Germany Finally Honours Spy Who Gave Nazi Secrets To America

Berlin - Fritz Kolbe, a German bureaucrat described by the CIA as the most important spy of the Second World War, has won recognition at last from his country Reuters/Peter Kolbe

FEW VISITORS to Berlin's vast concrete and glass foreign ministry building take much notice of the brass plate bearing the name Fritz Kolbe, affixed just three weeks ago to the door of one of its elegant wood-panelled conference rooms. Most Germans have never heard of Fritz Kolbe.

Yet the nameplate and a black and white photograph of a balding, impish- looking man with protruding ears on a wall inside the chamber have been reunited in Germany's attempt, 59 years on, to make amends for one of the shabbiest episodes in its post-war history.

Kolbe was described by the CIA as the most important spy of the Second World War. As a bureaucrat in Adolf Hitler's foreign ministry, he smuggled 2,600 secret Nazi documents to American intelligence in Switzerland from 1943 onwards, continuing his task undetected until the war ended.

No other German damaged the Nazi regime to such an extent. Kolbe supplied the Americans with vital information about where the Germans expected the allies to land in Normandy, crucial facts about the Nazi V1 and V2 rockets and Japanese military plans in south-east Asia. He even exposed a butler working in the British embassy in Istanbul as a German spy.

"My aim was to help shorten the war for my unfortunate countrymen and to help concentration camp inmates avoid further suffering," Kolbe wrote from his home in Switzerland in 1965. He never accepted money for his work as a spy.

Yet after the war, Kolbe was dismissed as a traitor by successive German governments. His attempts to rejoin the foreign ministry were repeatedly rejected and he was forced to end his days working as a salesman for an American chainsaw company, until his death in Switzerland in 1971.