by Danny Orbach
Canaris, who supported Wohlthat’s peace initiative, threw himself into the mission with zeal. He entrusted the operation to a pair of Abwehr agents, Ernst Bloch, of Jewish descent, and Johannes Hora-czek, a fluent Polish speaker. The chief ordered Bloch and Horaczek to go to Warsaw, find the rabbi, and take care of his safe transfer to Riga, which was still free from German occupation at the time. The two made their way to the rabbi’s hideout in a military car escorted by armed soldiers. To calm the frightened Jews, who would think the soldiers came with murderous intent, Bloch introduced himself to the rabbi as a Jew. Chaim Liebermann, Rabbi Schneersohn’s secretary, testified later that Canaris’s agent carried his Great War medal to keep the convoy safe from wandering German soldiers.10 Thus, in a smooth Abwehr operation, the rabbi was smuggled to Berlin, then to Riga, and finally to a ship bound for the United States. He never knew that he owed his life to the commander of the German Abwehr.
By 1940, Canaris’s reputation as somebody who was ready to help had been established in the eyes of his friends and neighbors, and he was constantly burdened with requests. Annemarie Conzen, a converted Jew, asked him to help her mother, who had disappeared into one of the concentration camps. Annemarie herself was defined by the government as fully Jewish, and had to live under the constant threat of deportation to the east. After the death of her Aryan husband, nothing could protect her anymore. She had to leave her own home and move with her two daughters, Irmgard and Gabriele, to a small apartment next to Canaris’s. Irmgard was a classmate of Brigitte, Canaris’s daughter, and the two girls’ mothers also shared a friendship. In 1940, Annemarie tried her luck, and pleaded to the admiral directly about her mother.
Canaris could not refuse. Through his personal courier, Wilhelm Schmidhuber, he located the woman in the concentration camp of Gurs, in southern France. Under orders from his chief, Schmidhuber supplied Annemarie’s mother and other Jewish inmates with clothes, food, and money. A little later, the Abwehr chief was able to obtain for Annemarie’s mother a permit to leave Gurs and immigrate to Argentina. (That was not as unlikely as it may sound. Two thousand inmates received permits to emigrate from Gurs, through various channels.)
Unfortunately, the old lady declined, as she did not want to leave her fellow inmates. Her decision was fatal: beginning on August 6, 1942, Gurs was evacuated, and most of its Jewish inmates were sent to Auschwitz and other extermination camps. The tragedy affected Canaris deeply, and he decided to save Annemarie and her daughters by any means possible. At the end of 1942, an opportunity presented itself. Hans von Dohnanyi proposed an ambitious rescue operation of Jews and converted Jews, under the cover of a legitimate espionage mission. Canaris agreed right away and asked to also include in the list Annemarie Conzen and her daughters. Some say that he did so partly at the request of his wife, Erica.11
In addition to supporting rescue operations, Canaris spoke out against German crimes in the occupied territories, such as the atrocities in Poland, especially those perpetrated by the SS Totenkopf Division. Later, he also raised his voice, almost alone, against the murder of Soviet commissars and the starvation of Russian POWs.12 Among all the section heads of the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces, Canaris was the only one who did so.
And still, Canaris knew that most of his soldiers and officers were loyal Nazis. As is shown in Winfried Meyer’s thorough study on the Abwehr and the Jews, Abwehr agents in Russia were deeply implicated in extermination operations, the most notorious example probably being a force called the Secret Field Police (Geheime Feldpolizei), a counterintelligence force formally under Abwehr command. The official duty of this unit was to purge the front of traitors, spies, and other “hostile elements.” But during Operation Barbarossa, Jews were increasingly associated with all of the above, and were exterminated en masse by army, police, and SS alike. The Secret Field Police was so active in these operations that it practically became an Einsatzgruppe. Its commander was very close to SD chief Heydrich. Formally, he was under Canaris, but in fact he answered to the SS security service.13
As the mass murder continued, so did attempts to rescue a fortunate few. In March 1941, another rescue operation was brewing in the Abwehr high command. It was ambitious in its scale, and, interestingly enough, its original impetus was not humanitarian but commercial. For quite a few months, Harry Hamacher, the director of Brasch & Rothenstein in occupied Amsterdam, smuggled Jews across the border for a hefty fee. Initially, Hamacher was able to secure border permits using contacts and generous payments, but, as time went by, the smuggling trade became increasingly difficult. Adolf Eichmann’s Jewish Affairs department became stricter and stricter in such matters. Quickly, Hamacher discovered that it was almost impossible to obtain visas for his customers. To overcome this problem, he appealed in early March 1941 to Maj. Walter Schulze-Bernett, the commander of Abwehr I (espionage) in occupied Holland. For the latter, Hamacher’s plea constituted an excellent opportunity to help Jews and, at the same time, to smuggle spies abroad. His motives were therefore both humanitarian and military. Knowing that such a large-scale operation would require support from the higher echelons, he turned to Canaris and asked for his blessing.
