Hitler's Spy Chief (36 page)

In addition there was a general feeling prevalent that this time Germany must be completely defeated so there would be no repetition of the 1918 legend that the German disaster came from a stab in the back from German socialists and that this time we should just substitute anti-Nazis.
4

Roberts is implying that Churchill and Roosevelt had clearly discussed the question of doing a deal with the German opposition at some length, but had come to the conclusion that ‘this time Germany must be completely defeated'. No doubt Menzies' reports, whether or not he had met Canaris a few weeks before, would have formed some part of Churchill's intelligence assessment of the German opposition.
5

Roberts continued:

At that time, rightly or wrongly, there was little confidence in either Churchill's or Eden's mind that any conceivable German opposition who might have been attracted by the prospect of terms other than ‘unconditional surrender' either would or could deliver the goods.

If Roberts is to be believed, these words strongly imply that Churchill's assessment of Canaris' ability to use the Abwehr convincingly against the regime in conjunction with the generals was negative. However, Roberts added a further reason which may have outweighed all other considerations:

Last but not least, the slogan was thought likely to appeal to Stalin as proof of our toughness and as removing from his suspicious mind the concept that we might want to do a deal with non-Communist Germany and so tempt him to do his own deal as in 1939 with Hitler.
6

Here Roberts candidly reveals Churchill's anxieties that Moscow was thinking of doing a deal with Hitler and links this fear with the need to head it off by breaking all links between London and Berlin. As Roosevelt acknowledged at the time: ‘It is just the thing for the Russians … Uncle Joe might have made it up himself.'
7

However, it is surely also possible that an alternative method of heading off such an armistice between Moscow and Berlin would have been to consider doing a deal with the Germans.

Roosevelt had received from Allen Dulles, his man and OSS resident in Switzerland, evidence from Adam Trott, the German diplomat and former Rhodes scholar with extensive leads to Britain, that ‘the German and Russian peoples could come to some agreement.'
8
Dulles shared Trott's views, passing them on to Roosevelt before the Casablanca declaration. Such a possibility was a nightmare for western statesmen. Trott, who had studied at Oxford before the war, knew what a sensitive nerve such a prediction would touch in English circles.

William Cavendish-Bentinck, then a senior Foreign Office official, throws further light on the thoughts then current in the highest quarters on the alternatives available:

After the First War, the spirit of the army remained in Germany. This would have happened after the Second War had it not been for unconditional surrender. If the spirit of the army had remained we would soon have found the German General Staff coming to terms with the Russians … I was not keen on the German generals and if there had been a Goerdeler government after the 20th July bomb plot, the generals would have held the trump cards.
9

Bentinck's statement strongly implies that some advanced thinking had occurred in certain quarters of Whitehall about doing a deal with a German opposition supported by Canaris and some of the generals who had conspired already, back in 1938, and that this view had unleashed quite a row at the highest levels of state.

However, unconditional or no unconditional surrender, the conversations with the German opposition were not ended. On the contrary, they appear to have resumed with almost redoubled efforts, as if the statement was only for Stalin's consumption and would not affect relations between Germany and the West. Undaunted by the declaration, Canaris, inspired by his contacts with Menzies and recognising that what governments said and what they did were, then as now, often different, worked more feverishly than ever; keeping his lines of contact with Menzies intact and opening up negotiations with the Americans on a number of fronts. In Switzerland, Gisevius was instructed to renew contacts with Madame Szymanska and strengthen contacts with Allen Dulles in Berne. When Gisevius brought Dulles evidence that his ciphers had been broken, the two began to talk more and more frankly.

In London the increased activity did not go unnoticed. Germany may have been losing the war but she still had strong cards to play. At SIS headquarters, Philby saw the threat and decided to take serious action against Canaris. As he himself recorded:

In 1943, I received (a decrypt) revealing that Canaris was to visit Spain. He was going to drive from Madrid to Seville, stopping overnight at a town called Manzanares. I knew the town well from Spanish Civil War days and I knew that the only place Canaris could stay would be at the Parador.

