In sum, Kolbe delivered 1,600 pieces of diplomatic correspondence
between the Foreign Office and 30 German missions in Europe and
overseas (these documents became known in the OSS as the “Kappa
messages,” while the “Boston series” is the name of the shorter com-
pilation). They included reports from the army and air force attachés
in the Far East; information about German espionage activities in
Switzerland, Spain, Sweden, Britain, Ireland, and Turkey (notably re-
garding the Cicero Affair); efforts to extract more raw materials and
labor from the occupied countries; and even a hand-drawn map of the
area surrounding Hitler’s secret “Wolf’s Lair.” In his conversations
with Kolbe, Dulles showed particular interest in his assessment of the
mood in Berlin amid the heavy Allied bombing. Some intelligence
and military officials continued to doubt his bona fides, but he had
the complete confidence of Dulles, and a number of his highly classi-
fied cables reached the desk of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
After the war, despite his desire for reinstatement in the Foreign
Service, Kolbe was rejected by West German authorities, as many
of them believed him to be a traitor to his country. After working at
various odd jobs, he resettled in Bern, where he died on 16 Febru-
ary 1971. Whereas his singular achievement had been extolled by
both American and British intelligence officials at the end of the
war, the first sign of recognition by the German government did not
occur until September 2004, when Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer
announced the naming of a conference hall in the German foreign
ministry in Berlin to commemorate his actions.KONSPIRATIVE WOHNUNG (KW). The equivalent of a safe house
in English, a konspirative Wohnung is a residence maintained by an
intelligence service for clandestine meetings, often between an agent
and handler, or for hiding a defector. The secret headquarters of ter-
rorist organizations such as the Red Army Faction also fall under this
rubric. Larger complexes known as konspirative Objekte (KO) were
used extensively by the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit.
KONZENTRATION. An intensified approach to dealing with former
Nazis and war criminals by the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit
(MfS), Operation konzentration (Concentration) began with a
directive to all branches by Erich Mielke on 2 March 1965. To
240 • KONSPIRATIVE WOHNUNG