The Abwehr chief quickly sent Schulze-Bernett a coded reply. “Thank you for the cigars you’ve sent me,” he wrote. “They made me very happy.” Schulze-Bernett understood the subtext: Canaris had agreed and would offer protection, “owing to his known humanitarian concerns and his opposition to the persecution of the Jews.”14 The operation was code-named Aquilar.
Once Canaris gave his consent, Aquilar developed at breathtaking speed; the list of Jewish refugees grew by the day. Most of them had nothing to do with spying and intelligence operations. Schulze-Bernett included some Jewish friends and acquaintances in the list, and even Gen. Friedrich Christiansen from the occupation government (a man deeply implicated in war crimes) added one or two people “whose personal stories moved him.” Another rescuer was Albrecht Fischer, an employee of Bosch and member of the conspiracy. He secured a place on the train for his Jewish friend the banker Rudolf Kahn. Helmuth Wohlthat, already involved in the Schneersohn operation, expanded the list further with eleven additional Jews.
Operation Aquilar began on May 11, 1941. Walter Schulze-Bernett and his subordinates personally watched over the first refugee train leaving Amsterdam on its way to Spain. The second one left the station four days later, and the third on May 18. Many of the refugees traveled further, to Lisbon, and from there on to the United States or South America. The impending invasion of the USSR made it difficult to get emigration permits for a while, but the operation was revived on August 4, 1941, with the fourth Madrid-bound train, again under the watchful eyes of three Abwehr officers. Yet another train leading Jewish refugees to freedom left Amsterdam on August 11, and the last one reached its destination in late January 1942. All in all, almost four hundred Jews were saved in this rescue operation, the largest one ever to be staged by the Abwehr.
The official reason for the operation was the growing need to install spies abroad. In reality, the intelligence obtained by Aquilar was close to zero. Schulze-Bernett himself confessed that the operation had no success as far as intelligence was concerned, because the Jewish refugees could not be expected to cooperate with the Abwehr.15 Indeed, the number of actual spies implanted abroad was very small, indicating that most passengers were innocent refugees sent for their rescue alone. The spying mission was mostly (though not exclusively) a cover story to fool Eichmann and his bureau. The list of refugees grew as the operation went on—another indication of its humanitarian nature.
It is indeed surprising that just when Eichmann was allowing fewer and fewer exceptions, Canaris and Schulze-Bernett were able to smuggle out so many Jews. To achieve this end, they obtained fraudulent visas for the refugees, thereby endangering their own lives. It is also important to note that the last train left the station three months after Himmler had forbidden further Jewish emigration from the Reich. Eichmann was no fool,
and his suspicions grew by the day. In late 1941, he began to look for ways to expose Canaris’s real intentions. This was well expressed in a letter he sent to the Düsseldorf Gestapo station on December 2, 1941, around the end of Operation Aquilar:
Recently, during deportation transports, there has been a suspicious intervention of Wehrmacht authorities or officers on behalf of Jews. Among the excuses for doing this is the notion that [these Jews] are to be used for Abwehr interests abroad . . . Under these circumstances, the possibility is not to be ignored that in most cases these requests are motivated by personal interests. In the future, Jews should not be allowed to be excluded from the transport . . . unless OKW [the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces] produces a well-reasoned letter confirming that these Jews will actually be used for intelligence operations.16
The only person in the Abwehr authorized to sign for the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces was Canaris. The letter was likely a ploy on Eichmann’s part to make the Abwehr chief personally responsible for the operation. Now, with his personal signature, he would have to answer for any suspicions raised over individual Jewish agents.17 Canaris, one must assume, was well aware of the trap, but he still would not stop his efforts to rescue Jews.
