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

Some months earlier, in May 1944, Fritz had already provided the OSS with a cable from Otto Köcher revealing that Germany was selling six thousand kilos of gold a month to the Swiss National Bank. The bank’s president, Ernst Weber, even said he was “ready to take even more gold than the amount fixed in the monthly quota” established by the bilateral agreement between the two central banks. Otto Köcher characterized him as a “personal friend” of Emil Puhl.

The existence of close economic and financial ties between Switzerland and Germany provoked the anger of the Allies. But there was something even more serious than the gold transactions between Berlin and Bern. A cable that Fritz brought in January 1945 revealed the existence of high-level negotiations between officials and industrialists of the two countries on weapons and advanced military technology. The Swiss wanted to acquire expertise in chemically propelled rockets and had frequent discussions with the heads of a major German company, Köln-Rottweil, part of the IG Farben conglomerate.

This information was transmitted to Washington in early February (“Jakka” messages, for January and Kappa). During his stay in Bern, Fritz did not merely share his information with Allen Dulles and Gerald Mayer. He openly made the argument for an overthrow of the Nazi regime to some of his colleagues at the German legation. At least two of the diplomats whispered to him that they agreed and that something had to be done to bring things to an end. They wanted to resign their positions, but they did not know if they could get political asylum in Switzerland. The atmosphere in the German legation had never been so gloomy. As for Fritz, he left for Berlin on February 2, 1945, making the return trip in a freight car. He used a backpack as a pillow and slept through most of the trip.

On his return to the capital of the Reich, Fritz lived through the most violent bombing he had ever experienced. The Allied raids of February 3, 1945 remained in memory as exceptionally deadly and destructive. That day, the Reich Chancellery was hit, along with the buildings of the Gestapo and the People’s Court. The city was unrecognizable. The railroad stations witnessed apocalyptic scenes of hysteria. The streets were clogged with masses of refugees and with troops on the way to the front. On January 30, the Red Army had crossed the Oder, provoking the flight of millions of Germans to the west. Fifty thousand a day were arriving in the capital of the Reich, fleeing the swift and terrifying advance of T-34 tanks, mounted Cossacks, and the Russian infantry, which, rumor had it, consisted, particularly in the lower ranks, of countless pillagers and rapists.

Crossing through Berlin on his way home, Fritz felt that he was in a city under siege. Corpses were scattered everywhere, barely covered by paper bags, with heads and feet exposed at either end. On February 7, 1945, Adolphe Jung described in his diary the new face of Berlin: “People are building barricades in the streets with whatever they find there from the houses demolished by bombing. Everything is used. Large and small bricks or stone blocks from the sidewalks; wooden beams or iron bars taken from neighboring ruins. Trees, if there are any, are cut down and used. There thus arise barricades two meters wide and two meters high that almost completely close off the street.”

And yet Berliners as a whole remained calm. The restaurants were full even if the menus were meager. And above all, no one spoke about the war. People seemed resigned, but not at all defeatist or even rebellious. Official Nazi propaganda recognized the existence of a “crisis,” but there was as yet no talk of defeat. Goebbels’s latest slogan was simple: “We will win because we must win!”

Returning to his Wilhelmstrasse office, Fritz realized that all the cables that he had carefully preserved in his safe had been destroyed by a colleague. He had been obliged to give him his key when he left for Switzerland, and the minister had ordered that “documents of no immediate interest” be destroyed in all the offices of the Foreign Ministry.

Bern, February 1945

In Bern, Allen W. Dulles was irritated to learn that the materials supplied by “George Wood” were considered by his Washington colleagues as “museum pieces” and regretted that their “full operational value” had not been obtained. He said that he “had never understood” why the “Wood” file had been treated first of all by the counterespionage service, which was endlessly concerned with verifying the authenticity of the source. Dulles finally complained about jurisdictional disputes among the army, the OSS, and the State Department. Information did not circulate, and the result was that his favorite source was treated with extreme neglect: “Again emphasize that to get full value out of this material will require staff of workers thoroughly competent German, with some background Wood material, knowledge of personalities and German diplomatic procedure plus ability decipher crossword puzzles.”

In Washington, the neglect of “George Wood” was not a matter of chance. Some members of the intelligence community and the army were enthusiastic about this miraculous source, General Donovan among them, but others had mixed feelings about the general quality of the Kappa material. One of them thought: “While much of this material has been of interest and importance from different aspects, it has not seemed top-drawer save for certain few exceptions. It would seem to be more the type of communications which the old Chiefs of Divisions in the State Department used to get and give and not the information which went directly to or came from the Secretary, Undersecretary, and President…”

A short time later, on February 16, 1945, Dulles again complained to General Donovan: “You have requested us to have Wood concentrate on Far Eastern material and we endeavored to comply and gave transmission of this material absolute priority. I have no clue whatever whether this material proved of value to you.”

Was Dulles’s outburst heard? A “special unit” was soon established in the OSS to analyze the Kappa messages. The “George Wood” file was no longer under the jurisdiction of the OSS counterespionage service and was now located in the secret intelligence department. An entirely separate administrative unit was specifically dedicated to the analysis of information provided by Fritz Kolbe, including a total of fifteen people, dividing files into geographical zones, and including two colonels assigned to elucidate the most technical questions.

Allen Dulles thought that these initiatives had come too late. Since Washington had not known how to make use of the information from “George Wood,” the chief of OSS Bern was now determined to take steps on his own to end the war more quickly. He was more than ever prepared to sidestep the hierarchy and act on his own hook. For example, he decided in late February 1945 not to refuse the hand extended to him by the commander of SS troops in Italy, Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff, Heinrich Himmler’s former right-hand man. Wolff was acting on his own. Like other high political or military officials of the Reich, he thought that “although Germany had lost the war, it could still choose its conqueror.”

After communicating through a Swiss intelligence officer and an Italian industrialist, Allen Dulles and Karl Wolff met in person in Zurich on March 8, 1945 and then in Ascona on March 19. These two meetings took place in the most complete secrecy. Contacts continued throughout March and April. In messages from Bern to Washington, Wolff was designated by the code name “Critic,” and the discussions with him were given the name of “Operation Sunrise.” President Roosevelt, who was already dying, did not oppose these negotiations when he learned of their existence. On April 29, 1945, the Wehrmacht laid down its arms in Italy, in a surrender without conditions. The Soviets were informed at the last minute and felt that they had been stabbed in the back. The Kremlin reacted very vigorously to this attempt toward a “separate peace” of the Western powers with the Germans. The last written contacts of Stalin with Roosevelt had to do with Dulles’s secret maneuvers in Italy. The extremely harsh tone of these messages was an early sign of the coming cold war.