KOLBE, FRITZ (1900–1971). One of the most prized Allied agents
during World War II, Fritz Kolbe was born in Berlin on 25 Septem-
ber 1900, the son of a saddle maker. In 1914, he became a dedicated
member of the Wandervögel, a middle-class youth movement that
rejected material gains in favor of a simple, more self-reliant life.
After his brief military service toward the end of World War I, he
completed his university education and became a junior diplomat
with the German Foreign Office in 1925. His first posting took him
to Madrid, where he remained until 1936. Despite his unequivocal re-
jection of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi movement—an evaluation from
the mid-1930s found him unfit for admission to the Nazi Party, and
he never sought membership himself, contrary to the repeated urging
of his colleagues—his career remained essentially intact. The death
of his wife cut short his next posting in Warsaw, but in late 1937 he
was assigned to the German consulate in Cape Town, South Africa.
Recalled to Berlin at the outbreak of war, Kolbe became a per-
sonal assistant to Karl Ritter, a hardened professional diplomat who
had just been appointed liaison between the Foreign Office and the
Wehrmacht supreme military command. Increasingly convinced that
his own minor resistance activities possessed no more than symbolic
value and that the Nazi regime could only be toppled from the outside,
Kolbe made numerous attempts to travel abroad in order to relay to
the Allies the highly sensitive, top-level information that crossed his
desk. In summer 1943, he traveled to Bern, Switzerland, as a courier,
and through Ernst Kocherthaler, an anti-Nazi acquaintance from his
years in Spain, sought contact with British authorities. Still reeling
from the disastrous Venlo Incident and under strict instructions from
the Foreign Office to beware of double agents, they rebuffed Kocher-
thaler, causing Kolbe to turn next to the Americans.
Seeing the copies of the documents in Kolbe’s possession and
speaking to him at length, Allen Dulles, the Office of Strategic Ser-
vices (OSS) station chief in Bern, took an immediate interest. After a
further investigation of Kolbe’s credentials, an agreement was struck.
Kolbe, however, declined any remuneration, citing his principled
opposition to totalitarian regimes—Nazi as well as Soviet—and his
desire to shorten the war. Assigned the code name george wood,
he had five more meetings with Dulles while also enlisting friends
and unsuspecting colleagues to help bring abundant material to Bern.
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