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

After having what Schroeder said confirmed by the head of personnel, Fritz was stunned. He who had sworn never to become Pg (party member) was now being offered a very handsome post on condition that he deny his convictions! He took two days to make up his mind. With a heavy heart, he decided not to accept the offer, wondering if he was not making a monumental mistake. He knew that nothing interesting would now be offered to him, and he saw himself stagnating for the rest of his life in some obscure back office in the ministry. Worse, he feared his gesture would be interpreted as an affront by Rudolf Leitner. He risked losing in him his only protector. From then on, catastrophe seemed inevitable.

And indeed a few days later Leitner called Fritz into his office. A great surprise awaited him. His former superior in Pretoria had called him in to encourage him to go to Stavanger and to try to persuade him to join the party. Fairly quickly, considering Fritz’s arguments, he nevertheless showed some understanding and even seemed to hint at his respect. One might say that he was saluting, without really daring to say it, Kolbe’s constancy. “The problem,” he said, taking the trouble to escort him to the door of his office, “is that now you are going to be offered something much less interesting, and for now I can’t do much for you.”

Reassured by Leitner’s attitude, Kolbe felt a bit more lighthearted. Staying in Berlin, he would be able to see old friends and take care of his aged mother, who detested the Nazis and could use the company. The priority was to remain himself, “defenseless but not without honor.” Walking through the Berlin streets on the way to his hotel—a temporary residence until he could get settled more comfortably—Fritz Kolbe felt torn between pride and despair, between his desire to flee to Norway and the personal integrity he prized. As he walked, he wondered about his fate. He thought with disgust about a Berlin doctor who had just divorced his wife after thirty years of marriage because she was Jewish and “he had not realized what that meant.”

Fritz had never felt so deeply nostalgic for foreign capitals. He remembered a mission to Paris in the late 1920s. He had been there for only a few days to deliver diplomatic correspondence, but he had preserved an undying memory of the city. At this very moment, he would have dearly loved to talk to Ernst Kocherthaler, his old friend from Madrid. It was too bad that it was no longer possible to see Don Ernesto. The Kocherthaler family had settled in Switzerland shortly after the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. They had not totally lost touch, of course. They continued to exchange letters, but the postal censorship in Berlin imposed a good deal of discretion. Fritz thought again of the question that Kocherthaler had asked him in the course of one of their conversations in Madrid: “Are you ready for exploits, suffering, sacrifice?” He regretted not knowing how to answer at the time. Now he knew what he would say: Yes, he was ready to make sacrifices, for example, giving up a post as consul. It might not be a spectacular act, but he had remained true to himself.

Fritz had understood, since the interrogation to which he had been subjected in Madrid in late 1935, how useful it could be to appear to be an idiot in order to preserve your freedom. Since that day, the party informers had left him relatively in peace, and suspicion toward him had faded to some degree. Rather than displaying feigned support for the established authorities (like a certain number of senior diplomats more or less opposed to the regime), Kolbe preferred to adopt an ingenuous attitude that fit well with his modest rank. He told himself that by cultivating his image as an obtuse but efficient minor official he would perhaps be left alone, and that the most insignificant post would enable him at least to maintain his dignity.

Berlin, November 21, 1939

Fritz Kolbe had been in his new position for a few days. He was now assigned to the visa and passport section of the ministry, which was under the jurisdiction of the legal affairs department. His mission consisted of delivering authorizations to leave German territory to members of the foreign ministry who had to go abroad. Kolbe had fewer and fewer regrets about the post of consul at Stavanger. Even if his new assignment was not very interesting, it enabled him to remain informed about events and to keep in contact with colleagues. The foreign ministry was a mine of invaluable information. With respect to the coming offensive in the West, Fritz had learned in the course of October 1939 that sixty to seventy divisions of the Wehrmacht had been transferred from Poland to the Rhine. There had also been rumors in the last few weeks that the SS had committed atrocities in Poland.

The name of the man who had attempted to assassinate Hitler in Munich had been made public. He was a thirty-six-year-old carpenter named Georg Elser. Arrested on November 8, the man had confessed after several days of interrogation. The bomb used in the attack was very primitive in design but effective. Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsführer SS, had reaffirmed that the British secret services had been behind the attack. A little later in the day, it was learned that the Gestapo in fact had arrested two high-ranking British espionage agents on November 9 near the town of Venlo on the Dutch-German border. Posing as opponents of Hitler looking to arrange for support from London, its agents had lured the English into an ambush, killing a Dutch intelligence officer in the process. The two British agents had been brought to Germany for interrogation.

Reading this news, Fritz Kolbe was not the only one who thought that Himmler was probably the brains behind the Munich assassination attempt. He thought of a setup. The Nazis, he said to himself, know that this war is unpopular and want to distract the Germans by making them think that the English want war and that the führer is a demigod protected by supernatural powers. On the other hand, if the SS was really behind this faked assassination attempt, how could Hitler have taken the risk of placing himself next to a ticking bomb that might have gone off a few minutes too soon? Suppose Georg Elser had acted alone, as he claimed. Fritz Kolbe would have liked to talk about the event with some of his friends in the ministry. But he was soon made to understand that it was better not to speak openly on the subject, especially if you called into question the analysis authorized by Goebbels.

The Ministry of Propaganda in fact had taken advantage of the event to put on a grandiose spectacle. November 11 had been declared a “day of national mourning.” In Munich, ten thousand people had marched in silence past the Nazi-flag-draped coffins of the seven people killed in the attempt. The ceremony had been broadcast live on the radio. The event served more than one purpose, because the party had taken advantage of it to settle some internal scores. Fritz thought of Georg Elser, the young Swabian carpenter who looked like a bum. He then remembered what Toni Singer had said to him in South Africa in the course of his brief Masonic initiation. Toni Singer had spoken to him of the symbolism of the tarot and had told him that the only card without a number, hence excluded from the game, was the Fool. This card was the symbol of the authentic initiate, able to see a world inaccessible to ordinary mortals. It pictured a vagabond, holding a staff in his right hand, his pack over his left shoulder, pursued by a dog trying to bite him, with his eyes turned toward the sky.

Berlin, May 10, 1940

The offensive in the West had begun. The Wehrmacht was in Holland and was heading for Belgium. Walking toward the Kottler, a restaurant and café on Motzstrasse in the Schöneberg neighborhood, Fritz Kolbe could not help showing his agitated state: He kicked every pebble he saw and muttered incomprehensible words under his breath. Passersby turned their heads to look at this lunatic walking at full speed, but he kept going, paying no attention to his surroundings. With his black leather coat and his eyes glowing beneath the brim of his hat, he might almost have been taken for an agent of the Gestapo.