Hitler's Spy Chief (40 page)

Here was the evidence, if Hitler had ever needed it, of the ‘great conspiracy' to which he could ascribe the destruction of the Third Reich. Kaltenbrunner was ordered to ‘proceed with the immediate liquidation' of the conspirators.
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Forty-eight hours later Huppenkothen arrived to order a summary trial. With SS Judge Thorbeck presiding, the accused, including Canaris, were led into the ‘court', and after reading the accusations and hearing Canaris' simple plea of ‘Not Guilty', sentence of death by hanging was passed. There was no defence lawyer present and no examination of the evidence. One final interrogation took place. After which, Lunding received the message from the next door cell: ‘That will have been the last … I think … Badly treated … Nose broken.'

Then Lunding received the last message:

‘I die for my Fatherland. I have a clean conscience. I only did my duty for my country when I tried to oppose the criminal folly of Hitler leading Germany to destruction. Look after my wife and daughters.'
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*

At dawn the following day Canaris, Oster, Karl Bonhoeffer and several others were led out and hanged. At a trial after the war of one of the SS executioners at Flossenberg, it emerged that the SS had kept Canaris until the end and then hanged him ‘twice', the first time just sufficiently to give ‘him a taste of death'.
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Josef Mueller, Canaris' Vatican emissary, sat in his cell awaiting his turn, but all that happened was that his cell began to fill with the burnt fragments of the bodies executed that day. The ashes of the corpses being burnt in the nearby yard floated relentlessly through the bars of his cell, settling down all round him.

That evening the rumble of artillery could be heard. In less than ten days the camp would be liberated, but perhaps inevitably, those who had
striven for an understanding with the Allies would now at the moment of their victory be consumed. On 16 April Ewald von Kleist, whose letter from Churchill had been discovered by the Gestapo in his desk, was hanged in Berlin. Even the modest Elser, the clock-maker, who had tried to kill Hitler in the Brauhaus, was executed at this time. The loose ends of the British–German intelligence connection were rapidly being dispatched. Somehow Mueller survived, but his links had principally been with the Vatican.

The Russians arrested Canaris' secretary, Fraulein Schwarte, and plied her with questions about Canaris' missing diary. Schrader's widow, who had been entrusted with a copy of it, said she had burned it on the Lüneburg Heath after the events of 20 July. The diary was the admiral's legacy and would have revealed many details of his attempts to secure an understanding. Many of them would no doubt have embarrassed the victors as much as it would have shocked the vanquished.

According to Colvin, a British naval intelligence officer after the war alluded to the diary
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being in a Foreign Office file. Other rumours soon spread to suggest it had been spirited away to the Kremlin or Washington, a powerful weapon to be used against the British in those early days of her post-imperial existence.

In any event, no diary was needed to testify that the admiral hanged that spring morning under the harsh lights of arc lamps had, as much as any other German, helped to destroy Nazi Germany and the pagan system it stood for. Alone of the conspirators, Canaris had built the means to take Germany out of the war, had London wanted an accommodation. That no such accommodation occurred cannot be held against the admiral's record.

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After the war, two Spanish diplomats would escort Canaris' widow and daughters to Switzerland and from there to a new life in Spain as the guests of General Franco. They swore never to talk about the admiral or the Abwehr during their lifetime.

CONCLUSION

It is the duty of every sophisticated Intelligence service to keep open a channel of communication with the enemy's Intelligence service
.

REINHARD GEHLEN
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The enigmatic admiral, whose behaviour puzzled so many both during and after the war, was in fact remarkably consistent. Though an early convert to National Socialism as a means of restoring Germany's position in the world, he was, if not instantly, fairly swiftly disillusioned with it. He was, like Beck and so many of the other German officers, always to suffer from the internal contradiction of his military oath, sworn in God's name, and his opposition to the regime. His loyalty, however, was always to a higher Germany that could take its place in the ranks of civilised nations.

Such a Germany was identified even during the war by many eminent Britons. Keynes, to name but one, recognised in his speech in Cambridge, at the beginning of the war, to émigré scientists and academics that there were ‘now two Germanies'.

