8
Swakopmund, September 1943
Meanwhile, little Peter Kolbe was living out his childhood in the distant land of South-West Africa. His happy, carefree existence was that of a “free child of Summerhill” before the fact. In Swakopmund, he lived in the house of “Granny Kahlke,” his adoptive grandmother, who was extraordinarily kind and did not have the strength to impose the slightest discipline on him. His adoptive parents, Otto and Ui Lohff, came to see him every weekend and on Sunday night returned to Walvis Bay, thirty kilometers away, where they lived during the week. Peter spent his time playing in the dunes and riding his bicycle along the huge Atlantic beaches. He would ride his bicycle far from the city, often alone in wild nature, with a small supply of dried meat (biltong, still well known in present-day Namibia). One of his favorite pastimes was to watch whales in the ocean. Desert animals were never far off. One day in the distance he saw a lion that had come to cool off at the edge of the water. He loved this landscape, “hard as locust wood, with dry river beds, and cliffs roasting in the sun.” At night, he devoured the novels of Karl May (the adventures of the Indian Winnetou). He read very late, hiding a flashlight under the sheets. Sometimes at night he also quietly left the house to go fishing on the seashore, after making sure that his grandmother was peacefully snoring. On one wall in his room, there was a photo of a boy playing a drum, dressed in the uniform of the Hitler Youth. The picture had been hung there by Granny Kahlke, who naïvely idealized the führer ten thousand kilometers away.
Events in Europe seemed very distant. The Germans in South Africa did not have the right to own a radio. News circulated by word of mouth. A few radios listened to in hiding made it possible to get scraps of information from the Reich. Peter Kolbe remembers that he jumped for joy every time a U-boat sank an Allied ship (the event was announced on German radio by the striking of a gong, and there were as many strokes as ships that had been sunk). All that did not keep him from going to soccer matches where German friends a little older than he played against British sailors on shore leave.
Peter had no news from his father. Gradually, he forgot him, even though, at the insistence of his guardians, he occasionally sent him an impersonal letter to tell him that he was making progress in the German school and that he behaved well in class. Because he played an important role in the local economy, Peter’s adoptive father Otto Lohff was spared from being sent to a camp by the South African authorities, unlike most of the Germans who had remained in the commonwealth. Almost every one of Peter’s classmates had an interned father, while their mothers continued to take care of the family farms.
One day in September 1943, when Peter (age eleven) came home from school, he encountered two South African plainclothes police at his grandmother’s house. For a German family at the time, it was not uncommon to receive a visit of this kind. The authorities in Pretoria collected all the information possible about this population, which was by definition suspect. After questioning Granny Kahlke for a long time, one of the policemen turned to the child and asked him a few precise questions: “What is your name? Who is your father? Where is he? Who is your mother?” Terrified by this unexpected interrogation, Peter believed that he had been identified as a bad boy. He had broken a window in a nearby house with a slingshot a few days earlier.
But the interrogation had no consequences. After a few weeks, Peter and his adoptive grandmother managed to forget this unpleasant episode. It was only much later, after the war, that Fritz’s son realized that this episode had a connection to his father’s clandestine activities in Berlin and Bern. Allen Dulles, with the help of his British and South African colleagues, had wanted to verify the statements of Fritz Kolbe. It was necessary to confirm the existence of the son, see if the address was correct, ask him about his life, verify the dates, and cross-check the information with counterespionage experts.
Bern and London, late August 1943
By August 20, 1943, in Bern, Allen Dulles and Gerry Mayer had in fact launched as precise an investigation as possible into their visitor from Berlin. No stone could be left unturned, all indications had to be assembled, and every hypothesis written down. A long labor of verification began. In order to do this, they asked for help from their colleagues in counterespionage (department X-2 of the OSS). All the data on the new agent were centralized in London, the European headquarters of the organization, and the Americans had no hesitation in calling on their British colleagues in MI6, who had a substantial lead over them on Germany thanks to their own network and their exceptionally abundant archives. The British also put at the Americans’ disposal their transmission lines between Switzerland and London, because the security of their communications was better. It was through the British coding department in Switzerland that all the documents dealing with Kolbe’s biography reached London; these sensitive details had above all to be kept out of German hands.
In Bern, the “Fritz Kolbe” file had been created even before his departure for Berlin. As early as the evening of August 19, Allen Dulles and Gerry Mayer set to work and put down on paper everything they had remembered from their conversation with him. Allen Dulles wrote several memos between August 19 and 31, with the intention of drawing a profile of the man and evaluating his credibility. First of all a code name had to be found for Kolbe: after thinking of calling him “König,” “Kaiser,” or “George Winter,” it was finally decided that he would be “George Wood.” The reason for the choice of this name is a mystery. To ensure the protection of their agents, the Americans chose nicknames by chance, with no relation to the context. George Wood was the name of a celebrated lawyer in New York in the nineteenth century, and perhaps Allen Dulles thought of him. In addition, like all Dulles’s other sources in Bern, “Wood” was given a number: from then on he would be “674” (and sometimes “805,” two numbers being better than one). This too was a purely random choice.
