Fighting to Lose

by John Bryden

  Hitler opted for murder, with Himmler supplying the killers. In the early morning of June 30, 1934, Hitler arrived at a hotel in the spa town of Bad-Wiesee at the head of a truck convoy of SS troops. Röhm was there with some of his key subordinates for a weekend of partying. Hitler burst in on him in his bedroom, yelling curses as pistol shots sounded in the room next door. Röhm’s deputy and the chauffeur he was sleeping with were killed in their blankets. The rest of the SA in the hotel, including Röhm, were seized, manacled, loaded into the trucks and taken away. Simultaneously, elsewhere in the country, SS troops rounded up other leaders of the SA.

  Röhm himself was flown to Berlin where he was taken to the fortress of Lichterfelde, stood against the courtyard wall, and shot by firing squad. The shootings continued all that Saturday and much of Sunday. People in the neighbourhood could hear the repeated volleys, accompanied by muffled cries of “Heil Hitler! It is the will of the Führer!” Bam! Bam! It was said that the wall in the courtyard remained stained with blood for months.4

  It became a general purge. The Nazis used the opportunity to kill former political rivals and prominent critics of the new regime. The prisons filled. Hitler proudly called it the “Night of the Long Knives” and people understood it to mean that no longer was anyone free from arbitrary arrest, and execution without trial. This was the new Germany, the stable Germany everyone had longed for, and it turned a blood-streaked face to the world.

  Historians have sometimes criticized the German army for not intervening. Hitler called it putting down a revolt, but plainly it was a blood purge. The army, however, was but a feeble leftover of the Treaty of Versailles at the time, and there was no guarantee that it could win against the SS. Its soldiers were scattered in depots across the country, and it must be admitted that there was no certainty as to how they might view the recent political developments. Would they even obey their commanders? Calling out the army would not have worked.

  Instead, the army leadership chose to co-operate. Hitler had destroyed the SA, which had been a threat to the army as well as to Hitler, so that was a good thing. Hitler promised to build up the armed forces, and that was good also. When Hitler demanded that army officers swear an oath of fealty directly to him, rather than to the constitution, there really was no alternative. A “no” would mean dismissal and that gained nothing. On the other hand, when Hitler proposed arming and organizing the SS along army lines, that was going too far; the SS might someday supplant the army. The first line of defence for those senior officers who saw the peril was to retain control of the army’s secret intelligence service: the Abwehr.5

  There was urgent need to act. After Hitler consolidated his power by eliminating Röhm and destroying the SA, Himmler tried to secure control of all major police and security organizations, including the Abwehr. An internal political fight followed, which pitted Himmler against the army’s chief of the general staff and the navy’s grand admiral, Erich Raeder. One solution, as they saw it, was to put in a new Abwehr chief, one who had the kind of war record that would impress the Nazis, and who possessed the personal skills to work successfully with them while retaining his personal and professional qualities as a soldier. They proposed Canaris.6

  It was a highly calculated choice. The primary pressure for bringing the Abwehr under Nazi control was coming from Reinhard Heydrich, the brilliant thirty-year-old chief of the Nazi party’s security service, the Sicherheitsdienst, or SD.

  The SD had been set up under Himmler to spy out political opponents of the Nazis and Heydrich quickly achieved a reputation for ruthlessness, sharpened by his part in Hitler’s bloody purges. Canaris, however, had been the thirty-six-year-old commander of the training ship Berlin when Heydrich was on board as an impressionable nineteen-year-old cadet. The younger man naturally still deferred to his elder, even though politically he was his superior. Canaris was to manage their relationship with great skill.7

  Hitler made few mistakes in these early days. He seems to have had an uncanny political intuition, and despite the riot and mayhem fomented by the SA, his advance to absolute power was by legal means, not force. He made promises — full employment, respect for the churches, peaceful rearmament, the redistribution of wealth, a dignified treatment of Jews, and so on — everything the masses of people wanted to hear, and he promoted his messages by radio broadcasts, advertising, and orchestrated rallies. He was received enthusiastically, garnered the votes he needed over several elections, and took over. Then, out of reach of the ballot box, he broke his promises.8