In late 1942, Canaris approved another large-scale operation, known retrospectively as Unternehmen Sieben (Operation 7), or “U-7” for short. Hans von Dohnanyi turned to Canaris and proposed to smuggle Jews abroad as “intelligence agents.” The chief agreed and even asked to include his neighbor, Annemarie Conzen, and her two daughters. As usual, his involvement was crucial. Without Canaris, such a rescue operation could never take place.
However, the key figure in U-7 was not Canaris but his “special adviser” Dr. Hans von Dohnanyi.18 His office was located in the most important wing at the Abwehr headquarters, close to the rooms of the chief and his deputy. At thirty-seven, Dohnanyi looked young for his age. He wore suits and ties, almost never uniforms, and had round glasses. It was easy to mistake him for a nondescript government functionary. However, he was no faceless bureaucrat but one of the kingmakers in German military intelligence, a personal confidant of Hans Oster and Wilhelm Canaris. A sworn enemy of the Nazi regime since its inception, Dohnanyi later testified that he had begun his struggle against the regime not only because of its lawlessness but also because of the “Nazi treatment of the Jews and the church.”19 After 1933, he decided to remain inside the system to fight it from within. His biographer Marikje Smid wrote that, as a resistance fighter and a “better German,” he decided to use his power to slow down the slide to evil as much as he could.20 He did that through his energetic activity in the German resistance and through saving victims.
During the 1930s, Dohnanyi was called upon by countless Berlin Jews, dissident clergy, Freemasons, and other persecuted people. They came to him for advice, and he used his connections, know-how, and financial resources for their sake. “His office,” testified his wife, Christine, “turned into a haven for people of all kinds who needed help.” He assisted with emigration procedures, gave friendly support, and sometimes even obtained concessions from Justice Minister Gürtner, his direct superior until 1938.
By the end of the 1930s, Dohnanyi had become one of the key members of the German resistance, a connector between civilian and military groups. When he was removed from the justice ministry because of his politically incorrect views, Oster got him a post as a special civilian adviser (Sonderführer) in the Abwehr. During his Abwehr tenure, Dohnanyi was involved in assassination attempts, and Oster entrusted him with day-to-day maintenance of the networks. “My husband decided not to fight for his country,” Christine said after the war, “but for those who will safeguard the eternal values of Europe.” For the same purpose, Dohnanyi also helped to record the crimes of the Nazi government, and he collected a large file of incriminating documents to be used for the prosecution of the Nazi leaders following the overthrow of the regime.21
The event that finally led to Operation U-7 took place in mid-November 1941, when an unusual guest came to Abwehr headquarters in Tirpitz-Ufer: a gray-haired man in his fifties limped to the gate on a wooden leg. He was admitted and taken to Dohnanyi’s office. His name was Fritz Arnold.22
Arnold was a lawyer of Jewish descent, a Lutheran Christian by confession, who had served as the representative of the Jewish lawyers in Berlin. He was worried nearly to the point of despair. So far, he and his good friend the Jewish lawyer Julius Fliess had been able to avoid deportation to the east. But now, they felt the noose tightening around their necks. Arnold and Fliess both earned medals in the Great War, but in 1941 past achievements meant little. The Jewish Council of Berlin advised Fliess that his name had been added to the Gestapo’s deportation list. In a few days, they told him, he must board the transport with his wife, Hildegard. Their nineteen-year-old daughter, Dorothee, was allowed to remain, since she worked in an ammunition factory. Fliess and Arnold knew that the journey to the east would be one-way.
Arnold and Fliess turned to several high-ranking officials for help, but no one was ready to fight with Eichmann and his bureau on their behalf. Eichmann was ordered to make Germany Judenrein, free of Jews, and he intended to finish his job to the last. In his despair, Fritz Arnold remembered Dohnanyi, with whom he had been in touch in his (Arnold’s) capacity as the representative of Jewish lawyers. At that point, Dohnanyi worked at the bureau of Justice Minister Gürtner. With the passing years, this contact was forgotten. Dohnanyi left his job in 1938, and for many months Arnold heard nothing about him. Now, he heard that Dohnanyi had a new job in the Abwehr. He asked for a meeting, which he was granted.
