Peter confessed that he was more interested by the trip to Europe than by the meeting with Fritz. After fourteen years of silence, the reunion seemed almost impossible. Peter was irritated by his father’s conduct toward women. Fritz played the role of seducer. He amused himself by trying to pick up women with his friend Harry Hermsdorf of the CIA. As for Fritz, he was sorry that his son was not conducting himself in a more docile manner. When they played chess, Fritz felt a fierce desire to win. He hoped that Peter would stay in Germany and was absolutely determined to find a position for him in the chemical or pharmaceutical industry. But Peter had no intention of staying in a country that was not his own, even though he spoke the language very well. At the end of three months, he decided to leave. He went from Frankfurt to Venice by bicycle, then took a boat, and was back in South Africa in January 1954.
Peter was not unaware of the fact that his father had worked for the Americans during the war, but he did not know any of the details of the story. “If something serious happens to you in life, speak to the American authorities and tell them that you are the son of George Wood,” was all Fritz had said. In June 1953, Peter had been to some parties in the American zone and had been able to see that his father had many friends in the CIA (Peter spoke English with them, pleased to see that his father did not understand everything they said). But at no time had it been possible to speak seriously with him about his past. Fritz preferred to talk about other things. He asked his son, for example, about the “prospects for the cement market in South Africa,” or advised him to join the Masons. Even in the presence of his own son, Fritz Kolbe hid himself behind a smokescreen.
Washington, 1953
Allen Dulles was appointed Director of the CIA on February 26, 1953. He had left the world of intelligence in late 1945 to resume his career as a Wall Street lawyer and to head the Council on Foreign Relations. General Eisenhower had been inaugurated as president of the United States in January 1953. With the return of the Republicans to power, the Dulles family was rewarded for its commitment and loyalty: John Foster, Allen’s older brother, was the new secretary of state. His younger sister Eleanor coordinated Berlin matters in the State Department. In a long portrait of Allen Dulles published in the New York Times Magazine on March 29, 1953, there were three paragraphs on one of the greatest “coups” of his career: During the war, Dulles had got hold of a German spy named “George Wood, the most valuable and the most prolific source of secret intelligence out of Germany.” Some years later, in September 1959, Allen Dulles was presented in the magazine True as “America’s global Sherlock,” “the man who stole two thousand six hundred secret documents from the Nazi Foreign Ministry.”
Since the end of the war, the reputation of Allen Dulles had rested to an appreciable degree on his encounter with Fritz Kolbe. In December 1945, when Dulles had resigned to return to the practice of law in New York, General John Magruder, one of the heads of the OSS, had written these words of farewelclass="underline" “It is with a deep sense of loss that I accept your resignation…. As you know, the head of the British Intelligence Service credits you with the outstanding intelligence job on the Allied side in this war. That recognition would have been due as a result alone of the steady flow of intelligence from Bern and especially the Kappa-Wood material…” In July 1946, President Truman had awarded Allen Dulles the Medal of Merit for his good and loyal services and had particularly congratulated him for three pieces of information sent from Bern: the location of the base in Peenemünde where the V-2s were made (May 1943), the launch sites for “rocket bombs” in the Pas-de-Calais, and the regular reports of the results of Allied bombing raids on German cities. Except for Peenemünde, this information had all come from Fritz Kolbe.
Fritz was more than a little proud to see his old friend from Bern occupying a position of the first rank in the United States. The two men remained in touch, and Allen Dulles sought out news of Fritz whenever he could. This purely friendly relation was no longer based on the feeling of being engaged in the same battles. As much as he was an anticommunist, Fritz equally detested imperial and triumphant America. He was hostile to nuclear deterrence, in favor of a “middle way between capitalism and socialism,” and had nothing but contempt for “the prosperity devoid of spirituality” embodied by the United States. He was not fascinated by the CIA and what it symbolized. Nothing makes it possible to determine his reaction to the coups d’état fomented by the CIA in Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954. There is no surviving statement from him about the protection provided by the CIA to former Nazis or even SS officers. But he remained very close to Allen Dulles, who had never dropped him.
Stratford, Connecticut, spring 1954
In April 1954, Fritz traveled to the United States to negotiate the terms of a new employment contract. Through his friend Harry Hermsdorf, he had learned that a small Connecticut company, the Wright Power Saw & Tool Corporation, was looking for a sales representative in Europe, based in Switzerland. This company made various models of power and chain saws with pneumatic motors. It is not impossible that Allen Dulles had intervened to help Fritz secure this position.
In a letter to Rudolf Pechel, Fritz described this new experience in a few words: “I am in the technical department, where the saws are repaired. It is necessary to know things of this kind in order to do my work in Europe. But I ask myself countless questions: all this technical jargon, and everything is in English!” In a letter to Ernst Kocherthaler, Fritz wondered who on earth would buy these chain saws: “The market is not good.” To get a good understanding of the material that he was going to be promoting in Europe, Fritz had to spend two months training in the forests of Connecticut. The chain saws were too heavy for him. The woods were infested with snakes.
The contract was signed in June 1954. Fritz was paid a salary of $250 a month. On this trip to the United States, he had made a detour to Washington to visit Allen Dulles. The highs and the lows of his career did not prevent him from maintaining his good humor: Peter Sichel, who put him up during his stay in the capital, recalls that “Fritz amused himself by climbing the trees in the garden to show me what he could do.” Fritz crossed the Atlantic on a steamer to return to Europe. He was carrying some chain saws in his luggage.
EPILOGUE
On July 20, 1961, a plaque was dedicated at the Foreign Ministry in Bonn honoring the diplomats who had resisted Hitler. The head of the German diplomatic service at the time, Heinrich von Brentano, delivered a speech on “the force of conscience inspired by God.” Ten names were engraved on the large stone panel—including Ulrich von Hassell, Adam von Trott zu Solz, Friedrich-Werner Graf von der Schulenburg—but not that of Fritz Kolbe. If he had been executed before 1945, his name might have been added to the official list of the “just.”
Allen Dulles had been able to do nothing to secure the readmission of Fritz Kolbe into the service of the ministry, even though he had very good personal contacts with Chancellor Adenauer. There remained the possibility of a rehabilitation “as a matter of honor.” This idea had germinated in the mind of Ernst Kocherthaler who found the injustice done to his friend intolerable. In November 1964, Kocherthaler—who had only two years left to live—wrote to Allen Dulles to ask for his support in an approach he was in the process of making to Eugen Gerstenmaier, president of the Bundestag and former member of the Protestant Church opposed to Nazism. In early spring 1965, after reading the file that Kocherthaler had sent him, Gerstenmaier signed a brief document aimed at “exonerating Fritz Kolbe from the suspicions weighing on him.”