By Mark Fritz / Globe Staff / March 11, 2001
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He was a civil servant in an uncivilized society, an underling assigned to incinerate the secret messages that circulated among his sinister superiors. He was a small cog in a big bureaucracy built by madmen to murder millions.
Fritz Kolbe hated his job. But what could one man do? Damage, he decided. Serious damage.
In the summer of 1943, Kolbe stuck a stack of papers into a pouch and took a train from Berlin to Bern, the Swiss capital.
He met Allen Dulles, a Wall Street lawyer hired to build an American espionage network in a neutral nation that had become a flea market infested with spies-for-hire, amoral entrepreneurs who smuggled goods and laundered cash without choosing sides.
Kolbe charged no fee for a commodity so rare it often went unrecognized: the truth. His information was staggering.
Hitler was ordering the liquidation of Jews in Rome. Stalin was installing socialism as the Red Army pushed into Europe. A spy who penetrated the British embassy in Turkey was feeding the Nazis details about the planned landing at Normandy.
There was more. He pinpointed Japanese plants building war planes, machine guns, cannons of all caliber. He told his handlers to expect a new Nazi weapon: a rocket that would roar 50 miles into the stratosphere and slam two tons of warhead into some shocked city block.
But to spymasters practiced in the art of deception, Kolbe was simply the man who knew too much. Too much to be trusted. It wasn't until well after the war that Americans could see just what a weapon they'd had in this bald-headed bureaucrat whose 5-foot-7-inch frame belied the sinewy build of a bantamweight boxer and the nervy bluster of a cornered badger.
Fritz Kolbe's 1,600 dispatches are among the nearly 500,000 documents the CIA has declassified since last June. In 1999, former president Bill Clinton appointed a commission to oversee the unsealing of such records, part of a global effort to unlock the last stash of secrets about World War II war crimes. The result? A flood of new facts about a historic time, says Gerhard Weinberg, head of the commission's Historical Advisory Panel.
''One of the most spectacular examples is this man in the German Foreign Ministry who gathered this vast amount of information,'' says Weinberg, of Kolbe. ''That this happened has been known for years. What was not known was the enormous extent and value of the material.''
Kolbe's records offer a stark, fly-on-the-wall account of a much-mythologized war being waged in real time. They show how unnervingly fast events unfolded and how quickly decisions were made, without the benefit of historical hindsight.
Hurriedly stapled, badly typed, with handwritten asides and personal chit-chat woven throughout, the declassified documents give a flawed, human intimacy and contemporary immediacy to something that occurred before most Americans were born.
Kolbe's canon of covert cables and the gnawing doubt that kept much of it from having an impact is a timeless cautionary tale for a trade best known for its embarrassments, whether it's the CIA's postwar employment of Hitler's secret agents, or the recent discovery that an FBI veteran had been a salaried Russian mole.
Did Kolbe have any regrets? ''No, never. He would do it again exactly as he did, with no recognition,'' says his son, Peter, a 68-year-old retired geologist living in suburban Sydney, Australia. ''I think the central philosophical question of my father's life would be: At what point do you take action to betray your country?''
A career civil servant
Fritz Kolbe was 14 years old when World War I erupted and 18 by the time Germany was reduced to ruins. He became a career civil servant, first in the rail ministry and then the foreign office of the Weimar Republic, the postwar democracy that crumbled to the nationalist creed and anti-Semitic screed of Adolf Hitler.
Peter Kolbe says his father had a circle of acquaintances, some in the Roman Catholic Church, with whom he discussed deep questions about the fascist regime. He remembers nothing of his mother, who contracted tuberculosis shortly after he was born and spent her last years in quarantine, dying when he was four.
He does remember when he and his father left Hitler behind for a job in the German embassy in South Africa. Then Hitler invaded Poland in 1939 and South Africa joined Britain in declaring war on Germany. The embassy had to go.
