Brent Cooper
Trial and appellate counsel for Cooper & Scully (1993–present)Updated 1y

Who is the biggest traitor in history of Germany?

Sometime the line between traitor and patriot is a thin one, often
depending upon the viewer. This person is in that category. He can be
viewed as the greatest traitor in German history. Or he can be viewed as
one of the greatest patriots.

“Few visitors to Berlin's vast concrete and glass foreign ministry
building take much notice of the brass plate bearing the name Fritz
Kolbe, affixed just three weeks ago to the door of one of its elegant
wood-panelled conference rooms. Most Germans have never heard of Fritz
Kolbe.“

“Yet the nameplate and a black and white photograph of a balding,
impish-looking man with protruding ears on a wall inside the chamber
have been reunited in Germany's attempt, 59 years on, to make amends for
one of the shabbiest episodes in its post-war history.“

“Kolbe was described by the CIA as the most important spy of the Second
World War. As a bureaucrat in Adolf Hitler's foreign ministry, he
smuggled 2,600 secret Nazi documents to American intelligence in
Switzerland from 1943 onwards, continuing his task undetected until the
war ended.“

“No other German damaged the Nazi regime to such an extent. Kolbe
supplied the Americans with vital information about where the Germans
expected the allies to land in Normandy, crucial facts about the Nazi V1
and V2 rockets and Japanese military plans in south-east Asia. He even
exposed a valet working in the British embassy in Ankara as a German spy.“

"My aim was to help shorten the war for my unfortunate countrymen and to
help concentration camp inmates avoid further suffering," Kolbe wrote
from his home in Switzerland in 1965. He never accepted money for his
work as a spy.“

“Yet after the war, Kolbe was dismissed as a traitor by successive
German governments. His attempts to rejoin the foreign ministry were
repeatedly rejected and he was forced to end his days working as a
salesman for an American chainsaw company, until his death in
Switzerland in 1971.”

"The risks Kolbe took were incalculable," wrote Allan Dulles, Kolbe's
American intelligence minder in Switzerland after the war. "I just hope
that the injustice done to him will be reversed one day and that his
country recognises his true role."

“Kolbe's name is still not mentioned in German history books. But the
German government's decision earlier this month to award him a
posthumous honour by naming a foreign ministry conference room after him
represents an attempt to do justice to his memory.”

"It is very late, but not too late to pay tribute to Fritz Kolbe,"
admitted Joschka Fischer, the German Foreign Minister, at a ceremony in
Berlin earlier this month. "The honour is long overdue. It was not a
glorious page in our foreign ministry's history," he said.“

“Kolbe's rehabilitation has been inspired by the release of his private
letters and CIA documents relating to his case that were declassified
only four years ago. The information was used as a basis for a new book
entitled Fritz Kolbe, the Second World War's Most Important Spy, by the
French historian Lucas Delattre.“

“More than 30 years after Kolbe's death, Delattre's book has managed to
provoke some serious soul searching in Germany. "Kolbe's story
demonstrates that ordinary Germans could do something to fight Hitler's
madness - and post-war Germany treated him like a leper because of his
actions," remarked Stern magazine.“

“Kolbe was recruited by the foreign ministry as a junior diplomat at the
age of 25. His career took him to Madrid and Cape Town, before he was
ignominiously ordered back to Berlin in 1939, having repeatedly refused
to join other German diplomats and become a paid up member of the Nazi
party.“

“His refusal to join the party barred him from taking interesting jobs
abroad and Kolbe was given lowly work stamping passports and visas in
Von Ribbentrop's foreign ministry. For the first three years of the war,
Kolbe spent his time railing against the Nazis with like-minded friends
in the back room of a Berlin pub and occasionally dumping anti-Nazi
leaflets in telephone boxes.“

“Kolbe felt impotent as the increasing barbarity of the Nazis became
more apparent. But in November 1941, at a soirée of the renowned and
discreetly anti-Nazi surgeon Ferdinand Sauerbruch, he underwent
something of a conversion. Kolbe was visibly distressed to hear an
account of the Nazis' programme to systematically murder thousands of
mentally ill patients, regarded as "people with lives useless" to the
Reich. Out of his horror sprung a fervent determination to take on the
mission to fight the Nazis.“

“He was painfully aware that the files and documents which passed over
his desk every day could be of paramount importance to the Allies in
their war against the regime. The only question was how to provide them
with it.”

“He had to wait nearly three years before he was given the chance. It
came when a superior foreign office employee and fellow Nazi critic
agreed to put Kolbe on the list of officials privileged to act as
diplomatic couriers for the Third Reich.“

“On the morning of 15 August 1943, Kolbe locked the door of his foreign
ministry office, dropped his trousers and bound two large envelopes
containing hundreds of mimeographed secret documents to his legs.
Equipped with a diplomatic bag full of official dispatches, he boarded a
train decked out in Nazi swastika flags at Berlin's Anhalter railway
station and set off for the Swiss capital, Berne.“

“On his first visit to the British embassy in Berne, Kolbe was laughed
at and promptly dismissed. The Americans, quicker to trust him, were the
first to realise what he could do for the Allied forces.“

“Meetings continued and by 1944, the Americans valued the information
supplied under Kolbe's codename "George Wood" so highly that only 11
people, including President Roosevelt, were allowed to see his
documents. By the end of the war, MI6 had conceded it had made a gross
misjudgement and singled out Kolbe as "the prize intelligence source of
the war". But he was not appreciated by a defeated German people. At
best he was regarded as a traitor. At worst he had the blood of millions
of his countrymen on his hands.”
Attribution

Fritz Kolbe - Wikipedia

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/germany-finally-honours-the-traitor-spy-who-gave-nazi-secrets-to-america-547543.html

A Time to Act: The Beginning of the Fritz Kolbe Story, 1900–1943

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