The first entry, dated August 19, is merely a summary description of the man. Date and place of birth of Fritz Kolbe; schooling; scouting (“Wood belonged to a German ‘Hikers’ club called Wandervogel which he claimed had been basically anti-Nazi”); career and postings; marriage; details about the son who had stayed in South Africa; second marriage with Lita Schoop (“a Swiss girl”), daughter of Ulrich Schoop, who lived in Zurich; very precise details about Lita’s brothers and sisters who also lived in Switzerland: One brother was married to an American, a sister was married to an Englishman serving in the British army. It was also noted that Fritz Kolbe had worked with Rudolf Leitner (“Botschafter, with ten years’ service in Washington”), and that he was a trusted subordinate of Karl Ritter (“once lukewarm towards Nazism and known to have proposed to the daughter of Ullstein, has now become thoroughly corrupt”). The document contained errors that would later gradually be corrected. Fritz’s date of entry into the Foreign Ministry, in particular, was wrong. The Americans had noted 1935 instead of 1925.
A preliminary physical description of Fritz Kolbe, alias George Wood, was rapidly sketched:
As to description, we generally agree. Gerry would put his height at 5′7″ and adds baldish. What hair he has is clipped short and brownish. Typical Prussian-Slavic features. Eyes wide apart, blue grey, frank expression in eyes. Unworldly, but acquired ease in conversation through his travels. Shape of head round, ears not large but stood out from head. Gerry only differs from me here in the color of the hair, but that made no great impression on me, as he didn’t have much of it. As to the ears, we both agree that they were not abnormally large, but they certainly were abnormally prominent.
As for Fritz Kolbe’s personality, the diagnosis was formulated in these terms: “Kolbe made the impression that he was somewhat naïve and a romantic idealist. He does not appear to be very intelligent or cunning. He wanted, for example, to send an en clair telegram to the housekeeper who is in charge of his son in South Africa, giving messages, addresses and so on, and he has also left with Dulles a letter addressed to his son ‘in case he is shot.’”
OSS headquarters in London very quickly set to work on the first elements sent from Bern. Colonel David Bruce, chief of OSS London, didn’t know exactly what to do with this file. He immediately had it sent to the British. Lieutenant-Colonel Claude E. M. Dansey was approached in person. Vice-director of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), Sir Claude Edward Marjoribanks Dansey was not only the number-two of the British intelligence services, but he was also a man of extremely strong character. Universally detested by his subordinates for his brutal and contemptuous manners, he nevertheless had recognized mastery over everything that had to do with Germany. In order to observe the Reich, he had set up his own espionage network in Switzerland before the war (“organization Z”). The file that was submitted to him by the OSS contained four pages in all: two on Fritz Kolbe’s biography and two of official German cables summarized in English as examples of the “material” offered by Kolbe. One of these cables came from “Hektor,” an Abwehr agent based in Stockholm, and said this: “JOSEPHINE reports June 24th: Notable increase loading English West coast June 11th to June 21th Liverpool. June 14th to June 15th departure 2 Panzer regiments destination Middle East. During this period total 25,000 men embarked mainly for Middle East.” The other came from Dublin and spoke of an attempted escape of “Götz,” a German agent in Dublin.
It took Dansey only a few days to produce a preliminary assessment of the file. The judgment was negative, pending further information.
I believe we have a trace of this man KOLBE, and not a very satisfactory one at that…. It seems possible that Wood is identical with a “Wood” who joined the German Navy in 1917. In 1924 this person was known as “Captain Wood” when he was in command of German Coast defenses and was concerned with a Lieutenant der Marine who was known to belong to the German I.S. in passing false reports through an intermediary to the Inter-Allied Commission of Control in Germany. In 1927 he left the Navy as a result of an accident and went to Brazil as an aviator. He returned to Germany about 1930, when he was given employment in the German I.S. In the beginning of 1931 he was attached to the Kiel office of the German naval and military intelligence service where he held the rank of Oberleutnant z. See a. D.
Dansey had mixed up some files. He was confusing Kolbe with a man of the same name whose physical description was similar (both were about 5′7” in height and suffered from fairly advanced baldness). Dansey’s word carried some weight, and this first expert opinion on Fritz Kolbe certainly troubled the Americans. Claude Dansey, for his part, detested the men of the OSS and Allen Dulles in particular. He thought of Switzerland as his private domain, so much so that it “had become a fierce proprietary obsession.” He was probably not displeased to be able to demonstrate that the Americans, those amateurs, had hit a snag.
In reality, Dansey was furious. “The sight of the Berlin papers must have been a severe shock to him…. It was clearly impossible that Dulles should have pulled off this spectacular scoop under his nose. Therefore, he had not. The stuff was obviously a plant, and Dulles had fallen for it like a ton of bricks.” These are the observations of a far from unknown figure, Kim Philby. He was at the time the number-two in the British counterespionage service (Section V of the SIS), and was asked to review the Kolbe file by his chief, Felix Cowgill. Cowgill showed great interest in the potential of “674” (Fritz Kolbe). But he did not want to do anything that might antagonize his superiors. “Dansey and Cowgill,” according to Philby, “had contented themselves with skimming the paper cursorily in the search for implausibilities and contradictions to buttress their advocacy of the plant theory.” For them, the information provided by “Wood” was “chicken feed,” an enticing means of sending the Allies off on the wrong track.
As for Philby, who was already working behind the scenes for the Soviets, his secret mission was to inform the Kremlin of any contact between the Germans and the Anglo-American forces. Through him, Moscow was probably aware, by the end of August 1943, of the existence of a German diplomat working in Berlin who wanted to work for the Americans.