Arnold told his former colleague about the deportation order for Fliess and his wife. “We must save them!” replied Dohnanyi, and he promised to do everything to have the order withdrawn. That was not his first attempt to help Arnold and Fliess. In 1938, he tried to protect them from the discriminating bylaws that prevented Jewish jurists from practicing law. “These two will be harmed only over my dead body,” he had said. Now, in late 1941, the situation had become a matter of life and death. Dohnanyi, like most of his coconspirators, knew well that the Nazis were exterminating Jews in the east. His wife, Christine, testified that during spring 1942, she had long nocturnal conversations with him about the options for rescuing the two Jewish lawyers. Around that time, probably, he made up his mind to save them using the resources of German military intelligence.23
Dohnanyi turned to his commander, Admiral Canaris, for help and advice. First, he asked for a recommendation letter for Julius Fliess, stressing his bravery during the Great War. After Canaris agreed, Dohnanyi quickly sent the letter. He hoped that Canaris’s power and influence could save his friend. Eichmann gave in this one time and agreed to postpone the deportation, but Dohnanyi was certain that the sword was in its sheath only temporarily. Soon, Eichmann would strike again. In summer 1942, Dohnanyi found out that Eichmann had decided to end outside interventions in his affairs. SD headquarters sent the following letter to the Jewish Council in Berlin: “The Reich Main Security Office has found out that Jews subject to deportation have attempted to thwart this by appeals to other authorities. We clearly announce that such pleas are proscribed. If a Jew subject to deportation attempts to apply for such interventions, his entire family will be deported as well.”24
Dohnanyi had to change his strategy. The time for pleas to Nazi authorities was over. Again he had a long, private discussion with Canaris, and he proposed to smuggle Arnold, Fliess, and their families to a neutral country as German intelligence agents. Canaris said yes.25 At that moment, Operation U-7 was born.
Unlike Operation Aquilar, which had been carried out a year earlier in a semilegal fashion, Operation U-7 was illegal from the start. In late 1942, it was already strictly forbidden for Jews to leave the Reich, and anyone who helped them was considered a traitor, subject to the death penalty. Therefore, unlike in previous operations, the risk for the Abwehr officers involved was concrete and acute. Furthermo
re, it put the entire conspiracy at risk. Canaris and his men all knew this, but it did not change their decision.
Immediately after confirming the basic idea with Canaris and Oster, Dohnanyi informed Fritz Arnold of the plan. He, Julius Fliess, and their families would be smuggled abroad as German spies. Arnold was skeptical at first and stressed that he would never agree to spy for the Third Reich. Dohnanyi calmed him down and told him that he, Oster, and Canaris did not expect the refugees to work as spies but that this cover story must be used as a concealment measure. Dohnanyi even asked Arnold to help with the organization of the operation.26
U-7 was managed as an intelligence operation. Canaris, as was his habit, stayed away from the details and entrusted Dohnanyi with the planning. Maj. Gen. Hans Oster secured Abwehr funds and negotiated with Swiss authorities. That wasn’t easy, as the Swiss were usually unwilling to accept Jewish refugees. Fritz Arnold was appointed the “leader of the refugees” and received an office in Abwehr headquarters. There, he busied himself with countless small details necessary for the planning and execution of the operation. First, a final list of refugees had to be made. Who, exactly, would be sent to Switzerland? The initial plan was modest: to save only Fritz Arnold, his wife, Ursula, and their daughter Irmingard, as well as Julius Fliess, his wife, Hildegard, and their daughter Dorothee. But the list kept growing. Canaris asked to add his neighbor, Annemarie Conzen, and her daughters, Irmgard and Gabriele. Afterward, Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a noted theologian and one of the resistance fighters in the Abwehr, heard of the operation and petitioned to include a converted Jewish woman, the church activist Charlotte Friedenthal. Like Annemarie Conzen, she had been defenseless since her Aryan husband’s death. When Bonhoeffer asked Dohnanyi to save her as well, he agreed without hesitation.