  He made one crucial error, however. He permitted a secret service to exist and flourish outside Nazi control. He decreed that the Abwehr would look after all foreign intelligence-gathering related to the economic and military war-making capacity of potential enemy states, while Heydrich’s Sicherheitsdienst would be responsible for homeland intelligence-gathering aimed at ferreting out critics of the regime, with the secondary assignment of collecting foreign political intelligence. Canaris ensured that this demarcation of responsibilities was strictly adhered to.

  Thus it came to be that Canaris, from the start a potential opponent of the regime, stood at Hitler’s side. As Germany’s senior secret intelligence chief he reported to him personally. The “Night of the Long Knives,” however, had made him into a secret enemy. As an early member of Canaris’s inner circle of conspirators told American interrogators:

  For a long time the Abwehr had been the center of gravity for all anti-Hitler activities within the armed forces. This feeling of rebellion existed for many years before the war; it actually began in 1934, when Admiral Canaris was put in charge of the Abwehr.

  The events of June 30, 1934, proved to Canaris that Hitler was and would remain a confirmed revolutionary to whom the exploitation of trust, decency, and truth was a mere instrument of policy. Hitler was ready to deny today what he swore yesterday, provided that his plans and aims were thus served.9

  And so began a ten-year campaign of intrigue and treachery against the regime, at all times requiring infinite finesse. Against such opponents, the smallest misstep could be fatal.10

  First and foremost, it was necessary to obtain and retain Hitler’s confidence. That required putting together the best possible intelligence service. There was no time to learn on the job, so Canaris did the next best thing. He picked up a book. His First World War predecessor, Colonel Walter Nicolai, actually wrote two books recounting his experiences, Nachrichtendienst (1920) and Geheime Mächte (1925), and one only need read the second of those two to see that there was good reason why Canaris had Nicolai’s picture on his wall; it was the blueprint for the intelligence service he put together in time for the Second World War.

  Geheime Mächte, oddly enough, was first published in English as The German Secret Service (London, 1924), so the Abwehr’s British adversaries always had at hand Canaris’s espionage “bible,” as it were. It would turn out, however, that few in British intelligence would actually read it.11

  Nicolai was secret service chief from 1914 to 18 and although he felt his organization did well enough, he also found great fault. The trouble, he wrote, was the German government did not appreciate that gathering intelligence should go far beyond just meeting the needs of the armies in the field. He complained that Germany’s leadership disastrously failed to demand the economic and political information on its enemies it needed for strategic decision-making

  Propaganda was also a potent weapon the Germans failed to exploit. The smarter British, he wrote, succeeded in labelling German soldiers as barbarians — the “Huns” — which generated images of rape and pillage, alienating people in the neutral countries and stiffening the resolve of the enemy’s armed forces. Worse still, the enemy, well-informed of political events and opinion in Germany, sowed dissent on the home front, causing Germany to succumb in 1918 to mutiny at home while still undefeated on the battlefield.

  The propaganda criticism was not lost on Hitler, especially in terms of ensuring German popular sup
port for the Nazi regime. One of the first things he did on coming to power in 1933 was to put one of his most loyal followers, Joseph Goebbels, in charge of manipulating public opinion through the then still novel mass media outlets, radio and film. He was hugely successful, selling ultra-nationalistic ideas at home and abroad with great skill. The huge rallies of the Nazi faithful and the broadcasts of Hitler’s speeches deeply impressed ordinary Germans, listening to radio in their parlours or watching the newsreels at their local cinemas. Indeed, Nazi propaganda pervaded German life, promoting everywhere the idea that Germans were special, that they were superior to other nationalities, and that destiny called upon them to take a dominant place in Europe and the world. Patriotism blossomed.

