Hitler's Spy Chief (19 page)

Canaris duly noted these events. He was building up contacts with anti-Soviet intelligence chiefs throughout Europe that year and had just rekindled some old contacts from his days with the Austro-Hungarian navy in Pola during the First World War. His former colleagues from the ‘imperial and royal' naval station, Adria, were now heading up the Hungarian service and Canaris had been charmed in particular by a young Hungarian officer called Szentpetery. Szentpetery and his Magyar colleagues were well aware of developments in their neighbour to the east.
5
Budapest, then as now, carefully monitored events in Moscow and Canaris came to rely on their reports. He even became so fond of Szentpetery that a photograph of the young man adorned his desk.
6
At the same time parallel contacts were being developed with the Baltic States and Japan, this last encouraged by Ribbentrop, who was dreaming of securing Japanese adherence to the Anti-Comintern Pact against the Soviet Union.

But with the distractions of the events in Spain, Canaris forgot about Tuchachewski until in the first half of June 1937 Canaris heard the news reports from Tass announcing that Tuchachewski and seven other generals
had been found guilty of treason and shot. This was the signal for a huge, bloody purge of the Soviet High Command. More than 35,000 officers would be executed, including ninety per cent of the generals.

Canaris may have recalled Heydrich asking a year earlier for the loan of Abwehr handwriting experts who could forge the signature of Tuchachewski. At the same time, Heydrich had wanted facsimiles of the expired German – Soviet military training agreement. But Canaris did not see the connection and it was left to other Abwehr officers to point out that Heydrich was gloating that he had orchestrated the entire affair. For with the forged signatures, Heydrich had created imaginary letters between Tuchachewski and German officers. These compromising documents had then been planted on the Czech secret service in the full knowledge that they would find their way first to the Czech president, Benes, and then to Stalin in Moscow.

Heydrich was working closely with some elements of the Soviet secret service through the double agent General Skoblin, an exiled Russian general living in Paris, who worked both for the Soviets and the SD. Heydrich had produced the documents on Hitler's instruction. As he later explained to Canaris, it was the Führer's idea that the leadership of the Soviet army should be decimated. Moreover, both Hitler and Heydrich convinced themselves that their forgeries contained a germ of truth. The Soviet high command may have been in truck with the German generals. When Canaris confronted Heydrich with his responsibility for the bloodbath, Heydrich's cynical indifference appalled him. ‘Why in Heaven's name did you get involved in such a scheme?' he demanded.

Canaris was not to know that Heydrich's contribution to the purge may only have only been minor because Stalin was, in any event, determined to destroy his generals, but the fact that Heydrich had falsified documents which had been instrumental in any way in a massacre of Russian officers in peace time showed that his old protégé was no longer a German officer bound by any accepted tradition of honour. Colleagues
who saw Canaris after this meeting with Heydrich described him in a state of ‘deep spiritual shock.'
7
This affair, more than any other, convinced him of the moral abyss into which the leadership of his country was falling.

As Richard Protze, Canaris' Abwehr colleague, noted, ‘this was the time when Canaris began to turn from Hitler.'
8
It was also the time when Canaris' final illusions about Heydrich were lost. His one time protégé in intelligence affairs and, indeed, later protector had become a monster over which Canaris had no control. Henceforth the ‘master', while remaining ever cordial and helpful on a personal level, would use every trick in his formidable armoury to cut the ground from beneath his former ‘pupil' and his more sinister machinations.

In the Tuchachewski affair, the SD moreover had operated in a sphere normally the preserve of the Abwehr. Everywhere the signs of encroachment were seen in the Abwehr. At first, Heydrich no doubt thought that having helped to give Canaris his job, he had little to worry about from the Abwehr. They would no doubt fall into line. In the excitement of his success in the Tuchachewski affair, Heydrich even began investigating German officers. On 22 March he arrested Ernst Niekisch, who had helped negotiate the 1926 agreement with the Russians. A further nineteen Germans were arrested, including one of Canaris' own officers.

