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

Fritz’s frequent comings and goings to see Maria Fritsch did not long go unnoticed by Sauerbruch. After hearing his assistant laugh during the evenings she spent with Fritz, the surgeon asked Maria to introduce her friend to him formally. The two men hit it off well. In this wartime period, lively minds like Fritz’s were welcome. He had a gift for diverting his audience by telling anecdotes from behind the scenes in the ministry or reporting the latest comical details about Ribbentrop’s life. And Sauerbruch adored gossip. He picked it up everywhere and spiced it up in his style in order to shine in Berlin salons. He liked Fritz a good deal and invited him home several times.

One evening at the surgeon’s house toward the end of November 1941, Fritz noticed a clergyman dressed in black, noticeable by his wrinkled suit, his thick glasses, and his slightly dirty white collar. The unknown man had drawn his attention from the very beginning of the evening. He and Ferdinand Sauerbruch had carried on an apparently interesting conversation in low tones. Fritz had been unable to catch the slightest scrap of it, but he had immediately seen that the churchman was an enemy of the regime. Those things could soon be felt. It took only a glance or a way of pitching one’s voice to be identified. Fritz wanted to know more about this figure. He learned that this was the prelate Georg Schreiber, former Reichstag deputy under the Zentrum label, the pre-1933 Catholic party. A theologian, university professor, and also a political man, Schreiber had been a very influential figure during the Weimar Republic. In his special fields of political action (church questions, culture, education, foreign policy, and science), he was an unquestioned authority. Since the Nazis had come to power they had subjected him to constant affronts. Research institutes and other learned societies over which he had presided had been forced to close down. For the leaders of the Third Reich, Georg Schreiber was the embodiment of the despised “old system.”

Schreiber had been protected by Sauerbruch on more than one occasion. The two men were personally very close. The prelate often came to rest at the Charité where he was treated for “abdominal troubles.” Fritz Kolbe was curious to meet a man of the cloth who had not compromised with the regime (it hardly mattered that he was a Catholic). He introduced himself.

After exchanging a few banalities about life behind the scenes in the Foreign Ministry and current sports (two areas in which Schreiber was well versed), Fritz dared to bring up politics. “What did you think,” he asked, “of Clemens von Galen’s recent speech against the elimination of the mentally handicapped? Why aren’t there more men of the church like him who dare to denounce the crimes of the Nazis?” Schreiber, after making certain that no one was listening to their conversation, expressed his full support of the bishop of Münster. He revealed to Fritz that Professor Sauerbruch had information that the Nazis had already eliminated seventy thousand of the mentally handicapped since 1939 (including many children), and that they intended to kill “old people, the tubercular, the war wounded, and others unworthy to live ( lebensunswerte Menschen ), as they say.”

This revelation startled Fritz. Now sensing that he could trust his interlocutor, he dared to ask the prelate to help him resolve his problems of conscience: “How can I continue to serve this regime? I want to leave the country, but that is not possible. If I stay, am I morally tainted by my status as an official? After all, I took an oath in the name of the führer, like all the others…” Georg Schreiber looked very serious and took him aside to answer him. The conversation lasted for more than an hour. No one knows exactly what Schreiber said that evening. In any event, Fritz retained the following message: “Do not leave Germany! Fight against the Nazis with the resources that you have. If you are in this post, this is because God willed it for one reason or another.”

Berlin, 1942

Germany could only be reborn—from the Nazis’ ashes. Fritz had known that since 1933. But for the regime to fall, Germany would have to lose the war. It took Fritz time to recognize that it was not shameful to be a “defeatist,” that a quick surrender was in fact in Germany’s best interests, but it took root in Fritz like a painfully obvious fact between late 1941 and early 1942. Not all his friends, far from it, could follow him into this way of seeing things. He himself sometimes began to doubt. Throughout all of 1942, he felt more alone and isolated than ever.

“You must opt for a party in the war… I have / No choice. I must use force or else endure it,” Fritz repeated to himself as he read The Death of Wallenstein (Act 2, Scene 1). He made the following argument: One could not wish for a Nazi victory. In addition, the defeat of Germany was foreseeable once the United States had entered the war against Germany in December 1941 and Japan on its side took no steps to attack Russia and establish a second front in the Far East. Finally, the longer it took Germany to lay down arms, the weaker it would be at the end of the conflict. This situation of weakness would risk throwing it into the arms of the Communists.

Since the early 1930s, Fritz had been almost as vehemently opposed to the Communists as to the Nazis. To be sure, he had for a time been attracted by the revolutionary language that cut through the perpetual compromises of the Social Democrats. After October 1917, he had not been impervious to the “great light in the East.” He had a few happy memories from that period of his life. For example, he still liked to sing, when he was in good company, songs of the radical left, full of mockery for the Social Democratic moderates: the “ Revoluzzer ” by Erich Mühsam was one of his favorite songs. But the dictatorial practices of the KPD had quickly snuffed any temptations in that direction. The possibility of the USSR invading Germany depressed him almost as much as that of Hitler attaining victory.

Even though Schreiber had advised him against engaging in dangerous activities, Fritz continued to write anti-Nazi leaflets throughout 1942. He left letters with “defeatist” content, supposedly written by a “soldier back from the Russian front”—a role with unassailable credibility in Germany at the time—in telephone booths. Fritz contemplated taking even bolder steps. He and two of his friends came up with the idea of blowing up a railroad bridge at Werder am Havel, a small town about thirty kilometers southwest of Berlin. But the plan, for unknown reasons, was never carried out.

This excited state, although dangerous, was pathetic and a little naïve. With the position he occupied and the information at his disposal, Fritz had long known that he could do much better: provide information to the enemies of his country. From his time as a Wandervogel, he knew that espionage was very much an act of war, and that he would “have to be very clever at passing news secretly from one place to another,” as Baden-Powell put it. He had been one of the boldest speaking out against the Nazis among the chatterers at the Café Kottler, and he had never lacked courage in writing anonymous propaganda against the regime, but this was something entirely different. Sharing intelligence with the enemy: these terrifying words frequently echoed in his mind, although he was unable to tell whether it was simple common sense or lunatic recklessness that had put such ideas into his head.

For some time Fritz had already been acting on the edge of “high treason” ( Hochverrat ), by counterfeiting passports in South Africa and by distributing anonymous messages. These were very great risks. But in the event he were to provide information of a strategic nature to the Allies, he would be guilty of genuine “treason to his country” ( Landesverrat ), which meant not only a death sentence but also dishonor in the eyes of generations to come.