Kim Philby decided to keep an eye on the “George Wood” file. He hastened to send significant excerpts to the experts of Bletchley Park (specialists in decoding German communications), in order to see whether any information provided by the mysterious agent in Berlin might be of some use to Moscow. The heads of the British secret services had for their part decided that “George Wood” was an impostor, even if some of his information was noted with great interest. Who were Josephine and Hektor, they wondered, when they found out that important leaks from London had passed through Stockholm.
But they could not accept that a volunteer agent like Kolbe could be serious. “On the whole, SIS prefers to have agents on its payroll, since the acceptance of pay induces pliability. The unpaid agent is apt to behave independently, and to become an infernal nuisance. He has, almost certainly, his own political axes to grind, and his sincerity is often a measure of the inconvenience he can cause,” explained Kim Philby. There was no lack of agents drawn by money, particularly in Switzerland, among Germans who had left the Reich for one reason or another.
In his memoir, Kim Philby devoted a few pages to Fritz Kolbe (without mentioning his name or his alias, George Wood). He remembered with what lack of interest the existence of the agent in Berlin had been greeted in London.
By the end of 1943, it was clear that the Axis was headed for defeat, and many Germans began to have second thoughts about their loyalty to Hitler. As a result, a steady trickle of defectors began to appear at the gates of Allied missions with offers of assistance and requests for asylum…. One day, a German presented himself at the British Legation in Berne, Switzerland, and asked to see the British Military Attaché. He explained that he was an official of the German Foreign Ministry, and had brought with him from Berlin a suitcase full of Foreign Ministry documents. On hearing this staggering claim, the Attaché promptly threw him out…. It was barely credible that anyone would have the nerve to pass through the German frontier controls with a suitcase containing contraband official papers.
In Bern, Allen Dulles’s views were diametrically opposed to those of Kim Philby. “‘If you have to pay an agent, you might as well not use him,’ he would tell recruits…. A potential agent should at the very least be driven by some other motivation—hatred, passion, or revenge.” Nothing could be more desirable than a community of interest between the agent and his case officer. Conversely, a venal agent was capable of betraying everyone, as the history of Colonel Redl on the eve of the First World War in Austria-Hungary had demonstrated. “Strong faith is more important than high intelligence. Moral force is the only force that can accomplish great things in the world,” was a maxim in the Dulles family, steeped in Presbyterian culture. Unlike most of the British, and particularly his colleagues in the secret services, Allen Dulles believed in the existence of “two Germanys,” one good and one bad. From the beginning, the head of the OSS in Bern had analyzed the challenge of the world war as a struggle for the conquest of German souls. With a little luck, Fritz Kolbe would turn out to belong to the “good Germany,” but his good faith had to be ascertained by means of a thorough investigation.
Dulles’s opinions about Germany were rather heavily influenced by his daily conversations with a German who had emigrated to Switzerland and whom he had hired in late 1942 and made into one of his closest collaborators in Bern. Gero von Schulze-Gaevernitz (b. 1901) had much that Dulles would find attractive: broad culture, a cosmopolitan spirit, a great capacity for friendship. This financier, devoted to sports and philosophy, who divided his time between skiing and reading Seneca, was the son of a German economist who had been a Democratic Party deputy in the Weimar Republic. Dulles had known him well in Berlin in the 1920s.
The Gaevernitz family had always been in favor of an alliance among Germany, Britain, and the United States in order to stand in the way of Soviet Russia. But they were equally opposed to Nazism. Although connected to the most influential circles in the country (his sister had married a member of the Stinnes family), the young Gero had left Germany to take refuge in Switzerland in 1933. His mother was Jewish. He himself, who had lived for several years in the United States, had renounced his German citizenship and defined himself as a “liberal Christian.” He would not accept the slightest compromise with the Hitler regime.
“Gaevernitz was deeply motivated by the conviction that Germany had never been so thoroughly permeated by Nazism as many were inclined to believe and that there were people in Germany, even in high positions in both the civilian and military administration, ready to support any workable undertaking that would get rid of Hitler and the Nazis and put an end to the war,” Dulles stated in one of his memoirs.
At the OSS in Bern, Gero von Schulze-Gaevernitz worked on most of the files concerning Germany. He regularly received informers or emissaries who had come from Berlin. Kept busy by his contacts at the highest levels, he was not directly concerned with Fritz Kolbe, and it is not certain whether Dulles informed him in detail about this extremely unusual case. However, by chance in a conversation on Tuesday, August 31, 1943, it turned out that Schulze-Gaevernitz knew Ernst Kocherthaler well.
Dulles immediately took notes, because he knew nothing about this mysterious figure who, as an intermediary for Fritz Kolbe, represented an important piece in the puzzle he was putting together. According to Gaevernitz, Kocherthaler was a man who could be trusted. “A man of excellent reputation and of considerable business standing in Switzerland,” he explained. “Von G. spoke highly of K…. [who] was at one time with Warburg & Co, Hamburg… According to von G. K. is Jewish, or partly Jewish, by race, Christian by religion and in fact very active in religious circles. Known to the Visser’t Hooft group in Geneva and has apparently done some work with respect to the establishment of a Christian University in Switzerland for the post-war education of German teachers.” Allen Dulles noted that Gero “seemed completely confident of [K.’s] consistent anti-Nazi position,” and he transmitted these details to his colleagues in London in order to assist the ongoing investigation.
