Basic goods and services were growing increasingly scarce. Life was constantly punctuated by collections for the community: cloth, old paper, shoes, materials of all kinds, including animals (particularly dogs, requisitioned for the army). Coal was in short supply. It was forbidden to run water during air raids; it had to be kept in reserve to fight fires. But this was not always enough: “Here and there a fire hose, handled by soldiers or firemen, threw jets of water on the houses,” wrote Adolphe Jung. “The water came from the Spree through long pipes in the depths of the river, because, of course, the usual pipes, less than an hour after the bombing, had no more pressure. Even in cellars, you could barely get a small quantity of water.”
Half the time, Fritz Kolbe and his close friends were in the shelters. “Life in a bunker,” he said himself of the winter nights of 1943 spent in underground shelters with stale air. You could never be without your civil defense kit, the content of which was strictly determined by the administration: a suitcase containing clothing, extra linen, shoe care products, a sewing kit, a bar of soap and a package of crackers for each person, a container of milk, sugar, oatmeal, a bottle of water, a small saucepan, plates and utensils, and matches. A pitiful set of provisions. In any event, the shelters provided only relative safety: “Cases of violent death were reported when the outside of a shelter was hit by a bomb with no damage to the interior. Some people are said to have fallen, bleeding from the nose and the mouth, dying from a fractured skull. This was caused by the impact transmitted directly to a head leaning against the bunker wall,” according to Adolphe Jung.
Berliners thus lived from day to day, in the expectation of imminent death. But life continued nevertheless. Professor Sauerbruch and his friends in the Wednesday Club continued to meet to discuss various subjects once or twice a month. In addition to a noteworthy presentation by the physicist Werner Heisenberg on “The Evolution of the Concept of Reality in Physics” (June 30, 1943), the year was marked by a presentation by the former ambassador to Rome, Ulrich von Hassell, on “The Personality of King Alexander of Yugoslavia” (December 15, 1943). The members of the club appreciated more than ever the friendly atmosphere of their meetings. One evening at Sauerbruch’s, the austere Ulrich von Hassell even stood unsteadily on a table and started singing old student songs.
A distinct relaxation of social constraints began to be noticed almost everywhere. After the summer of 1943, with the massive movement of families to the countryside, Berlin had become a city of bachelors. From boozy evenings to passing flirtations, men had decided to take advantage of life. “If their wives only knew!” wrote the journalist Ursula von Kardorff. Money no longer had much importance; tips had never been so generous in the cafés and restaurants that were still open. The center of this slightly decadent social life was the Adlon Hotel, near the Brandenburg Gate. In addition, a large foreign population had given the capital of the Reich a new face. Forced labor had brought people from around Europe to replace the Germans who were at the front. From workers to doctors, all professions were represented. Berlin was in the process of becoming a kind of involuntary melting pot.
The leaders of the Reich no longer knew what to come up with to mobilize the population for a “fanatical” drive toward “final victory.” In December, a directive from Goebbels required journalists to banish the word “catastrophe” from their vocabulary.
Bern, late December 1943
Meanwhile in Washington and London, “George Wood” began to be of real interest. Some secret service figures wanted to ask the Berlin agent questions on precise points. But Dulles informed his OSS colleagues in Washington: “Impossible now to ask 805 more questions without incurring risk, unless he comes back, which is not likely.” For his part, Fritz was furious at not being able to transmit regularly to Bern everything that passed through his hands.
Suddenly, a letter written on December 18, 1943 informed the Americans of the imminent arrival of their friend from Berlin. As had been agreed in October, the message was sent in the form of an innocuous letter to Walter Schuepp, Ernst Kocherthaler’s brother-in-law. “Dear Walter, I wanted to tell you that we are still alive despite the latest bombing. Apart from a few broken windows, nothing happened to us. I take the opportunity to tell you that I will probably be at your house on 27 December. So, save a piece of the Christmas goose for me! Say hello to Ernesto and his family. Merry Christmas!” Fritz had written this letter, signed “Georges” (sic), in Berlin but had given it to a diplomatic courier on assignment to Bern, and it bore a Swiss postmark of 21 December. As soon as he received it, Walter Schuepp passed it on to Ernst Kocherthaler, who immediately sent a telegram to Gerald Mayer: “I have heard from a friend abroad that he will probably be in Bern on the 27th… Since I should by no means miss him, I’m going to be there then, at 13:09. If you could be there too we could talk over our pending business.”
Fritz had managed to secure an assignment to Switzerland. This was his third visit to Bern since August. Because of the holidays at the end of the year, there was no other candidate for the trip. By going, he was doing a service for Fräulein von Heimerdinger, to whom he confessed that he was going “to talk to German émigré circles in Switzerland,” no longer attempting to justify his trip by the formalities of his divorce. The only difficulty was to provide a motive for this new absence to his boss, Karl Ritter, who finally signed his orders and asked Fritz to bring back a box of good cigars from Brazil, which he paid for, as usual, in advance. It took Fritz two days to travel from Berlin to Bern. The Anhalter Bahnhof had been bombed: the building was still standing but all the tracks had been destroyed. He had to go to Potsdam to take the train.
Fritz stayed in Bern over the holidays. Every night, he saw the Americans for many hours. It was on the occasion of this trip that he gave Allen Dulles von Papen’s cables alluding to Cicero, along with many other things. Allen Dulles and Gerald Mayer had never had to absorb so much information all at once. Fritz had brought more than two hundred documents, not only copies of cables but also handwritten notes that only Ernst Kocherthaler was able to decipher.
In the course of this third meeting with Kolbe, the Americans gathered information of all kinds. Night after night, Fritz unleashed a torrent of information. Revelations of a military nature were particularly interesting. Kolbe indicated the location of a Junkers factory where engines for the new Messerschmitt 262 were assembled, the first jet plane in the Luftwaffe (in Dessau, south of Berlin). He also provided one of the places where the new secret German rockets were stored. Fritz Kolbe did not know the name of these weapons, but Professor Sauerbruch had spoken to him of a site where he had seen launching pads aimed at England when he was traveling in Belgium. This was probably Helfaut-Wizernes, near Saint-Omer in the northern part of France that had been annexed to Belgium. The position was bombed some weeks later (from March 11 to September 1, 1944), although it is not known whether the information provided by Fritz had helped to identify the target.
Fritz Kolbe was well informed about the results of the most recent Allied bombing in Germany and the rest of Europe. He spoke at length about the ruins of Berlin and described daily life in the capital of the Reich. He revealed that the oil fields of Ploesti in Rumania had resumed production after being heavily bombed in August 1943. He also spoke of atrocities committed in the occupied countries. A cable from Athens dated January 2, 1944 revealed, for example, that as reprisal against the resistance, all the male inhabitants of the village of Kalavrita in the Peloponnese had been massacred, including young boys.