Hitler's Spy Chief (8 page)

But Berlin was reluctant to see him leave Spain. The German Admiralty wired: ‘There is no alternative at the moment to this officer remaining in Spain.' More and larger submarines were on their way to the Mediterranean. At the same time, British naval intelligence, in the shape of the formidable Admiral Hall, had realized that Spain, as the war developed, was increasingly a critical battleground. Spain was not only the base for
subversive activities against Allied interests in Mediterranean, it was also the key link for the great offices of state in the Wilhelmstrasse and the overseas world. What Canaris was up to in Spain and what the Spanish government was thinking became priority targets for Hall.
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Moreover, at the same time Krohn's activities became more transparent thanks to Room 40's interception and decryption of his signals.

For the next six months Canaris remained in Madrid building his organisation, though it may be wondered how useful this was given the fact that by now most of the embassy ciphers had been broken by British naval intelligence. Canaris appears to have travelled, reinforcing his networks and contacts, for most of the following months. It is not known therefore whether he was involved in the gruesome suggestion wired to Berlin by Krohn in June 1917 that ‘in order to close the Spanish–Portuguese frontier and to make communications difficult between the Portuguese and the Allies, I suggest contaminating the frontier with cholera bacilli … two glass phials of pure culture …'
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To be fair, Berlin replied the next day, declining this proposal. However, as the blockade of Germany continued and fodder and fertilisers stopped reaching German farmers, the idea of retaliating by the use of germ warfare against livestock in neutral countries, especially Argentine beef, which was shipped every week from Buenos Aires, was taken up again. This idea met with a more favourable response and Krohn was tasked with finding a suitable method of shipping the tiny sugar cubes which concealed the ampoules of anthrax from the Spanish port of Cartagena to the Argentine. Almost certainly they would have been transported by the ships of Reed Rosas, which would have picked them up from a U-boat, probably the U-35 which reached Cartagena later in June 1917 with a personal letter from the Kaiser to the King of Spain and then returned a few months later to pick up Canaris. (Certainly U-35 was believed to have anthrax sugar lumps in February 1918, some of which were sent to Hall, who lost no time in ensuring the King of Spain was
informed, an event which may well have contributed to Prince Ratibor's recall a few weeks later.)
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Canaris, meanwhile, was only with some difficulty able to rendezvous with U-35. Once again the French mole inside the German embassy was earning his keep. First, U-35 was held up off the Balearics by Allied ships, then Canaris, on board one of ‘his' ships, the
Roma
, was almost intercepted by a French warship as he transferred to the submarine. Reports indicate that the rising sun (it was 6.40 a.m.) helped shield this manoeuvre, which took four minutes, from the French. Irrespective of how close this particular shave was, Canaris landed at the Austrian base at Cattaro on 9 October, where his activities in Spain were rewarded with the order of the Iron Cross First Class. The citation quoted the ‘extraordinary skill with which he had carried out his mission.'

Back in Kiel, the submarine arm of the Imperial German Navy beckoned Canaris, as it appealed to many other officers who saw its remarkable possibilities and its scope for courage, imagination and resourcefulness. A long period of training began, enlivened by his meeting Erika Waag, whom he would later, after hostilities ended, engage and marry.

Fraulein Waag was a sensitive, musical and capable girl then aged twenty-four, whose brother was a colleague of Canaris. However, at this stage of the war, such ties were unthinkable. Canaris was posted to Pola and on 28 November finally achieved his ambition to command his own ship when he was put in charge of UC-27. However, a sudden vacancy for a second in command on the submarine U-34 gave Canaris the opportunity to engage the enemy more aggressively.

Canaris proved a success in submarines and U-34 had its fair share of victories against armed British merchantmen in the Mediterranean. The name Canaris even reached the Kaiser's attention: ‘Is this man any relation of the Greek War of Independence hero?', he added to the minutes of one report.