Berlin, late August 1943
Back in Berlin on Saturday, August 21, 1943, Fritz was greeted by one of the most terrible bombardments that the capital of the Reich had ever experienced. Between August 20 and 23, the Charlottenburg, Steglitz, and especially Lankwitz neighborhoods were very heavily damaged. Sunday evening, he was in fact in Lankwitz at his friend Walter Girgner’s when a huge roar of engines was heard: It was the RAF planes. Fritz was in the middle of recounting his trip to Bern and his meeting with the Americans. Also present was Hans Kolbe, Fritz’s only brother.
There was a deluge of bombs. None of the three friends had ever experienced anything like it. Like all Berliners, they could recognize by sound the different types of bomb (explosive or incendiary). But now they didn’t have the time to indulge in that exercise. Suddenly, lightning seemed to be striking them. The entire neighborhood seemed to be sinking beneath the earth in a deluge of fire. The two houses adjacent to Girgner’s were hit before their eyes. The three men took refuge in the cellar. At five in the morning, when the planes had left, Fritz and his friends came out of their hole and were stunned to see that an explosive bomb that had fallen very close to Girgner’s house had not detonated. They had had a narrow escape. The Lankwitz neighborhood was destroyed.
Fritz went home on foot, passing through scenes of desolation, amid the cries of survivors and the heat of burning ruins. The rescue services were overwhelmed by events. He took more than an hour to get back to the Kurfürstendamm, not knowing whether the house he lived in was still standing. Gott sei Dank, he said to himself when he got there. The building was still there, and most important, there was still running water on every floor. He quickly took a cold shower and went to the ministry at nine o’clock.
That same morning, his friend Karl Dumont came to see him in his office. Speaking in a low voice, he wanted to know everything about the trip to Switzerland. Of all Fritz’s colleagues in the Foreign Ministry, Dumont was the only one who was aware of Fritz’s real intentions. Since they had known one another in Madrid, there had been perfect rapport between the two men. Dumont had been absent because of illness the week before. He thought that his friend had failed and was ready to bury him in reproaches. At the moment, Fritz could not tell him the details of his trip, but he met him again in the late afternoon, at a time when the offices were already largely deserted, to give him a detailed report of his visit to Bern.
Bern, September 1943
By early September 1943, Allen Dulles had completed the first phase of his investigation of Fritz Kolbe. He had not yet eliminated the theory that it was a trap. He was waiting to see whether and how his informant would show himself again. It was a letter addressed to Ernst Kocherthaler, written in Berlin on September 16, 1943, that revealed that Fritz had not said his last.
The letter contained reading material for the Americans: a few copies of cables, a new map of Hitler’s headquarters (the same as in August, with a few errors corrected), and the schedule for the daily train between Berlin and Rastenburg, the “wolf’s lair” in East Prussia. It also contained a few details about the results of the Allied bombardment of the ball bearing factory in Schweinfurt a few weeks earlier. Fritz took the liberty of suggesting other targets and provided a personal opinion about German secret weapons, which he erroneously claimed was “the greatest bluff ever practiced on the German people.”
At the end of his letter, Fritz had hastily scribbled a few words in his unreadable handwriting: “I write these lines in wild haste, scanning the material with one eye and typing it with the other hand.” In conclusion, he took leave of his readers in Bern by sending them “greetings from Hektor” (an allusion to the Abwehr agent based in Stockholm), and signed “George M.,” for “George Merz,” the provisional pseudonym adopted during his August visit.
How had this message reached Bern? Mystery. Given its content, it could not have gone through ordinary mail. It was probably mailed in Bern by a colleague of Fritz’s carrying the diplomatic pouch—a routine expedition that took place every week, exactly like the one Fritz had made in August. Every time a diplomat went abroad for a mission of this kind, he took out and brought back dozens and dozens of private letters and packages having nothing to do with his professional duties. These packages were placed in the train’s baggage compartment, were entitled to diplomatic immunity, and were not checked at the border. From Germany to Switzerland, people sent books, radios, phonographs… It is probable that if Fritz Kolbe had given a personal letter to a colleague on assignment to Bern, the “mailman” was totally ignorant of its contents.
Another hypothesis can be suggested: Fritz knew a trustworthy person who, because he was a surgeon, could easily travel between Berlin, annexed Alsace, and sometimes even Switzerland. This was Albert Bur, a friend of Adolphe Jung’s, former chief surgeon of the hospital of Sélestat, dismissed in late 1941 for being a “Francophile.” Albert Bur lived in Obernai (Ober-Ehnheim in German). He was a specialist in photography and devoted a good deal of time to the emerging technique of color photography and its medical applications. In this connection, he frequented chemical industry circles, particularly the Agfa company. Fritz had naturally gotten on well with him. The two men shared a passion for sports: before the war, Bur had been president of the Sport Club of Sélestat.
Doctor Bur was prepared to take risks for the Allied cause. He was in contact with French Resistance circles and with British agents active in France. His wife was an American born in Chicago. He naturally became an intermediary for Fritz in order to transmit information, in particular about “Josephine,” and even tried to convince him to travel secretly to London. This was too dangerous, in Fritz’s judgment, but he nevertheless decided to involve his friend closely in his plans. Thanks to his frequent travels, Albert Bur was a rare jewel.
