Hitler's Spy Chief (26 page)

Canaris was not immune to pressure or impervious to threat but he was adamant that as head of the Abwehr he owed a duty to an authority higher than political expedience. He refused to help the officials ginger up the document they were preparing and the disappointed diplomats had to leave unsatisfied.

Several months before Norway, Canaris had opened new lines of contact with London in the hope of being able to head off the coming conflict. He was not prepared to compromise at a time when there were still a few unbroken reeds of hope that the coming invasion of Holland, France and Belgium could be avoided and that untold bloodshed could be saved and peace brought back to Europe.

In these hopes he had a willing ally in the form of the Vatican. Canaris had already, towards the end of 1939, initiated new contacts with Pius XII, who was personally known to him from his days as Nuncio in Berlin. Traditionally, the Pope, in Europe, as a temporal leader with a powerful, spiritual component enjoyed for centuries the role of adjudicator in disputes between states, and was their hierarchical superior. The treaties of Tordesilla and Saragossa, which divided the world between Spain and Portugal, were a late exercise of this role. Even today, a legacy of this can be seen in the protocol whereby in many countries the papal Nuncio is still given precedence over the diplomatic representatives of other countries.
8

Was the Pope prepared to mediate between opposition circles in Germany and London to avoid the war spreading? The Pope never hesitated, though he found the role of secret mediator intensely to his dislike, and,
while he refused to meet Abwehr agents, he read their proposals and passed them onto the British minister at the Holy See, Sir Francis d'Arcy Osborne. He was acutely aware of the dangers to the Vatican, Catholics in Germany and Austria and above all to the German Jesuits if any inkling of his mediation was revealed to Nazi circles in Berlin.

An Abwehr agent by the name of Mueller sought, through Pius XII's German advisor Cardinal Kaas, to use the good offices of the Vatican to mediate.
9
Detailed proposals were drafted. Again, Beck and the generals were involved and again Britain was offered a chance to do a deal with a conservative Germany, minus Hitler, committed to restoring Poland's and Czechoslovakia's (though not Austria's) territorial integrity.

Canaris was sceptical, however, that these talks would yield very much. He probably knew from his sources in London that these negotiations were being withheld from a number of key figures in Britain. Apart from the King, the foreign secretary and the prime minister, at that time still Chamberlain, very few people knew of these discussions. Neither Churchill nor Vansittart were shown the papers, though Cadogan, Orme Sargent and Strang, the top professionals at the Foreign Office did see them, together with their immediate juniors, Kirkpatrick, Makins and Frank Roberts. These latter three worked vigorously and consistently against German peace-feelers. Makins was long suspected of having strong sympathies with Moscow, Roberts famously put down the phone on a compromise-seeking Goering on the eve of war being declared, and Kirkpatrick was described by one German who defected to London as being ‘an adherent of the Morgenthau Plan
*
or some other scheme for the eternal humiliation of Germany.'

Even without these elements there were plenty of forces keen to sabotage such moves. Moscow appears to have been kept abreast of the developments, as were the SD, who had an agent who, melancholy to
relate, was a Benedictine monk. His presence was skilfully leaked to the British by someone in the SD to cramp Osborne's style, which began to suffer the interference of paranoid telegrams from London telling him to watch out for German seminarists. Osborne scornfully replied: ‘The German seminarists are dressed from head to foot in the brightest possible scarlet which does not conduce to the work of secret agents.'
10
But the report was true and it made London, still reeling from the unpleasant taste of the Venlo incident, suspicious.

In addition, the Vatican ciphers had been broken by German signals intelligence. Though Pius XII was careful to leave no paper trail, his meetings with d'Arcy Osborne did not go unnoticed (least of all by the French, who were ever wary of some deal being hatched at their expense by
Albion Perfide)
.

