danger and disillusionment: “People no longer cared how the war ended, just as long as it ended. They didn’t care who won,” according to Mary Bancroft’s German housekeeper (Bancroft was an agent and Allen Dulles’s mistress in Switzerland) in the summer of 1943. Mary Bancroft, Autobiography of a Spy (New York: Morrow, 1983), p. 178.
“one of the last times”: Account by August von Kageneck, wounded on the Russian front in the summer of 1942, in Examen de conscience (Paris: Perrin, 1996), p. 81.
finally near Tempelhof airport: Foreign Ministry, Fritz Kolbe file.
telephone number was 976.981: Portrait of Fritz Kolbe (2 pages), August 19, 1943, OSS Bern, National Archives. A few months later the Americans corrected the telephone number, which ended in 0, not 1. But they never used it.
of being “taken away”: Abgeholt: the word alone summed up the terror inspired by the Gestapo.
thoroughly, nothing more serious: Autobiographical document, May 15, 1945.
Chapter 6
by a personal chauffeur: Allen Dulles’s chauffeur was a Frenchman named Édouard Pignarre, totally loyal and extraordinarily discreet. Source: Cordelia Dodson-Hood, conversation with the author, Washington, March 21, 2002.
ambassador to Switzerland: The details about Allen Dulles and the Bern office of the OSS are drawn from several sources. An internal undated 36-page OSS document describes in detail the activities of the Bern office during the war (titled Bern, National Archives). The two standard biographies of Allen Dulles (by James Srodes and Peter Grose) as well as extensive correspondence with James Srodes, have also been very helpful. The memoirs of Mary Bancroft, colleague and mistress of Allen Dulles in Switzerland during the war (Autobiography of a Spy), are full of descriptions and anecdotes.
a few decades earlier: Dulles was “well born, well bred, well connected.” John Waller, The Unseen War in Europe (New York: Random House, 1996), p. 272.
a Wall Street lawyer: Allen Dulles worked at Sullivan & Cromwell, a firm founded in 1879 that still exists. According to Peter Sichel, “he was a rainmaker.” Interview, May 25, 2002, New York.
a friend to Germany: This reputation injured Dulles, who was often accused after the Second World War of having been close to certain German financial interests compromised with Nazism (notably the Schrœder Bank in London, connected to the banker Kurt von Schrœder in Cologne, who had helped finance Hitler’s rise to power).
seizing the southern zone: Since June 1941, there had been a German customs control station at Annemasse. Its mission was to exercise control over goods and people moving between Switzerland and France. It frequently moved along the border. On November 11, 1942, three days after the Allied landing in North Africa, the Wehrmacht did away with the unoccupied zone. The French-Swiss border was thenceforth completely closed.
now based in Algiers: Lieutenant-Colonel Pourchot, head of the Deuxième Bureau in Switzerland, became one of Dulles’s preferred informants. “Shortly after the Deuxième Bureau was suppressed by Vichy its financing was taken over jointly by OSS and the American Military Attaché, General Legge.” Internal OSS Bern report on France (French Intelligence), undated, National Archives.
disposal in occupied France: Pierre de Bénouville, of the Combat network, was a regular visitor to Herrengasse 23, where he was fed and lodged.
mistress of Admiral Canaris: Wilhelm Canaris (1887–1945) was one of the most enigmatic figures of the Third Reich. An ultraconservative nationalist, he nevertheless tried discreetly to counter Hitler’s belligerent plans. His double game finally came into the open and he lost his post in February 1944. He was executed in April 1945. See Heinz Höhne, Canaris, tr. J. Maxwell Brownjohn (New York: Doubleday, 1979).
military intelligence (Abwehr): The Abwehr, which designated all the intelligence services of the German army, was expert in counterespionage. The agency was established by Prussia in 1866, during the war with Austria.
also became preferred sources: In a letter of December 10, 1943, Hugh R. Wilson (a high official in the OSS) wrote to Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle: “On the second of November we informed our representative in Bern that the Joint Chiefs of Staff had instructed us to do what we could to detach the satellite countries, Bulgaria, Hungary and Rumania immediately from the Axis.” Foreign Relations of the United States 1943, vol. 1.
Lieutenant-Colonel Roger Masson: Lieutenant-Colonel Masson’s services had several irons in the fire: their contacts with the Americans did not keep them from sustained dialogue with the German intelligence services, headed by Walter Schellenberg, who went to Switzerland several times in 1943.
a large German community: The Swiss NSDAP had been banned since the assassination of its leader Wilhelm Gustloff by the Yugoslavian student David Frankfurter in February 1936 in Davos. Nazi Germany attached little importance to the country’s neutrality, as demonstrated by the 1935 kidnapping of the German pacifist militant Berthold Jacob by German agents in Basel.
(Sicherheitsdienst, foreign intelligence services: Headed by Walter Schellenberg, the SD was under the Central Security Service of the Reich, the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA), another name for Heinrich Himmler’s police empire. The SD was Department VI of the RSHA, the Gestapo Department IV.
“unconscious” of the Germans: See Bancroft, Autobiography of a Spy.
Ecumenical Council of Churches: Willem Visser’t Hooft: his friends called him simply Wim, and in Dulles’s secret correspondence with Washington, he was merely number 474. Sauerbruch had number 835 for the OSS, while Kocherthaler seems not to have had a number.
Dulles’s close collaborators: This visit was full of meaning for Dulles: The threat of a shift of German liberal elites toward communism was very real. This appeal was all the more troubling because it came from a man, von Trott, who had had some of his schooling in England and knew the United States well.
“unconditional surrender” of Germany: Policy defined at the Casablanca conference between Roosevelt and Churchill, from January 24 to 26, 1943. This strategy seemed dangerous to Allen Dulles because in his view it risked humiliating the Germans and driving them into the arms of the Russians. “We rendered impossible internal revolution in Germany and thereby prolonged the war and the destruction,” Dulles wrote after the war. Letter of January 3, 1949 to Chester Wilmot (Australian war correspondent), Allen W. Dulles papers, Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton.
contact for the future: Relations between Allen Dulles and Prince Hohenlohe were used after the war by Soviet propaganda to discredit after the fact American policy during the war. See James Srodes, Allen Dulles, Master of Spies (Washington, DC: Regnery, 1999), pp. 261–67.