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

Walter Bauer’s office, at Unter den Linden 28, was a place for meetings and discussions. Fritz was there very often. Those who frequented the address were not unknown: you could meet Goerdeler, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and other eminent figures among the anti-Nazi Christians. Fritz had no direct contact with these major figures of the time, but he came to recognize them. He probably did not always feel at ease in the midst of this intellectual community used to wide-ranging debates. Similarly, he chose to remain in the background at the Wednesday Club when Professor Sauerbruch honored him with an invitation to address it in 1944. “Those people intimidate me,” he said in explanation to the surgeon. What he didn’t tell Sauerbruch was that he found the members of the Wednesday Club “too old” for his taste.

However, Fritz felt perfectly at ease with a seventy-year-old man, Paul Löbe, a major figure in the SPD and a living embodiment of the Weimar Republic. The circumstances of their meeting are impossible to specify (probably in January 1944, maybe at Walter Bauer’s office, perhaps at the home of friends from prewar Social Democratic circles). Paul Löbe was the last president of the democratic Reichstag. Replaced in his parliamentary seat by Hermann Göring in 1932, he had been sent to a concentration camp in Silesia when the Nazis came to power. Abused and tortured, he had finally been released after several months’ detention. A former typesetter, he had survived on three hundred marks a month (one-third of Fritz’s salary) by proofreading for a Berlin publisher. Fritz was impressed by Löbe’s simplicity, an eminent figure who had remained close to the people and knew how to work with his hands. Even though it is impossible to say whether the two men met often and whether they had thorough discussions, Fritz felt that they were close, and even more, thought of him as a comrade in arms.

Bern, spring 1944

Everywhere in Europe in the spring of 1944, people were beginning to think about the shape of post-Hitler Germany. In Berlin, around Ludwig Beck, Carl Goerdeler, Julius Leber, and a few others, a government program was put in place and the organizational structure of a future government already existed on paper. In Bern, the Americans of the OSS engaged in the same kind of exercise. Allen Dulles had prepared for his superiors in Washington a list of German personalities likely to be given a principal role after the fall of Nazism. He mentioned the names of various figures exiled in Switzerland. Most of them had impeccable democratic credentials, like Otto Braun, former Social Democratic leader in Prussia, and the liberal economist Wilhelm Röpke. But there was also the name of an OSS informer, Hans-Bernd Gisevius, viceconsul of the Reich in Zurich, a former member of the Gestapo who had become a confirmed anti-Nazi in the Abwehr. If he had known of the existence of this list, Fritz Kolbe would probably not have found it unusual to be included, but his name was not there.

Among the Germans in exile in Switzerland there was a ferment of ideas and a proliferation of plans for the future. Ernst Kocherthaler, for example, wrote page after page during this period. On his own initiative, he wrote a series of brief analyses of postwar priorities for Allen Dulles. How could Germany be de-Nazified? It would be necessary above all, he said, “to create democratic universities” and help the Germans resist the attractions of communism, knowing that “only a minority among them understand the individualism of Western civilization.” Kocherthaler also wrote about the economic problems of Europe and the world following the conflict. He suggested turning to the creation of a “world economic government” acting “in a spirit of cooperation rather than competition.”

During this period, Ernst Kocherthaler sent Allen Dulles a memorandum titled “The Jewish Question in Post-War Europe.” In it he wrote:

In Spring 1944 most of the European Jews are killed or have emigrated overseas. Between 3 and 5 million have been exterminated. In the Ukraine and Poland only those who have joined the guerrillas have survived. Of the German Jews some are still spared in Theresienstadt (Czechoslovakia)…. With some minor exceptions, Hitler’s program of extermination had full success in Central and Eastern Europe and partial success in Western Europe…. In the process of liquidating the remains of Nazi ideology, the anti-Semitic question is important. A whole generation of youth has been fed with a vision of a Jew who has been given in Nazi religion the place of the devil…. It is therefore important for the future of the fight against Nazi ideology in Germany and German-occupied countries, that the returning Jews should be well chosen and return only gradually. For the rest, a home state anywhere in the world would offer the only solution. In Palestine mass immigration of Jews would provoke a conflict with the Arabs and the Moslems all over the world, since Pan-Islamism has been strengthened during the war…. A Jewish home must therefore be found where only a thin indigenous population would have to be expropriated. Regions with good climate and rich enough to be suitable for economic development seem to exist, best of all in Madagascar. Here a Jewish state under French sovereignty could occupy half the island.

Fritz was far removed from this kind of thinking when he arrived in Bern on April 11, 1944, for his fourth visit since August 1943. Worn out by the train trip made in ever more difficult conditions, he had above all experienced the terror of being arrested. Arriving in Switzerland without being searched, he had felt so relieved after the last customs inspection that he dropped the key to the diplomatic pouch in a toilet in the Basel railroad station (the attendant had agreed to retrieve it for a handsome tip). Forced to spend some time with a colleague from the German consulate in Basel who had come to collect a package of dispatches, Fritz had sat with him at a table in the railroad station restaurant. He had quickly drunk several glasses of schnapps before leaving for Bern.

“Wood has arrived with more than 200 highly valuable Easter eggs,” Allen Dulles wrote to his colleagues in Washington on April 11, 1944 (“What a bunny!” headquarters cabled back). Fritz’s visits now followed a well-oiled routine, always according to the same pattern. At night, they met secretly at Allen Dulles’s, on Herrengasse. The four protagonists of the summer of 1943 were still there: Dulles and Kolbe, but also Gerald Mayer and Ernst Kocherthaler. Among the surprises that Fritz pulled out of his bag on the night of April 11 were the famous “Japanese trinkets” requested in the postcard sent a few weeks earlier. And what trinkets! To Allen Dulles’s great satisfaction, Fritz had brought from Berlin several extremely interesting cables from Tokyo. One set of dispatches stood out from the rest. It was a long report on the principal Japanese military bases in Asia, written following an investigative mission carried out between January 28 and February 25, 1944. The cables were signed by Ambassador Heinrich Stahmer, but Washington would learn soon thereafter that the text was based on reports from General Kretschmer, the German military attaché in Tokyo, and his colleague Air Force General Gronau—which changed nothing of the exceptional quality of the document.

The two men had traveled almost everywhere in Asia and all doors had been open to them. They had gone to Burma (Mandalay, Rangoon, Prome), to Formosa, Singapore, Saigon, Bangkok, to Indonesia (Macassar, Madium, Manado), to Eastern Malaya (Kuching and Labuan), and to the Philippines (Davao and Manila). At every stop on their excursion they had been given a guided tour of military installations. They had conscientiously recorded everything that they saw: the location of the various bases of the Japanese army, the strengths and weaknesses of each of them, the number of divisions stationed at each site, the names of the principal commanders of each base, the supply lines, the state of Japanese knowledge of Allied forces, the relations between the Japanese army and navy. Some cables from Heinrich Stahmer reported private conversations with Asian political leaders subservient to Tokyo: General Pibul Songgram, the Thai prime minister, seemed demoralized by the bombing of Bangkok and no longer to believe in the victory of the Axis powers. President José Laurel of the Philippines was confronted with huge economic difficulties.