INTRODUCTION
In September 2001, the German weekly Der Spiegel published an article about Fritz Kolbe, whom it described as an "anonymous hero" of the Second World War. He was profiled as an example of those Germans who opposed Nazism and who "fought with no internal or external help, driven solely by the stirrings of their conscience." Fritz Kolbe was an unknown minor official in the foreign ministry of the Nazi period, so one wonders how the two authors of the article, Alex Frohn and Hans-Michael Kloth, had discovered him. The answer lay in the archives of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the predecessor of the CIA, just opened by the United States government in June 2000. These documents, which had been inaccessible for more than fifty years, had just been declassified in accordance with a law passed under the Clinton presidency in 1998, the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act. They included 1,600 German diplomatic cables classified "top secret" that had been delivered to the Americans by Fritz Kolbe, alias "George Wood," between 1943 and 1945.
To read these documents is to understand why Kolbe was described by Allied leaders in 1945 as the "prize intelligence source of the war." In his memoirs, published in April 2003, Richard Helms, former director of the CIA, pays tribute to him by emphasizing that "Kolbe's information is now recognized as the very best produced by any Allied agent in World War II."
As Der Spiegel noted with surprise in September 2001, no one in his own country knew Fritz Kolbe's name. This man, who had taken enormous risks to fight Nazism, had completely disappeared from German memory after 1945. German public opinion never recognized the merits of this "traitor," even though the "traitor" had chosen the camp of democracy and freedom. To be sure, the official history of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) extols the virtues of a few illustrious opposition figures, such as Count Stauffenberg, originator of the failed assassination attempt against Hitler in July 1944. But it has no room for all those who, like Fritz Kolbe, demonstrated by their actions that everyone might have done something against Nazism. As George Steiner has said, "the great 'no's' to barbarism came from those so-called simple people." The article in Der Spiegel portrayed Fritz Kolbe as an ordinary German, the equivalent of Dutilleul, the hero of Marcel Aymé's Passe-Muraille. However, if all the Reich's minor officials had, like him, attempted the impossible, Hitler doubtless would not have been in power for long.
