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

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.