Bern, October 1943
On October 10, 1943, the OSS in London received a mysterious telegram from Bern: Allen Dulles cabled cryptically that he “had just got some 200 pages of alpha and since they were no longer sure of beta, it would take weeks to handle. [He was] fully convinced of delta after yesterday’s gamma and from internal evidence.” The key to this strange message was not received in London until the following day. It was revealed that alpha meant German two-way secret Foreign Ministry cables, beta meant the security of the communications channel, and delta the particular value and authoritative quality of this material. Finally, gamma meant Wood’s cross-examination.
Fritz Kolbe had arrived in Bern a few days earlier in the course of a new assignment as diplomatic courier. Fräulein von Heimerdinger had shown herself very capable in securing this second mission for her protégé. The small gifts brought back from Bern in August may have facilitated matters. A cigar here, a box of chocolates there; Fritz Kolbe had been generous. Why not do him a favor and let him breathe a little bit abroad? In Berlin in October 1943 it was impossible even to pretend to live normally. The bombardment by Allied planes was added to the increasing harshness of the regime. There was not only the constant fear of bombardment hanging over everything, but the slightest misstep could send you to the gallows. How many people had already been executed for making “defeatist” statements?
The day before he was to leave for Bern, Fritz had narrowly escaped death. It was in the evening in the midst of an air raid. As a ministerial official, Fritz had a pass giving him the right to move around during curfew. He was coming back from the Charité hospital on his bicycle (he had gone to say goodbye to Maria) and was on his way to his office to file some documents. Sirens began to wail; it was an RAF attack. One could see the approach of white flares from the magnesium incendiary bombs. Just at the moment when the alarm began, Fritz was at the corner of Unter den Linden and Wilhelmstrasse. An armed warden ordered him to stop and not to cross the street. Fritz got off his bicycle and showed his pass. The warden examined the document with his flashlight. At that moment, a projectile fell less than fifty meters from the two men, a little further down Wilhelmstrasse, knocking them violently to the ground. After a few seconds, they staggered to their feet, stunned, covered with debris, but unhurt. Fritz warmly thanked the warden for having stopped him at the corner. Had he continued on his way, he would have been at the point of the bomb’s impact, where there was now a large smoking crater. He took one of the Havana cigars he had bought in Switzerland out of his pocket, gave it to the warden as a token of thanks, and went on his way to the ministry. The warden smiled with pleasure.
The next morning, he made preparations for departure. Fräulein von Heimerdinger, as she had the first time, gave Fritz a sealed envelope containing the diplomatic mail for Bern. After signing the registry indicating that he was now responsible for it, he went to his office to complete his packing with the personal documents intended for the Americans. This time, he had no wish to fasten documents around his thighs. It was a dangerous method and not worthy of him, he thought. But what else could he do? After returning from his first trip, in September, he had managed secretly to get hold of an official ministry seal, in exchange for a box of Swiss chocolates. Petty dealings of this kind were very common and attracted very little attention. The sealed envelope that had just been given to him could be slipped inside a slightly larger pouch containing the other documents. All he had to do was to properly seal the new envelope, even though it had become thicker than the original. Instead of a trunk with a false bottom, he had a pouch with a false top.
Fritz carried out the entire operation by manipulating the papers in a drawer of his desk hidden from prying eyes. Unfortunately, the wax caught fire and the operation almost turned into a disaster. He just managed to save his package and put out the flames. After wiping his forehead and opening the window to dispel the odor of burnt paper, Fritz went back to work with his heart pounding. Finally the package was ready. Fritz was not dissatisfied with the result: the seal marked with the eagle and the swastika had a rigorously authentic appearance. As for the weight of the package, he knew that diplomatic pouches were never weighed, neither going nor coming.
Fritz took the early evening train on Wednesday, October 6 from the Anhalter Bahnhof, as he did the first time (departure at 8:20). Ordinarily, the trip from Berlin to Basel took sixteen hours. But because of air raids, delays had become very frequent, and the trip might last as long as three days. Once he was in his compartment, he called the attendant of his car aside and, handing him a handsome tip, asked to be the first to be warned if there was an alert. “I am terrified of bombs and I would be a bit reassured if you were to warn me in advance,” he said. In fact, Fritz wanted to have time to get rid of his documents in case of danger.
At four in the morning, the porter rapped sharply on the door of his compartment. “Blue alert, sir,” he said. That meant that an attack was imminent. It was not yet a “red alert,” but he had to act quickly. The train had stopped. Fritz had kept his clothes on. He quickly got off the train holding his briefcase close to himself. The spot was deserted. They were in the middle of the woods, “probably between Frankfurt and Karlsruhe.” The moon lit up the rails. Then the other passengers began scrambling out of the train. A baby cried. A man yelled that he had lost something in the confusion. Fritz took cover in a ditch below the tracks.
At that point a plane headed directly for the train. It was a light English bomber, a Mosquito, an isolated plane flying low. The plane fired a few salvos at the locomotive. There was no answering fire: a passenger train like this one had no antiaircraft guns. The plane soon disappeared. But a few moments later, a huge explosion was heard a few hundred meters in front of the train. The plane had dropped a bomb on a trestle. Although not completely destroying it, the bomb had seriously damaged the track, making it impossible to continue the trip. There was a long wait before another train could replace the first one, on the other side of the trestle. Night passed, morning, and afternoon. Finally the journey could continue. The passengers had to cross the trestle over a precipice on foot, which took a long time. Fritz was irritated that he had lost an entire day from his schedule.
