A Spy at the Heart of the Third Reich: The Extraordinary Story of Fritz Kolbe, America's Most Important Spy in World War II

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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.

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