''I remember helping him burn some papers at night,'' says Peter Kolbe. ''Me, a seven-year-old boy, up all night burning papers.''
Kolbe left his son with friends in colonial Africa and boarded a freighter for new duties with the Third Reich.
The Nazis had opened three concentration camps and were euthanizing the disabled. Jews had been stripped of all rights.
In Berlin, Kolbe worked as an assistant to Karl Ritter, the Foreign Office liaison to Germany's supreme military headquarters. Message traffic crossed his desk from 40 Nazi outposts throughout the Pacific and European theaters.
Kolbe tried to get information to the Allies early on through his church acquaintances, primarily a man named Schreiber, the director of a monastery outside Stuttgart. They had no luck.
It wasn't until 1943 that Kolbe, with the help of a woman in the Foreign Office named Maria von Hammerding, got on the list of couriers assigned to deliver the diplomatic pouch between Berlin and the German Embassy in Switzerland.
Kolbe made surreptitious contact in Bern with businessman Ernst Kocherthaler, a German Jew living in Switzerland with a Spanish passport. The two had become friends when Kolbe was a vice consul in Madrid.
They went to the British embassy, but the British spurned Kolbe as a plant. He'd recall that the British laughed when he said he wanted no money. Nobody sold out for free.
So Kolbe turned to the Americans. He met with Dulles, a tweedy and charming New Yorker who had worked in the foreign service in Europe during World War I.
He was now working for the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA. The OSS had been heavily dependent on British intelligence, but Dulles was determined to build his own network.
Kolbe showed Dulles mimeographed telegrams that had the stamps, seals, and initials of authenticity. They included blunt assessments of German morale, statistics on sabotage by the French resistance, minutes of meetings between foreign envoys and German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop.
Dulles, too, was skeptical. ''I thought that at first that these documents were given to me in the [German] hope that we would cable them verbatim and furnish the Germans with an opportunity for breaking our cipher,'' he wrote in a 1948 affidavit seeking a US visa for Kolbe.
Still, Dulles enlisted Kolbe and gave him a code name: George Wood. His dispatches were dubbed The Boston Series -- for no apparent reason other than it was likely the next name on an often whimsical list of code words.
Kolbe made at least five trips to Bern, on one occasion getting a camera so he could microfilm material. Other times he stuffed documents in letters he asked colleagues to mail in Switzerland, pretending he was writing a paramour.
''The risks Kolbe took were incalculable,'' Dulles wrote in the affidavit, which is among his personal papers archived at his alma mater, Princeton University. ''If any envelope had been opened he would, of course, have been lost....''
Some of the reports were carbon copies that Kolbe was assigned to burn. ''He, of course, made a great show of destroying a great many of them which were of no interest to me, keeping only the most secret,'' Dulles wrote.
Once, von Ribbentrop was conferring with Heinrich Himmler, Hitler's sinister interior minister, when they called for a file that Kolbe happened to be photographing. Only Kolbe's light-footed agility allowed him to slip the dossier into its proper place before an aide entered the file room, Dulles said.
Kolbe's cables depict almost day-by-day a war without end, with the Soviets supplanting the Axis as the enemy, to the point where the old foe began to be seen as a key tool against the new one, leading to moral compromises that future generations would debate as survivors of the era die by the day.
From Axis-occupied Italy, Kolbe's reports show a beleaguered Benito Mussolini pathetically seeking an audience with Hitler while depending on Nazi occupiers to defend what was left of an army depleted by desertions. ''Mussolini is believed to be very often disheartened,'' one memo said dryly of the dictator whose people would eventually kill him.
The bureaucratic banality of the memoranda makes the content all the more creepy. A November 1944 dispatch notes that 27,000 Hungarian Jews ''still capable of walking'' would be shipped ''in lots'' to meet labor shortages in Germany. The remaining 120,000 would remain behind pending a decision about their ''final destination'' by an SS commandant named Eichmann.
