The article’s last two sentences – “At best he was regarded as a traitor. At worst he had the blood of millions
FRITZ KOLBE
By
Brent Cooper
The CIA described Fritz Kolbe as the most important spy of the Second World War. A member of Adolf Hitler’s foreign ministry, undetected he smuggled [levou clandestinamente] 2,600 secret Nazi documents to American intelligence in Switzerland from 1943 until the war ended. No other German damaged the Nazi regime to such an extent. Kolbe supplied the Americans with vital information about the Nazi V1 and V2 rockets, Japanese military plans in Southeast Asia, and where the Germans expected the Allies to land in Normandy (on D-Day). He even exposed a valet working in the British embassy in Ankara 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 despised [menosprezado] as a traitor by successive German governments. His attempts to rejoin the foreign ministry were repeatedly rejected and he ended his days working as a salesman for an American chainsaw company in Switzerland, until his death in 1971.
Kolbe’s name is still not mentioned in German history books. But the German government’s decision earlier this month to award him a posthumous honor by naming a foreign ministry conference room after him represents an attempt to do justice to his memory. “It is very late, but not too late to pay tribute to Fritz Kolbe,” admitted Joschka Fischer, the German Foreign Minister, at a ceremony in Berlin. “The honor is long overdue [muito atrasado]. It was not a glorious page in our foreign ministry’s history.”
Kolbe entered the foreign ministry as a junior diplomat at the age of 25. His career took him to Madrid and Cape Town, before he was ignominiously ordered back to Berlin in 1939, having repeatedly refused to join other German diplomats and become a paid-up member of the Nazi party. Barred from taking interesting jobs abroad [no exterior], Kolbe had to accept lowly work stamping [carimbando] passports and visas in the foreign ministry. For the first three years of the war, Kolbe spent his time railing against [protestando contra] the Nazis with like-minded [da mesma opinião] friends in the back room of a Berlin pub and occasionally dumping [deixando, colocando] anti-Nazi leaflets [folhetos] in telephone booths [cabines].
Kolbe felt impotent as the increasing barbarity of the Nazis became more apparent. But in November 1941, at a soirée [festinha, reunião noturna] of the renowned and discreetly anti-Nazi surgeon Ferdinand Sauerbruch, he underwent something of a conversion. Kolbe was visibly distressed to hear an account of the Nazi’s program to murder thousands of mentally ill patients, regarded as “people with lives useless” to the Reich. Out of his horror sprung [surgiu, saltou] a fervent determination to take on [assumir] the mission to fight the Nazis.
He was painfully aware that the files and documents passing over his desk every day could be of paramount importance to the Allies in their war against the Nazi regime. The only question was how to deliver this top-secret material to them. He had to wait nearly three years before he was given the chance. It came when a superior foreign office employee and fellow Nazi critic agreed to put Kolbe on the list of officials privileged to act as diplomatic couriers for the Third Reich. On the morning of 15 August 1943, Kolbe locked the door of his foreign ministry office, dropped his trousers [abaixou a calça], and bound [amarrou] two large envelopes containing hundreds of mimeographed secret documents to his legs. Equipped with a diplomatic bag full of official dispatches, he boarded a train decked out in [enfeitado com] Nazi swastika flags at Berlin’s Anhalter railway station and set off [partiu] for the Swiss capital, Bern.
His first stop was the British embassy in Bern, where he was laughed at and promptly dismissed [mandado embora]. The Americans, quicker to trust him, were the first to realize what he could do for the Allied forces. Meetings continued and by 1944, the Americans valued the information so highly that only 11 people, including President Roosevelt, were allowed to see his documents. By the end of the war, MI6 [the U.K.’s foreign intelligence service] had conceded it had made a gross misjudgment and singled out [escolheram] Kolbe as “the prize intelligence source of the war.” But he was not appreciated by a defeated German people. At best he was regarded as a traitor. At worst he had the blood of millions of his countrymen on his hands.
Adapted from Quora, September 9, 2021.
FGV 2023 - QUESTÃO 38
The article’s last two sentences – “At best he was regarded as a traitor. At worst he had the blood of millions of his countrymen on his hands.” – most likely suggests which of the following?
A) Because the full truth about Fritz Kolbe is still unknown in Germany, he has remained a controversial figure in that country.
B) After the war, many Germans believed that the moral and practical value attributed to Fritz Kolbe’s espionage activities did not justify those activities.
C) Even if Germany had won the war, the German people would still consider Fritz Kolbe nothing more than a traitor and a murderer.
D) If the Nazis had succeeded in arresting and executing Fritz Kolbe, the Second World War would have ended differently.
E) Fritz Kolbe’s biggest mistake was to think the Germans would be grateful for his courageous attempt to shorten the war and end the suffering of millions.
QUESTÃO ANTERIOR:
GABARITO:
B) After the war, many Germans believed that the moral and practical value attributed to Fritz Kolbe’s espionage activities did not justify those activities.
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