Hitler's Spy Chief (14 page)

Together with Benita von Falkenhayn, a member of the Berlin society of those times, and a frequent visitor to the races and theatres, Sosnowski worked on Frau von Natzmer. At a bathing party, seduction was soon followed by blackmail, with the result that what had been just a few titbits of information became a steady trickle of documents from I.N.6, Guderian's planning section. The tighter the turning of the blackmail screw the more desperate and informative the hapless victim became. As usual he gave her some money, but not enough to cover the debts run up by the victim, with Sosnowki's encouragement, to complete the web of financial dependency.

It was made clear to Natzmer that if she wished to be released from her ‘contract' with Polish intelligence she would have to enlist other girls in the war ministry who might be hard up to replace her. Unsurprisingly,
Natzmer complied, and within a year Sosnowski had more than a hundred documents detailing the secret development of German weapons on Russian territory and the latest developments in German armoured vehicle technology. He even managed to procure the keys to Guderian's safe.

Unfortunately, about that time, the Abwehr had ‘turned' the junior Polish military attaché in Berlin, Lieutenant Griff Tchaikowsky. This weak and rather amateur Pole was the exact opposite of Sosnowski; careless where Sosnowski was diligent, rocked by scruples and emotions where Sosnowski was ruthless. Passing on at the behest of his masters false documents purporting to come from Guderian's section, Tchaikowsky was surprised to find one day, hanging up to dry in the darkroom of the Polish embassy, some genuine material from Section I.N.6. Rarely has the old adage of the left hand not knowing the activities of the right in intelligence work had such dramatic consequences. Tchaikowsky showed the genuine documents to the astonished Abwehr, who then proceeded to investigate together with the all-seeing SD of Heydrich. It was not long before Sosnowki's spoor was detected. At a champagne supper given by Sosnowski, the Gestapo suddenly appeared, lining up the hysterical female guests and their nervous male consorts. Sosnowski, with the sang-froid of a Polish cavalry officer of Austrian training, regarded his interrogators impassively.

‘You are a spy', shouted the Gestapo.

‘No, no nothing of the sort', he replied coolly.

‘Then you are a confidence agent.'

‘You are quite mistaken', said the smiling Sosnowski.

‘I'll tell you what he is,' said Richard Protze, the Abwehr's man on the case: ‘You are a Polish intelligence officer.'
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When this accusation was repeated in the People's Court some months later, Sosnowski clicked his heels and sprang to attention. Sosnowski was exchanged for some German agents picked up in Warsaw. Both Frau von Natzmer and Frau von Falkenhayn were beheaded in February 1935. The
documents so carefully procured by them suffered the fate of much high grade intelligence; it was considered too good to be true and an obvious plant. It was ignored by the Polish intelligence staff.
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The incident, with its accompanying sensitive negotiation between Canaris and Warsaw on the exchange of prisoners, was the first joint Abwehr/Sicherheitsdienst operation to run smoothly and set the seal on a period of greater harmony between the two organisations. But the cooperation came at a price that Patzig had been unwilling to pay: the Abwehr was becoming a key building block in the totalitarian architecture of Germany. The lines of engagement between the once aloof military intelligence machine of the Abwehr and the more brutal activities of the SD security apparatus were being blurred.

At first there was some disquiet among Abwehr officers. The relationship with Heydrich so bitterly fought and resisted by Patzig appeared to be easily surrendered by the white-haired Captain. These critical views were not helped by Canaris' own appearance, which his subordinates pointed out could not have cut a more different figure from the energetic, dynamic and smartly turned out Patzig. In contrast, Canaris appeared tired, disorganized and distinctly unmilitary in appearance. One officer noted: ‘Compared to Patzig, he seemed decidedly shop soiled and old.'
15
Another noted: ‘We were so surprised, he gave the impression of a civilian rather than a senior German officer.'