In the dispatch sent to Washington, Dulles noted that Eichmann is ''not further identified.'' This was likely an early reference to Adolf Eichmann, head of the Gestapo's Jewish section. Eichmann, a true bureaucrat, had operated from behind his desk in Berlin, fussing over the details of how to efficiently exterminate 6 million people. The bean-counting butcher didn't become a public figure until he surfaced in Budapest to oversee the massacre of Hungarian Jews.
Good as Kolbe's information was, there were often enormous time lags between the time he filed it and the time it reached its destination. Take Hitler's Oct. 6, 1943, order to his top Nazi in Italy to round up the 8,000 Jews in Rome. ''They are to be liquidated,'' the report said. Other dispatches showed there was disagreement over taking that step, with some officials arguing that the victims should instead be used as laborers.
It took months for Kolbe's message to make it to Washington; the British intercepted the same extermination order -- albeit with virtually no context -- a week before it was actually carried out.
Richard Helms, who worked with Dulles and Kolbe in the OSS and ran the CIA from 1966 until 1973, said of Kolbe: ''He was absolutely gripped with trying to get rid of the Nazi elements. By the time the Americans and the British got around to believing this was the real thing, the war was so far along that it probably wasn't important.''
British intelligence kept harping on the notion that Kolbe was somehow part of an elaborate Nazi plot, even though, time and again, his reports were confirmed by events.
A full five months after Kolbe delivered his first batch of secrets, OSS chief William ''Wild Bill'' Donovan finally passed some of the reports on to President Franklin D. Roosevelt with a lukewarm endorsement of their credibility. One report even had details about Roosevelt's vice president, Henry Wallace, blabbing to a Swiss envoy about D-Day plans.
Helms says that he, Dulles, and others probably hyped the material to the point where there was a backlash effect on Kolbe's credibility.
''One of the problems with being a writer is you try to sensationalize things; it was Allen Dulles and me and various other people. And there was this argument with the British, and there was this period when the material was not thought of as sound. And we put it aside until we could find out,'' Helms says.
Still, the communiques show that certain information was indeed snapped up by Army and Navy strategists. Dulles himself said ''a vast amount of political material and strategic bombing information'' often arrived ''with only a few days delay,'' particularly when Dulles told Kolbe to focus on intelligence from the Pacific.
Kolbe relayed scores of reports from German attaches to Tokyo describing troop positions, industrial capacity -- even the number of shifts working at fighter-plane factories. As the Allies gained air superiority, Kolbe's reports painted a picture of a Japan so beleaguered that it was lying to its German allies about its setbacks. ''The Japanese claimed a smashing victory,'' one cable noted wryly after a Japanese defeat.
Kolbe also clearly exposed the Nazi spy known as Cicero -- played by James Mason in the film thriller ''Five Fingers'' -- who was actually the butler of the British ambassador in Istanbul.
Even though von Ribbentrop authorized the incredible payment of 300,000 pounds that Cicero demanded, the Nazis ultimately discounted his material as too good to be true.
When Cicero's cover was blown, the British ambassador confronted his valet, who smugly denied the allegations. He was fired, bought a villa in South America and lived in fleeting opulence until his hosts threw him in prison. The Nazis, it emerged, had paid Cicero in counterfeit.
That Washington dawdled on Kolbe's scoops doesn't diminish their significance. He tipped Dulles that German agents were hiding among POWs being repatriated to the Allies, that the Irish had let German spies set up a radio transmitter in Dublin, that the pope's holiday prayer urged Europe to unite behind the Nazis against the godless Soviets.
Kolbe also collected data on the resistance campaigns that were eating away at the Third Reich from within, and the brutal attempts to crush them. In Greece: ''Reprisals were taken for the wiping out of a German company of 120 men. Five hundred Greeks were shot, and (11) villages were destroyed.''