  Then there were the Jews. Goebbels fostered hatred of them as a means to Hitler’s political ends. It is an ancient trick, based on the principle that hate unites, and is especially effective when people are suffering.12 The collapse of the stock market in 1929 triggered the Great Depression and no country was hit so hard as Germany, already staggering under the burden of First World War reparations. People lost their savings, lost their jobs, saw the factories idled, and looked for someone to blame. Jews were an ideal target because they traced back to cultural roots decidedly different from other Germans, making them seem outsiders. This, combined with Nazi claims that real Germans were descendants of some vague Nordic race — Aryans — created the proper chemistry of hate, which was easily kept simmering because Jews seemed to be successful in every social niche: business, science, the arts, cinema, the civil service, and so on. They also had much representation at the bottom of the social and economic ladders, but it served the Nazis to ignore that.

  Hitler’s systematic attack against the Jews, it should be added, had nothing to do with Christianity. Hitler was against all sects of Christianity. He was a champion of a totally secular society, alike in principle to what the Communists were then imposing in the Soviet Union.

  Having blamed Jews for just about every national ill on the road to power, Hitler had to act against them when he achieved it. Starting immediately, in 1933, the Nazi government launched public campaigns for the boycott of Jewish businesses and products. This rather unfocused attack was followed by legislation in 1935 that defined a “Jew” by ancestry — three or more grandparents of the Jewish faith, or, for a Mischling (“half-breed” in English; “Métis” in French), one or two Jewish grandparents — and imposed special restrictions on all so deemed a Jew. The actual religion of the individual was not a factor; under the Nuremberg Laws a person could be a practising Catholic and still be deemed a Jew, with all the consequential restrictions on marriage, voting, and the holding of public office.

  Even more ominous, statutory Jews were required by law to identify themselves on census returns, thus putting the names and addresses of every one of them on record with the government. This greatly facilitated the roundups and mass exterminations that came a few years later.13

  Public persecution and humiliation of the Jews notched up to a deadly level on November 10, 1938, with Kristallnacht (Crystal Night), so-named because of the Nazi-orchestrated rampage that saw the windows of 7,500 Jewish-owned stores smashed and four hundred synagogues torched. Ninety-one Jews were killed, marking the beginning of the murders that would eventually run into the millions. Ordinary Germans saw little of the actual violence, but what they did see the next day was swaths of sidewalk and roadway flashing and sparkling in the sun, below gaping store fronts where once there had been glass. Perhaps some felt shivers of premonition; broken glass everywhere would be a common sight when Germany’s cities were mass-bombed just a handful of years further on.

  Canaris apparently tried to help mitigate the violence of Kristallnacht, for afterward he received the private thanks of Jewish community leaders. From then on, throughout the war, he secretly helped what Jews he could.14

  In the meantime, Canaris’s best tactic against the Nazi regime was to build up as effective a secret service as he could. He took his cues from Nicolai’s books and reorganized the Abwehr so that one of its main tasks was to build up as complete a picture as possible of the economic and social fabric of potential enemy states, collecting the information covertly and from open sources. He staffed the Abwehr’s offices with mature and worldly veterans of the First World War who had gone into business and had acquired skills in management and administration. He also tapped into the intelligence-gathering potential of business and commercial enterprises with operations abroad, and systematically recruited informants from among the sailors and officers manning German merchant vessels calling at foreign ports.

  Indeed, Abwehr files captured toward the end of the war show that a huge pre-war effort had been made to collect economic, social, and industrial information, especially on the United States. Colonel Nicolai had observed that Germany had been badly surprised by the tremendous war-making capacity of the Americans when they entered the war in 1917, and it resulted in crucial setbacks on the battlefield. Although the Nazi leadership hoped that the Americans would not be drawn into a second European conflict, Canaris ensured that Germany would be well-informed if they were. Reports by Abwehr spies in the United States ran into the thousands by late 1941.15

  Canaris read Nicolai’s books cover to cover. He responded to his complaint that collecting intelligence at the fighting front had been ineffective by creating the Aufklarungkommandos, special mobile units of military intelligence personnel that were to follow immediately behind the advancing troops and search for documents left behind when enemy positions were overrun. He met Nicolai’s suggestion that full advantage be taken of advances in aircraft and wireless development by doing clandestine aerial surveys of England’s south coast and Germany’s border areas with France and the Low Countries, developing portable wireless transmitters, and generally modernizing the paraphernalia of espionage.16 Hitler supported all these measures; Canaris needed spare no expense.

