Fritz Kolbe
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Photo:US Gov Archives
Fritz Kolbe (operational alias George Wood) (September 25, 1900 - February 16, 1971) was a German diplomat who served as a spy against the Nazi regime for the United States during World War II.
He was motivated by his hatred for the Nazi regime and refused to accept any payment. He was cold shouldered by successive post-war German governments as someone who had betrayed Germany, until publication of the original documents by the CIA in 2000 forced a review and his eventual official recognition. On September 9th, 2004 a conference room in the German foreign ministry was named after him by German foreign minister Joschka Fischer.
[edit] Career
Fritz Kolbe was employed as a junior diplomat by the German foreign ministry before World War II and had postings to Madrid and Cape Town, but his refusal to join the Nazi party led him to be assigned lowly clerical work in Berlin from 1939. He was influenced by the anti-Nazi surgeon Ferdinand Sauerbruch and around November 1941, became determined to actively help defeat the Nazis.
It was not until 1943, however, that an opportunity arose when a fellow anti-Nazi in the ministry reassigned him to higher grade work as a diplomatic courier. On 19 August 1943, he was entrusted to travel to Berne in Switzerland with the diplomatic bag. While there, he tried to offer mimeographed secret documents to the British embassy. They rebuffed his approach, so he went to the Americans, who decided to take a chance on him. By 1944, they realised they had an agent of the highest quality. He was given the code name George Wood. His US intelligence handler was Office of Strategic Services agent Allen Welsh Dulles. Altogether, by the end of the war, he had passed along 2,600 documents. He was later described by the CIA as the most important spy of the war.
He provided details of:
- German expectations of the site of the D-day landings,
- V-1 and V-2 rocket programs,
- the Messerschmitt Me 262 jet fighter,
- Japanese plans in Southeast Asia,
- exposure of a Nazi agent, Elyesa Bazna, working as a butler in the British embassy in Ankara.
The information Kolbe supplied did not have as great an effect on the war as it might have had. The American government feared for a long time that he might be a double agent feeding false information.
In 1949, Kolbe tried to settle in the U.S., but could not find suitable work. In 1951, he applied to return to work for the German Foreign Office, the AA. Its political director at that time, Herbert Blankenhorn, was a former member of the NSDAP, so he was refused. Kolbe finally found a living as a representative of an American power-saw manufacturer.
[edit] Quote
- "My objective was to shorten the war and to help spare the unfortunate people in the concentration camps further suffering."
[edit] References
- A Spy at the Heart of the Third Reich: The Extraordinary Life of Fritz Kolbe, America's Most Important Spy in World War II, Lucas Delattre, Atlantic Monthly Press, ISBN 0-87113-879-4 (2005)