Kolbe's reports noted that ''anti-Semitic activity'' sometimes caused backlash in Nazi-occupied countries. In Hungary, ''The people were said to be unable to comprehend individual instances of harsh treatment of Jews or the ransacking of Jewish shops by Nazi troops. Jews have become an object of pity.''
The dispatches show that all sides were conscious of the coming Cold War well before World War II ended. The nascent superpowers were clearly looking to carve out spheres of influence. Kolbe's cables told of Germans ''fleeing headlong'' from Romania, ''looting and raping and occasionally bartering their arms for liquor'' as the Soviets rolled in to claim what would become one of their satellites.
Eerie prescience pops up throughout the Kolbe collection.
The Germans even had a tip that the Allies planned to wipe out the gorgeous medieval city of Dresden -- more psychologically than strategically significant -- months before Allied bombers incinerated every Gothic spire in sight. And a Swiss official told a German envoy that Roosevelt would invade Europe soon to have a big military triumph heading into the November presidential elections. D-Day came two months later with the Allied landing at Normandy.
Kolbe's dispatches also reflect the war's impact on technology. The blistering evolution of weaponry and a multinational race to harness the atom instilled in Japan a fear that the war would be decided by superior science. ''Japanese expect Americans to use secret weapon,'' said one November 1944 report that presaged by nine months the atom bomb's debut.
Washington seemed taken aback by Kolbe's warning that Germany would soon deploy a rocket that would slam Allied targets with radio-controlled frequency. Kolbe ticked off locations of factories where components were being built; but OSS gurus couldn't find the plants.
In a later dispatch, Kolbe passed along what Allied troops later confirmed: The rockets were being built underground.
On Sept. 8, 1944, the Nazis fired the world's first operational liquid-fuel rocket, the V-2. More than a thousand more would pummel England. Captured V-2 technology provided the foundation for the superpowers' space programs.
Kolbe said other ''V weapons'' were in the works, but the report Dulles sent Washington intimated that such talk might be propaganda. In January 1945, however, Germany successfully tested a prototype of an intercontinental ballistic missile designed to reach North America.
Allied advances nonetheless thwarted Hitler's bid to take the battle to space. ''German morale is deteriorating even in headquarters,'' Kolbe wrote.
Dulles and Kolbe had become aware of a resistance building within the Third Reich. Kolbe longed to help, but Dulles told him he was too important to risk. Yet Kolbe had ''an impulsive and determined nature'' and contacted the others.
The resistance died with a failed attempt to kill Hitler on July 20, 1944. Kolbe, because he'd missed a resistance meeting at which minutes had been kept, narrowly avoided being swept up in the purge that left thousands dead.
Fleeing Germany
What happened to Kolbe in the chaos of the world war ending and the Cold War beginning is sketchy. The following account is based on interviews with people who knew him, the declassified files, Dulles' personal papers and a 1950 interview that a destitute Kolbe, using his George Wood code name, gave to the lurid men's magazine True.
As the Allied bombardment of Berlin intensified and German troops retreated, Kolbe's boss, Ritter, asked him to spirit a girlfriend, a Berlin singer, to Bavaria, where Nazi officials planned to secretly regroup after the Reich's downfall.
Kolbe tried to convince his future wife, a nurse named Maria Fritsch, to accompany them in a diplomatic staff car. But she refused to leave her hospital post. One of the doctors promised to look after Maria and prevailed upon Kolbe to take the physician's own wife out of town.
The three drove as far west as Stuttgart, but found it hard to find gasoline. They left the singer at the monastery run by Kolbe's old church confidante, Schreiber, and headed to the rail station. From Stuttgart, Kolbe hoped to reach the home of a retired Foreign Office colleague. But he and the doctor's wife were stopped at the station by the Gestapo.
Kolbe, a prickly, and often officious bureaucrat, blustered and bullied his way out of the interrogation by indignantly insisting he was en route to Bern to pick up a diplomatic pouch. The woman, he said, was a Reich official's relative whom he'd been asked to escort to Bavaria.
