Germany gave posthumous honors on Thursday to a government bureaucrat whom the United States once hailed as its top World War II spy — a half-century after he was branded a traitor by postwar Germany.
Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer said Fritz Kolbe, a mid-level diplomat who passed 1,600 secret Nazi documents to U.S. spies, was a patriot for resisting Hitler and said he had been wrongly ostracized by the German government after the war.
“It is very late, but not too late to pay tribute,” Fischer told 500 diplomats at a ceremony dedicating a room to Fritz Kolbe in the Foreign Ministry. “The honor is long overdue. It was not a glorious page in our Foreign Ministry’s history.”
After the war Kolbe lost his job, his friends and his reputation at the Foreign Ministry. His attempts to get a job in the West German government repeatedly rebuffed, Kolbe left his homeland and ended up as a salesman for a U.S. power tools company. He died in obscurity in 1971 in Switzerland.
“He deserves recognition,” Fischer said. “We can’t reverse what happened, but this is an attempt to make a historical reparation by honoring what he did for our country.”
Book revives interest in long-forgotten spy
A recent book by French journalist Lucas Delattre about Kolbe, based on declassified CIA documents and his private archives, revived interest in the long-forgotten spy. Kolbe said his only aim was to shorten the war and he took no money.
He said 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 U.S. Office of Strategic Services’ (OSS) point man in Switzerland, Allen Dulles.
“I didn’t know anything about him until now,” Fischer said, adding he read the book in two nights. “I didn’t have a clue.”
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 but not in Normandy.
Kolbe worked directly under a Nazi liaison officer to the armed forces. He handled — and secretly photographed — top-secret military documents that crossed his desk. Kolbe’s material surfaced four years ago in declassified CIA documents.
“It was certainly not decisive for the outcome of the war, but the fact is that he resisted the Nazis and worked actively to overthrow them,” Fischer said.
“After the war, West Germany had a difficult time dealing with those who resisted in the Hitler era — quietly viewed as traitors by some and by others quite openly,” he added.
Fischer said the Foreign Ministry did not hire Kolbe when it was reestablished in 1951 because superiors who worked with the Nazis or were sympathizers felt guilt for their failings.
“He was a permanent living reproach for those in the floors above him,” Fischer said.
