Hitler's Spy Chief (31 page)

Canaris felt compelled to protest and with the help of the Abwehr's legal department drew up a memorandum which, while accepting that the Geneva Convention concerning prisoners of war might on account of legal arguments not apply, nevertheless underlined that the ‘fundamental provisions of international law demanded it was ‘inadmissible to kill or maim prisoners. Every belligerent has moreover the interest of ensuring that his own troops are protected from bad treatment if they are made prisoners-of-war.'

With the onslaught against the Soviet Union, the role of the SS liquidation squads once more became very prominent and with it, the designs
on the territory of the Abwehr again became topical. Canaris' ‘squea-mishness' was noted and the file on the Abwehr's political unreliability that Heydrich was compiling grew thicker.

The Abwehr had, by any objective analysis of its activities, discharged its duties to the highest level of professionalism. Moscow refused to believe Churchill's personal warnings to Stalin that Hitler was planning to attack. The Abwehr's disinformation campaign, focussing on such obvious red herrings as an attack on Spain, had wrong-footed the Soviets and indeed nearly everyone else. As Harold Nicolson had noted in his diary ‘everybody' regarded the idea of an attack on Russia as ‘fantastic'.
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But the Abwehr once again now found itself fighting a war on the home front against Heydrich's organisation. In August 1941, Schellenberg, together with Dr Walther Huppenkothen, the SS lawyer, lunched with Canaris at Horchers. Huppenkothen noted that Canaris was definitely ‘not the Prussian officer type'. Canaris, however, had some powerful weapons in his armoury. He knew that Heydrich was, by strict application of the Nuremberg race laws, partly of Jewish origin, an inconvenient fact for someone of Heydrich's towering ambition. Ventilating the details of Heydrich's family tree could at any moment be used by Heydrich's many enemies in and outside the Gestapo to destroy his career.
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As one of his contemporaries noted: ‘Heydrich had a complex about his alleged Jewish origins. He always wanted to be more Nordic than anyone else.'

Some writers on Heydrich dispute the Jewish element in his background, noting that Heydrich's grandfather ‘Süss' had married his grandmother after his father, Bruno, had been born.
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This may not necessarily be conclusive, as Süss may have been Bruno Heydrich's biological father. The argument that Süss was not Jewish but Catholic would not have cut much ice with the grotesque racial theorists who framed the Nuremberg Laws, and it recalls the rhetoric of the anti-Semite Karl Lueger, pre-Great War Mayor of Vienna, who declared: ‘I decide who is a Jew in this city.'
Irrespective of all this, as one resident of Halle observed of Heydrich's father, Bruno: ‘Most of the inhabitants had not the slightest doubt about his Jewish origins.'
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Heydrich had gone to extraordinary lengths to keep rumours of his Jewish origins – true or false – at bay. Between 1935 and 1937 he had three times used lawyers to disprove allegations of Jewish origin. In one of these cases one of the witnesses had disappeared without trace. A family tombstone inscribed ‘Sarah Heydrich' also disappeared, to be replaced with one bearing simply the words ‘S. Heydrich'. Among the details in the Abwehr's Heydrich file, which Patzig had handed over to Canaris in 1934, were the details of the court cases and the bill from the Leipzig stonemason who had altered the tomb.
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As the campaign in the east unfolded, relations between Heydrich and Canaris, though outwardly cordial, began to cool. The more the SS and units of the army and even units of the Abwehr's Brandenburg Division proceeded against Russian prisoners and civilians, the more determined Canaris became to keep the Abwehr's reputation intact. The few operations involving blackmail (usually of Irish operatives, to little effect)
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were wound down and colleagues noticed that anyone suggesting ‘camps' or the rounding up of civilians was likely to be transferred rapidly away from the Abwehr: for example, Langendorf in Paris, who proposed putting Spanish refugees into detention centres.

