The Honest
Spy
Andreas
Kollender
Translated
by Steve Anderson
Amazon
Crossing 2017 353
Pages
Not all Germans were Nazis...
Like the
Schindler famous for a celebrated list that salvaged a cross-section of a
doomed race during the dark years of the holocaust, Fritz Kolbe detested Nazi ideology and despised party hacks, besides hating Germany’s Fuhrer with a
passion that ran dark and deep.
Unlike the
playboy-profiteer Schindler, the more principled Herr Kolbe was an insider,
being a senior civil servant in the German Foreign Ministry in Berlin. After a
promising early career with pre-war diplomatic postings in Spain and South
Africa, his continuing refusal to join the Nazi Party saw him ignominiously recalled
to Germany and given the lowly job of stamping visas and passports. Eventually
entrusted with burning high-level confidential documents, he copied key
extracts of these with a view to offering this vital intelligence to the allies
- and so hastening the end of the Nazi regime and relieving the suffering of
millions.
His
real-life spy story has now been given a fictionalized novelistic treatment somewhat
like the Booker Prize-winning Thomas Keneally classic, by German author Andreas
Kollender, ably translated into English by Steve Henderson. However, it is not
the ghost of Oskar Schindler but Thomas Mann that really hovers over the pages
of The Honest Spy. The autumnal tone and reflective style recall Mann’s
Nobel prize-winning novel The Magic Mountain. Kollender uses the device
of Kolbe recounting his life story to two young reporters in post-war exile in
Switzerland – interviews that eerily mirror his wartime interactions there with
Allen Dulles and William Priest of the wartime OSS, America’s precursor to the
CIA.
Fritz Kolbe finally
got his chance to contact the Allies when a foreign ministry superior (and
fellow critic of the Nazis) put him on a list of officials privileged to act as
diplomatic couriers for the Third Reich. Equipped with a diplomatic pouch of
official dispatches (and mimeographed secret documents tied to his legs under
his trousers), Kolbe set off from Berlin’s Anhalter railway station for the
Swiss capital, Berne.
On
his first visit to the British High Commission there, Kolbe was laughed at and summarily
dismissed. The Americans, quicker to trust him, were the first to realise his
value to the Allied cause. Meetings continued and by 1944, the Americans valued
the information supplied under Kolbe's codename "George Wood" so highly
that only 11 people, including President Roosevelt, were privy to the vital
intelligence he provided.
Andreas
Kollender deftly sketches the psychological burdens on an ethical man appalled
by the barbarism of the Nazi regime he was obliged to serve as a patriotic
German. The author makes the point that Kolbe was a hero not just
because of the many dangers he braved but because he made a difficult moral
decision about doing what he believed to be right, refusing payment. That hard decision – to save
his beloved Germany from itself - and its consequences understandably haunted
him for the rest of his life. He knew all too well about the death and
destruction suffered by fellow Germans that directly resulted from the
information he provided.
The
Honest Spy is also a
moving love story with the widower Kolbe conducting a passionate affair with
Marlene Wiese, a married nurse who later became a willing accomplice in his
one-man crusade to undermine the Third Reich.
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