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

Feeling the vise tighten around him, Elyeza Bazna left his position in March 1944. Since mid-January 1944, the British had been actively looking for the source of the leak. At the very moment that Allen Dulles had informed Washington and London of the existence of a mole in the British embassy in Ankara—at the very beginning of January 1944—Ambassador Knatchbull-Hugessen had learned from his Turkish interlocutors that von Papen “knew too much to be honest.” Two British counterespionage agents were sent to Ankara to carry out an investigation in his entourage. In Bern, Allen Dulles had asked them to be discreet and to behave as though the visit were a routine inspection. His concern was to protect his source, Fritz Kolbe, who might be identified by the Germans in case the network were dismantled. The two British agents also had to deal tactfully with the extreme sensitivity of the British ambassador, who could not understand how his embassy could be under suspicion. The detectives questioned Elyeza Bazna but found him too stupid and too ill at ease in English to consider him a suspect.

The Cicero affair could have been a disaster if the leak had not been discovered in time thanks to “George Wood.” “Nothing indicates that the Germans got from Cicero the slightest detail about the plan for a landing in Europe, except perhaps the code name of the operation: Overlord, ” Dulles wrote after the war.

Berlin, December 1943

After his October visit to Bern, Fritz thought that it would be a long time before he would be able to come back. Nor did Allen Dulles expect to see him again. It had been agreed that Fritz would thenceforth send what he knew through his friend Albert Bur, the surgeon from Alsace. This complicated means of transmission was probably never used.

Berlin was in a state of chaos. The bombing was more and more terrible. Late November was particularly hard, with thousands of dead, more than two hundred thousand people made homeless, and tens of thousands of buildings destroyed. The central neighborhoods of Alexanderplatz and Charlottenburg (Fritz’s neighborhood) were the most heavily damaged. Railroad stations were one of the favorite targets of the flying fortresses. Even the zoo was hit. A bomb landed directly on the crocodile house during the night of November 23. There were rumors of wild animals roaming through the streets of the city.

The Foreign Ministry was the target of several destructive raids. Only the offices on the second floor could still be used. That winter some of the chandeliers in the ministry began to resemble fountains. The carpets were saturated with water. Pieces of cardboard were hung in the windows in place of glass. It was cold. The diplomats worked with their coats on. Some of the ministry’s departments were evacuated to Silesia. But most heads of departments remained in Berlin, and Fritz Kolbe, as a result, also stayed in the capital of the Reich.

The Charité hospital, where Maria Fritsch lived, had not emerged unharmed from the rain of fire. “All the windows were broken,” wrote the surgeon Adolphe Jung in his notes for December 1943. “Most of the window frames and doors were torn out. Curtains and camouflage cloths for the windows, torn out as well. Cabinets opened and overturned. Plaster fallen from ceilings and walls. A strong wind full of smoke and soot blew through the corridors and the rooms open on all sides…. All the patients were in the cellars. The laundry and storage rooms were emptied out and the patients’ beds set out in them. Long rows of beds were in the corridors, men, women, and soldiers all mixed together.”

Basic goods and services were growing increasingly scarce. Life was constantly punctuated by collections for the community: cloth, old paper, shoes, materials of all kinds, including animals (particularly dogs, requisitioned for the army). Coal was in short supply. It was forbidden to run water during air raids; it had to be kept in reserve to fight fires. But this was not always enough: “Here and there a fire hose, handled by soldiers or firemen, threw jets of water on the houses,” wrote Adolphe Jung. “The water came from the Spree through long pipes in the depths of the river, because, of course, the usual pipes, less than an hour after the bombing, had no more pressure. Even in cellars, you could barely get a small quantity of water.”

Half the time, Fritz Kolbe and his close friends were in the shelters. “Life in a bunker,” he said himself of the winter nights of 1943 spent in underground shelters with stale air. You could never be without your civil defense kit, the content of which was strictly determined by the administration: a suitcase containing clothing, extra linen, shoe care products, a sewing kit, a bar of soap and a package of crackers for each person, a container of milk, sugar, oatmeal, a bottle of water, a small saucepan, plates and utensils, and matches. A pitiful set of provisions. In any event, the shelters provided only relative safety: “Cases of violent death were reported when the outside of a shelter was hit by a bomb with no damage to the interior. Some people are said to have fallen, bleeding from the nose and the mouth, dying from a fractured skull. This was caused by the impact transmitted directly to a head leaning against the bunker wall,” according to Adolphe Jung.

Berliners thus lived from day to day, in the expectation of imminent death. But life continued nevertheless. Professor Sauerbruch and his friends in the Wednesday Club continued to meet to discuss various subjects once or twice a month. In addition to a noteworthy presentation by the physicist Werner Heisenberg on “The Evolution of the Concept of Reality in Physics” (June 30, 1943), the year was marked by a presentation by the former ambassador to Rome, Ulrich von Hassell, on “The Personality of King Alexander of Yugoslavia” (December 15, 1943). The members of the club appreciated more than ever the friendly atmosphere of their meetings. One evening at Sauerbruch’s, the austere Ulrich von Hassell even stood unsteadily on a table and started singing old student songs.

A distinct relaxation of social constraints began to be noticed almost everywhere. After the summer of 1943, with the massive movement of families to the countryside, Berlin had become a city of bachelors. From boozy evenings to passing flirtations, men had decided to take advantage of life. “If their wives only knew!” wrote the journalist Ursula von Kardorff. Money no longer had much importance; tips had never been so generous in the cafés and restaurants that were still open. The center of this slightly decadent social life was the Adlon Hotel, near the Brandenburg Gate. In addition, a large foreign population had given the capital of the Reich a new face. Forced labor had brought people from around Europe to replace the Germans who were at the front. From workers to doctors, all professions were represented. Berlin was in the process of becoming a kind of involuntary melting pot.

The leaders of the Reich no longer knew what to come up with to mobilize the population for a “fanatical” drive toward “final victory.” In December, a directive from Goebbels required journalists to banish the word “catastrophe” from their vocabulary.

Bern, late December 1943

Meanwhile in Washington and London, “George Wood” began to be of real interest. Some secret service figures wanted to ask the Berlin agent questions on precise points. But Dulles informed his OSS colleagues in Washington: “Impossible now to ask 805 more questions without incurring risk, unless he comes back, which is not likely.” For his part, Fritz was furious at not being able to transmit regularly to Bern everything that passed through his hands.

Suddenly, a letter written on December 18, 1943 informed the Americans of the imminent arrival of their friend from Berlin. As had been agreed in October, the message was sent in the form of an innocuous letter to Walter Schuepp, Ernst Kocherthaler’s brother-in-law. “Dear Walter, I wanted to tell you that we are still alive despite the latest bombing. Apart from a few broken windows, nothing happened to us. I take the opportunity to tell you that I will probably be at your house on 27 December. So, save a piece of the Christmas goose for me! Say hello to Ernesto and his family. Merry Christmas!” Fritz had written this letter, signed “Georges” ( sic ), in Berlin but had given it to a diplomatic courier on assignment to Bern, and it bore a Swiss postmark of 21 December. As soon as he received it, Walter Schuepp passed it on to Ernst Kocherthaler, who immediately sent a telegram to Gerald Mayer: “I have heard from a friend abroad that he will probably be in Bern on the 27th… Since I should by no means miss him, I’m going to be there then, at 13:09. If you could be there too we could talk over our pending business.”