NOTES
Introduction
stirrings of their conscience: A quotation from Winston Churchill, speaking in 1946 of the conspirators in the failed plot against Hitler on July 20, 1944.
source of the war: Memorandum for the President, June 22, 1945, to President Truman from General Donovan, National Archives, College Park (entry 190c, microfilm 1642, roll 83).
agent in World War II Richard Helms (with William Hood), A Look Over My Shoulder (New York: Random House, 2003), p. 37.
done something against Nazism: See Peter Steinbach, Widerstand im Widerstreit (Paderborn, 2001).
so-called simple people: Interview conducted by Dominique Simonnet, L’Express, December 28, 2000.
Prologue
head of the OSS: The Office of Strategic Services was established in June 1942 and placed under the command of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Its role was to take charge of “unconventional warfare”—in other words, to gather intelligence and organize clandestine operations against the Axis powers. William Donovan, a Wall Street lawyer and a Republican, but above all a man of action and a First World War hero, was chosen by President Roosevelt to head the agency, which he did until 1945.
dated January 10, 1944: Memorandum for the President, National Archives (entry 190c, microfilm 1642, roll 18).
extraordinarily difficult to obtain: The distinction was already being made between the interception of enemy signals (signals intelligence, or SIGINT) and espionage based on human sources (human intelligence, HUMINT).
view to “liquidating” it: This German diplomatic cable had been transmitted to Washington on December 30, 1943, signed by Eitel Friedrich von Moellhausen, assistant to the Reich’s ambassador in Rome, Rudolf Rahn. See Robert Katz, Black Sabbath: A Journey Through a Crime Against Humanity (London: Barker, 1969). Thanks to Astrid M. Eckert, Berlin.
“be the only winner”: Message from the Swiss bureau of the OSS in Bern to Washington headquarters dated January 4, 1944, based on a cable from Ambassador von Weizsäcker of December 13, 1943. “Weizsäcker reports that the Pope hopes that the Nazis will hold on the Russian Front and dreams of a union of the old civilized countries of the West with insulation of Bolshevism towards the East.” Memorandum for the President, January 10, 1944, National Archives.
went over to the enemy: Message from the OSS Bern bureau, December 31, 1943, National Archives.
United States, Henry Wallace: Memorandum for the President, January 11, 1944. The Germans knew the content of a conversation between Vice President Wallace and the Swiss ambassador to Washington, his brother-in-law. The conversation had to do with the tensions between the Western allies (Great Britain and the United States) and the USSR. The Germans apparently had a good source in the Foreign Ministry in Bern. This affair probably hastened the disgrace of Wallace, who was replaced on the November 1944 election ticket by Harry Truman.
Chapter 1
“will also be prohibited”: The “law for the protection of German blood and German honor” and the “law on German citizenship” had been adopted during an NSDAP congress in Nuremberg. They laid the foundation for the total and definitive exclusion of the Jews from German society.
von Welczeck, the ambassador: Germany maintained embassies in the major capitals: Madrid, London, Paris, Rome, Washington, Moscow, Tokyo, and even Rio de Janeiro. Everywhere else, diplomatic representation did not have the title of embassy (Botschaft) but that of legation (Gesandtschaft), and the head of mission did not have the title of ambassador (Botschafter) but that of “envoy” (Gesandte).
A legation is a diplomatic mission maintained by a government in a country in which it does not have an embassy. The head of the legation, like an ambassador, is accredited to the sovereign or the head of state.
The Congress of Vienna (March 19, 1815) had distinguished two classes of diplomatic agents: ambassador (and legate or nuncio) and chargé d’affaires (accredited only to the foreign minister of the country). The Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle (November 21, 1818) added an intermediate class for resident ministers and extraordinary envoys. It is to this class that belongs a head of legation, who has the character of a plenipotentiary minister. He is addressed as “Minister,” or, by custom, “Your Excellency.” Thanks to Serge Pétillot-Niémetz, chargé de mission for the Dictionary of the Académie Française.
Count Johannes von Welczeck (1878–1974), ambassador to Madrid, was a diplomat of the old school. He had joined the ministry before the 1914 war, a period when a diplomatic career was still restricted to rich aristocrats able to pay their own way.
Biarritz, or Hendaye: German Foreign Ministry, Johannes von Welczeck file.
figures in the Spanish capitaclass="underline" Ernst Kocherthaler was vice president of the petroleum traders association in Spain. He represented the interests of major oil companies: first Shell and then the Soviet oil conglomerates favored by Madrid since the late 1920s. He was born in Madrid in 1894. His father, who came from a family of modest Jewish merchants of Würtemberg, had amassed a considerable fortune by carrying on trade between Germany and Spain. The family had returned to settle in Berlin at the end of the nineteenth century. Ernst Kocherthaler had converted to Protestantism as an adolescent. He had studied law and economics in Berlin before joining the prestigious Warburg Bank in Hamburg. In the early 1920s, he attended international financial negotiations on the stabilization of the mark as an expert. On this occasion, he met the economist John Maynard Keynes, with whom he had become rather close. He had settled in Spain in the mid-1920s. Source: private documents of the Kocherthaler family (Sylvia and Gérard Roth, Geneva).
of Jews in Germany: Hans-Jürgen Döscher, Das Auswärtige Amt im Dritten Reich (Berlin: Siedler, 1987).
of a Baltic beach: The Kraft durch Freude organization was established in November 1933 in order to organize the free time of the masses, particularly through tourism and vacation camps.
his perfectly polished shoes: “My father always had perfectly polished shoes.” Peter Kolbe, Sydney, November 2001.