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

Professor Sauerbruch also had occasion to go to Switzerland from time to time for conferences or surgical operations. Most of the time he went to Zurich. When the opportunity arose—as it did, for example, in mid-February 1944—Fritz asked him to mail a letter to Walter Schuepp. The explanation that he gave to the surgeon was the same one he had given to Pohle: He said that he had regular connections with “German émigré circles.” Fritz would never have dared to tell the surgeon the truth.

“Sauerbruch doesn’t know what’s in the letter. If you should be in contact with him don’t give me away. He would be deeply hurt,” Fritz wrote in a letter that he passed to the Americans through Ernst Kocherthaler toward the middle of February 1944. This was a letter of eight crowded pages, seven in tight script and one typed single-spaced. Once again, Kocherthaler had to be enlisted to transcribe the script. It was cast in the form of a dialogue between two fictional figures who agreed that the outcome of the war was already decided, and it supported this thesis by a sort of survey of the world situation in which the evidence was drawn from diplomatic cables supplied by Fritz and other sources of inside information. Fritz had no doubt wanted to amuse himself by using a fictional register. Had the purpose been to conceal the nature of his message, the device was not very prudent: If a letter like this one had been opened, it would have led him to the gallows. “I passed many sleepless nights when the ‘material’ was on its way,” Fritz confessed after the war. The letter ended hurriedly: “I have to stop. Too bad. What good are these air raids?”

In Bern, this letter troubled and confused Allen Dulles: “It is hard to decipher all the cases as well as to differentiate… Foreign Office documents or policy from Wood’s own opinions,” he cabled to his Washington colleagues on February 21. A few days later, Dulles explained that “this letter was written in a hurry and part of it was apparently composed during an air raid. These facts may explain the inconsistencies.”

Despite a few false notes, Allen Dulles managed to draw out of Fritz’s letter a series of interesting indications on certain very sensitive matters. German agents stationed in Ireland were providing a series of precise observations about military sites in England (air bases, arms factories, munitions dumps). Other passages reported a reinforcement of the Atlantic Wall in France. It clearly appeared that the preparations for a vast invasion of the continent, “between April and June 1944,” were known to the Germans. But the leaders of the Reich were ignorant of the location of the future landing (“there is talk of Holland,” reported the spies based in Ireland), and nothing indicated that they knew its date.

This was not all. For the first time, Fritz provided information about Japan ( Scarlet in the Kappa cables) on the basis of facts collected by the German embassy in Tokyo. He revealed in particular that Tokyo was secretly encouraging its Berlin ally to make peace with Moscow. He also transmitted information on certain Japanese positions in the Pacific (Burma and New Guinea).

Early in March, a postcard from Fritz arrived at OSS Bern through the usual diplomatic circuit. It pictured a bouquet of narcissus along with a few spring buds. At first sight, it was a warm birthday greeting addressed to Walter Schuepp, but he was born on April 28 and the card had been written on February 22—so it would seem that Fritz had been particularly early with his card. In fact, the greeting contained a hidden message. An assemblage of apparently incoherent letters had been typed on the right side of the card: D xzrfgx aqh ADX Thfokf tlhjlnlva hcy Htvkpz Alml Gsyfji Oxsuch Wkmybdcebzp. Was this simply bad typing? Fritz apologized. “A child was playing at typing just as the card was about to be sent,” and Fritz added that “unfortunately [he] had no other card available.”

This strange message was deciphered by the Americans through the code to which Fritz had given them the key during one of his previous visits to Bern. It said: “Yolland of OWI in Ankara is discussing defection to Germany with Consul Wolff in Ankara.” Fritz had not even taken the trouble to put the card in an envelope. He was confident in the indecipherability of his personal secret code. He was right. The card arrived at its destination without provoking the slightest suspicion. It had been mailed in Bern, as usual, by Willy Pohle or another of Fritz’s colleagues on a mission to the German legation in Switzerland.

Fritz’s mail was now arriving regularly in Bern. His correspondence might be hidden in a pair of shoes or in clothing, but mailings always arrived for Ernst Kocherthaler’s brother-in-law in the diplomatic pouch. Another letter soon arrived for Walter Schuepp (it had been written on March 6, 1944), with, once again, dozens of excerpts from confidential cables. “Poor fellow who has to read all that! I had real good opportunities, and I didn’t waste any of them!” Fritz wrote. Among the several “pearls” of this springtime delivery, the Americans found the summary of a conversation between the German envoy in Bern, Otto Köcher, and Marcel Pilet-Golaz, the chief of the Swiss diplomatic corps. The latter considered probable, in case of a failure of the Allied invasion, an “Anglo-German agreement” aimed at preventing the installation of a Soviet regime in Germany. Numan Menemencioglu, the Turkish foreign minister, expressed exactly the same opinion (according to a cable sent from Ankara on February 12, 1944).

Fritz Kolbe relayed certain rumors reporting tensions between the Allies. In a letter received in February, he had revealed that the German diplomatic service was interested in the anti-Soviet attitude of a certain “Dallas,” the key man in the American legation in Bern. This was, of course, Allen Dulles, whose remarks about the “excess of Soviet power” had reached the ears of Otto Abetz through Jean Jardin, former cabinet secretary to Pierre Laval who had been posted to Bern since the fall of 1943. In addition, in his letter of March 6, Fritz thought that he could say, on the basis of a recent cable from von Papen, that Roosevelt had been extremely critical of Stalin during the Teheran conference (November 28 to December 1, the first summit meeting among Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin). German diplomatic circles seemed not to exclude the possibility of a break between the Americans and the Russians, a prelude to a “compromise peace” between the Germans and the Anglo-American forces.

In relaying this kind of information, was Fritz expressing political intentions, and was he acting on behalf of a high Berlin official who wished to remain anonymous? The OSS people naturally asked themselves this kind of question. Some cables communicated by Fritz could pass for disguised political messages, such as one from January 2, 1944, written by the German envoy in Bucharest, Manfred Freiherr von Killinger. He said that, according to a Rumanian source working in Rome, “the Pope was highly perturbed and had told him that the British and Americans were paving the way for Bolshevism in Italy.”

However, the letter of March 6 helped reassure the American’s about “Wood’s” good faith. Fritz had put a second envelope inside the first, labeled “confidential/for Ernesto.” It contained four pages written in very small script. Reading with a magnifying glass, the Americans discovered a complete list of the German counterespionage service (the Abwehr) in Switzerland. Already fairly well informed on this subject, they could put this very valuable information together with what they knew from other sources and work out a nearly complete organization chart of enemy agents operating in their immediate vicinity. The most interesting was probably the information gleaned by Fritz that the Germans were unaware of the existence of the OSS office in Bern. In Berlin it was thought that the headquarters of American intelligence in Switzerland was located in Zurich.