by John Bryden
When Hitler invaded Poland in September 1939, Britain and France did indeed stand their ground and the general war that Canaris feared followed. It made him all the more determined to topple Hitler.
What Canaris next had in mind, now that the war had actually started, was a coup d’état. On formally naming Lahousen the new chief of Abwehr II (Sabotage), he assigned him his share of the enterprise. He was to devise a plan for seizing key members of Hitler’s entourage and of the Nazi security service. He was also to be prepared to take over the broadcast radio stations. Canaris was to look after forming a special Abwehr commando unit to carry out any gunplay. The necessary small arms and explosives were already on hand, hidden next door at 80 Tirpitzuferstrasse, headquarters of OKW/Chi, the German army’s cipher branch.6
What went wrong, Lahousen explained, was that success came too early to the commandos. Later to gain fame as the Brandenburg Regiment, the recruits were mainly Germans who had grown up outside the fatherland and who were fluent in the languages of their adopted countries. High standards of resourcefulness and physical fitness were demanded. Their first great test came during the 1940 invasion of Belgium and Holland when small bands of Brandenburgers donned enemy uniforms and by ruse seized key bridges and other objectives in advance of the German armies. They were so proud of their small role in Germany’s victorious conquest of France and the Low Countries, Lahousen explained, that if they had been given any cause even to suspect their commanders of disloyalty, “they would have shot them out of hand.”
And so it went. Lahousen was invited to put his thoughts on paper and it made gripping reading. He said all of the Abwehr’s division heads — Oster, Pieckenbrock, Bentivegni, Bürkner, and himself — were party to the conspiracy to undermine the Nazis. He told of two bomb plots against Hitler before the disastrous attempt of July 20, 1944; of repeated efforts to persuade senior army generals to arrest Hitler; of alerting Germany’s Axis partners and neutral countries to Germany’s military intentions; of only pretending to undertake missions; of secretly working with resistance movements in Austria and Czechoslovakia.
One of the most significant items was the revelation that in 1940 Canaris had personally blocked Hitler’s effort to seize Gibraltar, the British fortress colony overlooking the narrow western entrance to the Mediterranean. This was decisive. The sweeping victories of Erwin Rommel in the Western Desert were recent memory. So, too, was his final expulsion from North Africa in 1943 due primarily to his not being able to keep his lines of supply from Italy open. They were straddled by Malta with its air bases, and the sea between Italy and Tunisia became a graveyard of Italian freighters. Malta had been supplied and sustained by British convoys from Gibraltar. Had that not been possible, Rommel would have reached Cairo. No one in Lahousen’s audience would have thought otherwise.
Lahousen told how Canaris was sent to Spain several times by Hitler because he had made many friends there during the First World War, and because of the help he had given the dictator, Franco, during the Spanish Civil War. Instead of promoting Hitler’s proposal that Spain join the war, or at least allow German troops to cross Spanish territory, Canaris spoke against it. He needed to be persuasive because Spain had long lusted for return of “The Rock,” which the British had occupied in the eighteenth century and used as a naval base ever since. The outcome of his talks with the Spanish foreign minister, General Gomez Jordana, was never in doubt. As Lahousen explained:
The report to the Foreign Office (through Amt Ausland, OKW) which I made up according to a directive from CANARIS, before his meeting with JORDANA went approximately as follows:
“Spain will continue to support, as heretofore, the Axis powers, but retains her status as “Non-belligerent,” and will defend herself against every attack on her territory, even, if the case should arise, against Germany.”
JORDANA actually expressed himself far more carefully and hesitantly in the attendant conversation when it did take place …7
In other words, on this occasion Canaris replied for Spain before meeting with its government. As the Spanish were notoriously savage guerrilla fighters and the civil war had just concluded, Hitler dropped the initiative.
The “secret tasks” assigned to Lahousen as head of Abwehr II also included
Passive conduct of Abwehr II work with external show of great activity;
Failure to carry out enterprises whose execution can be avoided in any way;
Extensive alleviations of the hardships created by the brutalities of the Nazi regime .
