berlin, summer 1943
The war had reached a turning point, and the Wehrmacht was retreating on all fronts. In North Africa, German ambitions had just ended with the fall of Tunis (May 8, 1943). There was talk of “Tunisgrad” to point to the magnitude of the defeat. The Italian ally was starting to vacillate. The Allies were now not very far from the coast of Sicily. Mussolini had little time left. In the East, the prospects were hardly better. The Reich was shifting to the defensive. The period that was beginning was full of danger and disillusionment. People sensed the coming debacle, which would soon take the form of “a long retreat punctuated with halts and recoveries, wild counterattacks as before Kursk and Orel in July 1943, where, in the largest tank battle of the entire war, the Wehrmacht showed its teeth for one of the last times.”
During these decisive months, in Berlin, like everyone else, Fritz expected the worst. For the last little while he had been living in a little apartment at Kurfürstendamm 155, in a building also housing writers, an actor, and a business owner. Until then, between 1940 and 1943, he had lived with friends like a stowaway: first near the Tiergarten, then near Adolf Hitler Platz, north of Charlottenburg, finally near Tempelhof airport. Since meeting Maria, he had wanted to settle somewhere for good. He had found a few rooms in a large apartment to sublet.
There was no point in looking for his name on the door or his telephone number in the Berlin directory. Fritz remained a secretive person and gave his address only to very rare close friends. He lived on the second floor. The bell in the lobby was labeled Herr von Jaroschevitsch and Herr von Rohde (a colleague from the Foreign Ministry). The telephone number was 976.981. This was the first time since his return from South Africa that he had had the heart to set up a space for himself, furnished with sobriety but elegance. Despite the black paper stuck on the windows to block the light, the place was welcoming and warm. But as he saw a new personal life taking shape, around him the world was collapsing.
On his way to the office, almost every morning he met homeless people, entire families who had left burning houses in the middle of the night. Most often, these people had been able to take nothing with them, except sometimes a pillow or a blanket. Fritz also encountered crews of foreign workers who had been assigned to clear away the ruins. “We are stoic in the ordeal, no hysteria and no panic. The more we are attacked, the stronger we are,” said the weekly Das Reich on July 2, 1943. But at the end of the month, from July 24 to 30, the terrible bombing of Hamburg caused thirty thousand deaths and was a devastating blow to the morale of the German population.
The regime sank into a megalomaniacal and repressive autism with no end in sight. Informers were everywhere. In December 1942 children were taken from their parents’ care because they refused to make the Hitler salute at school. Prisons and camps were filling up. There was a risk at any moment and on the slightest pretext of being “taken away.”
One evening, in fact, strangers knocked brutally on Fritz’s door. “Open up!” they said harshly. Fritz had no choice. He already saw himself in the cellars of the Gestapo. In fact, it was only two minor local officials in charge of antiaircraft defense who ordered him to darken his windows more thoroughly, nothing more serious. Nevertheless, daily life had become a perpetual nightmare. The sinister shadow of Plötzensee prison hovered over the city. In this fortress near the great industrial warehouses of Berlin, extra butchers’ hooks had been installed in December 1942 to be able to hang several people at once without wasting time.