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

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.

Bern, spring 1943

The quiet city of Bern, capital of the Swiss Confederation, seemed barely touched by the events in Europe and the rest of the world, but it was impossible to guess from mere appearances how the city was swarming with activity. Fake diplomats were putting together embryonic counteralliances, and professional spies of all nationalities and all political persuasions had set up their headquarters there. Bern was the privileged place for thwarting the enemy’s stratagems, trying to foresee the ends and the means of the opposing camp, and exchanging false rumors for true secrets.

Switzerland was not only a nest of spies, but also, thanks to its status as a neutral country in the heart of Europe and at the gates of the Reich, the best extraterritorial platform that could be imagined. This had been even truer since November 1942. With the occupation of the southern zone by the Germans, France had been closed off to the Allies. Switzerland had become the only base for observation in the heart of Europe, planted like a triangle between Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and occupied France.

A mysterious figure had been living since November 1942 in a handsome old house in Bern, located not far from the cathedral, at Herrengasse 23. He could often be seen walking rapidly, the pockets of his coat full of hastily folded newspapers, between the railroad station and his downtown house. He liked the neighborhood, with its medieval fountains with multicolored sculptures, its sidewalks beneath arcades, and its ancient paving stones. From the windows of his large apartment on the ground floor of a building that had four stories, he had a magnificent view of the mountains of the Bern Oberland.

In the morning, to get to his office on Dufourstrasse, in the embassy district, he crossed the Kirchenfeld bridge over the Aare (a metal bridge forty meters above the river). At noon, he had lunch at the Theater Café, where the waiters seemed to know him very well. He could very often be seen at the Hôtel Bellevue, where foreign diplomats met Swiss politicians for dinner. Most of the time he went on foot. But sometimes he could be seen in the back seat of a Citroën driven by a personal chauffeur, and smoking a pipe. He was a tall man, with a mustache, who wore glasses with rather thick lenses that made him look like a college professor. He dressed in corduroy, flannel, or tweed. He usually wore a bow tie. Elegant without being stiff, he had a habit of wearing his hat toward the back of his head, which gave him an air of studied negligence. Some people thought he was English. In fact, he was an American.