Examples of the first two included the supplying of false reports on vessels sabotaged in the Mediterranean, the covert disobeying of an order to sabotage the French fleet at Toulon, contriving not to carry out Hitler’s order to murder the French general, Henri Giraud, and tipping off the Italian secret service to a Nazi plan to kill the Pope. The Abwehr II War Diary, Lahousen said, was largely composed of “puffery” and information faked by his trusted aide, the former German journalist Karl-Heinz Abshagen.
As to the third task, Lahousen’s American audience must have been surprised at the extent of the Abwehr’s aid to the victims of the Nazis, especially Jews. Canaris himself sheltered Hans von Dohnányi, a distinguished German jurist dismissed from the civil service because of his part-Jewish parentage, putting him to work in the office of his chief of staff, Hans Oster. These two, in turn, Lahousen said, used the Abwehr as cover to help Jews get out of Germany, sending them abroad as spies and then fabricating reports from them. Jewish “V men” were also used by Canaris in “counter-activity” exploits. This must really have raised the eyebrows of Lahousen’s American listeners. They would have had fresh in their minds the horrors of the recently discovered death camps, grim witnesses to Nazi extermination policies. Yet here they were, being told that the Abwehr — the German army’s secret service — had absorbed what Jews it could in order to save them.8
Lahousen revealed that the conspiracy against the Nazi dictator extended well beyond the Abwehr. He named as involved several high-ranking army officers, including Field Marshal Erwin von Witzleben, the first commander in the West after the fall of France, as well as two chiefs of the general staff, General Ludwig Beck and General Franz Halder. There were others outside the army, as well: some in the Ministry of Justice, the Reich Foreign Office, and even a few senior officials in the Nazi security services.
Canaris’s secret channels of influence extended nearly everywhere in the army, and especially to the military intelligence officers attached to the armies and army groups, and to Fremde Heere, the military intelligence–collating agency of the German army high command. For a time, from January 1941 to November 1942, he even had a fellow-conspirator in the top job at Fremde Heere, the former military attaché to Japan, General Gerhard Matzky, whom Lahousen described as being in the inner circle of Canaris’s “counter-activity.”9
Another item Lahousen disclosed must have been disappointing to British intelligence, especially to MI5’s Lieutenant Colonel T.A. “TAR” Robertson, who chaired the Allied committee that oversaw the collection and distribution of espionage-related interrogation reports.10 In describing how Canaris wanted quietly to discourage sabotage against Britain and the United States, Lahousen told of replacing an efficient Abt II officer in Paris with an ineffective one who never did anything other than send one agent code-named FRITZSCHEN to England. Lahousen said he was convinced from the start that the man was a British double agent, and so he was: FRITZSCHEN was the British double agent ZIGZAG, the English felon and con man, Eddie Chapman. In January, 1943, MI5 staged an elaborate deception, complete with phony photographs and phony reports in the press, aimed at convincing the Germans that FRITZSCHEN had successfully set off an explosion at an aircraft factory. Lahousen revealed he had paid no attention.11
Lahousen also said he only sent a handful of sabotage agents to England and Ireland, and only in token response to Hitler’s orders that the Abwehr do so. It was intended that they fail.
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��It would seem that our views on the causes of the Abwehr’s ineffectiveness and inertia should be revised,” an American noted in sending along the Lahousen reports to Colonel Robertson, adding that the descriptions of the Abwehr working against Hitler were backed up by two other interrogations.12 The words must have made the Englishman wince. Robertson had been in charge of MI5’s double-agent operations during the war. Lahousen’s remarks about not running saboteurs indicated the captured saboteurs he had “turned” into double agents had been phonies in the first place. Indeed, all those enemy agents landed with sabotage assignments in 1940–41 must not have been genuine.
This was not something the architect of MI5’s already celebrated “double-cross system” would have wanted to hear. It suggested his first and star double agent, Arthur Owens, had really been working for the other side.
Most spectacular of all, Lahousen said he believed Canaris had been personally in touch with the Allied intelligence services, and specifically with MI6, through intermediaries in Switzerland. And he named names.