''He risked his life and was very imaginative in bringing this stuff out of Germany... when people were being watched like hawks,'' Helms says.
The couple finally squeezed into a box car of a train heading west, then trudged eight miles through snow and darkness to the mountain cabin of his friend from the foreign service, who was already hosting a handful of other renegades. Two visitors were uniformed German officers who told Kolbe they and several others had left Berlin with five truckloads of documents from the German general staff offices. Kolbe had heard rumors of this. ''I know,'' he said. ''The intelligence files on Russia.''
Kolbe used his diplomatic credentials to get a visa to Switzerland and caught a train to Bern, where he told Dulles about the Nazi intelligence men and their cache of Soviet data. Dulles said he would pass the information on to Army intelligence, who would indeed hire Hitler's spies.
Dulles had been delving deeper into the German bureaucracy, eventually reaching the top Nazi general in Italy and negotiating his surrender. Days later, Hitler killed himself, Berlin fell, and the war in Europe was over.
Luck runs out
The subsequent years were less kind to Kolbe, a man who had refused to even join the Nazi Party. As the war ended, Dulles wrote, Kolbe ''volunteered to do difficult and dangerous work for us'' when fears of a Nazi resistance campaign gave way to paranoia that the Soviets intended to attack the Allies. Dulles got the OSS to establish a $10,000 trust account for Kolbe ''largely to protect a minor son in case any accident should befall him.''
Then, Kolbe's war-time luck turned bad. He was riding to OSS headquarters in Berlin when the jeep he was in smashed into a truck. Kolbe flew into a rock pile and fractured six bones, including his skull. He spent five weeks in traction.
''He said things were difficult for him,'' says Peter Kolbe, who finally received his first letter from his father since he'd left Africa. ''I didn't know anything about his special life then. I wasn't very convenient to him. It was some years before I heard from him again.''
The elder Kolbe recovered and continued to work for US intelligence. Truman broke up the OSS after the war but created the CIA in 1947, and Kolbe became close friends with an agent named Harry Hermsdorf. Kolbe ''was very charming, very charismatic,'' recalls Marcia Marshall, Hermsdorf's daughter and Kolbe's goddaughter.
Dulles, back at his law firm in New York, and Kolbe's old friend Kocherthaler began cooking up business deals. Kocherthaler told Dulles he'd hoped to hook Kolbe up with an American company ''to exploit German inventions not yet patented under a Washington license. Would the idea appeal to you?''
Dulles said he'd be happy to help. Kolbe came to New York and sank his $10,000 into an asbestos deal at a time when the substance was a hot new commodity as a fire retardant. The deal turned out to be a scam. Kolbe lost all his money.
Kolbe, penniless, borrowed money from Dulles. He returned to Europe and tried to get a job in the new West German government of Konrad Adenauer, but circles within the government considered Kolbe a traitor. More than 100,000 civil servants in the Third Reich got their jobs back. Except Kolbe.
The reporter from True found Kolbe living with his wife, Maria, in a one-room apartment outside Frankfurt. ''We're lucky to have this one room,'' he said. ''Pity we weren't Nazis.''
Peter Kolbe says his father was subsequently horrified by the breathless, hard-boiled style of the True story and never gave another interview. The Hermsdorf family said the article, ironically, had been planted in order to get some attention and financial help for the unheralded spy.
''My father arranged for that story,'' says Ronald Hermsdorf of Manchester, N.H. ''My father said he was unhappy that [Kolbe] didn't get paid.''
Kolbe subsequently did find work -- apparently back in the spy game. Kocherthaler wrote Dulles: ''He is quite happy in his new activities, which I consider especially interesting, as I consider it vital to change the defensive attitude in the Cold War.'' The Hermsdorf children say Kolbe, in fact, worked for the CIA until retirement. Helms denies it, and confirmation remains classified.
