Lucas Delattre - A Spy at the Heart of the Third Reich

Speed, precision, discretion, these were the qualities attested to by his superiors. As a result, one of Ribbentrop’s closest associates, Martin Luther (no relation to the father of the Reformation), had brought Fritz into his office to handle a task with which he had experience: processing requests for visas for foreign travel. This time he was not dealing with internal ministry files, but with requests presented by people outside the foreign ministry, notably party members, high government officials, and other eminent public figures. The multiplicity of authorizations that had to be obtained made Fritz Kolbe’s work truly exhausting.

Martin Luther was not a career diplomat. He came from the “Ribbentrop Office” and enjoyed the minister’s full confidence. With his round glasses, slightly pudgy face, sniggering smile, and bull neck, he in no way resembled the classic appearance of the foreign ministry. He was a member of the SA and, in fact, one imagined him much more at ease in street fights than in composing diplomatic cables. He was known as the “moving man” because he had been the head of a moving company in the 1920s (he had in fact met the foreign minister when he moved Ribbentrop’s furniture to the embassy in London). A specialist in financial manipulations, Luther had an extraordinarily extensive list of contacts.

He was one of the most feared figures in the ministry. The “German” department of which he was in charge had been established in May 1940 and was the exclusive umbrella department for many highly sensitive matters: relations with the NSDAP and all its subsidiary organizations (in competition with the “Organization of the Party for Foreign Countries” or Auslandsorganisation, also housed in the ministry); relations with the SS and various secret services of the Reich; the “Jewish question,” “race policy,” foreign propaganda questions (in competition with Goebbels’s ministry), matters related to foreign workers conscripted by force to work in Germany, and so on. As though more clearly to establish the independence of the “German” department from the rest of the ministry, its offices were not located on Wilhelmstrasse but in a building some distance away, on Rauchstrasse.

Fritz Kolbe detested Luther. He also hated his subordinates, notably one named Franz Rademacher, whom he sometimes encountered in the canteen. Pudgy, even a bit fat, Rademacher did not have the savoir faire of a high-ranking diplomat. He was the specialist on the “Jewish question” on Ribbentrop’s staff. In the spring of 1940, the “settling” of that question was a matter of intense reflection at the foreign ministry, which was attempting to secure a position of leadership in the matter and wanted to show that it put forward ideas for how to implement “the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.” All proposals were centralized in the “D III” (Deutschland III) office of Franz Rademacher, who had the diplomatic rank of secretary of the legation. Inside the ministry, Rademacher’s office was simply known as the “Jewish desk” or Judenreferat, just as there was a “French desk” and a “Russian desk.”

When Fritz Kolbe took up his duties in the “German” department, Franz Rademacher was totally absorbed in the “Madagascar plan.” This plan envisioned the deportation of the Jewish population of Europe to that Indian Ocean island, then a French protectorate. Fritz Kolbe, suddenly at the heart of the regime, had a hard time behaving himself. On several occasions, important figures had occasion to complain about him to Martin Luther. “Who is that petty official who doesn’t even give the Hitler salute when we come in?” Exasperated by these remarks, Martin Luther appeared one day without warning in Fritz’s office and gave him a warning as brief as it was threatening: “Kolbe, I wanted to tell you that I will not stand for one more lapse from you. You wouldn’t be the first to disappear.”

Fritz felt a chill run down his spine. From that moment on he became more careful and faded into the background. He decided to make himself known exclusively for his inordinate love of the game of chess. He was sometimes seen replaying for himself great matches of the past, using a handbook and a pocket chess set. He scribbled descriptions of the greatest tournaments on little scraps of paper that he never wearied of rereading. Once he was even heard to recite by heart—as though it were a poem—the opening of one of the great matches between Wilhelm Steinitz and Emmanuel Lasker at their celebrated 1896 Moscow tournament: “1. d4 d5, 2. c4 e6, 3. Nc3, Nf6, 4. Bg5 Be7, 5. e3 0–0, 6. Qb3 Nbd7, 7. Nf3, c6, 8. Bd3 dc4, 9. Bc4 b5…” Fritz established an amateur club that met in the ministry canteen. He did not hesitate to play matches with the most hardened Nazis. He took his revenge in the game, and once again he was taken for a likable eccentric.

Fritz’s office door was always open. He saw an enormous variety of people. The Nazi occupations in Europe caused a huge movement of specialists of all kinds and a proliferation of requests for foreign visas. There were lawyers traveling to supervise and manage the confiscation of Jewish property in the occupied countries, experts in the history of art who went to select works in France. Some ministers, like Ribbentrop, Göring, and Rosenberg, had teams specializing in foreign “requisitions” (works of art, horses, wine). There were representatives of every profession: journalists appointed to set up a pro-German press throughout Europe, directors of cultural institutes sent to conquered territories, archivists, lecturers, architects…

One day toward the end of the spring of 1940, a pretty woman entered Fritz Kolbe’s office and asked for a visa for Switzerland. It was rare for a woman to appear in the corridors of the Foreign Ministry. Fritz Kolbe gave her a form to fill out and had her sit at a little desk facing his own. While she wrote, he took the opportunity to scrutinize her. The visitor had style: dressed in white, she had entered the room wearing an elegant wide-brimmed hat. It was immediately apparent that she was a woman of quality, even displaying a certain distance from the people she addressed, the antithesis of a “Lieschen Müller,” the generic name for a Berlin shopgirl. She wrote quickly, crossing words out. Obviously, she was swamped with work and in a hurry to leave. About forty years old, like Fritz, she introduced herself as a personal assistant to Professor Sauerbruch. “Not someone likely to have children,” thought Fritz as he looked at her. He had immediately understood that she was one of those modern ambitious women who had difficulty seeing themselves in the role of housewife reserved for them by the Nazis.

As he watched her fill out the document, Fritz managed to read from a distance what she was writing. He learned that her name was Maria Fritsch, that she was unmarried, and that she was born in 1901 in Bütow, in Pomerania. A Kashubian woman, straight and even a little rigid like many people of the region, Prussians who had become a little Slavic because they lived in mixed German-Polish territory. “Pommerland?” he asked her in the local dialect, and he added—still in plattdeutsch —a famous line of poetry to make her notice him: “ Wo de Ostseewellen trecken an den Strand? ” (“Where the Baltic Sea waves kiss the beach?”). The woman’s face suddenly became more cordial. “ Dor is mine Heimat, dor bün ik tau Huus ” (“There is my country, there I am at home”), she countered immediately, still in low-German dialect. An onlooker would have had difficulty understanding much of the exchange that followed. It sounded like a slightly drunken conversation in untranslatable dialect. Only a few words, used by Fritz in an ironic way, could be recognized. He imitated a speech by Hitler in plattdeutsch, barking out Dütschland!, Föhrer!, Vaderland!, making his visitor burst out laughing.