One day toward the end of the spring of 1940, a pretty woman entered Fritz Kolbe’s office and asked for a visa for Switzerland. It was rare for a woman to appear in the corridors of the Foreign Ministry. Fritz Kolbe gave her a form to fill out and had her sit at a little desk facing his own. While she wrote, he took the opportunity to scrutinize her. The visitor had style: dressed in white, she had entered the room wearing an elegant wide-brimmed hat. It was immediately apparent that she was a woman of quality, even displaying a certain distance from the people she addressed, the antithesis of a “Lieschen Müller,” the generic name for a Berlin shopgirl. She wrote quickly, crossing words out. Obviously, she was swamped with work and in a hurry to leave. About forty years old, like Fritz, she introduced herself as a personal assistant to Professor Sauerbruch. “Not someone likely to have children,” thought Fritz as he looked at her. He had immediately understood that she was one of those modern ambitious women who had difficulty seeing themselves in the role of housewife reserved for them by the Nazis.
As he watched her fill out the document, Fritz managed to read from a distance what she was writing. He learned that her name was Maria Fritsch, that she was unmarried, and that she was born in 1901 in Bütow, in Pomerania. A Kashubian woman, straight and even a little rigid like many people of the region, Prussians who had become a little Slavic because they lived in mixed German-Polish territory. “Pommerland?” he asked her in the local dialect, and he added—still in plattdeutsch—a famous line of poetry to make her notice him: “Wo de Ostseewellen trecken an den Strand?” (“Where the Baltic Sea waves kiss the beach?”). The woman’s face suddenly became more cordial. “Dor is mine Heimat, dor bün ik tau Huus” (“There is my country, there I am at home”), she countered immediately, still in low-German dialect. An onlooker would have had difficulty understanding much of the exchange that followed. It sounded like a slightly drunken conversation in untranslatable dialect. Only a few words, used by Fritz in an ironic way, could be recognized. He imitated a speech by Hitler in plattdeutsch, barking out Dütschland!, Föhrer!, Vaderland!, making his visitor burst out laughing.
Already, she was getting up to leave. Fritz managed to delay her a little longer: the form was incomplete, a letter had to go with it. She hastened to write it, but hesitated for a moment before giving it to him. “Should I sign with ‘Heil Hitler’?” she asked him, her pen still uncapped in her right hand. Fritz Kolbe did not answer. She looked up, worried, and encountered an almost threatening look. “Look here, don’t think of it,” he finally said, “do you know where we are?” A quick exchange of smiles and there was now complete trust between the two.
Fritz wanted to see her again. He asked Maria Fritsch whether it would be possible to make an appointment to see Professor Sauerbruch. He did a lot of sports—boxing, running, bicycling—and always felt severe pain in his knees, despite a surgery he had had in 1933. “I’ll see what I can do,” she answered, “he is swamped, but I’ll try to slip in an appointment for you.” With that, she disappeared down the corridors of the ministry.
Ferdinand Sauerbruch was a great doctor. The surgical procedures that he invented were recognized around the world. In particular, he had conceived a revolutionary method for opening a patient’s rib cage without provoking a collapse of the lungs (the patient’s torso was placed in a low-pressure chamber, while his head remained in the open air). He had also created an artificial hand that could be moved at will.
Independently of his enormous talent, Sauerbruch was to the medicine of the Third Reich what Gustav Gründgens (the man on whom Klaus Mann modeled his character Mephisto) was to the theater of the time. Like him, he probably would have emigrated and would have become a fiery antifascist “if only he had been given attractive offers abroad,” according to Klaus Mann. Instead, the professor had chosen to pursue his career in Germany as though nothing had changed. At the age of sixty-five in 1940, the “Professor Doktor” was a prince of medicine, covered with honors, not lacking in self-importance or even vanity. He was head of the largest hospital in Berlin, the Charité. He sometimes exercised his art like a chess champion, carrying on several operations at the same time in different operating theaters. He taught in amphitheaters filled with students and admirers of both sexes. He was asked for his opinions throughout Europe, and he counted several crowned heads among his patients.
Sauerbruch had never taken care of Hitler, but the dying Marshal Hindenburg had called on him for his prostate, Goebbels for his appendicitis, and Robert Ley—head of the “Labor Front,” which replaced the dissolved unions—his hemorrhoids. Sauerbruch had contacts high up in the Reich chancellery. One of the doctors closest to the führer, SS-Obersturmbannführer Karl Brandt (in charge of the euthanasia program for the mentally handicapped), was one of his former pupils. In charge of medical matters for the principal scientific institutions of the Reich, Professor Sauerbruch supported some of the worst medical experiments carried out in the concentration camps.
The Nazis needed to keep on their side major intellectual and artistic talents like Ferdinand Sauerbruch. Not affiliated with the Nazi Party, the surgeon was an emblem of respectability for the regime, which granted him great freedom of speech and action. He was a member of the prestigious “Wednesday Club,” an independent intellectual group that continued to hold regular meetings despite the war. It was one of the few forums for discussion where one could still escape from the surveillance of the Gestapo. They didn’t engage in politics at the Wednesday Club, although they did not avoid various subjects related to the present time. Among the figures who were members of the club were both the biologist Eugen Fischer, one of the major theorists of eugenics, and General Ludwig Beck, former army chief of staff, who had resigned in August 1938 to protest against Hitler’s planned invasion of Czechoslovakia.
Fritz Kolbe did not yet know, when he met Sauerbruch for the first time, how useful he would find the Charité hospital and the protected status of the surgeon.
4
IN THE WOLF’S LAIR
Between Berlin and East Prussia, September 18, 1941
In the train taking him to Hitler’s headquarters in East Prussia, Fritz Kolbe read the newspapers and glanced through a few dispatches that he had to hand over the next day to the führer’s diplomatic staff. Since his departure from the Berlin-Grunewald station, he had been alone in his compartment. The car was reserved for officers and government officials headed for the front or on missions to the reserve lines. Since the beginning of the Russian campaign in June 1941, the führer’s headquarters had been in the “wolf’s lair” (Wolfsschanze) at the eastern edge of the country. Fritz was carrying a large quantity of documents, most of which were classified “secret Reich business” (geheime Reichssachen, the highest level of confidentiality for the Nazis). Under no circumstances was he to be separated from the briefcase containing them. The documents were intended for his superior, Ambassador Karl Ritter, one of the highest officials in the Foreign Ministry, who was in consultation with military headquarters.