With the benefit of hindsight, these moves stood less chance than those taken in September 1938 to avert the bloodbath that was coming. Once hostilities had commenced, the factor of the West taking military advantage of a putsch in Germany severely dampened the generals' enthusiasm for action. But the men who tried to broker peace cannot be faulted. As Owen Chadwick has written, ‘The British lost a chance. In a dictatorship like Hitler's they could hardly expect that conspirators should come out of their anonymity and give their ranks and dates of birth … To get rid of obsessive anti-Semites from a government and to restore Poland to independence would have averted the Final Solution.'
11

However, if these talks faltered, the Abwehr was able to do the West one last good turn. With Beck, Oster and Canaris agreed to send Mueller to Rome to warn the West of the imminent attack planned for 10 May. Mueller did not stay long in Rome, but he met a senior Belgian diplomat and gave him the date. Before leaving Italy and returning to Berlin, Mueller took the precaution of asking the Italian frontier official to insert an omitted entry stamp in his passport. The Italian complied, giving the date as I May, and point of entry Venice.

This was, in retrospect, a wise precaution. When Mueller visited Canaris the admiral handed him a telegram that Hitler was ‘foaming' over. It read:

‘From HE The Belgian Minister The Holy See

To Foreign Ministry Brussels

May 1st 1940

An officer of the German General Staff visiting Rome today reports that invasion of Belgium and Holland may be expected with certainty on or soon after May 10th.'

Mueller realised that the Belgian diplomatic code had been broken and that he was staring more or less at his death warrant. Fortunately for Mueller, the stamp in his passport, combined with the conscious disguise of his rank, spared him interrogation at the hands of the SD, though as he later recalled he had experienced in those moments the whiff of the firing squad. Unfortunately for Canaris, however, one of his own officers – Rohleder, a Pomeranian of remarkable thoroughness in his investigations of the betrayal – soon found that all the evidence pointed to Mueller.
12
Only with the greatest difficulty could Canaris ensure the investigation led to no dramatic consequences. Oster, however, was ordered to break off all contact with the Vatican and Mueller.

Irrespective of the warning, the Wehrmacht cut through the Western defences with sensational ease. The invasion of the West, thanks partly to General Manstein's brilliant imagination, was a dazzling success. The French army, which had fought so gallantly in the First World War, was vanquished in weeks. ‘C'est la dislocation,' a demoralised Weygand told a dumbstruck Churchill, who had never imagined the army he had seen fight so gallantly at Verdun would simply melt away.

The Brandenburg units of the Abwehr were everywhere in the vanguard of the attack, seizing vital points ahead of Guderian's panzers. Canaris, on the one hand staggered at the disintegration of the French and British armies, on the other hand intoxicated at the clink of champagne glasses
everywhere on the Tirpitzufer, could not but be infected with a sense of pride that his organisation had contributed brilliantly to the operation at every level. At the same time, German army officers exulting in their easy victories had some difficulty in getting Canaris to join in wholeheartedly with the celebrations. But beneath such superficial sentiments, there rested the vexing question of whether Britain would continue the struggle and how London could hope to withstand the forces of the most successful army the twentieth century had ever known.

As a naval officer Canaris was, of course, by the standards of his time an educated man. He therefore knew that the key to Britain's future lay not only in events taking place along the northern coast of France but also in the one area that Hitler consistently underestimated: the Mediterranean. In both theatres he would play a role, but as the remnants of the British Expeditionary Force made their way to Dunkirk, it was the English Channel rather than the Mediterranean which appeared to be the most pressing challenge. The Battle for France was ending and the Battle of Britain was about to begin.

In the strange spring days of May, the British government came close to throwing in the towel. Several members of the cabinet were for peace negotiations. One of them, Rab Butler, was so defeatist that memory of his pessimism in those days would blight his career and chances of leading the Conservative party decades later.
13
Through the British embassy in Madrid and again through the Vatican the peace-feelers came and went. The Vatican wanted Britain to seek peace terms. They could see the danger of Germany invading Britain and winning, and into that horrible speculation came the awareness of a similar fate awaiting them. Above all, they feared the end of European civilisation if Britain fought and lost. Churchill's response to all this, however, was characteristic: he ordered Admiral Somerville to destroy the French fleet. Whatever the cost in life, in this case nearly 1,200 French sailors, however shocking to the Royal Navy to have to train its guns on its former comrades in arms, however damaging
for the future relationship between the Royal and French navies, no action could signal to the world more vividly that Britain meant to continue the struggle, whatever the consequences. In Rome, the Cardinals examined the despatches of their nuncios and resigned themselves to a long war.