So I sent Cowgill ( Head of Counter Espionage) a memo suggesting that we let SOE know about it in case they wanted to mount an operation against Canaris. From what I knew about the Parador,
it would not have been difficult to have tossed a couple of grenades into his bedroom.

Cowgill approved and sent my memo on up to ‘C'. Cowgill showed me a reply a couple of days later. Menzies had written in his official green ink: “I want no action whatsoever taken against the admiral”.
10

As the Casablanca conference was in progress, Hitler, according to several senior German intelligence officers, gave orders to assassinate Churchill.
11
However, as Lahousen's war diary shows, there was at Canaris' insistence a complete ban on all ‘such acts of terrorism'. Nevertheless, Keitel passed on an order to have Churchill murdered by nationalist Arabs. On 1 June 1943, Leslie Howard and Alfred Chenfalls – who, smoking a cigar, bore an uncanny resemblance to Churchill – were killed when a BOAC plane was shot down on a return flight to London. It was the only attack on a BOAC flight on that route during the entire war. It would seem Canaris' writ could not influence everything.
*

Philby had to limit himself to monitoring for his Soviet masters the admiral's movements and the increased signs of clandestine diplomatic activity he was stimulating, though as Philby soon realised, they were not confined to the Abwehr or opposition.

One part of the peace-feelers involved Reinhard Spitzy, by now working undercover as a salesman with Skoda. Working closely with Schellenberg, and it would seem with Himmler's blessing, in January 1943, within days of Casablanca, Spitzy made contact with the Americans on the Iberian peninsula. By the third week in February, he was travelling to Switzerland for talks with Dulles in Berne.
12
The conversation lasted until three in the morning and ranged over the threat of a Bolshevik Europe and the need for an agreement between Germany and the West. The talks included Canaris' friend and agent Prince Max Hohenlohe.

The Dulles line at these talks was encouraging. Dulles saw positively a compromise peace that would preserve Germany's integrity, maintain the Anschluss and help provide a
cordon sanitaire
around Russia. Hohenlohe and Spitzy were both left with the impression that while London sought a balance of power in Europe with different spheres of influence, Dulles wanted a single entity of Europe that would create a large and extensive market for US commercial interests. This was encouragement indeed for those Germans seeking an agreement.

About the same time, in February 1943, Canaris received from General Treskow – a key conspirator against Hitler, then stationed in Smolensk – the laconic message: ‘It is high time to act'. On 22 February, Canaris met Treskow. The occasion was a conference of intelligence officers; a member of Canaris' staff carried a small package of plastic explosives, intercepted apparently from SOE sources, and a set of time fuses. Dohnanyi, a member of Canaris' staff, went into a meeting with Treskow and Schlabrendorff and it was agreed that an attempt would be made on Hitler's life when he visited the Army Group.

In 1970, in an interview with Professor Deutsch,
13
Spitzy characterised Canaris' attitude to the conspirators: ‘The admiral knew everything and said, “It would be good if you succeed and I will protect you but after all these immense crimes it is not possible to deceive history through a small trick. There must be
expiation.”
He used the French word.' To another of the conspirators, he observed ‘You will be judged only by one thing, your success.'
14

Canaris, despite his reservations concerning murder, appears by this time to have seen little alternative if an agreement with the West was to be reached.

On 13 March 1943, the explosive device was put into Hitler's aircraft as he left Smolensk. Disguised in a parcel of cognac bottles, the fuse ate its way through the retaining wire but when the wire parted, the intense cold rendered the detonator unserviceable and the bomb failed to explode.
Schlabrendorff flew to Rastenberg and retrieved the parcel before it was opened.
15

This attempt on Hitler's life appears to have been stimulated in some ways by the conversations with the Americans that had begun more or less at the same time as Casablanca As well as the Hohenlohe-Spitzy-Dulles talks in Switzerland, peace-feelers from the Americans were extended in Istanbul towards the end of January.