Frau SZYMANSKA — Wife of the last Polish attaché to Berlin. A very wise, also politically highly educated woman, whom CANARIS looked up regularly in Switzerland, and whose family in Warsaw was protected and especially looked after by the Abwehr. Her husband, Colonel or General SZYMANSKA, fought at that time with MONTGOMERY’s Army in Africa.
I have various indications that she was one of the most active supporters of CANARIS’ “counteractivity” just as, in general, I, and other like-minded persons, calculated that CANARIS maintained direct contacts via Switzerland to the Allied intelligence services.
Countess THEOTOKIS — a very clever Greek, Jewish or half-Jewish, perfectly clear in her political attitude, was along with her family supported strongly by CANARIS. She lived at that time 1941–42 in Corfu. CANARIS met her often in Rome or Venice. I believe she was connected with the British IS (Intelligence Service). The KO-Leiter Italy, Oberst HEIFFERICH, should know more about her.13
The Americans already had a dossier on the countess. A June 1944 OSS report on the Abwehr in Italy forwarded to the FBI mentioned that she had “received great assistance from the Germans in connection with her frequent trips from Greece to Italy, and from Italy to Switzerland and Germany. It was thought that the head of the German service, Admiral CANARIS, was particularly interested in her.”14
Anyone who read that report and then the one on Lahousen would know why.
Lahousen’s story about Canaris and his campaign to undermine Hitler’s Reich was stamped SECRET and filed away for the next half century. Some of what he disclosed came out at the Nuremberg Trials, where he was a star witness against the leading Nazis accused of war crimes, but his testimony then was dependent upon the questions asked of him. Consequently, only a limited picture of Canaris as an opponent of the Nazis emerged, leading most historians to conclude that he supported those who plotted against Hitler, but rarely got involved himself. Lahousen’s 1945 interrogation portrays him as the prime mover.15
2
1933–1939
Wilhelm Canaris was born in 1887 in a village in the Ruhr near Dortmond. His father was an engineer and both parents were decidedly middle class — well-educated, moderately patriotic, and moderately religious. Normally a son in such a family would go into business but the young Canaris joined the navy and the beginning of the First World War found him serving in the South Atlantic as a junior officer on the cruiser Dresden.
It was a dramatic voyage for the twenty-seven-year-old. The Dresden took part in the 1914 Battle of Coronel, where a German squadron under Admiral Graf von Spee sank two British heavy cruisers, HMS Monmouth and HMS Good Hope, only to be ambushed by a superior British force a few months later, with the loss of all of Graf von Spee’s ships save the Dresden. She was eventually cornered in a Chilean harbour and scuttled, her crew going into internment. Canaris, however, showed his resourcefulness by learning Spanish, disguising himself as a Chilean, and making his way back to Germany. He served out the rest of the war first in Spain, as a spymaster and agent recruiter, and then as a successful U-boat commander. Few could match his war record for bravery, cunning, versatility, and determination.
Canaris continued in the navy after the war, visited Japan in 1925, and then was named to the naval staff of the Defence Ministry, which involved him in secret shipbuilding and rearmament talks in Spain and Greece. In 1929 he got to know Count Theotokis, and visited him several times on the island of Corfu. He returned to a sea command aboard the battleship Schlesian, and in 1934 was appointed chief of the Abwehr, then still a modest-sized organization attached to the War Ministry. His reputation must have been a key factor in his getting the job; he was seen as astute, a good administrator, and a subtle manager of men. He was also known to be politically savvy and brave. This last quality was especially needed. He was being put at the focus of three of the most dangerous men of the century. Lahousen called them the three H’s: Hitler, Himmler, and Heydrich.
To appreciate the delicate game Admiral Canaris was to play over the next decade, the story of Hitler’s murder of Ernst Röhm must be told.