Keynes' subtle intelligence noted: ‘This is a war not between nationalities and imperialism but between two opposed ways of life and over what we are to mean by civilisation. Our object in this mad unavoidable
struggle is not to conquer Germany but to convert her, to bring her back within the historic fold of Western civilisation of which the institutional foundations are … the Christian Ethic, the Scientific Spirit and the Rule of Law. It is only on these foundations that the personal life can be led.'
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Crucial to the destruction of one Germany – pagan, criminal and van-dalistic – and the survival of the other – humanist, Judeo-Christian and civilised – was an ‘understanding' with Britain. For this Canaris strove relentlessly in peace and war, taking almost daily tremendous risks. It should not be forgotten, however, that as such an ‘understanding' was also high in his master, Hitler's, agenda, he was able to weave his complicated course partly by exploiting that factor. As the leader of the postwar German Federal intelligence service, Reinhard Gehlen, noted, every intelligence service worthy of its salt keeps a channel of communication with the enemy open. In this way the British came to realise that they had in Canaris an ‘ally' who embodied the qualities of those members of the elite of German society who desired an understanding with London.

These circumstances gave Canaris a protection denied to modern spy chiefs in today's democracies. It enabled him time and again to allow his conscience rather than political expediency to dictate the agenda. When the officials of the foreign ministry demanded that the Abwehr ‘sex up', to use the modern expression, their dossier that would prove beyond any doubt that Belgium and Holland had violated their neutrality and that therefore an invasion was ‘justified', Canaris sent them packing. They could not apply the modern weapons of ‘an undistinguished conclusion to a distinguished career' or public official disapproval implied by the withholding of some bauble or honour. The concept of the spy chief as an obedient bureaucrat dangling on the end of his political master's string was not generally accepted in those days. It was neither as deeply developed in Nazi Germany as one might have thought or as it was to become in most other countries fifty years later. When ordered to murder Churchill or the French general Giraud, Canaris was able to ensure such offences
against the basic ethics of war were frustrated. Political assassination was both in theory and in practice a war crime as far as the Abwehr was concerned and unacceptable to its chief.

That he was able to do this was the consequence of his having built up the Abwehr into an organisation of officers who largely shared his values and outlook and for whom the sharp practice of the Gestapo and SD was compellingly abhorrent. It is one of the unfortunate, but perhaps inevitable, developments of modern times that increasingly, politicians from all parts of the spectrum appear to prefer the more pliant SD model to the more independently-minded Abwehr.

Yet the strength of the latter model is well described by Leverkuen, who noted of the Abwehr that it possessed a confidence that, ‘in the ever-changing pattern of events, the right idea would “eventually strike them” …'

‘When a chief finds himself working with men of vision and imagination who are at the same time officers, men bred upon discipline and accustomed both to obey orders and to have their own orders implicitly obeyed, then there is welded a combination of personal and official relationships such as is to be found nowhere else.'
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It is not the least testament to the unique qualities of the Abwehr that so vivid a description of the creative energy in an intelligence organisation would be difficult to apply to the grey bureaucracies that embrace so much secret work today.

Canaris' hopes of an alliance with England against Soviet Communism, as we have seen, were not unrealistic. Right up to the end of the war, the Abwehr and British intelligence exchanged material on the Russian threat. The consistency with which distinguished public servants such as Roberts, Wheeler-Bennett and Makins reacted with such extreme and understandable hypersensitivity to peace-feelers emanating from Germany is testimony enough to the plausibility of such moves. Thanks to the incomparable Soviet section of the Abwehr, Canaris was fully aware of the degree of Soviet penetration of the British establishment. Nevertheless, in late 1942 he was
prepared to take the risk of meeting his opposite number to discuss the possibility of a compromise peace. As the testimony and documents of the time fulsomely imply, such a peace was closer in 1943 than in 1940, not least because intelligence circles in America strongly supported it. The possibility of Hitler doing a deal with Stalin was Churchill's worst nightmare. That Churchill and Roosevelt might strike a deal with Hitler was Stalin's permanent neurosis and, as these pages show, with reason.

