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

A work of remarkable scholarship that moves with the swift pace of a John le Carre thriller, A Spy at the Heart of the Third Reich is a chilling addition to the literature of espionage. In 1943, a young official named Fritz Kolbe from the German foreign ministry arranged to meet with Allen Dulles, then an OSS officer in Switzerland and later the director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Kolbe had decided to betray his country. Over the next two years, Kolbe passed on countless valuable documents about German war efforts by tying the pages to his thigh and praying to avoid customs searches. He described the location of munitions factories and relayed diplomatic reports on Germany's intelligence operations and relations with other Axis nations like Romania and nominally neutral countries like Spain.

Viewed by many Germans as a traitor, he was erased from the history books and, after Hitler's fall, his diplomatic career came to an end. Drawing on recently declassified...

Publishers Weekly

This modest but useful book is the first full-scale biography of Kolbe, one of the major Allied agents in Nazi Germany. A junior official at Hitler's Foreign Ministry, he had access to thousands of messages conveying valuable information about German weapons, tactics, plans and morale. As a diplomatic courier to the German embassy in Switzerland, he was able to travel freely, and regularly deliver his material to Allen Dulles, head of the OSS office in Switzerland. Dulles had to fight the opposition of the British to American espionage efforts and the skepticism of his own superiors, but eventually saw to it that Kolbe's material was put to use. Delattre paints a vivid portrait of Kolbe, a romantic and a stubborn fitness buff, who seems to have become an agent simply because he was a decent man confronting indecency. A longtime German correspondent for Le Monde, Delattre has supplemented his firsthand experience with extensive research and is terrific on conditions in Germany during the war. Kolbe survived the war but did not prosper in the peace, when he was regarded as a traitor in Germany. (Feb.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.