An Honourable Defeat (12 page)

In the main the employees of the Foreign Office were drawn from the aristocracy and the professional middle classes. They came from an educated, liberal background, and the younger ones amongst them especially looked forward to a world in which internationalism, as opposed to nationalism, would be the keynote. They saw Hitler’s policies as not only ultimately destructive to German interests, but grossly anachronistic — this quite apart from the moral and ethical questions raised. The Foreign Office was never a Nazi organisation, nor did the Party ever gain complete control over it. Ribbentrop set up his own bureau and largely ignored it, which was to the advantage of those working within it against the regime. The most significant members of this group, which was large, were the brothers Theo and Erich Kordt — Theo, the elder, being attached to the German Embassy in London, and Erich an adviser on Ribbentrop’s staff in Berlin. Their cousin Suzanne Simonis acted as a courier between the two brothers, learning long, complicated messages by heart and repeating them verbatim, as to carry written material would have been far too risky. Also attached to the Foreign Office was the major Resistance figure, Adam von Trott zu Solz, and Hans-Bernd von Haeften, whose younger brother Werner later became Stauffenberg’s ADC.

There were several others, and in the course of the war the official positions of the various members of the group changed, but these men formed the important core. They were at the centre of attempts both before and during the first years of the war to negotiate agreements with the Allies, principally in Britain and America. Negotiations were also carried on through different channels in Switzerland, Sweden and the Vatican. All could be said to have worked for the regime, but only in so far as they held positions within it which they then exploited as much as they could to the benefit of the Resistance. All were obliged to lead double lives, and all suffered from extremes of tension as a result.

Working closely with the Foreign Office was the Abwehr. Overall a very large organisation, it contained a relatively small but very effective cell of influential conspirators, who enjoyed the special protection of Wilhelm Canaris.

Canaris was a complex individual whose appointment as Chief of the Abwehr came at a time when his career might have been assumed to be over. He was a natural spy: he had a secretive nature and he either could not or would not show other people his true self. He was mistrustful of others, especially tall men (he was only five-foot-five), but he loved animals unreservedly. He was an accomplished rider, and his dog was probably his greatest friend.

His nickname was ‘the little Greek’. Though his family had been in Germany for 300 years, and was of Lombard stock, it pleased him to claim descent from Konstantin Kanaris, the Greek freedom fighter and later prime minister, who may have shared Canaris’s bloodline. His background was not military, but he joined the Imperial Navy aged eighteen in 1905. He served in submarines and later on the
Dresden
, which was scuttled after an encounter during the First World War with the superior British cruiser
Glasgow
off the Chilean coast. Avoiding internment, and speaking fluent Spanish (Canaris was a lifelong lover of Spain), he rode across South America and found his way back to Germany in time to take command of a submarine in spring 1918. Following the war, as a conservative officer and a Christian (his family was later to attend Niemöller’s church in Dahlem), he was involved in anti-Communist activity, and he has been accused of complicity in the murders of the Communist leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg in the troubled days that followed the end of the First World War, when Berlin nearly witnessed a revolution.

He remained in the Navy after the war, and in 1922 became First Officer of the cruiser
Berlin
. On board, the senior officer gained the affection and respect of one of the cadets, an eighteen-year-old called Reinhard Heydrich. Heydrich was later to become Himmler’s Number Two, and possibly the most dangerous man in the Reich. He was cashiered from the Navy in 1931 on account of dishonourably breaking off a promise of marriage — an experience which left him with an intense dislike of naval officers; but this antipathy was never extended to Canaris. Heydrich, whose death at the hands of Czech partisans in 1942 was to result in the revolting vengeance of the razing of the village of Lidice near Prague, was that rare mixture, a man of culture and intellect who was also a sadist and brutal killer. He was a past master at the ruthless in-fighting which typified the Security Service, and yet throughout his life his relationship with Canaris remained cordial. The Heydrichs and the Canarises were neighbours and socialised together, playing cards and holding soirées — for Heydrich was another gifted musician. It was this curious ‘friendship’ (for want of a better word) that protected the Abwehr for so long from Party pressure — the two men even agreed formally to leave each others’ departments alone — though some poaching occurred on both sides. After Heydrich’s death, his successor Ernst Kaltenbrunner proved to be a different kettle of fish, but by then the Resistance within the Abwehr was sailing ever closer to the wind. Himmler himself never worried Canaris — the Admiral thought the head of the SS a fool whom he could handle easily.