But the entry of the US into the war had turned the tide decisively and
the Habsburg Empire's disintegration had become a war aim of the Allies. Serbs and Croats were already eyeing up the assets of the Imperial Austrian Navy and Cattaro was deemed, in early October 1918, to be no longer secure. All submarines of the German navy were ordered to return to Kiel, and the Cattaro contingent sailed into Kiel on 8 November. Canaris, by this time, had his own submarine, U-128. As it powered into Kiel, he mounted the conning tower. He would never forget the sight which greeted him: from all the ships of the Grand Fleet there flew the red flag of mutiny. Within hours the Kaiser would have fled to Holland. Two days later the armistice was signed. The world which Canaris had been brought up to respect and imagine would last at least another hundred years was finished.

It is hard to imagine the effect this total breakdown of discipline had on an officer class raised on the dictum of unhesitating obedience. Nothing in Canaris' childhood or background had prepared him for the shock of such complete disintegration. The world Canaris had been born into was at an end. While the lessons he had learnt as part of Nicolai's organisation would never leave him, he might have been forgiven if in this moment of crisis he had turned his thoughts not to the future but to the past, and that happy childhood in a prosperous Germany which now lay about him, to all intents and purposes, entirely in ruins.

CHAPTER THREE

A GILDED YOUTH

Talent ist nur ein Spielzeugfür Kinder. Erst Ernst macht den Man und Fleiss das Genie
. [Talent is only a toy for children. First seriousness makes the man and diligence the genius.]

THEODOR FONTANE
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At twelve o'clock promptly, the carriage drew up at the gates of the Duisburg Steinbart Gymnasium and a short, wiry youth with a mop of dark blonde hair, shot through with a hint of Titian red, carrying a parcel of books, climbed in, to be driven home at a brisk trot through the January snow. A new century had been born barely two weeks earlier and the sense of optimism and comfort that pervaded Germany was immense. Technological advances on every front, a sense of progress, and above all an ever increasingly diffused wealth, all gave a powerful momentum to those who saw the coming twentieth century as the dawn of a new age.

The young pupil, who was now whisked away to the classical villa and park at 110 Wörthstrasse, was only one of countiess young men who were being quietly but confidently groomed to assume responsibilities in a Germany that would offer far greater possibilities than those available to an earlier generation. These thoughts, however, would have been remote from the young man who, deposited at home, flew not to his books but
to his favourite companions, his dogs. Isolated from the world beyond the walls that surrounded his family's gardens and tennis courts, the child's existence was relatively cut off from social interaction with his contemporaries. In the tradition of home and family, social life revolved around the hearth and a self-sufficiency that the febrile world of the late twentieth century would have regarded with astonishment.

This comfortable childhood was considered by one writer on Canaris as a ‘silver spoon' existence. It was certainly one in which this youngest of four and second son enjoyed in every way. Later, he would recall these days with unalloyed fondness. If he was teased at school on account of his height or, by German standards, strange name, his villa was his casde, over which the sun always shone. Born on 1 January 1887 in a small mining town near Dortmund, he may have observed the sacrifice and hardship of miners against the backdrop of well-honed German organisation, as one writer has suggested,
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but it is far more likely that he was principally influenced by his parents and the solidly bourgeois home they had created for him, his elder brother and two sisters.

Ironically, given later events, the cultural inspiration for such Germans came from that bastion of privilege and effortless superiority, England. English hunting prints adorned the walls of the villa. The silver tea service was English and there would have been many references to the self-discipline and values of the English ruling class. Uniformed governesses were also English and introduced the strange habit of placing lettuce in bowls at strategic places around the house to enable the children to satisfy any sudden yearning for food in the healthiest of ways.

However, these were by no means the most important influences. The young boy who excelled at riding and tennis was (with his father frequently absent at work as manager of the local factory) the only man in the house. His elder brother, Carl, had left home early to take up an important position with Thyssen. Wilhelm's stature and his dark skin set him apart from the more macho and athletic of his male contemporaries.
The predominantly feminine environment at home also invested his character with more sensitive influences. He seemingly enjoyed the attention lavished on him by his doting sisters but was nevertheless introspective and far from transparent. His schoolfellows, when later asked about him, found him difficult to remember; so low a profile did he have, so shy was he in many ways.

