It is not certain whether Fritz had wanted to get a document like this. In a long letter to Ernst Kocherthaler dated January 10, 1965, Fritz revealed his deepest feelings:
The members of the resistance are honored once a year, on 20 July. But a good member of the resistance is one who is dead. Whoever had ears to hear and eyes to see knew what the Nazi madness meant, even before 1933. Those who didn’t want to see or understand anything continued their successful careers in the ministry…. My aim was to help my poor nation end the war sooner and to cut short the suffering of the people in the camps. I don’t know if I succeeded. But what I did manage to do was to make the Americans see that there were people in Germany who were resisting the regime without asking for anything in return. People who acted purely out of conviction. No one has the right to give me good marks for my conduct during that period. No one can withdraw from me or grant to me my honor.
Fritz Kolbe died from gallbladder cancer on February 16, 1971 in Bern. A dozen people attended the funeral. Among them, two unknown men laid a wreath on behalf of Richard Helms, director of the CIA. Shortly before his death in 1969, Allen Dulles had written: “I always felt it was unfair that the new Germany failed to recognize the high integrity of George’s purpose and the very considerable part which he played in the eventual overthrow of Hitler and Hitlerism. Some day I hope that any injustice will be righted, and that his true role will be properly recognized in his own country.”
A REMEMBRANCE OF FRITZ KOLBE
In December 1945, Richard Helms started to turn over his responsibilities as Chief of the Berlin Base of the Office of Strategic Services, which later became the CIA, to me. Dick had held this position ever since Allen Dulles had returned to the United States in the late summer of 1945. Now Dick himself was going back and I, previously head of a special unit, would be in interim charge of the entire Berlin office until a new chief was named.
Among the cases Dick turned over to me was a special one: Fritz Kolbe, alias George Wood. He briefed me on Fritz’s work during the war, and the necessity of protecting him both from German reprisals and the quite real risk of Soviet kidnapping. He praised Fritz’s ability to put us in touch with reliable people in Berlin, as well as Fritz’s eagerness to help the prosecution of Nazi criminals in Nürnberg. He told me that we had tried to dissuade him from doing this, since it might expose him to reprisals, but that Fritz was determined to even the score.
I met Fritz shortly thereafter, in a sort of official turnover from one case officer to another, but I did not get to know him well—Harry Hersmdorf, an intelligence officer whose responsibilities largely concerned helping former members of the German resistance and their widows, had day-to-day responsibility for Fritz’s case. Harry was a big, generous, and charming man who quickly became a close friend to Fritz and his companion, Maria Fritsch. He established an easy camaraderie with Fritz and his circle of friends.
Berlin was exciting and sad at the same time in this first harsh winter after the war. The city was almost totally destroyed, especially the center. Endless groups of women were involved in stacking up the stones and bricks that lay all over the landscape, at time creating virtual mountains. These Trümmerfrauen are an indelible memory to anyone who lived in Berlin during that period. We worked hard, but also played hard, spending evenings entertaining “reliable” Germans to get a better grasp of what had happened to them, personally and emotionally, in the long nightmare they had lived through. A good number of these Germans were friends of Fritz Kolbe, who usually accompanied them to my house, where they had a chance to be warm and have a good meal and plenty of alcohol, coffee, and cigarettes, the three things most highly valued at that period. This is how I got to know Eugen Gerstenmaier, who ultimately became a good friend, as well as Gertrud von Heimerdinger and Professor Sauerbruch. I entertained Sauerbruch quite frequently in my house as well, a complex man who consumed prodigious quantities of my cognac.
I finally got to know Fritz better only when we decided that he had to leave Berlin for his own safety. He was altogether too foolhardy to be left there on his own, not realizing what a desirable target he was for the Russians. I finally drove him out of Berlin in a Jeep, disguised in the odd uniform worn by American civilians working for the occupation authority. He also had an official document to justify his drive through the Russian Zone to Helmstedt and ultimately to Frankfurt. It was a six-hour drive, and we had plenty of time to talk—that is how we became friends. I only saw him three or four times after that. The time I remember most fondly is greeting Maria and him on their arrival in New York, which coincided with my return to Washington on retiring from the Army to join SSU (Strategic Service Unit), one of the successor organizations of OSS, which ultimately became the CIA. I spent three or four days with the two of them, showing them around New York. They also visited Washington in 1954; we spent a lot of time together reminiscing about the war and discussing the evolution of Germany since the war.
Fritz was the easiest man to establish rapport with. He was a straight arrow, looked you in the eye, and was neither shy nor aggressive. He was happy in his skin, healthy, physically active and proud of it. He was no intellectual, no great thinker, but a great doer. To be active was everything; he simply had no end of physical energy, which needed an outlet. He had no pretense and when discussing his wartime activities, he regarded them his duty as a patriotic German. Like most great men, he was rather simple; he knew what he had to do and did not give it a second thought. Though he regretted not being able to get back into the German Diplomatic Service, he was not bitter about it. He felt that he had done his duty and he was willing to accept what fate had in store for him. He was not even much put out when the friend to whom he had entrusted his savings disappeared. Oddly enough, Fritz told me in 1954, his friend did turn up ultimately and returned the money.
I have been approached a number of times in the last fifty years by authors and TV producers who wanted to do a book or film about this man, who without any doubt was one of the greatest, if not the greatest, source of “human intelligence” information in the Second World War. Very little came of all this, until Lucas Delattre contacted me three years ago. It was obvious from our first contact, and his visit to Bordeaux to make my acquaintance, that finally someone understood the need to tell this story. Fortunately Lucas also possessed the other qualities necessary to do the job: intellectual curiosity, a background in German history and culture, and the professional expertise of a newspaperman. It was fun to be of a little help to him, putting him in contact with the few survivors and answering whatever questions he had. It was also great to be reminded of the many people who had a hand in this operation and with whom I had worked at one time or another during and after the war. I had long forgotten Eduard Wätjen, Eduard Schulte, Gertrud von Heimerdinger, and Gertrud’s sister, who also worked on the courier desk at the Foreign Office. Neither of my old colleagues Harry Hermsdorf and Fred Stalder, who was transferred to my unit in Berlin from Bern after the war, were around to help with this story.
Finally there is an interesting lesson to learn from Fritz’s story, which has been repeated many times since. Good intelligence sources are usually those who, for ideological reasons, do not agree with the policies of their government. They make contact with “the opposition” and volunteer their information. In this manner the Russians and we have gathered high-level intelligence over the last eighty years. Only rarely are “agents” recruited through subterfuge or the offer of money or blackmail. Ideology is still the great motivator and Fritz Kolbe is the ideal example of such a freedom fighter. The German government finally recognized the service he has rendered and dedicated a room to him in the German Foreign Office in Berlin.