In his first speech, Canaris made it clear that he expected the atmosphere of resentment towards the SD and Heydrich to change. His opening speech was decidedly pro-Nazi and contained the phrase, which sent a shiver down some spines, ‘comradely cooperation with the Gestapo',
16
a point overlooked by some biographers of the Admiral who have preferred to dwell on the oft-quoted Nicolai reference to espionage being the ‘domain of gentlemen'. Certainly Canaris made a passing reference to this, for all intelligence officers, comforting remark, but he appears at this point to have been keen to play as straight a bat as possible, knowing
of course that his words would within hours be reported to Heydrich by his sympathisers in the Abwehr, of whom Rudolf Bamler, head of section III, counter-espionage, and therefore in closest contact with the SD, was only one.

Moreover, Canaris knew that cooperation between the Wehrmacht and the SD was the theme of the moment. The day after Canaris gave his introductory speech, he was summoned with the rest of the senior military to a speech in the Berlin Opera House in which Hitler denounced the ‘rumours of military disloyalty', pledging his faith in the loyalty of his generals and rejecting criticism of them by the party. The speech was delivered to quell rumours of tension between the party and the senior officers of the military and knock on the head once and for all the rivalries that seemed to poison the key relationship of the Reich. In this it was a success, as the appeal to the generals' vanity once again silenced many of the critics in field grey. For a brief time it even looked as if all might yet be sweetness and light with their black-uniformed contemporaries.

Canaris was seated in the stalls behind Keitel and Jodl and under no illusions that he would have to play his own part in this rapprochement if he, and indeed the Abwehr, were to enjoy some freedom of manoeuvre and play the role which the coming years would offer.

In private, Canaris worked on his officers to quickly convince them that the only choice for the Abwehr was to ‘run with the party' if it was to develop and grow and expand into an instrument capable of some independent thought and action. That, however, as he pointed out, did not mean that the Abwehr would adopt the methods of the Nazi party. As one officer who was very impressed by the admiral that day noted: ‘All activities would be conducted in a gendemanly style, the style in fact of our chief.'
17

In intimate conversation, Canaris made it clear that orders from outside agencies that involved brutal methods would be disregarded by a variety of methods, some involving deceit, others delay, but never any public acts of direct obstruction. Gradually many Abwehr officers realised that far
from being some party apparatchik, their chief was a more subtle spirit. The relationship with his subordinates was paternal (as with Heydrich in the old days) and Canaris introduced the naval tradition of calling staff by the familiar
Du
rather than the more formal
Sie
of the German Army.

In discussing events with his officers he rarely missed an opportunity to show his contempt for scurrilous behaviour in espionage. Blackmail he abhorred. Indeed, he took advantage of the Sosnowski case to dwell on the shortcomings of such methods, making it very clear that he would not tolerate for a moment similar tactics in the Abwehr: ‘If one of my officers has recourse to these methods,' he sternly warned his section heads as the case wound down to its melancholy conclusion, ‘I shall proceed against him with the utmost severity.'
18

Good intelligence, in Canaris' philosophy, came from neither extortion nor blackmail. The human element was the key. It was far better to establish a relationship of trust with an agent than to deploy the black arts so beloved of spy fiction, though as will be seen, the Abwehr, far from always playing by Queensbury rules, was certainly not above blackmail, especially with regard to its Irish agents during the Second World War. Nevertheless, on the whole, honey rather than vinegar was Canaris' watchword.

For similar reasons, although he had an entire section devoted to sabotage, (Section II), he was also sceptical of its value, not least on account of the danger to innocent civilians. Such groups were difficult to control and often provoked reprisals against the civilian population. Gradually, one by one, the Abwehr officers learnt that they had a strong and wily protector of their interests in the slightiy dishevelled admiral and that, as one of the Abwehr officers pointed out a few weeks later, There is rather more to him than meets the eye on first impression'.
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Canaris, needless to say, made his mark with the Führer. Between December 1934, just prior to his taking over the Abwehr, and March 1935, Canaris had no less than seventeen private meetings with Hitler. Like
every chief of clandestine intelligence he enjoyed the right of access to the head of state at any time. But in Canaris' case this privilege appears to have been unusually generously interpreted. No record exists of their first meeting but we can be sure that the qualities Canaris had manifested throughout his career stood him in good stead.