Nevertheless, despite the sharp contrast between the methods and beliefs of the two men, they continued to socialise. Both men were neighbours in the wooded Schlachtensee suburb of Berlin. Canaris' house, a modest establishment with wooden eaves on the today renamed Waldsängerpfad, was linked by a common garden to the more imposing Heydrich residence with its twin gables in the classic alpine Nazi style. The different houses reflected the two mens' personalities. Where the interior of the Canaris villa was soft wooden panelled walls lined with books, heavy metal doors and iron sculptures in the best totalitarian style
adorned the Heydrich villa. The proximity of the two houses gave rise to many encounters after office hours when Heydrich would play the violin accompanied by Canaris' wife on the piano. Canaris himself would cook, often a dish of Spanish inspiration.

However, Heydrich continued to watch Canaris and the Abwehr like a hawk. By the time of the attack on the Soviet Union he was already investigating the Abwehr for treason in connection with the attack on Belgrade. The young Schellenberg, the ‘hero' of the Venlo incident, following the German occupation of Belgrade had found a copy of a telegram which the British military attaché had failed to destroy in an abandoned part of the British embassy. It read simply: ‘The Luftwaffe will commence attack with overwhelming bombardment of the capital, according to our faithful friend ‘Franz-Joseph'. Inform the Yugoslav government.'

The telegram came from London but Schellenberg soon established through other files that the ‘Franz Josef' warnings were based on secret operational files deposited in the safe of the Abwehr office in Prague. Repeated Gestapo investigations yielded little that was conclusive, but for Heydrich they were grist to the mill of his complaints that the authorities in Prague were too soft under the Reichsprotektor von Neurath, former foreign minister and a well-known anti-Nazi.

The administration of Bohemia and Moravia was too gentle. The Czechs were seething with resentment and conspiracy against the Germans which they only thinly cloaked with the veil of humorous indifference. However, despite a number of attempts by the SS to unseat von Neurath, Hitler had kept him in place, promising a showdown with the ‘damn Czechs' after the war.
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It was only with the compilation of lengthy reports listing supposedly large scale resistance movements planning to ‘sabotage and destroy harvests' that Hitler began to listen more attentively to Heydrich and Himmler. With the help of the police commander in Prague, Karl Böhme, the SD began to draw up evidence that the security situation in Prague
was deteriorating rapidly under von Neurath and that a new viceroy would be needed who, unlike Neurath, would not wish to ‘work with and through the Czechs' in running the province. Thanks to Böhme, Heydrich was fully informed of every detail of the situation in Prague and could impress Hitler at a lunch on 21 September with his grasp of the situation. Heydrich demolished Neurath's record and said the integrity of the Reich was threatened. Hitler was incensed by the Czechs, whom he despised with all the vehemence of a provincial Austrian. Without consulting Neurath he appointed Heydrich ‘acting protector' and promoted him to SS Obergruppenführer.

As always, the decision was supported by senior figures for their own reasons. For Himmler, the move meant the SS could virtually take control of an entire state within the Reich. For Martin Bormann, Hitler's enigmatic link with Moscow,
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it shunted Heydrich sideways into the administrative distractions of state bureaucracy.

For Canaris, however, the move was far from unalloyed good news. First, Heydrich was not giving up his position of chief of Reich security. He would remain a dagger pointed at the heart of Abwehr activities. Second, Heydrich's appointment gave him ministerial status and therefore greater access to Hitler. Those who have worked in organisations belonging to one personality will know that access to the owner equates more than any other factor to power. Heydrich was still only thirty-seven. He had come a long way since being cashiered by the German navy.

For his part, Heydrich lost no time in pursuing his twin objectives of building his reputation as the coming man in the Reich by subduing the Czechs, while at the same time using his newly appointed powers to leave nothing unchecked in his ceaseless search for incriminating material on the Abwehr. The Gestapo, whose activities had been circumscribed by the ‘old gentleman' Neurath, now sprang into life without the faintest moral constraint. The Czech prime minister, General Alois Elias, was arrested and tortured, thousands of suspects were rounded up and hundreds executed
after summary trials. This campaign of massive intimidation was initiated so that in Heydrich's own words, ‘We will try using the old methods to Germanise these Czech vermin.' The Jews in particular came to fear the ‘Butcher of Prague', and even before the Wannsee Conference had sealed the fate of European Jewry, the Jews in the Czech lands were herded into newly established ghettoes at Theresienstadt before being deported to the death camps. Of the 93,942 Jews deported from the Protectorate, only 3,371 survived the war.
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As well as the suppression of any subversive activity on the part of the Czechs, Heydrich also ensured that there were measures in place to turn the screw on the Abwehr. A Gestapo raid on a secret transmitter on 3 October yielded a number of uncoded messages which the unfortunate wireless operator had not had time to destroy before committing suicide. The messages referred this time not to ‘Franz Josef' but to ‘René'. According to Abendschön, the Gestapo police chief: ‘The information attributed to René appeared to me of such particular secrecy that it could only be known to a very few people in Prague, such as Frank, the Protector's adjutant, Geschek, head of the Gestapo and Dr Holm, alias Paul Thummel of the Abwehr.'
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To Canaris' dismay, Heydrich proceeded to move against Thummel, thus threatening one of the Abwehr's links with SIS.