This shyness, which betrayed a sensitive nature, was disguised by a powerful sense of humour which constantiy amused his three sisters and parents. It was the mask of irony, which so many outsiders deploy in dealing with a world that seems challenging and unknown. It may partly have been his response to the most important influence on his life, his parents' rather different personalities. His father appears to have been a gruff, overbearing, socially ambitious but capable businessman; while his mother, Auguste Amelie Popp, was a woman of more refined bearing, the daughter of a Franconian forester and a descendant of a Silesian Catholic family who had always preserved their Austrian as opposed to Prussian identity. Indeed, Catholicism had also been the Canaris family's religion until Wilhelm's grandfather had converted to Protestantism for social reasons on marrying a Protestant, certain professions in Prussia, for example the military, at that time being barred to Catholics.

As is often the case in liberal times, the household limited church-going to high days and feast days, but there is no doubt that Canaris was
brought up with a strongly Christian ethos, reinforced by his mother's piety. While never later belonging to any religion in a regular confessional way, he nevertheless was brought up to believe that there was a higher authority watching and judging the affairs of men. In his closing months of freedom, he would derive great comfort from the interiors of the great Spanish Cathedrals and be dubbed by British intelligence rather disparagingly as ‘a kind of Catholic mystic'.

No less doubtful is the fact that as a privileged son and heir to a protagonist of bourgeois capitalism, the young Canaris would have been brought up with a degree of suspicion towards Marxism and its growing influence on the working classes of the Ruhr, as more and more workers from the East diluted the local labour force and old local loyalties were broken down, to be replaced by ideological ties. While the socialist measures of Bismarck – state pensions, social welfare – were praised by Canaris' father, the ‘poison' of Marxism would have been regarded as a threat to the wealth and future of the strata of society to which the Canaris family belonged.

Throughout his later career, Canaris would combine these two traits: a strong sense of responsibility for the welfare of people subordinate and less well off than himself, and an instinctive rejection of Marxism and extremes. It was a point of view shared by many of his background and articulated perhaps in its most magisterial form by the hugely influential 1891 papal encyclical of Leo XIII,
Rerum Novarum
.

Such a family, with an almost uninterrupted ancestry of solid bourgeois achievement, had never aspired to the higher echelons of German society. The Canaris family tree is traceable back to the sixteenth century, but one looks in vain for any sign of aristocratic or military pretensions. But the Germany of the early twentieth century, with its colonial opportunities, naval expansion and powerful industrial development seemed to offer even the arriviste bourgeoisie access to careers that had hitherto been the preserve of an aristocratic caste.

Nevertheless, it appears to have come as a great surprise to his family when the young Canaris, following a cruise around the Aegean with his parents, announced that he would like to join the Imperial German Navy. It is important to remember that not by the furthest stretch of the imagination could anyone have seen the Canaris family as in any way related to the officer or
Junker
class that traditionally made up imperial Germany's officer corps. There had never been a professional soldier in the Canaris family, although that did not mean that the family was hostile to the military. Canaris' father had served in a territorial pioneer regiment in
Metz, but the idea of arms as a profession struck most industrialists like Canaris' father as too poorly paid to be taken seriously.

This attitude also extended to the relatively parvenu service of the navy. But during his cruise the young Canaris had not only seen the impressive new ships of the Imperial Austrian navy in Pola and Trieste, but also something which appears to have had a profound effect on his psyche: namely, the statue erected in Athens to the memory of Admiral Canaris, hero of the Greek war of Independence. Perhaps struck by the unusual sound of his name, perhaps mocked by his fellow German students, the young Canaris seized on this heroic figure and learnt all his daring exploits off by heart, as if to embrace him as an honorary member of his family tree. In fact, despite Canaris' fascination with the Greek hero, there was no evidence of any relationship.
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