  By 1939, the Abwehr was the most advanced and effective secret intelligence service in the world.

  In contrast to the British, where the various secret services were fragmented into separate organizations, each answering to the appropriate civilian or military department, the Abwehr dealt with most of the major security and intelligence tasks. It answered solely to the army high command — Oberkommando des Heeres or OKH — before the war, and then, after it started, to Hitler’s headquarters, the armed forces high command — Oberkommando der Wehrmacht or OKW. It consisted of three main departments: Abteilung I: Espionage; Abteilung II: Sabotage; and Abteilung III: Counter-espionage.

  Smaller departments had specialized responsibilities — Abteilung Wirtschaft focused on economic intelligence, for example. These names were almost always abbreviated by the Germans themselves as Abt I, Abt II, Abt III, Abt Wi — or, if the reference was to the headquarters department in Berlin, Abwehr I, Abwehr II, Abwehr III, and so on.

  The Abw/Ausland (Foreign Affairs) department collected open intelligence, largely obtained from the Abwehr-appointed military attachés posted to the German embassies abroad. The Zentrale — Abwehr Z — was the administration, finance, and records department, the latter an archive containing the names and personal files of thousands of spies, informers, enemy agents, and persons of interest. The equivalent in Britain was the Central Registry administered by MI5 but serving the same function for both the Security Service and the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). Zentrale was headed by Hans Oster, a dedicated foe of the Nazi regime.

  Abw I was subdivided into Eins Heer (IH: Army Espionage), Eins Marine (IM: Naval Espionage) and Eins Luft (IL: Air Espionage).

  Abw III also had a number of subdivisions, the most important being IIIF (Counter-espionage agents bureau). Its main task was to compromise and destroy enemy clandestine organizations by infiltrating them with its own spies and informers. The ultimate prize was to get an IIIF agent into the enemy’s intelligence service.17

  The main departments were usually mirrored in t
he Abwehr’s sub-offices, called Abwehrstellen or “Asts” for short. Thus there was an Ast Hamburg, an Ast Wilhelmshaven, an Ast Weisbaden, and so on, each usually with IH, IM, and IL desks as well as an IIIF section. The pattern was repeated as Nazi Germany conquered its neighbours, with the establishment of Ast Brussels, Ast Dijon, Ast Bordeaux, and so forth. Abwehr offices in neutral countries were called Kriegsorganisationen, or KOs for short, the two most important being KO Portugal in Lisbon and KO Spain in Madrid. These Abwehr stations worked under the cover of the German embassies.

  Each Ast or KO was encouraged to recruit and run its own secret agents, coordination being effected by keeping Berlin informed. Thus, Ast Hamburg and Ast Cologne both could have spies in Britain, France, or wherever. This had the advantage of insulating agent networks one from the other, so that if one was penetrated or blown, the others would not be. Also, since individuals with the right temperament and skills for espionage were hard to come by, the chances of finding persons suitable for specific tasks, in terms of language ability, background, and motivation were immensely increased if every Abwehr office and its sub-offices — called Nebenstellen, or “Nests” — were on the lookout. The really successful spies, the many that the British and the Americans did not catch, were obtained in this way.

  Ast Hamburg and its satellite, Nest Bremen, were the two principal overseas intelligence-gathering centres, for both were great ports with a large number of companies engaged in shipping and overseas commercial enterprises. Businessmen travelling abroad were persuaded to informally share their observations with Abwehr representatives on their return, while seamen were recruited to act more directly by taking pictures, collecting postcards, and gathering information and documents on the harbours and railways at their ports of call. They were also useful as couriers for Abwehr spies resident in the target countries.18