Hitler's Spy Chief (39 page)

According to one account of this meeting, Hitler accused Canaris of his service disintegrating. Canaris calmly replied that it was ‘hardly surprising given that Germany was losing the war.'
15
This was not what Hitler had wanted to hear. Dismissing the admiral, he resolved to subordinate the Abwehr to Himmler.

Barely two weeks later, on 18 February, he issued a decree setting up Heydrich's old dream of a unified German intelligence service under Himmler and Kaltenbrunner's control. The ghost of Heydrich, who two years earlier had struggled in vain to achieve such an end, might have been present that day.

But it was too late. Canaris was neither arrested nor accused of treason. He was simply retired. With his mothballing, however, the service he had built up with such determination over nine years quite literally fell to bits. Hundreds of officers who knew every inch of their territory and sections applied for active postings, even to the Eastern Front. On the Western Front, the experience of Herman Giskes, the Abwehr counter-intelligence chief, who had trapped so many of the SOE agents in Holland with Philby's help, was typical. Giskes resigned rather than take orders from the Himmler, Kaltenbrunner, Schellenberg trio.

As Gilles Perrault has written, ‘Giskes' work and outlook were unmis-takeably formed by the personality of Canaris who was to his men an example, a chief and a symbol. Even if the admiral sometimes exasperated them by his excessive scruples, they knew it was him they had to thank for being able to keep their hands clean from the mire and blood in which Germany was foundering.'
16

Schellenberg was intelligent enough to realise that with Canaris' dismissal, he was taking over a ship whose crew had either deserted or were no longer capable of serving effectively. SD officers with the haziest notions of military intelligence procedures and techniques took over
positions where networks of agents, painstakingly built up over years, were ‘burnt' in weeks. As the intelligence war reached its climax ahead of the Normandy landings, the Abwehr was literally
hors de combat
.

Canaris was banished to Lauenstein castle for four months but at the end of June he was given what Trevor-Roper called an ‘acceptable sinecure' as chief of the Special Office for Economic Warfare, at Eiche near Potsdam. He was a shell of his former self. The years of tension and perpetual movement had sapped his physical strength, while the double game he had played with Hitler had dissipated large parts of his mental energy.

However, shortly before the Allies landed in Western Europe, he made one last recorded attempt to use his contact with Menzies to bring about some compromise agreement. According to one source in US intelligence, Canaris was the source of much detailed information on the German order of battle ahead of D-Day.
17
If this was the case, once again Canaris was reacting like a British agent under enemy control. His journey from mere ‘ally' to enemy ‘asset' was to all practical intent over. 659 was now hindering the German war effort in every way possible in spite of the casualties it might inflict on his own servicemen.

In May 1944, he visited Paris, where, if some sources are to be believed, he asked a young SIS agent by name of Keun to deliver a message to Menzies.
18
In reply, he received a letter from Menzies shortly afterwards, delivered to him at an SIS station housed in the Lazarite convent on the Rue de la Santé. Though the risks of such a meeting-place were obvious to all parties, both the mother superior and several other eyewitnesses confirm Canaris' presence.

The letter's contents remained secret but the courier who delivered it noted that when Canaris had finished reading Menzies' letter, he turned ‘white and gave a little gasp. “This is the finish for Germany …”' Canaris put the letter in one of his inside pockets and the two men sat for a short while without saying a word until Canaris repeated: ‘Finis Germaniae'.
19

Canaris' visit to Paris may have been prompted by his being aware of
the conspiracy that was now forming around the young Catholic idealist Claus von Stauffenberg. He was sceptical of it bringing any results. Expiation was running its course. It was too late now, after the lost opportunities of 1943, to produce positive results from Hitler's overthrow. Alone in his villa (he had evacuated his family to Bavaria), Canaris studied Russian with a Baltic friend, Baron Kaulbars. But as the events of 20 July soon showed, he was by no means out of the loop.

On 20 July Stauffenberg, carrying a time bomb made once again of British components, went to Hitler's headquarters at Rastenburg in East Prussia. This time the conspirators' bomb went off. Had the meeting not been transferred at the last minute from its original underground location to an outside hut, it would certainly have killed Hitler wherever it had been placed. But the flimsy walls above ground were blown out by the blast and Hitler escaped.

Stauffenberg, after flying to Berlin, rang Canaris, who recognised Stauffenberg's voice. On hearing that ‘the Führer was dead', Canaris replied in the best tradition of the spy chief avoiding a compromising call on an intercepted line: ‘Dead? Mein Gott! Who did it? The Russians?'
20

A few hours later the phone rang again, this time carrying the news that the conspiracy had failed. Canaris immediately went to his office and dictated a congratulatory telegram from his office and staff to ‘his beloved Führer'. It fooled no one, but it showed that Canaris was on his mettle, stimulated by the danger and ready for the battle of wits which was about to begin.

Three days later a black Mercedes with SS markings drew up outside Canaris' house. Schellenberg stepped out of the car with a warrant for the admiral's arrest.

‘I thought it might be you,' Canaris laconically observed.

As Canaris accompanied Schellenberg to the car he took his arm and said ‘Promise me just one thing. That you will arrange in three days for me to have a personal interview with Himmler.' Canaris knew full well
that only Himmler's ambition to replace Hitler and seek contacts with the West stood between him and a firing squad.

Schellenberg drove Canaris to Fürstenberg after offering the admiral a chance to escape. But the admiral said he was ‘sure of his own case' and would rely on Schellenberg's promise to arrange a meeting with Himmler.

