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

Fritz Kolbe had been Karl Ritter’s personal assistant since late 1940 or early 1941. This promotion had been due to the intervention of Rudolf Leitner, the former head of the German legation in Pretoria, who had been a member of Karl Ritter’s cabinet since his return from South Africa. Rudolf Leitner had never let Fritz drop, and Fritz was deeply grateful to him for making it possible for him to leave the “German” department and its stifling atmosphere. But now, he found himself assistant to the chief of political-military affairs in the midst of the war! “It’s really farcical,” Fritz had been telling himself since he assumed his new duties. “I hate the Nazis and I can’t manage to get out of the highest circles of power!”

The work for Karl Ritter was interesting. Instead of stamping passports and visas, every morning Fritz Kolbe received dispatches from German diplomatic posts abroad, sorted them according to their importance, and summarized them for his boss. Kolbe was to destroy the documents already read by Ritter. Summaries of conversations between high officials of the ministry with foreign diplomats posted to Berlin also came across his desk. Finally, Fritz received and read the foreign press (with a few days’ delay, because the English and American press, for example, came through Lisbon) and summarized its content for Ritter. “In a short time, I became one of the best informed officials in the ministry,” Fritz wrote a few years later. By early 1941, Fritz was one of the first to know of the secret preparations for the Russian campaign: Karl Ritter’s role was specifically to prepare the movement of German troops toward Russia through its allied countries in central Europe (Finland, Hungary, Romania).

In personal terms, Fritz had no complaints: Karl Ritter was not very likable, but he was fair to his subordinates. And he was a man of the world, not at all like the coarse Luther with his brutal manners. Ritter had always been at the heart of German social life and besides, he clearly had panache, with his twinkling eye, his careful language, and his elegant hands (Luther had often had dirty fingernails). Ritter spoke most European languages, he knew most of the big industrialists in the country, he frequented art openings, he went to the opera.

The relationship between Ritter and Fritz Kolbe was essentially professional, and since both men were workhorses, they got on fairly well together. Both were short, a detail not without importance. On a few occasions, their conversation took a personal turn. When Kolbe had joined Karl Ritter’s staff, Ritter had let him know that he knew of his reputation as a “hothead.” He tried to reassure Fritz by telling him that here, what counted was above all competency and work done well. To set him at ease, he said that the Nazis didn’t like him either. “You know I have a reputation as a democrat in this house. The authorities know that I drafted almost all the commercial treaties of the Weimar period. I spent all my time in the Reichstag. Since my drafts were passed by the SPD or the Zentrum, that was enough to sabotage my reputation in some eyes.”

A little later, Ritter had questioned Fritz Kolbe briefly about his experience in South Africa. “I too know Africa well,” he had said. “Some of my studies were at the Colonial Institute in Hamburg, where I learned many fascinating things: tropical hygiene, applied botany, colonial law, and even Swahili. Just before the Great War, I was appointed to a position in the imperial government in Cameroon. The war put an end to that adventure, and I had to return to Berlin.”

When Karl Ritter had learned where Fritz’s family came from, he had spoken to him spontaneously of the Pomeranians of Brazil, entire families of whom had gone into exile there to escape famine and poverty. Though Brazil might seem unlikely, in fact there were already German colonies in the south of the country, established early in the nineteenth century.

Fritz Kolbe recalled these scraps of conversation as he headed for the führer’s headquarters on the night of September 18, 1941. This mission was something new for him. Ritter wanted his mail to be delivered personally. The ambassador had lost confidence in the diplomatic mail services. At the end of August 1941, he had complained about the careless way in which confidential documents were sent to him. “My mail was found in the headquarters kitchen, another time at the telephone switchboard!” he had informed his Berlin office. As a result, he wanted his subordinates to be their own telegraph operators.

Fritz was not overjoyed with this trip. Of course, it gave him an opportunity to leave Berlin, but he had no desire to get closer to Hitler, Ribbentrop, and the top generals of the Wehrmacht. He had been dreaming of exile for months now, but not to the East. He pined for Spain and South Africa (sometimes he thought of Switzerland, which had the virtue of being a neutral country and seemed to have been spared by events). From time to time, he looked out the window of his compartment. The German-Polish plain with its endless birch forests exuded melancholy, despite a splendid sunset shining through the woods. Autumn and the climate of war enveloped the landscape in matchless sadness.

Having nothing else to do, Fritz plunged into reading the newspapers. The press was entirely subject to party propaganda, but the most important facts could be found in it: “The wearing of a yellow star is obligatory for Jews beginning this month of September 1941.” News from the front was more difficult to decipher. The triumphant communiqués of the army high command (the OKW, or Oberkommando der Wehrmacht ) hardly made it possible to get a precise idea of the real situation. “Siege of Leningrad, imminent fall of Kiev”: that was about all that could be learned from the day’s papers. There was no need to try to find out more, the rest was merely a long lyrical and indigestible outpouring on the theme of the “heroic action of the soldiers of the Wehrmacht” or on the battle of Kiev, “the greatest of all time.”

Everyone knew in the fall of 1941 that there could no longer be any question of a quick end to the war. Fritz recalled the rumors heard in Berlin: there were more and more frequent whispers that Hitler had had terrible outbursts of fury. The führer was said to have an increasingly pronounced tendency to lose his composure in the face of the enemy. He had been heard to howl with anger when Rudolf Hess went to England in May 1941, and when Churchill and Roosevelt offered assistance to Stalin in mid-August 1941, making possible for the first time a coordinated war on two fronts. According to an unverifiable rumor, sometimes Hitler would bite anything at hand: his handkerchief, a cushion, and even the curtains!

In the train taking Fritz to the “wolf’s lair,” the night was very dark: it was traveling through what used to be the Danzig corridor with all lights out, for fear of bombardment or sabotage by the Polish resistance. At break of day, following the instructions he had received, he put on the uniform that he would have to wear at the führer’s headquarters, a feldgrau -colored uniform provided by the ministry. He had difficulty recognizing himself in the mirror. He hesitated particularly before putting on the headgear: a peaked cap with a double strand of aluminum above the visor and a badge representing an eagle holding a swastika in its claws.

Fritz arrived in the early morning at Gerdauen, a little town that looked like a border post, sixty kilometers southeast of Königsberg. A Foreign Ministry car was waiting to take him directly to Karl Ritter. They went through the countryside of Masuria and the forest of Rastenburg (still more birch woods), with silvered lakes and magnificent glades, but also marshes and peat bogs. “The region is infested with mosquitoes,” warned the driver, advising Fritz to cover his hands and neck with Dr. Zinsser’s lotion, made in Leipzig, “excellent as a preventive measure.”