The sequel to the Vermehren's defection underlines vividly the extent to which Philby's activities were primarily directed against any understanding between London and Berlin taking place.

Billeted in Philby's mother's flat, the Vermehrens furnished Philby with a list of important contacts in the Catholic underground in Germany. These names, which could have formed the backbone of a conservative Christian post-war German political leadership, were liquidated by Philby's colleagues in the KGB. When Allied intelligence officers tried to make contact with them after the war, they found most had disappeared or been murdered.

As Philby later recalled with some passion, and here even his distortions of the truth appear to have been put briefly aside: ‘One of the reasons I acted as I did was because the total defeat of Germany was almost a personal matter for me. I had strong feelings about the war and I was directly responsible for the deaths of a considerable number of Germans.'
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It was to be Canaris' personal tragedy that these views eventually, after considerable and, still more than half a century beyond the event, secret debate, came to be shared by the war cabinet and Whitehall, for whom ‘finishing the war had lower priority than crushing Germany.'
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As the influential official Wheeler-Bennett noted with some vitriol in 1943 as the possibilities of peace between Germany and the West were at their most intense: ‘At the conclusion of the war we are not going to be liked by any Germans, “good” or “bad”. We should not place ourselves in the position of bargaining with any Germans “good” or “bad”. This is inherent in the principle of Unconditional Surrender.'
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However, even ‘unconditional surrender' could, as the case of Italy showed, be conditional and as the intelligence agencies of the West began to get wind of a possible peace deal between Berlin and Moscow, the possibility of a peace with Germany arose for reasons of strategic expediency. The ‘Most Secret' telegrams of the end of September 1942, which were reaching London from neutral countries, notably Portugal, clearly reveal the progress of these two separate discussions, mirroring each other with almost perfect symmetry between the autumn of 1942 until the summer of 1944. Most of the peace-feelers led directly or indirectly to Canaris.

It is clear that despite the hopes of stopping the bloodshed which filled the minds of so many, the Allied statesmen were driven primarily by the thought of how to secure a peace that might endure. The experience of the aftermath of the First World War highlighted the need to eliminate German militarism, even if it meant liquidating precisely those families whose scions had been Hitler's most bitter opponents. Moreover, strategic decisions also played their part.

Once Churchill's idea, bruited at Tehran, of an Allied landing in the Adriatic to bid for the Danube and move into central Europe had been rejected by Roosevelt as well as Stalin, it was inevitable that the Red Army would reach Eastern Europe first.

Informal British undertakings to the Soviet Union already in 1941 pointed towards a post-war ‘solution' whereby the vacuum left by German influence in central Europe would be replaced by Soviet Russia. While fear of Moscow and the desire to rearm Germany eastwards had been the tacit foundations of Chamberlain's appeasement policy before the war and prevented a deal with the German opposition, now the need to keep Moscow in the war underpinned Churchill's rejection of any accord with the ‘good Germans'. Paradoxically in both phases of Anglo-German relations, the Soviet Union was a key determining factor.

Above all, British geo-strategists saw the post-war partition of Germany as the best safeguard against the resurgence of a troubling giant that could
again upset the balance of power in Europe. The story of Canaris highlights more than any other the dazzling possibilities of the Anglo-German relationship and its practical limitations. Those who work to advance this relationship today should heed the lessons to be learnt here.

These calculations, which spelled the doom of Canaris' plans, were of course familiar to him. He knew all too well the thinking of Stalin and Churchill but he felt it his duty as a German and a European to take whatever steps he could to try to save his country from inevitable destruction. He well knew, as his comments to his closest staff confirm, that Germany was facing a process of dissolution without parallel in modern history. As a patriot imbued with a strong moral sense he tried to spare Europe the tragedy of many avoidable months of war, with massive civilian and military casualties. His career nails once and for all the canard that the Germans were only interested in peace once they were losing the war. Long before objective observers could detect any weakening in Germany's military strength, Canaris was working for an understanding with England. Indeed, had his emissary Kleist been taken more seriously by the British government in 1938, there is at least a distinct possibility that the conflict which tore Europe apart might have been avoided altogether.