Canaris’s monarchist and generally right-wing leanings often made him a butt for the radical press during the Weimar Republic. His relaxation and relief from such houndings was to travel to Spain, which he did often. He was an accomplished linguist, but he spoke Spanish with total fluency and could easily pass for a Spaniard. His love of the country was absolute. At home, he was an early supporter of Hitler’s rearmament policies, and especially in favour of the rebuttal of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, and the restoration of Germany’s 1914 frontiers. However, his fastidious personality found Nazi officials distasteful, both in their manner and their persons.

His career was not distinguished, and 1934 found him in command of the coastal batteries and marine garrison at the bleak Baltic port of Swinemünde — directly north of Stettin (now in Poland). This looked like a dead-end job, the last posting before retirement. But meanwhile the head of the Abwehr, Naval Captain Conrad Patzig, was finding it difficult to get on with Himmler and had fallen out with Blomberg. It was Blomberg who ordered Admiral Erich Raeder to get rid of Patzig (since the Abwehr was a military department and Patzig under Raeder’s ultimate command). This was duly done, but the Navy wanted to keep a man of theirs in the post, so Raeder proposed Canaris. He did not suggest Canaris out of any special warmth of feeling, for in fact he did not like the man. Canaris had a nervous, volatile temperament which worried the Admiral. He was also a sensitive man, and very alert to what was going on around him. These qualities, together with his natural secretiveness and his political acuteness, made him a dangerous underling. But he was the best man in the Navy for the job. He took up the appointment on January 1935.

The Abwehr was divided into several departments, dealing with information gathering (using V-men —
Vertrauensleute
— what we might call ‘moles’), counter-espionage, the organisation of agents provocateurs and sabotage in enemy countries, linked to a central administrative office. The ‘Overseas’ department was responsible for liaison with the OKW and the Foreign Office, and at the same time it was entrusted with the surveillance of foreign embassy attaches in Germany. The ‘Overseas’ department was to be subject to expansion and change, as the National Socialists developed espionage and the German secret service network to a degree of phenomenal complexity (but not necessarily efficiency) because Hitler and Ribbentrop mistakenly believed that the British intelligence service was a paragon of efficiency.

In the prewar years, Canaris served Hitler well, developing the Abwehr from a ‘little shop’ into a large and sophisticated unit. He would not, however, carry out any orders which he thought contravened the Rules of War, and he fought cleverly and hard right up until the time of his fall to prevent the annexation of the Abwehr by the Party’s State Security Service. He saw his unit as a brake on Nazi extremism, but at the same time he felt that Hitler was indeed ‘Germany’s fate’, and that he would lead the country into total destruction. That destruction was necessary, in Canaris’s view, for Germany to purge herself of the evil of Nazism.

Canaris was a workaholic who could not delegate. His subordinate, General Erwin Lahousen, an Austrian officer who served in the Abwehr and was a party to the conspiracy, said of him:

Canaris was the most difficult superior I encountered in my thirty-year career as a soldier. Contradictory in his instructions, given to whims, and not always just, always mysterious, he had nevertheless developed intellectual and, above all, human qualities which raised him far above the military rubber stamps and marionettes that most of his colleagues and superiors were. He never struck me, Austrian that I am, as the typical German military man; rather he seemed a cosmopolitan in the uniform of a German admiral
...
[39]

He got on very well with Hans Oster, already in place and running the administrative department. The special relationship with Heydrich (though Heydrich was tall and therefore fundamentally mistrusted by Canaris) meant that:

