Hitler's Spy Chief (15 page)

Later during the war, many of the peace-feelers that would engage London and Berlin would be transmitted through the Vatican. At a stroke, Canaris and Weiszäcker restored cordial relations: the freemasonry of the imperial German navy apparently breaking the ice which had frozen relations between the Tirpitzufer (German admiralty) and the Aussen Amt (foreign ministry).

With the SD, any reserve felt by the Abwehr officers after Canaris' inaugural speech may have been dissipated by a Bierkeller evening specially arranged for officers of the Abwehr and the SD on the evening of 13 January, less than two weeks after Canaris took over as Abwehr chief. The mood was convivial and field-grey and black appeared to mingle on the best of terms. Himmler, predictably well-briefed by Heydrich, hit it off with Canaris: the naval officer with the understated manner, but keen gaze, was the spy chief of all his fantasies come true.

As it happened it was also the day of the Saar plebiscite. The rich coal mining area lying north of Lorraine was detached from Germany under articles 45-50 of the Treaty of Versailles, and the rights of exploitation granted to France for a period of fifteen years. At the close of this period the population were to decide their future status, on this day voting more than ninety per cent in favour of reunion with Germany. Unsurprisingly, the
mood in the
Berlin Bierkeller
was
gemütlich
(convivial). Both sides could take pleasure in the fact that the ball of German ascendancy had been set rolling.

The viper's nest of competing intelligence in the Third Reich

Less than a week later, on 17 January, Canaris and Heydrich met to establish the framework, later to be known as the Ten Commandments, which would regulate the work between the SD and the Abwehr. The need for such a framework had, it may be recalled, been the result of Patzig's refusal to allow the SD to encroach on the Abwehr's political work, in particular the Abwehr's right to act
pari-passu
with the Gestapo political police. The agreement now discussed envisaged the Abwehr's monopoly on secret espionage left intact, in return for an undertaking that the SD had priority to act as more than
primus inter pares
with regard to political counter-espionage activity, which was subject to judicial procedure.

Both sides expressed their satisfaction with the agreement, which would be formally finalised at the end of the year. Of course, as no strict definition was applied to counter-espionage, there was needless to say ample room for manoeuvre on both sides. Moreover, the Abwehr remained the dominant agency in military matters and as anyone with the briefest of knowledge of the intelligence world could see, it would not be difficult to extend this interest into the political field in a country like the Third Reich. Even in democracies, the frontier between military and political espionage is rather fluid. Canaris could collect political intelligence on the grounds that it was relevant to military decision making. In this way he could continue to prick Ribbentrop and, as will shortly be seen, outshine the foreign minister's own intelligence credentials and so further ingratiate himself with Hitler.

Moreover, if he offered cooperation with the SD, this was a two-way street. If Heydrich felt he had a window on the military thanks to Canaris, the Abwehr was building up its own surveillance of the party, so that by December 1938, the diplomat von Hassell could note in his diary that the
‘one positive approach … is the surveillance of the entire party through the intelligence section (Canaris) of the army.'
22

At the same time, Canaris set about building up his intelligence machine. The Abwehr was divided into five sections
(
see the diagram on pages 112-3
)
. Section I, under Colonel Pieckenbrock, was responsible for secret espionage abroad. Section II (Sabotage), under the direction of Major Helmuth Grosscurth, was responsible for preparation of sabotage/ commando activity behind enemy lines. Into this section was inserted a formidable special forces unit known, after the area in which they were trained, as the ‘Brandenburgers'. These were the true predecessors of todays special forces. Multi-lingual, highly mobile and trained to operate behind enemy lines, these units recruited by word of mouth proved more than a match for the NKVD at Murmansk and even the SAS at the Iron Gates on the Danube, and later at Leros. At the same time, these units may have later formed the secret potential nucleus for an armed revolt against Hitler.

Section III (Counter-Espionage), under Major Rudolf Bamler, was the principal department liaising with the SD and was a domestic security section dealing with infiltration, treason and counter-espionage.

In addition to these three sections, there was the so-called ‘Foreign Section' under Admiral Leopold Birkner, a colleague of Canaris from his Wilhelmshaven days, which had the job of evaluating foreign military intelligence and liaising with the military and naval attachés
en poste
abroad and foreign attachés posted to Berlin.

Finally, Section Z, under Major General Hans Oster, was responsible for administration and organisation: perhaps in many ways the most important, if least transparent, part of any intelligence organisation. This section dealt with budgeting issues, although in certain circumstances conflicts were resolved by Canaris himself.

