Book Review (Fiction) - The Honest Spy

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.