Going through customs in Basel was nerve-wracking. As much as, if not more than the first time, Fritz had violent stomach pains and was perspiring so profusely that he was afraid of attracting the attention of the customs agents. He knew that in the event of a thorough search, he would have no hope of escape. Nothing was worse than this precise moment. A German customs agent was looking at him with a particularly suspicious air. Did he suspect? Fritz tried to maintain all the composure at his command. He looked directly into the eyes of the man in uniform, attempting to keep his gaze as cold as possible, keeping his pouch in plain sight under his arm (“above all, appear to have nothing to hide,” he said to himself). The official motioned him through.
Even though he was still in the “German station” of Basel, Fritz was now in Switzerland. He headed for the men’s room and locked himself in a toilet. He tore open the outer envelope and removed the documents not intended for the German legation in Bern and put them in his coat. The official envelope was replaced in his briefcase. He burned the now superfluous envelope and flushed the ashes down the bowl. He went out and took a taxi across the Rhine to the Swiss station of Basel (Basel SBB), where he caught the train to Bern. Before getting on the train, he found a telephone booth from which he called 146 at Adelboden, Ernst Kocherthaler’s number. The Americans were immediately informed that “Wood” had arrived.
It was Thursday, October 7, late at night, when Fritz arrived in Bern. His friend Ernst was already in town. The next morning, after delivering the diplomatic mail to the German legation, he and Fritz met at a café, as they had the first time. Ernst informed Fritz that the Americans had impatiently been waiting for his return and that they wanted to see him that very evening. “At 11:30 tonight, Gerald Mayer will pick you up in his car on Kirchenfeld bridge. It’s a Triumph sportscar. You will wait in the shadows at the southern end of the bridge. To identify himself, he’ll switch on his headlights once he’s in the middle of the bridge. They are blue because of the curfew.”
That evening the meeting took place as planned. At 11:30, Fritz jumped into Gerry Mayer’s car. “Glad to see that you made it back again,” he said in a friendly voice, adding that they were going to see Mr. Douglas. Fritz admired Gerry Mayer’s handsome Triumph, wanted to talk to him about the Horch that he had had to give up because of the war, but unfortunately the trip was very short. After taking a few narrow cobblestone streets in the old city, Mayer steered his car onto a road along the River Aare. The Triumph was going very slowly, with no lights. Soon it reached a point below the Kirchenfeld bridge whose metal outline could be seen forty meters above. The height seemed dizzying. Mayer turned off the engine. At this very dark spot, there were few passersby and it was easy to pass unseen. Mayer asked Fritz to get out alone and explained how to get to Dulles’s house through the garden in back, up a steep path through dense shrubbery. “Go on alone. I’ll rejoin you up there in a little while. You’re expected.”
A few minutes later, Fritz Kolbe was in Herrengasse 23. Glass in hand, he savored this moment of stolen freedom and appreciated the very “old England” comfort of the ground floor living room. The principal lighting in the room came from a large fire in the fireplace. Allen Dulles—a poker in one hand, his pipe in the other—frequently stirred the fire and added logs when necessary. Gerald Mayer arrived a few minutes later. Dulles contemplated the sheaf of documents that Fritz had just deposited on a coffee table. There were two hundred pages of documents, half copies of cables, half Fritz’s handwritten notes in German, in a cramped handwriting that only Ernst Kocherthaler was able to decipher. Dulles did not have time to read the documents in detail that night. Out of curiosity, he skimmed through the “delivery.”
The ambassador of the Reich in Paris, Otto Abetz, gave a list of the French whom he suspected of sympathizing with the Allies and whom he recommended should be arrested. From Spain, there was a message that the Falangist authorities had agreed to make new deliveries of “oranges” to Germany. The “oranges,” as Fritz was to explain a short time later, designated tungsten, a strategic material that the German armaments industry desperately needed. From Latin America came information that a particular Allied sea lane was threatened by U-boats in the Atlantic. Was Dulles interested? He let nothing show.
The conversation continued late into the night. Even more than the documents he had brought from Berlin, Fritz’s opinions seemed to intrigue the Americans. They asked him even more questions than in August. He indicated on a map of Berlin some sites that, according to him, were worth bombing. “This particular Telefunken plant produces precision instruments for the Luftwaffe…. There in the Lichterfelde district is the enlarged SS barracks, housing the Leibstandarte SS, Hitler’s personal guard.”
Fritz had time to dwell at some length on his motivations, his family, his opinions. The Americans wanted to gather information, but they also wanted to determine whether Fritz contradicted himself and whether his explanations were plausible. They spoke again of the Wandervogel, and at length about Madrid and Cape Town. Fritz was made to understand that no detail was superfluous. Dulles and Mayer were interested in everything, including details that might seem useless. “Where are the principal shoe factories in Germany?” they asked him in the course of the conversation.
Life in Berlin and the general atmosphere of the capital of the Reich seemed to interest them just as much as revelations of a political or military nature. Fritz was asked to speak of his friends and contacts in Berlin. He naturally mentioned his friend Karl Dumont in the ministry, but also Count Waldersee, the Wehrmacht officer whom he had met in Professor Sauerbruch’s circle, with whom he had hit it off in the summer of 1943.