But here Heydrich overstepped the mark, and he soon began to realise that the Abwehr was not going to submit without a struggle. At the trial the admiral sat in the court to hear the evidence. When the hearing was over and the Gestapo had been unable to prove his officer's guilt, Canaris walked forward in court, demonstratively shook the accused's witness by the hand and loudly asked him to let his office have a note of his expenses.
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This act of almost ostentatious bravado went down well among the officers of the Abwehr, who realised their chief would look after his own and that they should not submit to the demands of the SD. The tension between SD and Abwehr gathered apace. Only those who have worked in an established organisation of any size can understand the myriad of bureaucratic
techniques that can be deployed to delay the requests of hostile outsiders. The Abwehr continued to promise the SD full cooperation, but such appearances increasingly began to bear little relation to reality. These developments did not go unnoticed by Heydrich, who began warning his officers to not be taken in by the ‘mild little man'. Canaris, Heydrich hissed, was a ‘crafty old fox'.
10

At the same time, Heydrich moved against the General Staff on another front. Perjured evidence was trumped up to destroy the commander in chief, von Fritsch, and a scandal arranged to remove the war minister, Blomberg. Blomberg had married a woman of dubious background, and even though leading members of the regime, including Hitler and Goering, had attended his wedding, this did not protect him from the scandal ‘ventilated' to the press that his wife had briefly been a prostitute. The union, first seen as a glorious example of the breaking down of the rigidities of the old Prussian officer caste – the new Frau von Blomberg was wonderfully
petit-bourgeois
– quickly became a scandalous cause célèbre.

In the case of Fritsch, a delinquent named Schmidt was bullied by Heydrich into denouncing Fritsch as his lover. In fact, Schmidt had had a homosexual relationship with a certain Captain Frisch. Canaris got Protze to take a photograph of this officer before the SS spirited him away. But though the case collapsed, Frisch and Schmidt were both murdered by the SD and General Fritsch was never reinstated. The scandals had served their purpose of weakening the General Staff, thus allowing tighter political control. The staff was further deprived of some of its most important functions as a new high command, the OKW, was created under the direct control of Hitler on 4 February 1938, a duality of reporting lines which was to have fatal consequences later in the war.

Richard Protze was convinced that these events began to mark a crisis of loyalty between Canaris and Hitler.
11
In the summer of 1938, Hitler spoke at a parade in Gross Born warning ‘I, too, would not recoil from destroying ten thousand officers if they opposed themselves to my will.' The
obvious reference to the Russian purges was not lost on those present as Hitler continued: ‘What is that in a nation of eighty million? I do not want men of intelligence. I want men of brutality.'

The intrigues against the generals and the Moscow purges showed Canaris all too vividly the weakness of the traditional German officer class in the modern world of the Nazi police state. No longer could the officer class see itself as the kingmaker in German politics. It was gradually, but relentlessly, being outmanoeuvred. Dining at Horchers with his predecessor Patzig, back from the Coronation Review off Spithead where he had commanded the
Graf Spee
pocket battleship, Canaris dicussed not only England but also outlined the crimes of Himmler and Heydrich in angry detail.

Patzig was about to be made chief of naval personnel and offered some advice:

‘You cannot continue to direct the Abwehr. Submit your resignation from the service. I will see you get transferred to an important command.' The route of resignation was to be taken shortly afterwards by the Chief of the General Staff, General Ludwig Beck. It was a route always open to Canaris. But Canaris was not Beck. He was not an officer in the Prussian mould, though he adhered to the ethics and values of the German officer class. He was a worldly operator, totally at home in intrigue and yet, like others addicted to espionage and its broad curriculum of sharp practice, he was desperate for the counter-balance of a noble cause.

