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By Erik Kirschbaum
BERLIN (Reuters) - A German bureaucrat the CIA once called "the most important spy of the Second World War" but was scorned at home as a traitor may soon get belated honors from the government -- three decades after he died as an outcast.
Fritz Kolbe, a Foreign Ministry official who passed on more than 1,600 top secret Nazi documents to U.S. handlers in Switzerland between 1942 and 1945, was hailed for his deeds in Washington after the war but ostracized and forgotten at home.
While army officers executed for a failed 1944 plot to kill Hitler have been idolized by postwar Germany for their futile yet face-saving assassination attempt, Kolbe lost his job, his friends and his reputation at the ministry, where his passing of Nazi secrets to the allies was viewed as treason.
Repeatedly rebuffed in his postwar attempts to get a job at West Germany‘s Foreign Office, Kolbe left his homeland and ended up a salesman for a U.S. power tools company. He died in 1971 in Switzerland.
Now a new book about Kolbe, based on declassified CIA documents and his private archives, is giving the long-forgotten spy overdue recognition just as Germany prepares to mark the 60th anniversary of the Hitler assassination plot.
"My aim was to help shorten the war for my unfortunate countrymen and to help concentration camp inmates avoid further suffering," Kolbe wrote in a 1965 letter that is included in the book by French journalist Lucas Delattre.
"I don‘t know if I succeeded," Kolbe is quoted as saying in "Fritz Kolbe, der wichtigste Spion des Zweiten Weltkreigs" (The Most Important Spy of World War II). "But I believe ... it showed there (was) resistance to the hated regime inside Germany."
Kolbe took no money. He aided the enemy because he was a patriot who hated the Nazi regime and wanted to accelerate its demise.
He smuggled top-secret files to the American Office of Strategic Services point man in Switzerland, Allen Dulles. Dulles later said he was at first wary but quickly saw the immense value of the information from inside Berlin. Kolbe was given the code name "George Wood."
"The risks Kolbe took were incalculable," Dulles wrote in a affidavit in 1948 for Kolbe, who was seeking a U.S. visa. "If any envelope had been opened he would, of course, have been lost."
Richard Helms, former head of the CIA, called Kolbe‘s information as "the most important ever supplied by an agent working for the Allies during the whole of World War II."
REHABILITATED IN GERMANY
A spokeswoman for the Foreign Ministry in Berlin said the ministry had assisted Delattre with his research on Kolbe and was looking into an appropriate way to honor to Kolbe and other resistance fighters at the ministry during the Nazi era.
"Paying tribute to Fritz Kolbe is one of a number of considerations we‘re working on to document and honor the resistance at the Foreign Ministry," the spokeswoman said.
During the war, Kolbe passed on documents on Germany‘s morale, details on sabotage, notes from high-level meetings in Berlin and reports showing Berlin expected the Allies to land in the Netherlands or Scandinavia, not Normandy. He also provided details on developments with missiles and plans to deport Jews from Hungary and Italy to the death camps.
Kolbe worked directly under Karl Ritter, the Nazis‘ liaison officer to the armed forces. He handled -- and secretly photographed -- top-secret military documents that crossed his desk. Some of Kolbe‘s extensive material surfaced four years ago when the CIA first declassified nearly 500,000 documents.
But Delattre, a former Germany correspondent for Le Monde newspaper whose book first appeared in French, went further by drawing on Kolbe‘s private letters and with interviews.
"I wrote this book because I wanted to read it," Delattre said. "When I realized no book had ever been written about him, I decided to do it myself."
Delattre said he was at first baffled that Germany paid such exalted tribute to the executed July 1944 plotters led by Count Claus von Stauffenberg, an army colonel who planted a briefcase bomb during a staff meeting with Hitler that failed to kill the Nazi leader, but took so little notice of Kolbe.
"I think Kolbe has been neglected by Germany because his case shows that everybody, not just aristocrats like Stauffenberg or a young idealist like Sophie Scholl, could do something against the regime," Delattre said, referring to the executed leader of a student resistance movement.
http://reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=ourWorldNews&storyID=4738350&pageNumber=0
BERLIN (Reuters) - A German bureaucrat the CIA once called "the most important spy of the Second World War" but was scorned at home as a traitor may soon get belated honors from the government -- three decades after he died as an outcast.