Between Friday, October 8 and Tuesday, October 12, the date of his departure for Berlin, Fritz came to see Dulles several times, using all possible tricks to avoid being followed. He slipped furtively through the arcades of the old city, plunged into shops that had back doors, and multiplied zigzag movements, always arriving at the back door of Herrengasse 23. Most of the time, meetings took place late at night. In his nocturnal movements through Bern, Fritz wore his hat pulled low on his forehead and used a different coat from the one he wore during the day. To avoid attracting the slightest suspicion, he accepted all dinner invitations from his colleagues in the legation. Dulles and Mayer never saw him arrive before eleven at night and did not let him leave before two or three in the morning. He came to see Dulles in company with Ernst Kocherthaler. The two friends had stopped meeting during the day, because they thought that their connection might attract suspicion.
This nocturnal activity was harmful to Fritz’s reputation. The managers of the Hotel Jura looked at him strangely. Obviously they were suspicious of him. Was the hotel in contact with the Gestapo? To avoid any unpleasant surprises, Fritz decided to pass himself off as a Don Juan. In his discussions with colleagues from the German legation, he frequently spoke teasingly of the “pretty Swiss women, who were not all that timid.” One night, he spent a few hours in a brothel in Bern (Café Colombine), after which he made an appointment with a local doctor who specialized in venereal diseases. At the end of the visit, he was presented with a bill, which he carefully preserved in order to have concrete evidence available in the event of a later interrogation.
On Tuesday, October 12, 1943, Fritz had to leave for Berlin. Before his departure, the Americans agreed with him about ways of improving their future collaboration. It was not certain whether Fritz would be able to return to Bern anytime soon: Diplomatic courier assignments were handed out sparingly. Could they figure out a secure and regular means of communication? Sending mail to Ernst Kocherthaler, as Fritz had done with his September 16 letter, was much too dangerous for everyone. “You have to be much more cautious!” the Americans admonished him.
One idea was decided on: Fritz could from time to time send to a third person based in Bern a perfectly innocuous message on an ordinary postcard. Alerted by this signal, the Americans would know that Dr. Bur had brought home to Obernai “material” provided by Fritz in Berlin. An American agent could come to get the package in Alsace a few days later. The envoy would be introduced as M. or Mme. König. It was decided that Fritz’s “mailbox” in Bern would be that of Kocherthaler’s brother-in-law, Walter Schuepp. A librarian by profession, Walter Schuepp was, according to Fritz, a “good Swiss citizen” who was perfectly ordinary. He had the twofold advantage of being completely unnoticed in the local scene and of living very near the OSS offices in Bern (his address was Gryphenhübeliweg 19). Even though they were not really very close, Ernst Kocherthaler trusted him enough to involve him in this delicate enterprise.
And suppose the Americans wanted to contact their agent in Berlin? Fritz proposed a scenario: “One of your contacts in Berlin just has to call me at my office (telephone number: 11.00.13) claiming to be ‘Georg Merz.’ We’ll arrange to meet at my apartment on Kurfürstendamm.” Dulles and Mayer carefully noted this proposal. What Fritz did not know was that apart from him, the Americans had no contacts in Berlin. Even if they had, they never would have sent one of their agents to Fritz’s apartment, not yet being able to state with certainty whether he was a sincere friend of the Allies or a double agent working for the Gestapo.
Fritz was delighted with these secret arrangements. The more schemes and complicated tricks there were, the happier he was. He insisted that he be informed by certain coded signals whether his messages had in fact been received. Thanks to his contacts in business circles who were constantly going back and forth between Switzerland and the Reich, Ernst Kocherthaler could have food parcels sent to Fritz, containing sardines, butter, coffee… These parcels, Fritz suggested, could be sent at regular intervals but would contain coffee only if the messages from Berlin had been received in Bern. The Americans and Kocherthaler were not enthusiastic, but they promised Fritz that they would do as he wished.
Before leaving, “Kaiser” wanted to repay the 200 Swiss francs that he had been given on his first trip by Allen Dulles. In order to do this, he had brought with him two gold rings (probably the wedding rings from his two marriages). He wanted to exchange them for money at a jewelry shop in Bern. The Americans dissuaded him, telling him that he should use his time for more useful things. They nevertheless agreed to keep the two rings as mementos of him.
Fritz asked the Americans if they could give him a revolver, but Dulles and Mayer thought that a firearm would only worsen his case if he were caught. Fritz was disappointed, but in any case he had what he needed in Berlin—in a drawer at home he kept a little revolver that he had brought back from South Africa, and he counted on using it on the day when the Gestapo came to arrest him.
The return train trip from Bern to Berlin went off without incident or air raids. He left on Thursday afternoon and arrived in Berlin the following morning. Among the diplomatic cables he was carrying in his briefcase was one from the chief of the German legation in Switzerland, Otto Köcher, telling Ribbentrop that Swiss neutrality would be preserved at all costs. “Switzerland cannot join the Allied cause,” he wrote in this cable of October 7, 1943. It was known in Berlin that the Americans were putting pressure on Switzerland, whose airfields they wanted to use for raids on Germany. Otto Köcher was well informed: The leaders in Bern had no intention of quarreling with Germany.
