Hitler's Spy Chief

HITLER'S SPY CHIEF

Richard Bassett

PEGASUS BOOKS
NEW YORK

IN MEMORY OF

Julian, Alan and Nicholas whose world this was.

AND FOR

Beatrice and Edmund whose world this may, with luck, never be.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Preface

Author's Note

Preface to the American Edition

Introduction

1  A Naval Tradition

2  The League of Gentlemen

3  A Gilded Youth

4  Finis Germaniae

5  Spy Chief

6  Spain

7  Fallen Bastions

8  Lines of Communication

9  Keeping the Empire Afloat

10  Total War

11  Duel to the Death

12  The Search for Peace

13  Unconditional Surrender

14  The End of the Abwehr

Conclusion

Sources Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

Preface

The would-be biographer of Canaris could hardly choose a more difficult subject. Notwithstanding several excellent biographies on him, notably by André Brissaud and Heinz Hoehne, the mystery of the German admiral who somehow helped Britain win the war remains, even more than fifty years after his death. Despite the thousands of words devoted to the admiral after the war, the riddle of his links with Britain continue to cast shadows over almost every chapter of the war's history. It is therefore with some trepidation that I have attempted to shine my torch into the already much visited and, by now, quite Stygian cellars of the Abwehr.

The hazards of working with material related to secret operations are immense. Long-standing friendships with this or that member of a particular service are only a disadvantage, as events still covered by the Official Secrets Act and therefore subject to archival embargo obviously cannot be discussed. The consistency with which the most modest and oblique of enquiries have been met with a wall of dignified and amicable silence in certain quarters, usually quite voluble on other topics, is an impressive testament to the oaths of loyalty that servants of the Crown, distinguished and undistinguished, embrace. If there is one great lesson to be learnt by those who research the more obscure dealings of the British secret services during the war, it is that the officers of those services cannot, on the whole, be persuaded to break their vows. For those who
believe that a country without an efficient and loyal intelligence force is automatically doomed, this is reassuring.

It is, however, always a pleasure to be able to talk to men who took part in what Lewis Namier called, albeit in a less capitalist age, the ‘transactions' of contemporary history. Moreover, as he pointed out, a great many profound secrets are always somewhere in print and easily detected when one knows what to seek. Previous knowledge is a marvellous stimulant to cogent reasoning and astute deductions. However, the published literature is pitted with inaccuracies and false trails, and the unpublished archives are occasionally contradictory.

To illustrate this point, Namier recalled a story related by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on how, when crossing Paris from the Gare de Lyon to the Gare du Nord on his way back from the Riviera, the taxi-driver acknowledged his generous tip with the words, ‘Thank you, Sir Conan Doyle'. The author of the greatest detective stories of his time was astounded. ‘How do you know who I am?', he asked, to which the driver replied, ‘I saw in the papers that you were coming from Cannes by way of Marseilles and I see that your hair is cut in the Cannes style and that on your boots is the mud of Marseilles.'

‘Is this all you recognise me by?', the bewildered writer asked.

‘No,' came the reply, ‘on your luggage is your name, printed in very large letters.'

There is much in print to help those wishing to focus on links between Canaris and his opposite number in the British secret service, Sir Stewart Menzies, and there can be no doubt that both men worked together for an understanding between Britain and Germany, with Churchill's tacit encouragement, which could, by 1943, have led to the war ending far sooner than it did.

As to whether Menzies and Canaris ever met, the reader must draw his own conclusions. The circumstantial evidence appears to be against Menzies' post-war and oft repeated mantra to journalists that the meeting
never took place, though unsurprisingly, no documentation for such an encounter exists in the public domain.

The criteria for decisions taken by those in power are rarely easily understood, even when those decisions are taken in the full glare of modern democratic transparency. This is especially the case in time of war. However, it is not the purpose of this book – nor would it, in my view, be appropriate for those of my generation, however well informed – to pass judgement on those statesmen and servants of the Crown whose decisions vitally affected the duration of the Second World War. As Leo Amery once noted, it requires practical experience of great affairs to judge the conduct of public men fairly. In the intelligence world there is the added problem of facing confusing and different sets of choices, a situation which most people not in that world would have difficulty in understanding.

The story of Canaris illuminates in sharp relief the alternatives which faced those in power at the twentieth century's moment of supreme crisis. The reader must decide for himself whether the very tangible chances of ending the conflict two years earlier with the consequent saving of life, certainly many millions, can be weighed successfully against the durable balance of power hammered out by the victors in 1945, which kept the peace of the world for half a century – more or less – though at a high price for the countries of central and eastern Europe.