These were, first and foremost, a cosmopolitan oudook on life. Canaris was perhaps the only politically reliable (i.e. anti-Communist) figure close to Hitler who knew something of the outside world. Much has been written about Hitler's admiration for Ribbentrop,
20
the whisky salesman who had traded with the Scots and was therefore, somewhat rashly, invested by Hitler with a broad knowledge of the British empire. If Ribbentrop could appear a man of the world to Hitler, it would not have been difficult for Canaris, with his knowledge of the clandestine armaments and banking worlds, to appear the very incarnation of geo-political wisdom.

Secondly, Canaris was a good listener, a sine qua non of any meaningful relationship with Hitler. Canaris knew well how to listen and charm Hitler, playing to his foibles and character weaknesses. Canaris had a soft spot for the Austrians: a legacy, perhaps, of his love of Europe south of the Alps. While Hitler would come to represent all that he loathed about
klein bourgeois
Austria, Canaris knew enough about the central European temperament to know how to ‘play him'. That meant pandering to Hitler's prejudices, including anti-Semitism.

Following research by Willi Grosse,
21
there is a probability that in one of these conversations, Canaris even mentioned the crass and repellent idea of identifying Jews in Germany by their enforced wearing of the Star of David. It was, of course, long before the death camps had been constructed, but while several biographers have sought to defend Canaris, claiming that he was acting in accordance with geographical rather than racial considerations, this conversation, if it indeed took place, must count as one of the blackest marks against Canaris' record. At this stage, with the first flush of success in reorganising the Abwehr, it is sadly all too
plausible that Canaris might have wanted to ingratiate himself with the Führer by suggesting a ‘solution' to the Jewish problem inside Germany. As mentioned earlier, Canaris was, in part, as a result of his views on Communism, far from philo-Semitic, yet as has been seen from his time in Spain during the First World War and his subsequent action in saving many Jews by drafting them into the Abwehr, he cannot be branded a typical anti-Semite either. He had worked successfully with Jewish bankers such as Ullmann, and would time and again rescue Jews from the certainty of being sent to the concentration camps by drafting them as agents abroad. Indeed, the conversation in which the question of the wearing of the Star of David arose may well have been provoked by the fact that the Abwehr was, uniquely in the Third Reich, exempt from the Aryanisation laws that barred Jews from government service.

For Canaris, the means justified the end, and if the Abwehr was to play a decisive role in Germany's future it had to be inoculated against the charges of treason, sentimentality and pro-Zionist tendencies, especially as its chief was hardly the embodiment of aryan vigour. That meant not only supping with the devil but imbibing much of the poison on the same menu.

Canaris was ambitious. He knew that his was only one of seven intelligence gathering agencies in Hitler's Germany
(
see the diagram on page 109
)
and his aim was to make the Abwehr the predominant and best informed of them. The Abwehr had to share the intelligence stage with the Sicher-heitsdienst, the Naval Intelligence section, Goering's Forschungs Amt, Rosenberg's Foreign Political Office, the German Minorities Intelligence Centre and the Foreign Ministry. It was by no means clear that the Abwehr could establish the necessary predominance to overshadow these rivals, all of which had Hitler's ear in one way or another. Relations with the Foreign Ministry were especially strained, partly on account of Ribbentrop's jealousy but also on account of that inevitable tension between diplomats and intelligence officers which always casts a shadow over collaboration between
these organisations. It is in the nature of diplomacy to strive to avoid incidents which result from espionage activity, while it is in the nature of intelligence work to risk provoking such events, if only because espionage frequendy involves people for whom the codes of diplomacy are sadly very far from being second nature.

In order to establish credibility and dominance, Canaris aimed to mend fences on all fronts. He established cordial links with the Foreign Ministry through a former naval officer and colleague, von Weiszäcker, then a state secretary but soon to play an important role at the Vatican as German minister to the Holy See, and to collaborate with Canaris in heading off Hitler's instructions later in the war to kidnap Pope Pius XII.