Fritz was beginning to think that if he continued to rub shoulders with evil he would end up being its accomplice. He had had enough of behaving like the good soldier Svejk. Playing the stupid and narrow-minded petty official led to nothing, except protecting himself. He sometimes saw himself in dreams in a foreign uniform, bearing arms, fighting against the men of the Wehrmacht. He immediately reproached himself for denying his own people. After all, German soldiers had not wanted, for the most part, to be involved in this kind of criminal adventure. The only ones who deserved to be eliminated were the leaders of the country. These questions tormented him. In that fall of 1941, it was not uncommon for him to wake up in the middle of the night with violent cramps in his stomach. In addition to the multiple pains he suffered from his constant excessive exercise, Fritz was beginning to hurt everywhere.
By chance, since he had met Professor Sauerbruch’s assistant in the spring of 1940, Fritz had easy access to the Charité hospital. At the request of Maria Fritsch, the famous surgeon had agreed to treat Fritz’s knees and had prescribed a thermal cure at Bad Brambach in southern Saxony, where he had spent three weeks at the end of the summer of 1940.
Fritz gradually developed the habit of going to the hospital once or twice a week for no medical reason. Located not far from the Foreign Ministry, the hospital was a veritable enclave in the city, with fifteen red brick buildings with neo-Gothic façades. There were even hot-houses for the cultivation and wintering of plants and trees. Fritz went to see Maria on leaving his office and spent a good bit of time chatting with her at the hospital. One evening, he even played her an old song from the Wandervogel, accompanying himself on a guitar that happened to be sitting in a corner of the room. He sang well, with a warm voice, and the words of the song were a declaration of love. “Come, let’s go into the fields, the cuckoo is calling us from the pine forest / Young girl, let yourself go in the dance.” Maria had been unable to conceal her emotion.
From that moment on, the two were inseparable. They met in the restaurants of Charlottenburg, then went to the cinema. Fritz felt all the more comfortable at the Charité because he had the feeling of being protected from prying eyes. At the Foreign Ministry, he knew that he was under surveillance and had to be constantly careful not to say one wrong word. This wasn’t true at the hospital, which was like an island protected from the outside world, even though it was in the heart of the capital of the Reich. The Gestapo did not penetrate there, and Fritz did not feel he was being spied on. On the contrary, he was the one in an observation post, trying to identify the figures who came to see Professor Sauerbruch. And there were many of them. You might encounter the surgeon in the company of a doctor in an SS uniform, and then the next day with a man who was under heavy surveillance by the regime.
Fritz’s frequent comings and goings to see Maria Fritsch did not long go unnoticed by Sauerbruch. After hearing his assistant laugh during the evenings she spent with Fritz, the surgeon asked Maria to introduce her friend to him formally. The two men hit it off well. In this wartime period, lively minds like Fritz’s were welcome. He had a gift for diverting his audience by telling anecdotes from behind the scenes in the ministry or reporting the latest comical details about Ribbentrop’s life. And Sauerbruch adored gossip. He picked it up everywhere and spiced it up in his style in order to shine in Berlin salons. He liked Fritz a good deal and invited him home several times.
One evening at the surgeon’s house toward the end of November 1941, Fritz noticed a clergyman dressed in black, noticeable by his wrinkled suit, his thick glasses, and his slightly dirty white collar. The unknown man had drawn his attention from the very beginning of the evening. He and Ferdinand Sauerbruch had carried on an apparently interesting conversation in low tones. Fritz had been unable to catch the slightest scrap of it, but he had immediately seen that the churchman was an enemy of the regime. Those things could soon be felt. It took only a glance or a way of pitching one’s voice to be identified. Fritz wanted to know more about this figure. He learned that this was the prelate Georg Schreiber, former Reichstag deputy under the Zentrum label, the pre-1933 Catholic party. A theologian, university professor, and also a political man, Schreiber had been a very influential figure during the Weimar Republic. In his special fields of political action (church questions, culture, education, foreign policy, and science), he was an unquestioned authority. Since the Nazis had come to power they had subjected him to constant affronts. Research institutes and other learned societies over which he had presided had been forced to close down. For the leaders of the Third Reich, Georg Schreiber was the embodiment of the despised “old system.”
Schreiber had been protected by Sauerbruch on more than one occasion. The two men were personally very close. The prelate often came to rest at the Charité where he was treated for “abdominal troubles.” Fritz Kolbe was curious to meet a man of the cloth who had not compromised with the regime (it hardly mattered that he was a Catholic). He introduced himself.
After exchanging a few banalities about life behind the scenes in the Foreign Ministry and current sports (two areas in which Schreiber was well versed), Fritz dared to bring up politics. “What did you think,” he asked, “of Clemens von Galen’s recent speech against the elimination of the mentally handicapped? Why aren’t there more men of the church like him who dare to denounce the crimes of the Nazis?” Schreiber, after making certain that no one was listening to their conversation, expressed his full support of the bishop of Münster. He revealed to Fritz that Professor Sauerbruch had information that the Nazis had already eliminated seventy thousand of the mentally handicapped since 1939 (including many children), and that they intended to kill “old people, the tubercular, the war wounded, and others unworthy to live (lebensunswerte Menschen), as they say.”
This revelation startled Fritz. Now sensing that he could trust his interlocutor, he dared to ask the prelate to help him resolve his problems of conscience: “How can I continue to serve this regime? I want to leave the country, but that is not possible. If I stay, am I morally tainted by my status as an official? After all, I took an oath in the name of the führer, like all the others…” Georg Schreiber looked very serious and took him aside to answer him. The conversation lasted for more than an hour. No one knows exactly what Schreiber said that evening. In any event, Fritz retained the following message: “Do not leave Germany! Fight against the Nazis with the resources that you have. If you are in this post, this is because God willed it for one reason or another.”
Berlin, 1942
Germany could only be reborn—from the Nazis’ ashes. Fritz had known that since 1933. But for the regime to fall, Germany would have to lose the war. It took Fritz time to recognize that it was not shameful to be a “defeatist,” that a quick surrender was in fact in Germany’s best interests, but it took root in Fritz like a painfully obvious fact between late 1941 and early 1942. Not all his friends, far from it, could follow him into this way of seeing things. He himself sometimes began to doubt. Throughout all of 1942, he felt more alone and isolated than ever.
“You must opt for a party in the war… I have / No choice. I must use force or else endure it,” Fritz repeated to himself as he read The Death of Wallenstein (Act 2, Scene 1). He made the following argument: One could not wish for a Nazi victory. In addition, the defeat of Germany was foreseeable once the United States had entered the war against Germany in December 1941 and Japan on its side took no steps to attack Russia and establish a second front in the Far East. Finally, the longer it took Germany to lay down arms, the weaker it would be at the end of the conflict. This situation of weakness would risk throwing it into the arms of the Communists.