As with other intelligence agencies, a civilian front company acted as a screen for the organisation's financial transactions that could not be
handled by the diplomatic bag. In this case the company was called, suitably enough, Transmare and was run by a Levantine Jew known only by his cover name of Baron Ino. Ino possessed Turkish nationality and was, like Canaris, someone whose commercial links were intimately linked with armament interests.
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Also like Canaris he had forged his early career in Spain, where he first came to the attention of British intelligence in 1916. As early as 1925 Stewart Menzies had called up his file. Ino had a dozen aliases but his real name was Misrachi. The British intelligence Black Book knew him as Baron von Rolland. Canaris would regularly entertain him in Berlin in Hungarian bars. It is a tribute to the power Canaris managed to garner for the Abwehr that Ino was able to pass through Germany unmolested until the summer of 1939. By that time the Abwehr had long had its own passport and visa section and, with the special permission of the Führer, immunity from the Nuremberg rules on aryanisation policy.

The Abwehr

Oster, the head of Section Z, was from the moment of Bredow's assassination a determined figure in the resistance movement. A cavalry officer of impeccable turn-out, who believed that life was an obstacle course that had to be surmounted with intelligence and wit, he was at first suspicious of Canaris. The relationship between them was tense. Where Canaris was cautious and ambivalent, Oster was direct and honest to the point of folly. Nevertheless, both men were deeply if not formally religious and for both, ethical considerations were paramount. Moreover, Oster felt he could always speak his mind in an Abwehr under Canaris: a circumstance which, as Abshagen points out, ‘only those who knew and experienced the Nazi police state can understand what that meant.'

Between 1935 and 1937, Canaris expanded this core framework considerably. From an organisation of less than 150, the Abwehr grew rapidly to nearly a thousand in less than three years. The intake was mixed and as has been documented elsewhere,
24
fell into three categories. First were the traditional imperial officers, men who had grown up in the Kaiser's
service and adhered to nineteenth century values. Then came the post-1918 intake made up of officers of the Reichswehr, the small force permitted by Versailles and groomed by von Seeckt, highly qualified men with a technical training without equal anywhere in the world at that time. They were, nevertheless, bureaucratic in outiook. Both these cadres were apolitical. The third group, made up of younger officers who had completed their training after 1933, were more indoctrinated by the party: Hitler, after all, had given them a career with possibilities.

All three groups had in common an above average intelligence in comparison with many of their military contemporaries, but they were not as cohesive as a whole as might be imagined. If Bamler was pro-Nazi, Oster was his opposite. If ‘Piecki' (Pieckenbrock) was the dry technocratic Rhinelander, ‘Benti' (Bentivegni), who would replace Bamler in 1939, was as Prussian an officer of the old school as one could find, complete with spurs and monocle.

In 1938, following the incorporation of Austria into the Reich, this disparate group would be joined by yet another type, in the form of Colonel Lahousen, the ‘purest example of the typical Imperial and Royal officer corps of the old Austria'. Detached, sardonic, charming and when appropriate refreshingly frivolous, Lahousen was at the same time at ease with the most Balkan of intrigues. With his Austrian
k.und k
. (imperial and royal) training – Lahousen had even served in the old imperial and royal Austrian secret service known as the Evidenzbüro – came an utter contempt for the Prussian officer corps type (though Lahousen was careful to refrain from ventilating this prejudice too loudly until after the war, when he denounced several of his former colleagues as ‘born Prussians, typical Berlin philistines.'
25

If this was an eccentric group of officers to form the core of a powerful secret organisation, they only reflected the foibles of their chief. Canaris was, his regular siestas on his iron camp bed apart, a workaholic and prone, like most men obsessed with their work, to be capricious in their
judgements of personalities. He loathed men with too small ears and large physical frames. ‘That is a kidnapper', he would say, deploying the English word after meeting someone whose appearance somehow threatened him. At other times he would tolerate intellectual lightweights if they had the requisite manners and were ‘handsome or dashing'.

A similar lack of convention governed the furnishings of Canaris' office. Here austerity ruled, as elsewhere in his modest life-style. If his wife had had to sell her violin for him to build their modest house on the Schlachtensee, Canaris' office was also dominated by few trappings of comfort. A military camp bed, a sofa and a threadbare carpet, which he obstinately refused to repair, greeted foreign ministers of state and visiting chiefs of staff. On his desk was a model of his beloved cruiser
Dresden
, on the wall a map of the world. Otherwise the only memorable details appear to have been a portrait of his ‘ancestor', the Greek admiral Kanaris, a hazy photograph of his illustrious predecessor Colonel Nicolai and the three small bronze apes: seeing no evil, hearing no evil and speaking no evil, which some took to be the motto of the Abwehr but in fact had a wider symbolism, with echoes of Kipling and the Anglo-Saxon world of the Great Game. Nearby a small safe completed the picture of an otherwise unmemorable office.

Given the pace with which events moved from January 1935, it is tempting to conclude that Canaris simply had no time to consider richer furnishings. In any event, he loathed desk work and no trappings of office could soften the tedium which the thought of office life provoked.