Canaris by now believed that tempting though Patzig's offer might be, he had a new destiny awaiting him. From now on he would not only be the man who preserved the integrity of the Abwehr against the predatory demands of the SD, he would fashion the Abwehr into an instrument that would do all it could to prevent the war which the methods of Heydrich, Himmler and Hitler would make inevitable and which would be a disaster for Germany and all Europe. ‘I cannot resign', he told Patzig simply, ‘because after me would come Heydrich.'
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From now on, as if struck by an intense Damascene conversion, Canaris saw his duty in opposing Hitler from within his lair rather than from without. Fate had placed him in a position to monitor the regime – he began keeping a diary – and even prevent some of its excesses. At the same time, he would preserve an organisation that would demonstrate that there was an honourable Germany capable of independent action in the gangster state. The organisation would be imbued with the ethics of European civilisation; a small but effective Trojan Horse within a criminal regime, a beacon of decency and honour in the ever darkening night of moral disintegration.

Canaris now began to divide his instructions to his fellow officers into ‘open orders' and ‘secret directions'.
13
The open orders already marked a line in the sand between the Abwehr and Heydrich's SD. They included the following:

1. Limitation of all Abwehr activity to military tasks with absolute non- interference in political activities.

2. Sharpest rejection of all methods employed by the SD and the Gestapo.

The ‘secret directions' were listed at the end of the war by Colonel Lahousen as aiming to prevent war under any circumstances:

1. The formation of a secret organisation within Abwehr II with the purpose of consolidating anti-Nazi forces and preparing them for all illegal acts that might be possible in the future against the system.

2. The systematic removal of fanatical Nazis or SD spies from the Abwehr.

3. Protection of those personalities threatened by the Gestapo, SD, NSDAP and Foreign Office.

4. Passive conduct of Abwehr II (Sabotage) activities with external show of apparent very great activity.

Later, when war became inevitable, these instructions were reinforced with more detailed methods of outwitting the SD and a strict policy of ‘failure to carry out any orders relating to kidnapping, assassination or poisoning.'
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As can be seen from the first of the ‘secret directions', Canaris was, in the utmost stealth, collecting around him such men as might be able to prevent Hitler from carrying out his plans. At the same time, he also made his views known discreetly to important sources in the West, including London. The
News Chronicle
correspondent in Berlin, Ian Colvin, began to have ‘his first glimpses of his separate diplomacy.'
15
Also, about this time is the letter attributed to Juan March to a friend in Madrid:

Hitler's regime bodes ill for the future. Basil Zaharoff who knows his Germany and who has tried to get along with the National Socialist riff-raff agrees with me. More important, Canaris thinks the same and does not love or trust his new masters. He is our best ally in Europe at the moment … Zaharoff is horrified at the idea that Germany may once again perpetrate another world war.

Canaris is not what he seems. He has learned a lesson and will now merely hold on to his powers in the intelligence world to find out Hitler's plans and to thwart him until some new rulers can be brought to power.
16

Canaris felt, as one colleague later wrote, that ‘he must remain at his post because that mattered more than his opinion of Hitler or the Third Reich. He felt it was his duty to maintain this powerful organisation, the Abwehr, with its thousands of agents, its network throughout the world and its enormous budgetary resources which he controlled. He wanted it to be identified with a high concept of human rights, of international law and morality.'
17

Canaris was convinced after the small conference held secredy on 5 November 1937 that Hitler was determined to go to war, hence his
beginning to draw Abwehr officers around him who could, in accordance with the ‘secret directions', work to ‘prevent war'. Canaris did not attend the conference himself. Only the three service chiefs, Hitler's war minister and foreign minister and the adjutant, Colonel Hossbach, whose memorandum of the meeting was used in evidence at the Nuremberg Trials, had attended.
18

Germany, Hitler had told his somewhat startled audience, ‘had nothing to gain from a prolonged period of peace.' Germany needed ‘Lebensraum' and her superiority in weapons would last only until 1943. Austria and Bohemia were to be incorporated into the Reich with ‘the speed of lightning'. As Goering made plain a few days later to the American emissary William Bullitt, who was in Berlin in November 1937, what Germany feared most was a union between Vienna, Budapest and Prague with a restoration of the Habsburg Monarchy.
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Such a development would be an immediate
casus belli
.