The Abwehr enjoyed more freedom from Gestapo control and direction than any other organisation in the Third Reich. For instance, the Abwehr had its own passport office both for establishing passes for foreign travel and for visas. Moreover, the Abwehr personnel was, to some extent anyway, protected from ‘screening’ in the matter of investigation into ‘Aryan’ ancestry and descent. Among the officials of the Abwehr there were some good men — and among the so-called V-men...a good many who could not have complied with the requirements of the Nuremberg laws on racial purity.
[40]

Like that of so many of his fellow conspirators, Canaris’s political outlook seemed contradictory until seen in the light of his conservative background. It was his main concern to present Hitler with selected intelligence in an attempt to guide the Führer’s political decisions, but he was not against all of them. Opposing the alliance with Mussolini, for example, he was irritated by Britain’s weak line over the invasion of Abyssinia. On the other hand, he supported Franco to the extent of recruiting right-wing German ‘volunteers’ to fight on his side in the Spanish Civil War — a perfect training and testing ground for German men and weapons — and he helped organise the infamous airborne ‘Condor’ legion, which bombed Guernica.

And yet it was at about this time, 1936, that, almost certainly influenced by Oster, he began to view the Nazis with political as well as personal distaste. The main source of concern initially was the danger implicit in
Gleichschaltung
— Canaris could see that this signalled not just the beginning of a strong authoritarian regime which he might have welcomed, but of the destruction of personal and political freedom, which he did not. He retained his sense of humour, however, which more often than not expressed itself in sarcasm — a trait which did not increase his popularity. Within the Abwehr group of conspirators — and it must be stressed that it was a group, not the entire unit — he could be biting. ‘Never’, he once told a staff meeting with a straight face, ‘neglect to give the “Heil Hitler” salute to any flock of sheep you might be passing. You never know: there may be some high-ranking official among them.’ He shared with several officers of the old school, such as Beck, a horror of the decay in standards of simply decent behaviour. These were the early days of espionage and counter-espionage on their modern, cynical and highly technical level. Canaris’s gentlemanly sense of what was ethical was horrified at Heydrich’s manoeuvring. There was a distinct cooling of the social relationship for a time when Canaris learned that Heydrich had been supplying the OGPU (the Russian Secret Service) with false documents destroying the reputation of some of the Soviet Union’s top generals in order to bring them down. This was part of Hitler’s early plan to weaken the Red Army — a policy he continued throughout his ‘alliance’ with Stalin between 1939 and 1941.

Though Canaris toyed with the idea of resigning in 1937, he decided — like Weizsäcker — to continue in office and fight the regime from within. He was certainly privy to the plot hatched by Oster at about this time which would find its fruition in the coup scheduled against Hitler for the autumn of 1938. He had a large and complex network of foreign contacts to draw on, and he liaised with Beck over the Blomberg/Fritsch scandal, keeping him informed about Security Service tactics to bring the senior commanders down.

His closest aide in the so-called CC (Canaris Club) was Hans von Dohnanyi. He was born in 1902, the son of the composer Ernst von Dohnanyi. A brilliant lawyer who had been opposed to the National Socialist regime from the first, Dohnanyi was recruited to the Abwehr by Oster in late August 1939. Attached to Oster’s Department Z, he enjoyed considerable power and freedom of movement. Department Z wasn’t just concerned with Abwehr administration; it was responsible for personal data on personnel, finance and law. It also controlled the Abwehr’s archive, the secret personnel index with 400,000 names, and the top secret index of
V
-
Leute
, to which access was strictly limited.

Dohnanyi was responsible for managing liaison abroad, in particular with the Bamberg Catholic diplomat Josef Mailer’s secret mission to the Vatican, and he played a leading role in ‘Undertaking Seven’ — a successful plan to help Jewish fugitives escape from Germany using Abwehr funds and by employing them as Abwehr agents. The plan derived its name from the original number of people helped, successfully sent to South America as Nazi spies with the blessing of the Security Service in 1942! It is a tribute to Canaris’s ability to manipulate men like Himmler that the Abwehr was able to fulfil this plan.