At Fürstenberg prison Canaris found himself with dozens of generals and senior officers implicated in the plot. Many of these would be executed in the coming days, but Canaris bore a charmed life. There is no record of his meeting with Himmler, but Schellenberg makes the convincing point that the meeting must have taken place otherwise Canaris would certainly have been executed long before he met his fate.
21

As Himmler well knew, the foreign contacts which Canaris possessed were clues to how he and Schellenberg and even Kaltenbrunner might survive. Throughout the late summer and autumn, Himmler worked on peace overtures, again contacting Dulles in Berne. The British, sensing the wedge to be exploited between Himmler and Hitler, reacted with characteristic imagination and ruthlessness. RAF planes dropped blocks of Deutsches Reich stamps with a portrait of Himmler rather than Hitler onto the bemused Austrian peasants beyond Bad Ischl and other parts of the German Reich.
22

Undaunted, Himmler even persuaded the imprisoned Goerdeler to get in touch with the Zionist leader Weizmann to put proposals from Hitler to Churchill. These involved resurrecting the old terms brought by Hess for an Anglo–German alliance against the Soviet Union. As a sign of good faith, Himmler in the
ratissage
following the 20 July plot, rounded up and shot ‘all those Germans who were attempting to reach a settlement with Russia.'
23

As a colleague of Canaris' noted: ‘I am convinced that Himmler kept Canaris alive because he had avenues of communication with the British which Himmler himself coveted.'
24
Himmler's peace overtures were directed mostly towards London.
25

The ‘value' Himmler placed on Canaris even survived the devastating discovery of extracts of his diaries, secreted in a metal box in the cellar at Zossen. The metal box had belonged to Colonel Schrader, a close confidant of Canaris', who had committed suicide in the hours after the failed 20 July putsch.

With the diaries were Hitler's medical records, including a negative assessment of his mental health by a doctor who had examined him after his gassing in the First War. More damaging were reports on German atrocities compiled by Dohnanyi and other members of the Abwehr; reports on Bonhoeffer's conversations in Sweden and Switzerland with British agents and reports on the conversations with the British through the Vatican.

Walther Huppenkothen, the Gestapo commisioner, needed three weeks to sift through the material, sending a copy to Hitler and ‘through Martin Bormann to Himmler'.
26
Hitler ordered the discovery of the documents to be kept secret, reserving, as Huppenkothen noted, ‘the right to decide what the sequel to this affair would be.' Here was enough evidence to ‘hang the lot of them' but Hitler, now acquainted with the full extent of the treason against him, wanted more details and the interrogators were set to work.

Canaris, along with Oster, Mueller and countless other former members of the military
‘Prominenz'
were kept in the Gestapo headquarters in the Prinz Albrechtstrasse. Discipline was not so strict as to prevent all human contact, though the prisoners were manacled and Canaris, along with his fellow inmates, was forced to scrub the floors like a sailor on the deck of a ship, much to the amusement of his SS jailers.

But Canaris appears to have been resigned to his fate. No doubt supported by his Christian outlook, he almost seemed to relish ‘notching up another cross' of ill-treatment. He played a relentless war of wits with his interrogators, who did not resort to torture, and fenced brilliantly with
them, exposing all their intellectual weaknesses.

He also developed an amusing technique of prising information from the guards by asking supposedly foolish questions such as ‘I suppose we have pushed the Russians back over the Vistula?' These were invariably answered with a realistic assessment of where the Russian army was at this stage. The ease with which he affected stupidity (always a useful weapon in a spy chief's armoury) astounded those who knew him. He could mislead the interrogators with secondary plots, camouflage the truth and apologetically offer the occasional half-admission of some totally irrelevant fault in order to throw his interrogators off the scent.

In this way he kept secret the names of many who would otherwise have ended up in prison with him, notably Lahousen and Leverkuen, to name but two. Other prisoners did not possess the same moral, intellectual and nervous resources. Oster was confounded by irrefutable evidence. Others were broken by physical torture.

1945 saw little respite in the interrogations despite the approaching armies. Events took a more ominous turn in February. By now, Hitler, already aware that Himmler might be planning to use the surviving conspirators to help broker a peace, decided there was little point in pursuing such option and began burning Himmler's bridges. On 2 February, Goerdeler was hanged in Berlin. The same day the People's Court passed the death sentence on Klaus Bonhoeffer, brother of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Hans John, the brother of Otto John. The day after, there was a colossal air raid on Berlin, the most formidable of the war to date: the People's Court was in ruins and the Gestapo prison badly damaged. The decision was taken to evacuate the prisoners to Buchenwald and Flossenberg in the Palatinate.

There Canaris was put into cell 22. In cell 21 was Captain Lunding, Canaris' former opposite number in Denmark, as head of intelligence. Lunding later recalled that though the admiral, whom he recognised at once, was pale, his bearing was still soldierly, though he wore only a grey
suit and fur-lined overcoat. The two spy chiefs rapidly communicated with each other using an alphabetical code, which produced the following pattern:

The first tap in each call indicated the group, the second gave the letter of the alphabet. Lunding conversed regularly with Canaris and had the distinct impression that the admiral still believed he might be saved. There was still no conclusive evidence.

On 17 March, Kaltenbrunner himself came to interrogate the admiral. The Austrian, whose hands always reminded Canaris of some medieval murderer's, conversed for several hours with Canaris in the courtyard of the prison. No details exist of the conversation. Kaltenbrunner, who must have realised he had no future as the Allied armies approached, would at this stage of the war have sought some information which could save his neck. If he wanted Canaris to give him a name or a contact on the British side who might help him, the admiral was unmoved. After Kaltenbrunner's departure, the interrogators began more physical forms of interrogation.
27

On 1 and 2 April, Lunding received messages about these from the admiral though Canaris appeared not to complain. Three days later, Hitler was shown another discovery from a safe in Zossen: the complete five volumes of Canaris' diaries. These listed in detail all of Canaris' contacts with the British and his consistent attempts since 1938 to come to an understanding with London.