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

The shock waves of events in Germany had spread as far as South Africa. In the German consulate in Cape Town, Fritz Kolbe had observed a gradual deterioration of the climate. Afrikaner nationalism seemed to have grown wings thanks to Hitler, and the atmosphere had become electric. The Afrikaners imitated fascist spectacles commemorating their own history. One evening in the fall of 1938, on leaving the consulate, Fritz had encountered a small troop of Grey Shirts, a fascist league modeled on the SA. The young men had greeted him with a Hitler salute. Fritz had pretended to have forgotten something in the building in order to avoid having to talk to them.

The militants of the Afrikaner cause, as always, had chosen the German camp out of hatred for the British. This had already taken place during the Boer War in 1899, and again in 1914. Since Hitler’s accession to power, the descendants of Dutch immigrants thought that once again the fate of the Afrikaner volk was in the hands of Germany and more or less openly praised all the victories of the Reich in Europe.

Fritz had seen all kinds at the consulate. Sometimes they had talked to him as though he were a personal representative of the führer. The most moderate of his visitors argued in favor of South African neutrality: “After all, Hitler is no threat to our interests,” he often heard. Others openly wanted an alliance with the Reich and proposed returning the colony of South-West Africa to Germany in order to seal this agreement in the name of peoples oppressed by “British imperialism.”

The worst had come when Fritz had had to organize a visit to Cape Town by an NSDAP delegation that had come from Berlin to meet with South African counterparts from the New Order (a movement founded by Oswald Pirow), who defended a “Christian nationalist” ideology based on the ideals of blood and soil. This had happened early in 1939. Fritz had been unable to get out of participating in an evening “among comrades” at the city’s German club. The reception, naturally accompanied by large quantities of German beer, had featured various songs drawn from the Nazi repertory.

Lüderitz, October 22, 1939

Lüderitz, a port of South-West Africa, was named for a tobacco merchant from Bremen who had set up a trading post there toward the end of the nineteenth century. Liners sailing to Europe called there twenty-four hours after leaving Cape Town. From the deck that morning, Fritz watched the swarm of activity on the pier: herds of sheep, horses, and the transport of freight—impressive quantities of bales of wool, rifles, agricultural equipment, cases of schnapps. Europe was distant, but German was spoken here, and the architecture as well displayed its clearly German origins.

The former colony of the Reich, half desert, had maintained majority German-speaking enclaves like Lüderitz and Swakopmund, populated by Catholic missionaries from the Rhineland, merchants from the Baltic Sea coast, and transplanted German farmers. The Nazis were naturally interested in this region, which they contemplated reconnecting to the Reich in the context of a vast colonial project. Berlin had already appointed the “shadow governors” of the future African empire. The agitation of the Afrikaners in South Africa was vigorously encouraged by certain German circles in the Südwest. Toward the mid-1930s, NSDAP cells had been set up throughout the territory. Swastika flags had been raised here and there. Leaders of the Hitler Youth had come from the Reich with the intention of training overseas imitators. Fritz knew by reputation the German consul general at Windhoek, Walter Lierau, who had arrived in 1939: he was the first diplomat of the Foreign Ministry to have been a member of the SS.

Fritz thought about his son; this was the region where little Peter was going to live during his father’s absence, with his adopted family. The child was to live with Otto and Suzi Lohff, a German couple who lived in the town of Keetmanshoop, 250 kilometers in the interior, who were soon to move to Swakopmund, very close to another port, Walvis Bay. Otto Lohff worked for the Metje and Ziegler company, one of the largest German firms in South-West Africa, importers of supplies for construction and public works. Because the local economy needed him, he had not been interned by the South African authorities.

Otto Lohff had rather nationalistic opinions, but he was not a Nazi. Fritz was especially close to Suzi (nicknamed Ui), Otto’s wife; in fact, she had become his mistress. After separating from his wife, Fritz had lived in the small boarding house in Cape Town run by Ui’s mother, Frau Kahlke. She thought of herself almost as little Peter’s grandmother. Fritz found “granny Kahlke” marvelous, knowing everything about his relationship with her daughter and never committing the slightest indiscretion in front of the deceived husband. As a result, he had forgiven her a good deal, starting with her naïve admiration of Hitler (“She has not set foot in Germany since 1914,” he said to himself, “she cannot understand what is happening”). Fritz had promised Ui that he would come for her after the war and take her to live in Germany.

For now, he returned to Berlin alone, because he wanted to spare his son the misfortunes of war and allow him to escape from privation and hunger, of which he still had terrible memories from his experience in Berlin after 1918. Nor did he have any intention of entrusting him to the schoolmasters of the Nazi regime. He knew that the Hitler Youth now called the shots in classrooms. There was no question of leaving Peter in the hands of some brigade, nor any question of seeing him forcibly enlisted in the “Reich labor force” to repair roads or cut wood in the forest.

Sailing toward Europe, Fritz knew that he had already crossed the line in his opposition to the Nazi regime. In Cape Town, he had committed his first illegal act: He had agreed to forge some passports at a friend’s request, to save some anti-Nazi refugees from Germany. This friend may have been Toni Singer, an engineer of Austrian origin, a company head, and member of a Masonic lodge. Thanks to him, Fritz had penetrated the secret society a bit and had begun, clandestinely, his personal initiation. He had particularly appreciated the idea that man had to reform himself before attempting to reform the world. Self-improvement should be intellectual as well as physical. “Only mastery of the body opens up the fullness of being,” according to a Masonic precept to which Fritz fully subscribed.

Fritz realized, on the ship taking him back to Germany, how estranged he had become from his own country. He was incapable of mixing with the German passengers, some of whom were noisily celebrating the losses inflicted on the British by the U-boats and singing: “Today Germany belongs to us / And tomorrow the entire world.” Alone in his cabin, frequently nauseated because of the stormy sea, he thought that there was perhaps already a Gestapo file with his name on it, like those he had personally handled in the Cape Town consulate (“unreliable element, to be watched, regularly socializes with Jews and Freemasons”). In Berlin, he would be forgiven not a single false move. In the best case, he risked being sent to the front. Fortunately, he was appreciated. The invaluable protection of Rudolf Leitner must not fail him. But Fritz was weary of pretending in order to avoid trouble.

There could be no question of fighting against the Nazis. During his preceding stay in the capital of the Reich in 1936 and 1937, he had seen up close the cost of protesting the regime: One of his friends had lost his job with the Berlin city government, two others had been sentenced to two and three years in a concentration camp, another, arrested for “illicit possession of printing material,” had committed suicide after being tortured. So many others, whose names he did not know, had disappeared into the camps.