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

The ship headed for the open sea on a journey that, if all went well, would last about two weeks. But submarine warfare was raging between Germany and England, and crossing the English Channel would be dangerous. A naval escort had been provided for the end of the voyage. Anxiety prevailed on board. The passengers gradually went belowdecks. Many went to the radio room to listen to the latest news from Europe. Kolbe remained alone, leaning on the rail. He did not know when he would see his son again. “Was I right to leave?” he asked himself with a pang, but it was too late to reverse his decision. The port had already disappeared over the horizon.

Fritz wondered how he could ever leave South Africa behind. As he watched the splendid shore of the bay drift by, he took with him images of flowering bougainvillea, and he caught a glimpse against the clear night sky of the flat summit of Table Mountain. When he had left Madrid at the end of 1935, he had felt himself to be Spanish. Now he had become an adopted Cape Towner. For the last time he identified the rocky peaks overlooking the sea, the Lion’s Head, the Devil’s Peak, the Twelve Apostle mountains—a landscape he had traveled through many times at the wheel of his superb automobile, a 1935 Horch 830 convertible. This was a luxury car ordinarily used by members of German high society, and acting consul Fritz Kolbe had used all his savings to buy it. Of all his possessions in Cape Town, his Horch was the only thing that he had insisted on shipping to Berlin (he did not yet know that he would soon have to give it up because of restrictions due to the war).

Fritz thought again of the long drives he had taken in the region, and breathed one last time the warm wind coming off the African veldt. In July 1939, he and a friend had explored the vast territory of South-West Africa and the Kalahari Desert in an all-terrain vehicle. The former German colony of South-West Africa (Südwestafrika or Südwest) was a paradise for antelope hunting. Recalling it now, Fritz remembered the exquisite taste of the wild game, but already a smell of sadly European vegetable soup was rising from the ship’s kitchens.

As the African coast slipped by that evening, Fritz Kolbe thought about the harshness of fate. Young Peter’s mother, Anita, had died in June 1937. She had never seen Warsaw (where Fritz had stayed for only three months), or South Africa. Fritz had remarried in the fall of 1937; his new wife was Lita Schoop, from Switzerland. Because the ceremony took place in Zurich, they had not received the copy of Mein Kampf now given to all newlyweds in Germany. It was a marriage of reason rather than love: Fritz had been looking primarily for a replacement mother for his son. The couple had come to live together in Cape Town early in 1938. The marriage had not lasted long; they had already been separated for some time when Fritz left Africa. The tension in the couple, evident after only a few months of life together, continued to build during their time in South Africa. One day, Lita had even threatened to denounce her husband’s anti-Hitler convictions to the consul. Fritz’s immediate superior was a dedicated Nazi by whom Fritz took care to remain unnoticed. After that incident, Fritz had invited a friend home so that he could spend an entire evening feigning obeisance to the “party line” in the presence of his own wife. What an unbearable charade! Very soon afterward, he had slammed the door on the marital home in the upscale neighborhood of Camps Bay (a handsome detached house with a garden), taking his son with him. Lita and Fritz had not seen each other since then. He merely knew that Lita had decided not to return to Europe (he would later learn that she had been interned as a German citizen in a British camp in East Africa).

If Fritz Kolbe had decided to leave, this was purely out of loyalty to the head of the German legation in Pretoria, Rudolf Leitner, who had asked him to return with him. Even though the diplomat was a member of the party, Kolbe respected him as a human being. He was pleased to see him on board the Bloemfontein. The two men knew each other well: In 1936, when Fritz had briefly returned to Berlin after a short stay in Warsaw, Leitner had been his superior in one of the departments of the ministry (Kolbe had been recommended to him by Count von Welczeck, the former ambassador to Spain). Leitner, a good-natured Austrian Catholic, particularly appreciated Kolbe for his habits, “worthy of the finest Prussian administration.” Fritz was a veritable workhorse, having no hesitation in working overtime and spending the night at the office when necessary. As for Kolbe, he liked to chat with Leitner, particularly when he talked about America, where he had been posted for more than ten years. As the former consul in Chicago in the mid-1920s, he knew a huge number of amusing anecdotes about Al Capone and the hidden history of prohibition.

When Leitner had been sent to Pretoria at the end of 1937, he had not hesitated to fight to have Fritz Kolbe appointed to the consulate in Cape Town. The mission he had assigned him was to restore order to the consulate’s finances, which were in a sorry state after several years of mismanagement. Kolbe had been appointed in spite of the initial hesitations of the powerful liaison office between the Foreign Ministry and the NSDAP, which controlled all foreign appointments. Leitner had had to use all his influence for Kolbe’s professional qualities to trump his politically questionable status in the eyes of the liaison office.

Kolbe was something of a “protégé” of Leitner’s, and Fritz would have been very distressed to compromise him. If he had decided to stay in South Africa, as some of his friends had advised, he would have been interned until the end of the war—that was one thing—but above all he would have put his immediate superior in difficulty. In Berlin, Rudolf Leitner would have been criticized for having supported a “deserter,” which would have put an end to his career. Kolbe decided to return to the ministry, with an aching heart.

It was a sad voyage. Fritz Kolbe had never felt so alone. He did not reply when an unknown traveler suggested they have a drink. He was suspicious, because the ship was full of informers, cheaters, and professional gamblers. Late at night, he could still be seen strolling on the promenade deck, lost in thought. He was trying to imagine Europe at war. He resigned himself to returning to a Berlin under the Nazi yoke.

The capital of the Reich, he thought, must be gloomier than ever. Fritz had heard that the Gestapo had veritable carte blanche to eliminate whoever it wanted with no legal accountability. Patrols would harass passersby on the slightest pretext. Building managers were now in service to the party, ready to denounce the slightest suspect behavior. Fritz remembered the day in 1937 when he had had the misfortune to pass a Nazi leader’s car on a broad Berlin avenue. The eminent figure’s chauffeur (was it Göring, he wondered?) had given him a threatening look and followed him for a while, as if to record his license plate. Fritz anxiously anticipated a summons from the Gestapo. Nothing had happened in the end, but he had slept badly for two weeks.

Even if the war was far from popular, a majority of Germans remained in favor of Hitler and thought that he “was going to come through it,” as always. How, he wondered, could millions of people see the approaching catastrophe without reacting? How could they accept the curfew and the obligatory food and clothing ration cards? Fritz told himself that it was probably already too late—military hostilities were right around the corner, and public opinion would unite behind the regime out of a patriotic reflex.

The ministry to which Fritz was returning was, worst of all, under Ribbentrop—the man who had just signed a pact with Moscow after having denounced for years “the Russians, our sworn enemies.” Fritz had never seen him but had a fairly clear idea of him. The foreign minister had earned the nickname “Ribbensnob” since he had purchased the right to put a “von” before his surname. He was one of the most mediocre leaders of the regime, known for his pathological obsequiousness toward the führer and his brutality to his subordinates. It seemed that the atmosphere in the Wilhelmstrasse offices had seriously deteriorated in the last two years. Everyone was said to be at the mercy of outbursts of anger from the minister, who insulted his interlocutors, not hesitating to call them “idiots” or “wimps.” Generally speaking, Ribbentrop—a former sparkling-wine merchant—detested most career diplomats. He wanted to make the Foreign Ministry into a “powerful National Socialist instrument at the service of the Führer,” and to do this he had taken control of the ministry by placing reliable men in the key positions. Half of the five hundred high officials in the ministry were already members of the party, and one in ten belonged to the SS.