When Thummel was arrested a cascade of protest descended on the Gestapo from Canaris, Bormann and even Himmler, who had known Thummel for many years. The tension between the Abwehr and the SD was escalating rapidly now. Canaris sensed a new aggression in Heydrich and during his morning rides with Schellenberg, the younger man was at pains to point out to the admiral that only a new agreement between Canaris and Heydrich could defuse the situation.
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In November, Canaris travelled to Prague and according to Schellenberg, a very frank conversation was held in which Heydrich used Thummel's arrest to browbeat Canaris about ‘treason' in the Abwehr.
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Heydrich, however, overplayed his hand and the following dialogue, taken
down by Schellenberg, shows the admiral was not easily intimidated.

‘In proposing negotiations to you admiral,' Heydrich stiffly began, ‘I will not conceal from you that after the war the SS will take over everything in the Abwehr's field.'

‘After the war, my dear Heydrich?' said Canaris, smiling, adding: ‘You know very well that nobody will touch the Abwehr as long as I am alive.'

‘Nobody, Herr admiral? Not even the Führer?' answered Heydrich.

Canaris parried the thrust: ‘Do not imply what I have not said. The Führer is not concerned in this as you very well know. It is you and I. That is very different and very clear.'
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It was agreed that Thummel would be released but kept under close surveillance. But to achieve this, the admiral had had to compromise. He explicitly admitted that the time had come for certain ‘questions between the Abwehr and the SD' be examined ‘in depth'. A
modus vivendi
would be established which would aim to remove the unfortunate friction of the last few months. Schellenberg noticed that Heydrich went pale during the meeting, sensing that the admiral had somehow outwitted him. Canaris gave away territory very rarely. What, the ever-suspicious Heydrich must have thought, was the reason for this strategic withdrawal?

Thummel, meanwhile, continued his official Abwehr duties, which included monitoring the activities of three Czech officers in the resistance, Colonel Balaban, Colonel Masin and Captain Vaclav Moravec. The first two were quickly found by the Gestapo, the third, Moravec, appeared more elusive and when, after the Gestapo lost patience with him, Thummel was rearrested, continuing to deny treason, he offered to help the Gestapo search for Moravec as a gesture of loyalty.

But Thummel tried to warn Moravec and as the case continued to mount against Thummel, Heydrich used it to blackmail Canaris into more and more concessions.

Was not the Thummel case the greatest act of treason in the history of the Third Reich? Did the Führer need any further proof that the Abwehr
was a nest of defeatist traitors? The questions rained down on the Abwehr chief from Heydrich's office, the most sinister being: why did the Abwehr allow Thummel to establish links with British intelligence?

While the investigations of Paul Thummel continued, it was impossible for Menzies not to be aware of what was happening, not just to his network in Prague but also to the Abwehr. Menzies was fully informed about the rivalry between Heydrich's SD and the Abwehr. As Paul Thummel was arrested for the second time, Canaris made a sudden visit to Spain. The SD report on his activities in Spain at that time includes material which shows that the Abwehr chief was under close surveillance by his own side. Frequently, however, they lost him as his own Abwehr officers helped him disappear for a few hours. The SD were able to note, nevertheless, that he had arrived in Madrid with four heavy suitcases and had left without them. Given Canaris' frequent use of Spain as a conduit for information to London, it is difficult to imagine some hints of his predicament not being transmitted.