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

invasion of Czechoslovakia: The meetings of the Wednesday Club took place on one or two Wednesdays each month. Each of the members played host in turn. The purpose of the association, according to by-laws dating from 1863, was to foster “scientific discussion” among a few figures of the first rank of all disciplines. The sixteen members of the club were exclusively male, chosen on the basis of cooptation, “independently of their personal orientations.” See Klaus Scholder, Die Mittwochsgesellschaft (Berlin, 1982).

Prussia, September 18, 1941 : Fritz Kolbe was sent on a mission to Hitler’s headquarters in East Prussia ( Wolfsschanze, the “wolf’s lair”) from September 18 to 29, 1941. Foreign Ministry, Fritz Kolbe file.

Ambassador Karl Ritter: Fritz Kolbe was appointed private secretary ( Vorzimmermann ) to this high ministry official in 1940. Autobiographical document, May 15, 1945. Karl Ritter (1883–1968) had been an official at the Foreign Ministry since 1924. He had been in charge of the department of economic affairs (Wirtschaftsabteilung). In July 1937, he had been appointed ambassador to Rio de Janeiro. Foreign Ministry, Karl Ritter file.

Ministry since the 1930s: In the Almanach de Gotha of 1935, we find that Karl Ritter is in charge of “the national economy and reparations policy” in the “Foreign Office of the Reich.”

“ambassador on speical mission,”: In German: Botschafter z. b. V. (zur besonderen Verwendung ). After the war, Ritter claimed that he had agreed to work for Ribbentrop in 1939 on condition of not being involved in the “routine” of the ministry. He said that he had been a “free electron.” Source: interrogation of Karl Ritter for the Nuremberg tribunal, July 24, 1947 ( U.S. Chief Counsel for War Crimes, Hans Jürgen Döscher collection, Osnabrück) Karl Ritter and Friedrich-Wilhelm Gaus (the ministry’s chief lawyer), were, according to Fritz Kolbe, the only two diplomats in the ministry to “have permanent and unlimited access to Joachim von Ribbentrop.” Source: conversations of Fritz Kolbe with the De Witt C. Poole commission (September 26, 1945), National Archives.

away from the ministry: Karl Ritter was always with the foreign minister, whether at Hitler’s headquarters in East Prussia or at Fuschl castle near Salzburg. Boston document no. 469, National Archives.

dangerous pro-Nazi agitator: This expulsion took place after a failed putsch by the “Integralists,” a Brazilian fascist movement drawn to the Third Reich and very strongly supported by a Nazi Party cell based in the German embassy with the full agreement of Karl Ritter.

return from South Africa: Autobiographical document, May 15, 1945.

“highest circles of power!”: Ibid.

its content for Ritter: Memorandum of August 19, 1943, OSS Bern, National Archives.

wrote a few years later: Autobiographical document, May 15, 1945.

went to the opera: Karl Ritter was present at major German social events. He was on board the first transatlantic flight of the Hindenburg in May 1936, the famous zeppelin that crashed tragically a year later not far from New York. Foreign Ministry, Karl Ritter file.

didn’t like him either: Karl Ritter was considered a little too lukewarm an anti-Semite. During the Weimar Republic he had wanted to marry a young woman from the Jewish Ullstein family, one of the largest newspaper publishers in Berlin. In addition, he was never a member of the SS, unlike many high officials in the ministry.

in the nineteenth century: Around 1820, demobilized Prussian soldiers were hired by Emperor Pedro I of Brazil to establish an army worthy of the name, defend the newly independent country, and make war on Argentina. This emperor married Amelie von Leuchtenberg, a Bavarian princess. There are still German towns in southern Brazil (Blumenau, Pomerode).

informed his Berlin office: Source: Foreign Ministry, Berlin.

and even the curtains!: Ulrich von Hassell, Die Hassell Tagebücher (Berlin, 1988).

a swastika in its claws: Internal circular of the Foreign Ministry on duty uniforms, November 27, 1942. See also Jill Halcomb, Uniforms and Insignia of the German Foreign Office (Crown/Agincourt, 1984).

between Ribbentrop and Hitler: Walther Hewel was one of the few high-ranking Nazis who had experienced the outside world: He had lived for several years on the island of Java, where he had managed a tea plantation for an Anglo-Dutch company. Enrico Syring, article on W. Hewel in Die Braune Elite, v. 2.

“all its natural resources!”: In May and June 1941, the Wehrmacht high command gave orders intended to guarantee the “unprecedented rigor” demanded by Hitler with respect to Russia. Soviet prisoners of war were not treated in conformity with the norms of the international laws of war. Between the summer of 1941 and the spring of 1942, more than two million Soviet prisoners died in German detention.

“of the Geneva Conventions”: Informal conversations transcribed by Heinrich Heims at Hitler’s East Prussia headquarters, Monologe im Führerhauptquartier, 1941–1944 (Hamburg, 1980).

“sailor”) and “Lili Marlene”:“Das kann doch einen Seemann nicht erschüttern ” was composed for a film by Kurt Hoffmann, Paradies der Junggesellen (Bachelors’ Paradise ), with Heinz Rühmann. “Lili Marlene” was composed in 1938 by Norbert Schulze, a popular composer of light music. The version sung by Lale Andersen had become the unofficial anthem of the Wehrmacht.

complained about German aggression: “Course of Life,” personal archives of Fritz Kolbe, Peter Kolbe collection.

U-boats against American ships: The Greer was attacked off the coast of Iceland in early September 1941. A few months earlier, the Robin Moor had been sunk in the South Atlantic.

did not feel comfortable: “In Ritter’s staff, I had the chance to see with my own eyes all the atrocities… of the Nazis…. [N]ow I could see what war really was!” “Course of Life.”

plane, a Junkers Ju 52: Foreign Ministry, Fritz Kolbe file.

a pickax or a hammer: Reports from the Einsatzgruppen on the massacres in Russia circulated in the Foreign Ministry in Berlin beginning in December 1941. Döscher, Das Auswärtige Amt im Dritten Reich.

went to the cinema: It is not impossible that Fritz and Maria went to the Capitol cinema, near the zoo, where on October 31, 1941 the first color film from the Ufa studios was shown, a musical comedy with waltzes, fox-trots, and frills, entitled Women Are Much Better Diplomats, with two stars of the time, Maria Rökk and Willy Fritsch. Nor is it impossible that they saw The Important Thing Is to Be Happy, with Heinz Rühmann, which was shown at the Gloria Palast in the spring of 1941.

him home several times: “Sauerbruch and Kolbe became good friends.” Biographical document by Gerald Mayer and Fritz Kolbe.

the despised “old system”: The meeting with Schreiber is recounted in detail in the biographical document by Gerald Mayer and Fritz Kolbe. Georg Schreiber (1882–1963) was simultaneously a theologian, a university professor, and a politician. The pope had given him the honorific title of “prelate” in 1922. A Zentrum deputy in the Reichstag from 1920 to 1933, he avoided Nazi harassment with the help of Ferdinand Sauerbruch, who gave him a medical certificate enabling him to avoid a forced transfer to East Prussia. The prelate nevertheless had to give up all his duties at the University of Münster and accept a post as professor emeritus. Source: Professor Rudolf Morsey, Neustadt (former colleague of Georg Schreiber after the war).