Maria Fritsch

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Maria Fritsch (* 1901 in Bütow ; † 2000 ) was a German secretary . She supported her future husband Fritz Kolbe in the resistance against National Socialism. She was the private secretary of the surgeon Ferdinand Sauerbruch .

Life

Maria Fritsch was born in Bütow , Pomerania, in 1901 and grew up in a Kashubian family. During the Second World War , Fritsch worked as the private secretary of the surgeon Ferdinand Sauerbruch . In the spring of 1940 her boss sent her to the passport and visa section of the Foreign Office , where Fritz Kolbe worked, to organize a visa for Switzerland for him. Fritsch and Kolbe started talking and fell in love. Fritsch, who at that time despised the National Socialists as much as Kolbe, introduced Sauerbruch to her new friend. During Kolbe's regular visits to the Charité, the men talked and became friends. Sauerbruch occasionally invited Kolbe to his villa, where the opposition Wednesday society also held meetings. Here Kolbe established contacts with the resistance.

Fritsch's office on the third floor of the surgical clinic was directly below that of Adolphe Jung , a surgeon from Alsace who spied for the French Resistance. With Margot Sauerbruch, Adolphe Jung and Fritz Kolbe, Maria Fritsch built a small espionage machine at the Charité , which was used until the end of the war on August 8th / 9th. May 1945 remained undiscovered. Fritsch helped her friend, who was stealing secret Reich items from the Foreign Office, to collect, copy, analyze and hide them in her room. From here, Kolbe smuggled them to the American secret service OSS in Switzerland. Fritsch married Kolbe on December 3, 1948 and took his name. She outlived her husband by 29 years, died in 2000 at an old age and since then has been resting with Kolbe in a grave in Berlin's Luisenfriedhof III .

reception

Books

In 2003 a biography of Kolbe, written by the journalist Lucas Delattre, appeared in France, and in 2004 the German translation was published. In it, the author described Maria Fritsch to the public for the first time.

In 2019, the novel was published in The spy Charité of Christian Harding House . The plot about the fictional protagonist Lily Kolbe is based on the work of Maria Fritsch and inspired by Fritsch's 1972 memorandum.

Movie

  • In the second season of the television series Charité (Germany 2019), Maria Fritsch is played by Sarah Bauerett .

literature

  • Lucas Delattre: Fritz Kolbe. The main spy of World War II. Piper, Munich 2004, ISBN 978-3-16-148410-0 .
  • Christian Hardinghaus: Ferdinand Sauerbruch and the Charité. Operations against Hitler. Europa Verlag, Berlin / Munich / Zurich / Vienna, 2019.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Delattre, p. 65.
  2. ^ Hardinghaus (spy), p. 240.
  3. ↑ Delattre, 94 ff.
  4. ↑ Hardinghaus (Sauerbruch), p. 150 ff.
  5. ↑ Find a Grave: Grab Kolbe. In: findagrave.com. Retrieved March 12, 2019 .
  6. ↑ Hardinghaus publisher interview. In: Europa Verlag. Retrieved March 12, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Fritsch, Maria
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kolbe, Maria
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German secretary and spy
DATE OF BIRTH 1901
PLACE OF BIRTH Butow
DATE OF DEATH 2000