London, November 1943
Colonel David K. E. Bruce, head of the OSS in London, was a multimillionaire, a Democrat, and the son of a senator and son-in-law of Andrew Mellon, the American steel magnate and former secretary of the treasury. All information coming from Europe passed through him and his services before being communicated to OSS headquarters in Washington. In late November 1943, David Bruce received a note from Norman Holmes Pearson, his colleague in charge of counterespionage (X-2) in London. This eight-page note concerned Fritz Kolbe (“Subject: Wood case”). This was a synthesis of everything that had been written by the Americans and the English since early August about “George Wood.”
The document was full of mistakes, including in the presentation of facts: “On 16.8.43 an individual known as Wood appeared in Geneva carrying a diplomatic bag from the German FO…. His first approach was through a German Jew named Kochenthaler.” In this note, Fritz Kolbe was presented as a “somewhat naïve and romantic idealist” who “made no special effort to find out which of the cables were of special interest,” but who “made no attempt to lead the conversation into any particular channels.”
Dansey’s theory, according to which Kolbe was a navy officer who had been a double agent in the 1920s, was reiterated as a plausible hypothesis. What could be concealed behind “George Wood”? A German attempt to decipher the OSS Bern messages? To avoid this risk, everything had been done to confuse matters: none of the cables transmitted by “Wood” had been transcribed and “sent in the German text or even a literal English translation summary of the original cable,” in communications between Bern and London. Every proper name had been changed, whether of people or places. “We are keeping close watch on cipher security in re-wording,” Dulles wrote in one of his secret messages to Washington. In accordance with these elementary precautions, the word Grand meant the German foreign minister, Porto designated a German foreign embassy or legation, Grimm was used for Germany or German, Zulu was the equivalent of the United Kingdom, Red was France, Storm designated the German legation in Bern, Vinta was Ribbentrop, Apple was Otto Abetz, Fat Boy was Göring… Hitler had no alias.
Another hypothesis: “Wood” was working for a sophisticated operation aimed at drawing the Americans into a trap. He came to Bern only to awaken their interest in order to be in a better position to deceive them a little later on. That could not be ruled out. But an analysis of Wood’s messages did not provide anything, for the moment, to support that hypothesis. “To the contrary, a certain amount of interesting material from an X-2 [counterespionage] point of view has been revealed.”
In particular, Fritz Kolbe had provided material to help identify “Josephine,” a mysterious mole well placed in London who was providing high-class information to the Germans. Thanks to “Wood” and the Ultra machine, the British identified the spy, about whom they knew that he was supervised at a distance by the Abwehr office in Stockholm. The British secret services discovered that “Josephine” was the Swedish naval attaché in London, Johann Gabriel Oxenstierna, a diplomat who was particularly well informed about the movements and preparations of the Royal Navy.
Count Oxenstierna was not himself an agent of the Reich, but his professional mail was read at the defense ministry in Stockholm by a secretary who was working for the Germans. The Abwehr’s liaison agent in Stockholm was Karl-Heinz Krämer, known as “Hektor” in the secret German documents. In September 1943, London demanded that the Swedish authorities recall the naval attaché. They reacted sharply and took several months to accede to the demand. Finally, Count Oxenstierna was expelled in the spring of 1944. A certain number of high British officials, who had been particularly talkative in their discussions with “Josephine,” were disciplined.
Fritz Kolbe’s credibility was no doubt increased by the discovery of “Josephine.” However, in early November, the number-two of the British secret services, Claude Dansey, asserted that “there is nothing in them [Wood’s cables] which could affect the course of the war.” Others, beginning with Allen Dulles, were less categorical. Fritz Kolbe had enabled the Americans to put pressure on Ireland to put an end to German espionage activities in that country. The Dublin authorities had been urged to confiscate a clandestine radio transmitter, the existence of which Kolbe had revealed. Moreover, Kolbe made it possible to verify the impact of some of the Allied bombing of major German cities. For example, he provided the official Nazi report of bombings on October 2 and 3, 1943: “EMDEN: 20 bombs struck the Nordsee Werfte. MUNICH: IG Farben has been severely hit, also Dynamit AG, Allgemeine Transport Gesellschaft, Metzeler Gummi Werke… Slaughterhouse and main railway station were also hit. KASSEL: damage was done to Panzer locomotives and howitzers at the Herschel Werke. Junkers factory was not hit.”
In order to determine whether “Wood” was trustworthy, each document that he provided was closely scrutinized by the OSS in London. The files were transmitted to Washington with long commentaries. Paragraph by paragraph, word by word, everything was gone over with a fine-tooth comb and weighed against information derived from other sources. “Paragraph 1 is probable but hard to verify,” “paragraph 2 had been verified, its content is accurate,” “paragraph 3 is correct,” and so on. While the Allies had still not ruled out the possibility of a trap, they nevertheless thought it less and less likely. Nothing in “Wood’s” attitude led them to detect suspect behavior. If this was a game of deception, “it will have been far and away the most elaborate deceptive strategy so far known either to British or American counterespionage services,” wrote Norman Pearson in his November 23, 1943 memorandum.
“Wood’s” motivations seemed to be purely individual. “On the whole,” Pearson went on, “it seems likely that whether or not Wood is acting as he does from the ideological motives he professes, and despite the fact that he is unwilling to receive any money for his services, he is at the same time not unaware that after the Defeat some special consideration might be accorded to him.” The conclusion was chilling: “The habits of rats on sinking ships are well known.”