Fritz was charmed by this elegant Frenchman, who also knew the United States from having studied there. Transferred by force to the interior of the Reich in March 1942, Adolphe Jung had worked first in the Lake Constance region, and then joined Ferdinand Sauerbruch’s staff in Berlin. He had arrived in Berlin in October 1942. The appointment was a stroke of luck for him, enabling him to work with a leading doctor. At the Charité hospital, he treated chiefly Professor Sauerbruch’s private clientele.
From one air raid to the next, Fritz and Adolphe Jung got to know each other better: “In the shelter where we met during Allied air attacks,” Jung wrote after the war, “we usually passed each other by without speaking. If possible we stayed in separate compartments of the shelter. But what joy shined in our eyes when Allied successes saddened the pale faces of the Nazis surrounding us. K. tightened all the muscles of his face, struck his left palm with his right fist, and constantly repeated: ‘What are they doing? What are they waiting for? Berlin has to be bombed over and over! We’ll die, so what, but let them come!’ We were agreed, K. and I, that they had to come. But can I be blamed for confessing that just thinking about it made a chill run down my spine?”
When she heard Fritz use this kind of language, his lover Maria couldn’t stand it. “Now keep quiet, keep quiet. Are you mad?” she asked. Turning to Adolphe Jung, she exclaimed, “He’s mad, isn’t he? He doesn’t know what he’s saying! He laughs stupidly like that, to himself, when the sirens wail and warn us of another thousand bombers from the RAF or the U.S. Air Force, what is that all about?” “K. was not mad,” writes Jung, “but very intelligent, very aware of all the dangers. Perhaps he was sometimes a little too excitable, but that was his temperament. He was well served by a vigorous imagination which enabled him to find in a flash the right solution or the right reply in the most difficult situations. His hatred of Nazism was real. For the Germans he had only disdain. ‘They’ll die,’ he said, ‘they’ll get what they deserve.’”
In the spring of 1943, Fritz met an exceptional woman who was to be of great help in his plans. A little cold at first sight, slightly older than Fritz (she was approaching fifty), this woman looked like a rather austere old maid, which did not keep her from being refined and elegant. Her name was Gertrud von Heimerdinger, and she had a decision-making position in the diplomatic mail service (office 138, Wilhelmstrasse 74–76). She had the power to recommend one diplomat or another for a particular foreign post. Fritz had an intuition that she shared his opinions. He had a few very precise ulterior motives for approaching her. He had not given up his plan to go to Switzerland, and he counted on making her into an ally.
Gertrud von Heimerdinger was the daughter of a Prussian general who had served under Emperor Wilhelm II. That no doubt explained her rather austere appearance. But Fritz felt from their first encounter that she was a trustworthy person, cultured, belonging to the aristocratic milieu that detested Nazism because it was coarse, vulgar, and opposed to the elementary values she had learned at a very early age. Prussian aristocrats like her were both very conservative on some points and very liberal on others. They had nationalist convictions that did not keep them from being instinctively attached to the rule of law. Fritz was beginning to tell himself that women definitely had more character than men, in this Germany that had been cut adrift.
In the Adlon shelter, in the canteen, or in the corridors of the ministry, Fritz arranged to cross paths with Gertrud von Heimerdinger, and each time he said a few words to her, nothing more. The conversation did not go much beyond an exchange about the weather and similar banalities. One evening when he met her in the subway, he made a little friendly sign. The charm offensive finally had the desired effect: After a few months, there was a tacit confidence between them. Fritz very soon understood that Gertrud was well disposed toward him. There was nothing political in this.
During one of their encounters in the spring of 1943, Gertrud von Heimerdinger promised to help Fritz Kolbe secure a mission to Switzerland as soon as possible. As he had done regularly since 1940, Fritz repeated that he had to go there to settle the formalities of his divorce. His second wife, Lita Schoop, was of Swiss nationality, and his marriage had taken place in Zurich. “If I manage to get you out, you can take care of your personal affairs, and then you will escape from the bombing, at least for a few days,” Gertrud told Fritz. It seemed that she had decided to take him under her protection.
From that day on, Fritz could not stay still. Although his duty was to destroy the diplomatic cables that his boss had read, he began to collect conscientiously the most interesting among them. He put them in his safe, in order to make use of them as soon as the opportunity might arise.
Berlin, summer 1943
The war had reached a turning point, and the Wehrmacht was retreating on all fronts. In North Africa, German ambitions had just ended with the fall of Tunis (May 8, 1943). There was talk of “Tunisgrad” to point to the magnitude of the defeat. The Italian ally was starting to vacillate. The Allies were now not very far from the coast of Sicily. Mussolini had little time left. In the East, the prospects were hardly better. The Reich was shifting to the defensive. The period that was beginning was full of danger and disillusionment. People sensed the coming debacle, which would soon take the form of “a long retreat punctuated with halts and recoveries, wild counterattacks as before Kursk and Orel in July 1943, where, in the largest tank battle of the entire war, the Wehrmacht showed its teeth for one of the last times.”
During these decisive months, in Berlin, like everyone else, Fritz expected the worst. For the last little while he had been living in a little apartment at Kurfürstendamm 155, in a building also housing writers, an actor, and a business owner. Until then, between 1940 and 1943, he had lived with friends like a stowaway: first near the Tiergarten, then near Adolf Hitler Platz, north of Charlottenburg, finally near Tempelhof airport. Since meeting Maria, he had wanted to settle somewhere for good. He had found a few rooms in a large apartment to sublet.
There was no point in looking for his name on the door or his telephone number in the Berlin directory. Fritz remained a secretive person and gave his address only to very rare close friends. He lived on the second floor. The bell in the lobby was labeled Herr von Jaroschevitsch and Herr von Rohde (a colleague from the Foreign Ministry). The telephone number was 976.981. This was the first time since his return from South Africa that he had had the heart to set up a space for himself, furnished with sobriety but elegance. Despite the black paper stuck on the windows to block the light, the place was welcoming and warm. But as he saw a new personal life taking shape, around him the world was collapsing.
On his way to the office, almost every morning he met homeless people, entire families who had left burning houses in the middle of the night. Most often, these people had been able to take nothing with them, except sometimes a pillow or a blanket. Fritz also encountered crews of foreign workers who had been assigned to clear away the ruins. “We are stoic in the ordeal, no hysteria and no panic. The more we are attacked, the stronger we are,” said the weekly Das Reich on July 2, 1943. But at the end of the month, from July 24 to 30, the terrible bombing of Hamburg caused thirty thousand deaths and was a devastating blow to the morale of the German population.