Continuing on his way, Fritz passed in front of Göring’s Air Force Ministry. Huge black limousines were parked in the courtyard. A little further along, he passed the buildings of the RSHA (the Gestapo and the other security services of the Reich) and could not repress a shiver. Himmler’s empire occupied a whole stretch of Wilhelmstrasse, between Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse and Anhalter Strasse. It was common knowledge that inside the walls of these palaces from the imperial period, people were assassinated and tortured. Fritz walked faster. He turned to the right and saw the station. Finally, a neighborhood with a little more life! Opposite the large Anhalter station was the Askanischer Platz. Despite the war, the plaza had remained welcoming, with its large hotels, its commotion, and its numerous restaurants and beer halls.
Fritz saw a large crowd at the entrance to the station. There were many families leaving to seek refuge far from the city. It had been strongly recommended that the women and children of Berlin leave the capital of the Reich to get away from the bombing. It was a headlong flight. “What is most striking walking in the streets of Berlin today is the huge crowd that forms from time to time in certain neighborhoods around certain stations of the Stadtbahn. People are heading for an unknown destination without noise, I even often have the impression without a word. Even in the most crowded rush hours for the métro, I never saw such a compact crowd in the streets of Paris,” wrote Adolphe Jung in his diary of Berlin at war.
On the way to his train, Fritz noticed in the shop windows on the plaza facing the station the first tangible signs of the beginnings of shortages. There was not a single razor blade to be found; specialized stores offered to sharpen used blades. Continuing through the mass of departing travelers, Fritz saw young boys in military uniforms: the draft age had just been lowered to seventeen. The ogre of the Wehrmacht was devouring the youth of the country. Perhaps Fritz thought of his son, who was now eleven. He had received one or two postcards from him, mailed from South-West Africa, but he had not answered. (Why this silence? Perhaps to preserve the boy and avoid attracting police attention.)
Fritz entered the station building. He was holding the timetable, which showed on one side the “schedule valid from November 1942 on,” and on the other an advertisement for the Dresdner Bank. Inside the building, the huge glass-lined hall multiplied the echoes of human voices and steam locomotives. The place was rather grandiose. This early August 1943, the locomotives were decorated with swastikas and propaganda posters: “The wheels of our trains must roll in the direction of victory.” Other very large posters were hanging on the walls of the station: one sign indicated the direction to the air raid shelter in the station basement, another asked the traveler to avoid any unnecessary trip.
As night began to fall, the station was plunged into semidarkness. There was no longer any real lighting on the platforms. The bulbs in the lampposts had been painted blue in order not to attract the eyes of enemy pilots. Everywhere, pylons had been covered in white paint up to two meters from the ground so that travelers would not bang into them. On platform 1, the train for Basel was beginning to fill up. Fritz went into a special compartment reserved for travelers on official missions, in the front of the train.
The train left Berlin punctually at 8:20. Fritz did not sleep, or barely. The car was full throughout the journey through Germany, but few travelers were going as far as the Swiss border. The night passed without incident. Apart from routine verification of tickets on leaving Berlin, there was no checking on the passengers. Fritz watched stations go by throughout the night. Halle, 10:35. Erfurt, 12:25 A.M. Frankfurt am Main, 4:34. Heidelberg, 6:27. Karlsruhe, 7:22. Freiburg im Breisgau, 9:40. During the trip, there were several long halts; this was not because of air raid warnings but because the locomotive was changed several times. Finally, they arrived in Basel, German station (Basel DRB, for Deutsche Reichsbahn), close to the scheduled time, 11:11. It was Monday morning, August 16, 1943.
The “German station” in Basel was an enclave of the Reich in Switzerland. Fritz had heard that this border station was a favorite observation post for the Nazis and a nest of German spies. As he left the train, Fritz looked around him, not very reassured. At a bank counter, he was given the regulation ten marks (no more) to which every German leaving the Reich had the right. Then he approached the border post, where he managed more or less to conceal his nervousness as he presented his papers. His heart was beating like mad. If there had been a body search, he would have had no hope of escape.
Fritz Kolbe’s papers were in order: he had an authorization to stay for four days (until Friday, August 20). As could be verified inside his passport, he had a German visa furnished by the Foreign Ministry (visa no. 4235), and a Swiss visa, provided by the Swiss legation in Berlin (visa no. 519). The German customs officer, with a look as cold as a statue, signaled him to move on. The hardest part was over. Fritz was in Switzerland. He felt an immense relief.
After taking a shuttle to the Swiss station in Basel (Basel SBB), Fritz got on another train, for Bern. He took a deep breath. Perhaps he had seen in the Basel station German trains full of coal or military materiel moving slowly toward Italy through the Gothard tunnel (the route connecting Rome and Berlin). But he suddenly felt transported into another world. Switzerland was a strange country, both very close to and very far from Germany. A country where you could find German political refugees, Jews, resistance fighters from around Europe trying to lie low, German, Italian, and Austrian deserters, escaped prisoners of war, Allied airmen who had survived missions in Germany…
Bern, Monday, August 16, 1943
On his arrival in Bern, Fritz was immediately picked up by a diplomatic vehicle that took him to the German legation in fifteen minutes. He was astonished by the beauty of the site and at the same time surprised to discover the modest size of the Swiss capital. He soon noticed that Bern had absolutely no road signs and that it was thus very easy to get lost if you didn’t know your way around. He found out that the road signs had been removed because of the prospect of a German attack: Everything had to be done to make the invader lose his way. He also noticed that the car in which he was riding did not display a Nazi flag.
On leaving the station, Fritz had had the time to leave his personal belongings at his hotel, which was not far from the station. This was the Hotel Jura (on Platz Bubenberg), a modest hotel, but quite comfortable. He had taken the opportunity to hide the documents he had concealed beneath his pants. The day passed in consultations with his colleagues in the German legation, which was located in a villa in the Brunnadern district, in the southern part of the city (Willadingweg 78). Perhaps Fritz had a brief conversation with Otto Köcher, head of the legation, whom he had known well since Spain.
Crossing through the city by car, he had seen the handsome residences of the Kirchenfeld district. All the diplomatic missions of the world were there, to judge from the flags decorating the façades. What was striking, coming from Berlin, was the idyllic nature of the place. There was a liveliness and an apparently gentle way of life, which was no longer known in Berlin, even if Fritz was a little disappointed by the absence of chocolate and pastries from the store windows in the center of town. Getting out of the car that deposited him in front of the German legation, he felt surrounded by calm and silence. Just the sound of the wind in the trees and the “pock” of tennis rackets hitting a ball nearby.
That evening, Fritz was invited to a diplomatic reception. He had the time to go back to his hotel to change, and it was probably then that he managed to reach his old friend Ernst Kocherthaler from a public telephone. Kocherthaler had been living in Switzerland since September 1936. After fleeing the civil war and the Falangists (who suspected him of having supplied arms to the Republicans), he had settled with his family in Adelboden, a little mountain village in the Alps near Bern, an hour and a half south of the capital. Fritz knew his telephone number (“146 in Adelboden,” he said to the operator). This was the first time that the two men had spoken in eight years. They were moved by the reunion, but the poor quality of the telephone line made it impossible for them to speak for long. They arranged to meet in Bern the next morning.