8
“GEORGE WOOD”
Swakopmund, September 1943
Meanwhile, little Peter Kolbe was living out his childhood in the distant land of South-West Africa. His happy, carefree existence was that of a “free child of Summerhill” before the fact. In Swakopmund, he lived in the house of “Granny Kahlke,” his adoptive grandmother, who was extraordinarily kind and did not have the strength to impose the slightest discipline on him. His adoptive parents, Otto and Ui Lohff, came to see him every weekend and on Sunday night returned to Walvis Bay, thirty kilometers away, where they lived during the week. Peter spent his time playing in the dunes and riding his bicycle along the huge Atlantic beaches. He would ride his bicycle far from the city, often alone in wild nature, with a small supply of dried meat (biltong, still well known in present-day Namibia). One of his favorite pastimes was to watch whales in the ocean. Desert animals were never far off. One day in the distance he saw a lion that had come to cool off at the edge of the water. He loved this landscape, “hard as locust wood, with dry river beds, and cliffs roasting in the sun.” At night, he devoured the novels of Karl May (the adventures of the Indian Winnetou). He read very late, hiding a flashlight under the sheets. Sometimes at night he also quietly left the house to go fishing on the seashore, after making sure that his grandmother was peacefully snoring. On one wall in his room, there was a photo of a boy playing a drum, dressed in the uniform of the Hitler Youth. The picture had been hung there by Granny Kahlke, who naïvely idealized the führer ten thousand kilometers away.
Events in Europe seemed very distant. The Germans in South Africa did not have the right to own a radio. News circulated by word of mouth. A few radios listened to in hiding made it possible to get scraps of information from the Reich. Peter Kolbe remembers that he jumped for joy every time a U-boat sank an Allied ship (the event was announced on German radio by the striking of a gong, and there were as many strokes as ships that had been sunk). All that did not keep him from going to soccer matches where German friends a little older than he played against British sailors on shore leave.
Peter had no news from his father. Gradually, he forgot him, even though, at the insistence of his guardians, he occasionally sent him an impersonal letter to tell him that he was making progress in the German school and that he behaved well in class. Because he played an important role in the local economy, Peter’s adoptive father Otto Lohff was spared from being sent to a camp by the South African authorities, unlike most of the Germans who had remained in the commonwealth. Almost every one of Peter’s classmates had an interned father, while their mothers continued to take care of the family farms.
One day in September 1943, when Peter (age eleven) came home from school, he encountered two South African plainclothes police at his grandmother’s house. For a German family at the time, it was not uncommon to receive a visit of this kind. The authorities in Pretoria collected all the information possible about this population, which was by definition suspect. After questioning Granny Kahlke for a long time, one of the policemen turned to the child and asked him a few precise questions: “What is your name? Who is your father? Where is he? Who is your mother?” Terrified by this unexpected interrogation, Peter believed that he had been identified as a bad boy. He had broken a window in a nearby house with a slingshot a few days earlier.
But the interrogation had no consequences. After a few weeks, Peter and his adoptive grandmother managed to forget this unpleasant episode. It was only much later, after the war, that Fritz’s son realized that this episode had a connection to his father’s clandestine activities in Berlin and Bern. Allen Dulles, with the help of his British and South African colleagues, had wanted to verify the statements of Fritz Kolbe. It was necessary to confirm the existence of the son, see if the address was correct, ask him about his life, verify the dates, and cross-check the information with counterespionage experts.
Bern and London, late August 1943
By August 20, 1943, in Bern, Allen Dulles and Gerry Mayer had in fact launched as precise an investigation as possible into their visitor from Berlin. No stone could be left unturned, all indications had to be assembled, and every hypothesis written down. A long labor of verification began. In order to do this, they asked for help from their colleagues in counterespionage (department X-2 of the OSS). All the data on the new agent were centralized in London, the European headquarters of the organization, and the Americans had no hesitation in calling on their British colleagues in MI6, who had a substantial lead over them on Germany thanks to their own network and their exceptionally abundant archives. The British also put at the Americans’ disposal their transmission lines between Switzerland and London, because the security of their communications was better. It was through the British coding department in Switzerland that all the documents dealing with Kolbe’s biography reached London; these sensitive details had above all to be kept out of German hands.
In Bern, the “Fritz Kolbe” file had been created even before his departure for Berlin. As early as the evening of August 19, Allen Dulles and Gerry Mayer set to work and put down on paper everything they had remembered from their conversation with him. Allen Dulles wrote several memos between August 19 and 31, with the intention of drawing a profile of the man and evaluating his credibility. First of all a code name had to be found for Kolbe: after thinking of calling him “König,” “Kaiser,” or “George Winter,” it was finally decided that he would be “George Wood.” The reason for the choice of this name is a mystery. To ensure the protection of their agents, the Americans chose nicknames by chance, with no relation to the context. George Wood was the name of a celebrated lawyer in New York in the nineteenth century, and perhaps Allen Dulles thought of him. In addition, like all Dulles’s other sources in Bern, “Wood” was given a number: from then on he would be “674” (and sometimes “805,” two numbers being better than one). This too was a purely random choice.
The first entry, dated August 19, is merely a summary description of the man. Date and place of birth of Fritz Kolbe; schooling; scouting (“Wood belonged to a German ‘Hikers’ club called Wandervogel which he claimed had been basically anti-Nazi”); career and postings; marriage; details about the son who had stayed in South Africa; second marriage with Lita Schoop (“a Swiss girl”), daughter of Ulrich Schoop, who lived in Zurich; very precise details about Lita’s brothers and sisters who also lived in Switzerland: One brother was married to an American, a sister was married to an Englishman serving in the British army. It was also noted that Fritz Kolbe had worked with Rudolf Leitner (“Botschafter, with ten years’ service in Washington”), and that he was a trusted subordinate of Karl Ritter (“once lukewarm towards Nazism and known to have proposed to the daughter of Ullstein, has now become thoroughly corrupt”). The document contained errors that would later gradually be corrected. Fritz’s date of entry into the Foreign Ministry, in particular, was wrong. The Americans had noted 1935 instead of 1925.