Frankfurt, October 1950
Had Fritz been a traitor to his country? Confronting the wall of silence that faced him, he began to have reasons to question himself. Fortunately, he was not alone with his conscience. Some of his friends helped him to reflect on his past, to legitimate his action, and to preserve his personal dignity. One of them was a major intellectual, Rudolf Pechel, whom Fritz had probably met through Professor Sauerbruch. Pechel embodied the continuity of German thought: Since 1919, he had headed the editorial board of the Deutsche Rundschau, a prestigious monthly established in 1874, comparable to the Revue des Deux Mondes in France. Banned by the Nazis in 1942, it had been relaunched in 1946 by securing a British license. Fritz Kolbe became a permanent employee of the publication in October 1950. He was in charge of managing subscriptions and single-issue distribution, particularly in the Soviet zone, where the journal circulated in secret.
Although Fritz was cut off from his professional milieu, he found welcome spiritual comfort in this new work. Rudolf Pechel had unquestionable moral authority. He was not a man of the left (he came out of the “revolutionary conservatism” of the 1920s), but he had been persecuted by the Nazis, who had sent him to a concentration camp from 1942 to 1945. The Deutsche Rundschau published accounts by victims of Nazism and works by prestigious authors (Carlo Schmid, Golo Mann, Wilhelm Röpke) who wrote high-minded essays on the major questions of the time: resistance, treason, democracy. Through the journal, Fritz Kolbe sharpened his ideas on the themes that constantly preoccupied him. The Deutsche Rundschau fought in defense of the honor of the members of the German resistance to the Third Reich. It regularly denounced the return by Nazis to key positions in the Federal Republic of Germany. It gave a platform to the conspirators of July 20, 1944, who explained why their “treason” had been a patriotic gesture.
For his part, Fritz Kolbe had never doubted that he had acted as a patriot. But he needed to understand why the accusation of “treason” was sticking to him. The “right to resistance” against dictatorship was inscribed in the Fundamental Law of the new Federal Republic only in 1968. What he was reproached with, in the end, was perhaps with having supplied information that caused the death of hundreds of Germans. At the Nuremberg trial, the diplomat Hasso von Etzdorf had declared that he “had respected certain limits that mark the difference between a traitor and a patriot” and that he “had not sold Germany to foreign countries,” specifying that it would have been easy for him “to supply information of a military nature to Lisbon, Stockholm, or Madrid.” Hans-Bernd Gisevius, as well, had always been careful not to tell the Americans everything he knew, keeping some information to himself with the aim of saving lives. Fritz Kolbe had not had the same scruples. He had supplied industrial and military targets, aware that the Allied bombings would create many innocent victims. In the end, he had followed his job as a spy to its logical conclusion, acting as an American or British soldier would have done.
Frankfurt, September 1951
In September 1951, the daily newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau published a sensational investigation revealing that former Nazis were resuming power in the new German Foreign Ministry. It had been authorized to come back into existence a few months earlier under the direct authority of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. The outcry produced by this series of articles was so huge that a parliamentary investigative committee was set up in the Bundestag.
Less than a year later, in June 1952, this committee turned in its final report, demanding much more rigor in future appointments and recommending the suspension of four high officials in the Foreign Ministry who were particularly compromised. In a Bundestag debate in October, Chancellor Adenauer did not attempt to conceal the facts and recognized that the great majority of new German diplomats (66 percent) were former members of the NSDAP. He went on to say, however, that in his view, “it was not possible to do otherwise” and that the country needed people who had “experience and skill.” After being suspended for a year or two, the principal diplomats incriminated by the investigative committee were partially rehabilitated. Chancellor Adenauer appointed a new chief of personnel for the Foreign Ministry and gave him the mission of eradicating “the spirit of Wilhelmstrasse” from the ministry. The new appointee soon discovered that “it was already too late.”
Frankfurt, 1953
Fritz continued working at various odd jobs. The salary from the Deutsche Rundschau was not enough to live on, and the Americans had stopped paying him when he left Berlin in April 1948. In early 1953, he tried to secure a position as a correspondent for a German press agency in Switzerland. His application had been accepted, the contract was on the point of being signed, but at the last moment, for reasons that he never discovered, the employer terminated discussions. Fritz was no longer surprised by anything: His name seemed to have been placed on a blacklist.
Fortunately, life was not reduced to these repeated disappointments. Fritz remained a lover of life and never complained. In April 1953 his son had reached the age of twenty-one, the age required to get a South African passport and to be able to travel to Europe. Fritz had put money aside to finance the trip. The reunion took place on July 6, 1953, in the Dutch port of Hoek. Fritz and Maria had come to pick up Peter in a car. Maria remembered that “Fritz was eager to see his son again.” Peter, for his part, never thought that that was the case. The son’s feelings toward the father were mixed at the very least:
He was a complete stranger to me. I was surprised to see how small he was. He had an ideal, abstract image of me; he treated me like a child. He wanted me to put on a sweater so I wouldn’t catch cold and he absolutely insisted on carrying my luggage. I hated the way he had of wanting to repair the damage after such a long absence. He could have written to me after the war. But he didn’t, just giving me a few very distant signs of life. I had expected something from him which never came.
It wasn’t the presence of Fritz’s new wife that troubled him. Peter was meeting Maria for the first time, and they got on quite well together. He soon began calling her “Muschka.” “If she had not been there, things would have gone badly with my father,” Peter confessed fifty years later. Fritz could not stop lecturing his son, as though he wanted to recover the lost years of bringing him up. “You must do your duty every day without complaining,” he said, using as an example all the workers who got to their factories early in the morning as though eager to begin working. This frenzy of work was impressive. There were construction sites everywhere in Frankfurt, swarming with activity at all hours of day and night. Peter had never seen that in South Africa.