Germany honors long-forgotten WWII spy

[Kellanved]

BERLIN - Germany gave posthumous honors on Thursday to a government bureaucrat whom the United States once hailed as its top World War II spy — a half-century after he was branded a traitor by postwar Germany.

Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer said Fritz Kolbe, a mid-level diplomat who passed 1,600 secret Nazi documents to U.S. spies, was a patriot for resisting Hitler and said he had been wrongly ostracized by the German government after the war.

“It is very late, but not too late to pay tribute,” Fischer told 500 diplomats at a ceremony dedicating a room to Fritz Kolbe in the Foreign Ministry. “The honor is long overdue. It was not a glorious page in our Foreign Ministry’s history.”

After the war Kolbe lost his job, his friends and his reputation at the Foreign Ministry. His attempts to get a job in the West German government repeatedly rebuffed, Kolbe left his homeland and ended up as a salesman for a U.S. power tools company. He died in obscurity in 1971 in Switzerland.

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