(“The Story of George”): “Allen Dulles asked me for a ‘story’ about George. He says that you are too modest to write it yourself.” Letter from Ernst Kocherthaler to Fritz Kolbe, July 4, 1945, personal archives of Fritz Kolbe.
in the German resistance: Letter from Fritz Kolbe to Toni Singer, September 30, 1946, personal archives of Fritz Kolbe.
Ernst Kocherthaler in July: Letter to Ernst Kocherthaler, written in Wiesbaden, July 2, 1945, personal archives of Fritz Kolbe.
enterprise of collective mystification: “Everybody and his brother, it seems, are writing their memoirs of the Hitler era.” Morgan, “The Spy the Nazis Missed.”
film or a book: In the late 1960s, Gerald Mayer began working seriously with Fritz Kolbe on a proposed book. He had the CIA in Washington send him a complete file on the activities of “Wood” during the war. Fritz’s death in 1971 put an end to the work. “I have seen George Wood in Bern on several occasions. He looks very fit and I hope to be of help to him in the writing of his memoirs,” Mayer wrote to Allen Dulles on July 14, 1968. Allen W. Dulles Papers. In October 1972, Maria Fritsch wrote a memo in which she said that “death struck Fritz down at a time when he was ready to write his memoirs as he had hoped to do for a long time.” Private archives of Martin and Gudrun Fritsch, Berlin.
for the magazine True: Correspondence between Gerald Mayer and Fritz Kolbe, September 1949 to January 1950, personal archives of Fritz Kolbe. True was an abundantly illustrated mass market men’s magazine owned by the Fawcett group. Edward P. Morgan later had a career as a political journalist and television commentator.
Game of a Diplomat: Personal archives of Fritz Kolbe; Allen W. Dulles Papers.
unsuccessfully attempted to prevent: “I am sorry about George’s article as I fear the publication in Switzerland at this time will do him a good bit of harm and this is really very tragic.” Letter from Allen Dulles to Ernst Kocherthaler, April 20, 1951, Allen W. Dulles Papers.
major intellectual, Rudolf Pecheclass="underline" Rudolf Pechel had been arrested in 1942 because of an article that had displeased Goebbels. He was born in Güstrow in 1888. He had been a naval officer before the First World War. Close to Moeller van den Bruck in the 1920s, he had later moved away from nationalism. During the war, he frequented the most active members of the German opposition (Carl Goerdeler, Wilhelm Leuschner). In 1947, Pechel wrote a book titled German Resistance (Deutscher Widerstand) in order to prove that there had been forms of rebellion in his country. He spent the end of his life in Switzerland, where he died in 1961.
journal circulated in secret: German Federal Archives, Koblenz, Rudolf Pechel file.
Golo Mann, Wilhelm Röpke: Carlo Schmid (1896–1979): major postwar Social Democratic leader, he was also an activist for Franco-German reconciliation and the construction of Europe. Golo Mann (1909–94): historian, son of Thomas Mann. Wilhelm Röpke (1899–1966): economist, one of the spiritual fathers of the “social market economy.”
been a patriotic gesture: In their democratic and pro-Western declarations of faith, Rudolf Pechel, and Ernst Kocherthaler as well, were in sympathy with the Moral Rearmament movement founded by the American minister Frank Buchman, who promoted a “world without hatred, without fear, without egotism,” and who had committed himself to a “moral and spiritual reconstruction” of Europe, with the reconciliation of old enemies, particularly France and Germany, as a priority.
acted as a patriot: “I am convinced to have acted as a German patriot in having proved to some Allied personalities I got acquainted with that even in Germany the front of goodwill has existed and still exists.” “The Story of George.”
Republic only in 1968: Article 20, paragraph 4 of the Fundamental Law of the FRG, added to the 1948 Constitution in 1968, stipulated that “all Germans have the right to resist against anyone who undertakes to remove the democratic order, if no other means is possible.”
Lisbon, Stockholm, or Madrid: Mary Alice Gallin, German Resistance to Hitler: Ethical and Religious Factors (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1962). Hasso von Etzdorf was a conservative diplomat opposed to the Nazis during the Second World War.
aim of saving lives: Bancroft, Autobiography of a Spy, p. 195.
soldier would have done: In a speech delivered on July 20, 1964 for the twentieth anniversary of the plot against Hitler, Eugen Gerstenmaier pointed out that the Germans who resisted Nazism had had “constantly to weigh the balance between rebellion against the government and loyalty to the people and the army.” Hans-Jakob Stehle, “Der Mann, der den Krieg verkürzen wollte.” “They’ll die, that’s what they deserve,” Fritz had said to Adolphe Jung about the Germans. See Chapter 5.
were particularly compromised: Among them was Werner von Bargen, former envoy of the Reich to Belgium, who shared responsibility for the deportation of Jews from Belgium during the war. Döscher, Verschworene Gesellschaft.
was already too late: Ibid.
Berlin in April 1948: According to Richard Helms and William Hood, Fritz Kolbe received a monthly pension from the CIA starting a few years later when he settled in Switzerland in the mid-1950s. A Look Over My Shoulder. According to Peter Kolbe, Fritz also received a pension from the Foreign Ministry in the last years of his life.
employer terminated discussions: Letter from Ernst Kocherthaler to Allen Dulles, February 20, 1953, Allen W. Dulles Papers.
life and never complained: “He was not plaintive in any sense. It was just those little things that an individual lets out, that shows that you were hurt by the fact that you have been thrown aside.” Richard Helms, interview with Linda Martin for The History Channel, September 2003. “Kolbe never expressed any feelings of bitterness or regret about his post-war fate.” Tom Polgar, letter to the author, May 13, 2002.
see his son again: Handwritten document written by Maria Fritsch in October 1972. Collection of Martin and Gudrun Fritsch.
him which never came: All these details come from an interview of Peter Kolbe in Sydney, November 2001.
Hermsdorf of the CIA: Relations between Fritz and his third wife, Maria, seem to have gone through some rough times in the 1950s. In her private diaries of the time, Maria confided her romantic unhappiness. At the end of her life, she admitted never having fully penetrated Fritz’s personality: “he came from another planet,” she said. Interview with Gudrun and Martin Fritsch, Berlin, January 2002.