Fritz Kolbe, a Foreign Ministry official who passed on more than 1,600 top secret Nazi documents to U.S. handlers in Switzerland between 1942 and 1945, was hailed for his deeds in Washington after the war but ostracized and forgotten at home.
While army officers executed for a failed 1944 plot to kill Hitler have been idolized by postwar Germany for their futile yet face-saving assassination attempt, Kolbe lost his job, his friends and his reputation at the ministry, where his passing of Nazi secrets to the allies was viewed as treason.
Repeatedly rebuffed in his postwar attempts to get a job at West Germany‘s Foreign Office, Kolbe left his homeland and ended up a salesman for a U.S. power tools company. He died in 1971 in Switzerland.
Now a new book about Kolbe, based on declassified CIA documents and his private archives, is giving the long-forgotten spy overdue recognition just as Germany prepares to mark the 60th anniversary of the Hitler assassination plot.
"My aim was to help shorten the war for my unfortunate countrymen and to help concentration camp inmates avoid further suffering," Kolbe wrote in a 1965 letter that is included in the book by French journalist Lucas Delattre.
"I don‘t know if I succeeded," Kolbe is quoted as saying in "Fritz Kolbe, der wichtigste Spion des Zweiten Weltkreigs" (The Most Important Spy of World War II). "But I believe ... it showed there (was) resistance to the hated regime inside Germany."
Kolbe took no money. He aided the enemy because he was a patriot who hated the Nazi regime and wanted to accelerate its demise.
He smuggled top-secret files to the American Office of Strategic Services point man in Switzerland, Allen Dulles. Dulles later said he was at first wary but quickly saw the immense value of the information from inside Berlin. Kolbe was given the code name "George Wood."
"The risks Kolbe took were incalculable," Dulles wrote in a affidavit in 1948 for Kolbe, who was seeking a U.S. visa. "If any envelope had been opened he would, of course, have been lost."
Richard Helms, former head of the CIA, called Kolbe‘s information as "the most important ever supplied by an agent working for the Allies during the whole of World War II."
REHABILITATED IN GERMANY
A spokeswoman for the Foreign Ministry in Berlin said the ministry had assisted Delattre with his research on Kolbe and was looking into an appropriate way to honor to Kolbe and other resistance fighters at the ministry during the Nazi era.
"Paying tribute to Fritz Kolbe is one of a number of considerations we‘re working on to document and honor the resistance at the Foreign Ministry," the spokeswoman said.
During the war, Kolbe passed on documents on Germany‘s morale, details on sabotage, notes from high-level meetings in Berlin and reports showing Berlin expected the Allies to land in the Netherlands or Scandinavia, not Normandy. He also provided details on developments with missiles and plans to deport Jews from Hungary and Italy to the death camps.
Kolbe worked directly under Karl Ritter, the Nazis‘ liaison officer to the armed forces. He handled -- and secretly photographed -- top-secret military documents that crossed his desk. Some of Kolbe‘s extensive material surfaced four years ago when the CIA first declassified nearly 500,000 documents.
But Delattre, a former Germany correspondent for Le Monde newspaper whose book first appeared in French, went further by drawing on Kolbe‘s private letters and with interviews.
"I wrote this book because I wanted to read it," Delattre said. "When I realized no book had ever been written about him, I decided to do it myself."
Delattre said he was at first baffled that Germany paid such exalted tribute to the executed July 1944 plotters led by Count Claus von Stauffenberg, an army colonel who planted a briefcase bomb during a staff meeting with Hitler that failed to kill the Nazi leader, but took so little notice of Kolbe.
"I think Kolbe has been neglected by Germany because his case shows that everybody, not just aristocrats like Stauffenberg or a young idealist like Sophie Scholl, could do something against the regime," Delattre said, referring to the executed leader of a student resistance movement.
http://reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=ourWorldNews&storyID=4738350&pageNumber=0