These had been predicted by Canaris, who late in 1942, over lunch in his villa close to the Schlachtensee, had asked Paul Leverkuen to set up a new Abwehr office in Istanbul. Leverkuen recalled after the war: ‘Canaris did not mention a word to me about peace negotiations but I have no doubt that he posted me to Istanbul to take up whatever threads might be put in my hand.'
16

Canaris was aware that before the war Leverkuen had known, quite well, General William Donovan, who was later to become Head of the American OSS, the forerunner of the CIA. Leverkuen was soon in touch with the Americans. As he recalled, ‘It was about the time of the Stalingrad disaster that the first peace-feelers reached me from the Americans.'
17
These would develop into a dialogue which recently declassified documents from the OSS show was more profound than many have hitherto suspected. Canaris and Gisevius were both known to the OSS by symbols.

Some of these initial peace-feelers came from George Earle, a former governor of Pennsylvania and personal envoy of Roosevelt's, who had accompanied the president to Casablanca before arriving in Istanbul.

Earle's arrival in Istanbul followed a series of colourful incidents with a cabaret artiste called ‘Adrienne' in the Bulgarian capital, where he had been minister. Following the German occupation of Bulgaria, Earle returned to the US where Roosevelt thought long and hard for a mission which would be acceptable to the US State Department, who had had enough of Earle's somewhat unconventional diplomatic profile. Although Roosevelt
was sceptical of the German opposition, he could not ignore the intelligence coming to him via Dulles in Switzerland. Thus while preparing to comfort Stalin with formal talk of unconditional surrender, Roosevelt also opened up contacts with the Germans informally through trusted mediators.

Earle had made many enemies while minister in Bulgaria. The Soviets were monitoring his movements from the moment he set foot in Istanbul, and it may have been they who placed the bomb in his luggage that exploded in the Parc Hotel the day he arrived. A few weeks later a bomb attack by Soviet agents narrowly missed killing the German ambassador, von Papen. The bomb proved defective and killed the plotter, in whose mangled remains the Turkish police found evidence of Russian complicity.

In Earle's case no one was seriously hurt and within days he was establishing contact with Canaris through the Abwehr's Leverkuen. According to Colvin, these contacts included an ‘exploration of the sort of terms of peace that America would be prepared to consider.'
18

Von Papen not only supported these contacts, he had by February 1943 begun, despite his murky past as one of the worst accomplices of Nazi aggression, to assume an important role among the conspirators. As Leverkuen recalled, ‘I told the ambassdor about this approach and Herr von Papen composed a little speech for our war cemetery in February.'

Papen noted in the course of his oration: ‘We have always had great esteem for the men who made history across the ocean and created the land of unlimited opportunity through their initiative and dynamism. We bow to Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Monroe and many others. But we would not find it unfitting if the Monroe doctrine were extended to Europe.'
19

The last sentence, said Leverkuen, was inserted to mollify Ribbentrop, who remained hostile and suspicious. He was not alone. In the Kremlin the thought that Papen was aiming at a separate peace with the West confirmed their most intense suspicions.

The results of von Papen's kite were almost instantaneous. In early
March 1943, the Turkish foreign minister, Numan Menemenjoglu, informed von Papen that Monsignor Spellman, the archbishop of New York, would be visiting Turkey and had expressed a desire to meet with the ambassador.
20
The choice of Spellman as an intermediary showed the important role the Vatican might play in bringing about an end to the hostilities in the West. Ribbentrop, however, prevented this meeting but contacts with the Americans in Istanbul continued. Leverkuen, who had lived for ten years in the States, was optimistic, confiding several times to junior colleagues that a peace agreement was imminent.
21

By June, Adam Trott, a long-standing opponent of Hitler, arrived in Istanbul to confer with von Papen. Trott had had extensive talks with Dulles in Switzerland, and one of his repeated themes to the American had been British intransigence towards dealings with the German opposition. If Roosevelt was prepared to follow a twin-track policy of formal declaration of unconditional surrender and informal talks, London was backtracking fast from any encouragement of its contacts of late 1942 with Canaris and other members of the German opposition. What debate there had been at the highest levels on this issue had, as we have seen in Roberts' and Bentinck's evidence, been resolved in favour of crushing Germany.