Röhm was the head of the Sturmabteilung — usually simply the SA — a civilian army of malcontents, sociopaths, and labour radicals born from the street protests that became a daily feature of German life following the 1929 stock market crash. Germany under the Weimar Republic was then one of the most liberal democracies in Europe, but its elected politicians were blamed for the soaring unemployment and rampant inflation occasioned by the worldwide Depression. While still just a fringe political party, the Nazis organized the violent side of the protests along military lines and by 1931 the “Brownshirts” — the name given them for the quasi-uniforms the SA took to wearing — numbered some four hundred thousand, four times greater than the actual German army.
When Hitler finally won power, Röhm made the mistake of bragging publicly that he was the Nazi leader with the real clout, and that the new German chancellor would do well to pay him close attention. That Hitler most certainly did.
By all accounts, Röhm was an ugly character. He was a huge hulk of a man, encased in layers of flesh, with a red face and puffy cheeks divided by a domino moustache teetering on his upper lip. He was given to creature excesses — sex, food, alcohol, preferably all at once — and reports of his binges, sometimes involving hundreds of his SA followers, were graphic and gruesome. Such behaviour was perhaps not surprising for someone who ordered phalanxes of like-minded louts into innocent neighbourhoods to smash windows, kick in doors, and randomly beat up people.
They were, as one commentator of the period noted, “beefsteak Nazis” — brown on the outside but red inside. They were the German “Bolsheviks” of the Depression and Hitler harnessed their communist sentiments as a means to his political ends. He promised them a “revolution” that would transfer power from the corporate elites and bosses to the workers. The word Nazi, indeed, is a contraction of the first word of the party’s full German title, Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei — in English, National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Röhm expected Hitler to live up to this name.1
(It is one of the great fictions of the post–Second World War era that the Nazis were right-wing fanatics. In fact, they were zealous left-wingers imbued with a strong sense of nationalism.)
In the beginning, Hitler needed Röhm. His strategy was to take over government legally by manipulating the social instability fuelled by his followers. Elections in Germany were by proportional representation, leading to chronic minority governments that were short-lived and indecisive. The constitution stipulated that the Reich chancellor (prime minister) could rule by decree in a national emergency if given this power by the Reich president — at that time the eighty-five-year-old First World War–hero Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg.2 The role of the SA was to create so much violence and chaos in the streets throughout Germany that all sectors of society — big business, small business, landowners, merchants, chu
rches — would long for the stability Hitler promised should the Nazi party win government, and be amenable to one-man rule when it did.
In the lead-up to the election of 1933, Röhm served Hitler well. There were window breakings, street fires, and beatings in abundance. The theme song of the Brownshirts as they marched by torchlight ran like this:
String up the old monarchists on lamp-posts
Let dogs bite at their bodies ’til they fall
Hang black pigs in all the synagogues
Let the churches have it with grenades.3
A year later, after the Nazis won a majority in the Reichstag and a desperate and confused Hindenberg gave Hitler emergency powers, such sentiments were no longer needed, and not wanted. A stable one-leader, one-party Germany required the co-operation of the corporate and social establishments and Hitler immediately set about building these alliances. Röhm, however, publicly insisted that Hitler fulfil Nazi promises to nationalize the big industries and break up the holdings of large landowners. “Honour the Revolution,” he proclaimed. Röhm had to go.
Getting rid of the commander of one’s own private army is a tricky business, but Hitler had an enthusiastic helper. The minister in charge of Germany’s police, Heinrich Himmler, former chicken farmer turned top Nazi, also had assembled a private army for Hitler, the Schutzstaffel, better known simply as the SS. It numbered two hundred thousand in 1933, half that of the SA, but its members were a cut above, drawn to it for reason of personal prestige, rather than politics. The designer-created black uniforms of the SS were smart, gave a sense of elitism, and were popular with the girls.
Himmler’s army called for good, manly specimens, and an SS man needed only to look in the mirror to see confirmation of Himmler’s quack theories of Aryan superiority: blond, high cheeks, strong chin and noble nose, set off by a peaked hat with glamorous badges, and a black tunic with silver highlights. Good looks, at least in the eyes of the beholder, masked every other inferiority, and for this gift of self-esteem the SS man offered Himmler his absolute loyalty. If Himmler and Röhm had been driven to open battle it would have been a bloody affair.