Two weeks before Churchill took the fateful decision to sink the French fleet at Oran, a strange link had been established with the Abwehr that would give the beleaguered British leader some grounds for optimism. He would later write that: ‘Our excellent intelligence confirmed that Operation Sealion had been definitely ordered by Hitler.'
14
But he also noted that, ‘already in June, I had some inkling' of the German navy plan. Given that the outiine plan only went forward to Keitel for detailed planning on 2 July, this was remarkable. There had, of course, been an invasion paper prepared by Admiral Raeder in November 1939, but this was long before Hitler expressed an interest in such planning. Churchill knew that the plan envisaged an attack along a front which he described as ‘altogether different from or additional to the east coast on which the Chiefs of Staff, the Admiralty and I in full agreement still laid the major emphasis.'
15

As has been noted before,
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this intelligence could not have come from air reconnaissance or ground observers. Nor was it possible at that stage for it to have come from Ultra decrypts. It was only on 22 May that Ultra began breaking any significant codes and its ‘golden eggs' were confined for several weeks to the Luftwaffe operational key, useful perhaps for picking up intended Luftwaffe targets such as Coventry or London, but unable to cast much light on strategic decisions.
17
Churchill's ‘inkling' could only have come from someone in close contact with the German naval staff or the chiefs of the High Command. Barely a dozen senior officers in Germany knew what Churchill knew. Of these, Canaris was one. Operation Sealion, when circulated among these few officers, offered the strategy of ‘a surprise crossing on a broad front extending approximately from Ramsgate to a point west of the Isle of Wight.' As Ian Colvin noted: ‘The hand of Mr Churchill seems to have been guided at this time by
somebody to whom the innermost counsels of Hitler were revealed.'
18

By acting in this way Canaris appears to have stepped further along the route of treason. Communication to an enemy of details of the invasion plan might cost the lives of many German sailors. But Canaris appears to have been motivated by the belief that armed with such information the British would take the necessary steps and Operation Sealion would be stillborn.

It would seem that not only the details of the German invasion plan were being given to Churchill. With this intelligence came a strange ray of hope, illuminating the dark landscape of defeat and despair. The source of this intelligence might offer more insights and by extension more support for Churchill to overrule his cabinet colleagues bent on a compromise peace. As Churchill's speeches resounded with all their oratorical splendour across the ether, Canaris took home copies of the Abwehr monitorings of the forbidden texts and read them to his wife.
19
According to Erika Canaris, the Admiral remarked after reading out one of the speeches: ‘The English are lucky to have a statesman to lead them.' Canaris saw in Churchill's messages something he and Beck and the other opponents had long sought in England: backbone and resistance.

Richard Protze later recalled: ‘Canaris admired Churchill. He had the same initials and would refer to him as the great ‘W. C.' When some big stroke of British statesmanship turned the screw a little harder on Germany, he would say, “ What can I do against the great W. C.? I am only the little W. C.”'
20

After the war, when Michael Soltikow asked Churchill how it was possible that he had been so well-informed about Sealion, Churchill merely pointed to Colvin's book on Canaris.
21
How the intelligence reached Churchill remains a subject for speculation. Some evidence points to Mueller being sent to Rome and passing it through the Vatican.
22
Other evidence suggests Spain; however, the fragments of evidence are not conclusive.

The useful details of the operation that were reaching London were not the only ways in which the Abwehr assisted Churchill. Canaris was helping Churchill on several other fronts with regard to Sealion. He was acutely aware that Hitler was himself riddled with reservations about the plan, not least as he knew the business of a contested occupation of Britain would make a compromise agreement leading to an alliance far more difficult. Why, in any event, stage an invasion if a pro-German fifth column might seize power in London, the seed of an idea which Churchill himself may have allowed to be conveyed to German circles to delay the invasion? Certainly, Canaris' advice to the High Command seems to have supported those arguing for caution on ‘Sealion'.