Frankfurt, spring 1950
“We regret to inform you that the position referenced above has been given to someone other than you.” This brief letter from the economic administration of Frankfurt, dated February 4, 1950, put an end to Fritz’s hopes of finding a position in the consular services of the new Germany. He thought he still had possibilities at the future Foreign Ministry, whose rebirth was being actively prepared by the Federal chancellery in Bonn. In October 1949, Fritz had written to Hans-Heinrich Herwarth von Bittenfeld, chief of protocol at the Chancellery in Bonn, to ask him officially for his “readmission into the services of the Foreign Ministry.” This time, instead of putting forward his status as a former “Allied contact” during the war, he had merely said that he represented the interests in Germany of a company based in Switzerland (“Maurer & Co., Bern, exporters of woolen looms,” a company controlled by Ernst Kocherthaler). He had added a copy of a document that certified that he “was not affected by de-Nazification measures.” But he never received any response to his request.
Obviously, someone was standing in his way, but Fritz never found out who it was. The reasons for the obstacles he faced, however, were clear: The old networks of the Nazi period were resuming control of the ministry and were trying everything to keep this “traitor” away. The foreign policy adviser to Chancellor Adenauer, Herbert Blankenhorn, had served in the German legation in Bern. He proclaimed publicly that the new members of the German diplomatic corps had to be “new men… democratic and pro-Western,” but behind the scenes the reality was quite different.
Fritz Kolbe was without any question democratic and pro-Western. His only mistake was to have been those things before everyone else. A few months later, in May 1950, Walter Bauer spoke of the “Kolbe case” to Economics Minister Ludwig Erhard in person: “I told him that your hiring by the consular services was a problem because, apparently, they are unwilling to recognize your political activity since 1942. That deeply shocks me,” Bauer explained to Fritz Kolbe shortly after this interview in Bonn. What if Allen Dulles, or his brother John Foster Dulles, U.S. Secretary of State, got wind of this story? “You can imagine what impact that would have on the mutual trust between Germany and the United States!” Bauer pointed out. Apparently, Ludwig Erhard was aware of the problem and shared this point of view. In the course of his conversation with Walter Bauer, the economics minister had turned to his secretary of state and asked him to note down Fritz Kolbe’s name. The file was to be sent to the federal chancellery. The matter was to be cleared up. But that was the end of it, and the initiative had no consequences.
On June 1, 1950, Walter Bauer wrote to the deputy Walter Tillmans, one of the cofounders of the CDU, who had promised to help him. Walter Bauer had explained to him that Fritz Kolbe “had acted exclusively out of patriotism” and that it was “frightening” that his candidacy was blocked because of his pro-Allied activity during the war. On June 14, 1950, Fritz—still optimistic—wrote to Walter Bauer to tell him that Dr. Tillmans seemed to be having some success: “Several deputies are said to have spoken in my favor,” he explained.
Fritz Kolbe was wrong to hope. It did not take him long to understand the origin of the ostracism of which he was the target. In a letter of July 30, 1950, Walter Bauer wrote to Fritz to ask him for details on a specific episode of his biography: “I have been told that you went to the German legation in Bern shortly before the surrender to ask that Köcher turn over to you the legation’s gold. I have also been told that Köcher’s death is not unconnected to you. Can you tell me more about this?” The fatal misadventure had thus taken place in the last days of the war. Fritz had been wrong to play the role of emissary from the Americans to the envoy of the Reich, who had complained about him to several of his colleagues before committing suicide. Five years later, Fritz was considered not only a traitor but an assassin. The Americans could do nothing to help their former agent to get a position. In early August 1950, Allen Dulles met Herbert Blankenhorn in Bonn, but nothing concrete came out of the conversation. It was obvious that Fritz would never again have a position in the ministry.
Frankfurt, July 1950
At the end of the war, Allen Dulles and Gerald Mayer had managed to persuade Fritz to write his memoirs, even though, for security reasons, there were no plans to publish them. Ernst Kocherthaler had taken down Fritz’s account and translated it into English in a seven-page document (“The Story of George”). “The important thing,” Kocherthaler had said in order to persuade his friend to speak out, “is for the Americans to know that there was a positive side to Germany.” Fritz had no doubts about it. He even thought that he had played the role of a “leader” in the German resistance, and he was flattered by the interest taken in him. But at the same time his pride led him to refuse to put himself forward. “What does Allen want to do with all this?” Fritz asked in May 1945. “Unlike other people, I don’t want to gain fame through my story,” he added in a letter to Ernst Kocherthaler in July. Observing that “memoirs of resistance to Nazism” were becoming a literary genre in their own right, Fritz had reasons for not associating himself with a huge enterprise of collective mystification.
The idea of publishing something about Fritz, however, remained alive in the mind of Gerald Mayer, who had left the world of intelligence for the movie industry (he headed the Paris office of the Motion Picture Association). In September 1949, Mayer suggested to Fritz that he write his story so that it could be made into “a film or a book.” Fritz would not hear of it and refused to go to Paris to discuss the plan, as Gerald Mayer had suggested. Mayer was not discouraged, and put Fritz in contact with an American journalist, Edward P. Morgan, who wrote for the magazine True. Fritz was at first reticent. “Who still cares about what happened then?” he said. “All that’s in the past.” Finally he agreed to see Morgan. The meeting took place in early 1950 in Fritz’s apartment near Frankfurt.
“In the last two years of World War II, ‘George Wood’ brought to the Allies no fewer than 2600 secret documents from Hitler’s Foreign Office, some of them of the highest importance. Eisenhower called him one of the most valuable agents we had during the entire war.” These lines introduced the article published in True in July 1950, under the title “The Spy the Nazis Missed.” This fourteen-page article was somehow typically American, with an alluring title, illustrations worthy of a detective story, and written in a lively style. Edward P. Morgan did not mention Fritz Kolbe’s real name, but the article circulated among German diplomats, who had no difficulty in identifying the figure. This was even more the case when the article was translated in full and published a year later in the Swiss weekly Die Weltwoche, with a darker title than the American version: “The Double Game of a Diplomat.” This publication in German, which Allen Dulles had unsuccessfully attempted to prevent, helped to destroy Fritz’s reputation: Instead of seeing him as a member of the resistance, most of his former colleagues considered him as an informer and a renegade.