In any case, Kolbe's delicate standing in Germany became painfully clear when a Swiss newspaper reprinted the True article. ''I fear the publication in Switzerland at this time will do him a good bit of harm and this is really tragic,'' Dulles wrote Kocherthaler in 1951.
Into this tense, internecine environment flew Peter Kolbe, an 18-year-old youth who had grown up in the sheltered white man's fantasy of colonial Africa.
''It's obviously interesting to meet your father,'' says Peter Kolbe. ''It was somewhat difficult, of course. He was a European and I was a colonial boy. The war almost didn't touch me. My father had lived with the threat of death and intense psychological pressures. Then he was regarded as a traitor, and that is still the case.''
Peter Kolbe was a free spirit who had no stomach for sudden fatherly authority. ''He was obviously a very strong man. But he was obviously very German, somebody who believed people could be cowed by discipline,'' he says.
The younger Kolbe did get a taste of the intelligence life in postwar Germany. ''I met most of the CIA people in Berlin when I arrived. I did a bit of translating for him,'' he says. ''I read some lovely report about some king who was going to get kicked in the ass by some Colonel Nasser.''
Later, on a trip to Egypt, Peter Kolbe saw the posters of the new leader: Gamal Nasser. ''I had a good laugh.''
Such Third World intrigue was a hallmark of the CIA when Dulles was chosen to head the agency in 1953. He used backwater coups and rightist authoritarians in a global chess match with the Soviets and their own arsenal of leftist revolutionaries. He was ousted in 1961 for his role in talking President John F. Kennedy into the bungled attempt to topple Cuba's Fidel Castro at the Bay of Pigs.
Kolbe and his wife retired to Bern. They came to Cambridge in 1966 and visited Peter Kolbe and his wife and their new daughter. The younger Kolbe was conducting research at MIT at the time. ''I saw my father a number of times, but each time no more than a couple of weeks,'' says Kolbe, who has two grown children and two grandchildren in Sydney.
Fritz Kolbe and his wife then traveled to Manchester, N.H., and visited the family of his old friend Hermsdorf. Ronald Hermsdorf said Kolbe had lost none of his boxer's bounce. ''You know those Basque shepherds with the weathered faces? That was how I remember Fritz Kolbe. He was just a very, very tough little guy,'' he says.
During his trip, Kolbe contacted Dulles at his home in Washington. ''I am delighted to hear that you are in the country,'' Dulles wrote back. ''I have not been in the best of health... but that should not prevent our getting together.''
Kolbe and Dulles kept in touch. By 1968, they were old warriors left to their reflections. The voluble Dulles wrote books and gave speeches. Kolbe finally decided to write his memoirs. He wanted Dulles to round up those incredibly detailed dispatches that Kolbe had filed during World War II.
But it was too late. The intelligence bureaucracy had become calcified in a culture of secrecy even more sacrosanct than the secrets themselves. Even Dulles was locked out of the fortress he helped build.
''I do not have any authority with respect to the documents to which Fritz might desire,'' Dulles wrote a mutual acquaintance. ''I have never myself succeeded in getting my hands on the great pile of Foreign Office telegrams which I delivered to the State Department many years ago.''
Within seven months, Dulles was dead. Kolbe followed two years later. Late last year, Maria was buried beside him in Bern. She'd refused requests to talk about her husband. The legacy of one of the last century's greatest spies remained locked away. Until now.
Peter Kolbe has some of the letters that Dulles wrote his father. He's collected piecemeal accounts of the man's wartime exploits. Only recently was he able to locate the grave of the mother he never knew, on the outskirts of old East Berlin.
Fritz Kolbe's son spent his career conducting geological research and exploration, dealing with the hard, immutable facts of proven science. He can hardly fathom the illusory life his father lived. ''I'd be afraid of doing something like that,'' he says. ''You could never prove anything.''
Mark Fritz's email address is
mfritz@globe.com