One of the consequences of Canaris' failure to achieve an understanding in 1943 is that the Germany that has emerged to take its place in the twenty-first century, after the total destruction of the twentieth, is without any shadow of a doubt a democratic, largely Christian country, committed to cooperation, consensus and values that are the exact opposite of those espoused by the Nazi regime. The Federal Republic, whatever its faults, has proved a stable and moderate cornerstone of peace in Europe for two generations.

Such a conversion may well have been possible without the
nearannihilation of Germany that took place between 1943 and 1945. The desperate and often painful experiences of those families in post-war Germany who had been actively against the regime, and their often very difficult attempts at reintegration into post-war German society in the 1950s, suggest on the other hand that the virus of Nazism, with its powerful pagan hatreds, might have survived all but the most comprehensive of inoculation programmes.

The Germany that has entered the twenty-first century would have been recognisable to Canaris as a country more or less conforming to the Germany ‘within the fold of Western civilisation', to quote Keynes, which he and his fellow conspirators strove for and which ultimately they and the little admiral died for.

Author's Note

This biography of Admiral Canaris, the first to appear in English for nearly thirty years, caused some controversy among those historians who reviewed it in England on its arrival early in 2005. I am grateful to them for focusing, mostly to the exclusion of anything else, on points which bore often little relation or relevance to the basic narrative.

Certainly, with only limited knowledge of German, it is difficult for those historians and critics to grasp perhaps the main themes of the German spy chief's career. I have found German sources often as enlightening as British ones which on the whole are rather dismissive of the German resistance and Canaris. Such are human affairs that even when they are most deserving of praise, they are often the subject of sinister interpretation by those who sit in judgement on the interior state of others.

More than fifty years after the end of the war, the enigma of Admiral Canaris, like that of the man with the dark lantern of the ‘Powder Treason' or that other man of mystery in the iron mask, continues to baffle and perplex. The false but oft-repeated mantra that the German opposition could have removed Hitler whenever they wanted continues to cast a shadow over Canaris' integrity. One great advantage of generally accepted theory is that it is generally accepted. But repetition, however endless, does not make truth and, as has been pointed out in another context, where truth rests on evidence
which is incomplete, it must be subject to challenge and revision even at the expense of national mythology.
5

This story of Canaris does not illuminate some great unrevealed truth about the Second World War. Intuition and imagination suggest that is still to come. But there are shafts of lightness in between patches of obscurity. Whether, once the Moscow archives on the war are opened beyond 1941, there will be clarity, remains to be seen. In London, the archives subjected as they are to intense pruning on such delicate matters are of limited assistance and, as has been showed recently, capable of mischief. In America, where the papers are more complete, the recent changes in the intellectual climate there suggests access will become in time less generous than hitherto. The least that can be said is that this book is a reasonable interpretation of such evidence as survives. The most one could say is that it is more plausible than any other.

The present received wisdom is that Britain and Germany fought each other for six years without thought of compromise. Canaris' career reveals, perhaps all too clearly for some, that this thesis merits an alternative. There is another related widespread misunderstanding concerning the role of Pius XII whose actions highlighted here show not only how he personally intervened to save Rome's Jewish population but also how he saw his mission was to bring about that compromise peace which this book shows was far from unthinkable even in 1943. Only in this way could the factory slaughter of the innocents and the unique bestiality of the holocaust be brought to an end.

This book cannot attempt to give all the evidence, solve all the problems or comment on all the documents but it is offered tentatively as a spotlight on a career of one of the most fascinating figures of the twentieth century and one whose story has been far too long neglected by historians in this country.

Richard Bassett, London

5
Francis Edwards, S.J.,
The Real Story of the Gunpowder Plot
, London, 1969

Preface to the American Edition

A book which challenges some of the basic assumptions concerning the 1939-1945 war is clearly offering a hostage to fortune, and several reviewers differed with my assessment of Admiral Canaris.

It was therefore doubly pleasing to receive letters from those few survivors of the Abwehr and wartime Germany who recalled the Admiral in a more sympathetic light. Of those, some were living proof that the Admiral had risked his position and intervened directly to rescue people.

In a letter to me, Dr Stefan Heyden
1
remembered the Admiral visiting his father, who was the local vicar in Zehlendorf, the smart suburb of Berlin where the Admiral lived. The Admiral's fine uniform with its naval ‘dirk' and black trimmed hat always impressed them. As Dr Heyden recalled:

The Admiral was instrumental in rescuing my father on at least four occasions. The most notable of these was when he intervened after an incident relating to the horrendous
Kristallnacht
. My parents, listening on the radio and feeling shocked but helpless, told us what was happening and in a desperate show of solidarity took us to a Jewish paediatrician. Then, the following Sunday, my father gave this sermon:

What a terrible harbinger of events to come for our Germany, the land of the Reformation, that the synagogues of our fellow human beings should be ignited and burned down with deliberate criminal intent.