Nein!
Hitler had offended against all these values and beliefs. He was an uncouth parvenu who lacked manners, education, culture and any of the attributes of refinement which army officers so valued in themselves. He demanded allegiance to himself, not the state. He first shamed and then sacked a head of the army (Fritsch), and used the opportunity to take personal command. He had led an assault on the values of decency, and unleashed his supporters and secret police to commit appalling violence against German citizens. Worst of all, he was marching Germany to a war which most senior military figures believed would end in defeat and disaster.
The problem for the generals, however, was that the army (known as the Reichswehr before the Fritsch crisis and the Heer afterwards*) was no longer the same organisation as the one in which they had grown up.
The army’s unwillingness to protest at the horrors of the Night of the Long Knives – even though one of its most senior brethren had been amongst the murdered – and its quiet acquiescence during Beck’s ‘blackest day’, when all the generals meekly lined up to take the oath of allegiance to Hitler, had weakened both its influence and its self-respect. The army’s leaders may have been trained to take bold decisions in battle, but their indecisiveness and hesitancy on the field of politics was – and would continue to be – a fatal brake on their ability to halt or change what all of them believed was a coming catastrophe. A British politician described the Wehrmacht leadership in 1938 as ‘a race of carnivorous sheep’. Even allowing for the fact that this was an easy criticism to make when you did not have to risk your life to oppose your government, there was much truth in the cruel epithet.
The composition of the Wehrmacht was also different from its predecessor. The old professional army, along with the traditional comradeship of its officer corps, had been diluted and submerged under the vast expansion of the army’s numbers. The flood of new equipment, much of it of world-beating quality, along with the attention, promotions, medals – and even in some cases money and estates – which Hitler showered on the Wehrmacht and its senior officers, sapped the army’s will to do what it knew it should to stop the headlong rush to war.
Nevertheless, pre-war opposition to Hitler remained strong amongst the most senior ranks of the Wehrmacht, even to the point of contemplating a coup to remove him. In 1938, those who supported Ludwig Beck’s view that if Hitler could not be stopped, he would have to be removed, included the commander-in-chief of the Wehrmacht, General Walther von Brauchitsch, and the majority of his senior generals, especially in the Reserve Army† based around Berlin.
Although active resistance to Hitler was variably scattered across most German institutions, its highest concentration was in the Abwehr, and particularly in the Tirpitzufer building (nicknamed the Fuchsbau, or Fox’s Lair), which was part of a large Berlin administrative complex called the Bendlerblock. This also housed the Naval Warfare Command and the headquarters of both the Wehrmacht and the Reserve Army. Though physically connected to the Bendlerblock, the closed enclave of Abwehr headquarters was in every other way a world apart. Here Wilhelm Canaris gathered together as many as he could of those who, like him, opposed Hitler. They formed such a tight-knit group that the Tirpitzufer was sometimes referred to in Berlin circles as ‘Canaris Familie GmBH’ (The Canaris Clan Inc.). Among those closest to the Abwehr chief were Hans Bernd Gisevius, a lawyer of formidable physical proportions whom his friends christened the ‘eternal plotter’; Hans von Dohnányi, a gifted young judge who was the son of the famous composer Ernst von Dohnányi and brother-in-law of Dietrich Bonhoeffer; and the impetuous, fanatical Hitler hater and member of Pastor Niemöller’s congregation, Colonel Hans Oster. Sleek, fearless, cunning and a gifted amateur cello player, Oster, who made a habit of referring to Hitler as ‘the Swine’, was described by one contemporary as ‘an elegant cavalry officer of the old school, handsome, gallant with the ladies and contemptuous of the national socialist leaders. He was all for striking when the iron was hot; but the admiral had a more hesitant nature.’
Hans Oster
Canaris encouraged his senior lieutenants to do as he did, and recruit those sympathetic to the cause. His often-repeated instruction when it came to new recruits was ‘Being anti-Nazi is more important than any other quality.’ He also went out of his way to use the Abwehr as a refuge for Jews, placing them in posts outside Germany beyond the reach of the Gestapo, and claiming when challenged that they were essential to the Abwehr’s work in gathering foreign intelligence.
In the middle of the 1930s, the Abwehr over which Canaris presided as what one colleague referred to as the ‘grande éminence grise’ was probably the best foreign-intelligence service in the world. The French Deuxième Bureau, one of the most proficient interwar spy services in Europe, went through a series of convulsive reorganisations in the early 1930s which sapped its effectiveness. Britain’s MI6 was going through a difficult period too, after much of its network of intelligence stations across the Continent had been blown. A whole new British spy network was being constructed in great secrecy, and without the knowledge of anyone apart from the MI6 chief Sir Hugh Sinclair and his closest advisers. This was known, rather melodramatically, as the ‘Z Organisation’, after its creator ‘Colonel Z’, otherwise known as Claude Edward Marjoribanks Dansey. The Russian spy agencies, meanwhile, though still capable of effective work, were hobbled by the repeated waves of Stalin’s purges.
Canaris’s value to Hitler lay in the priceless information he was able to bring his chief, including, crucially, both the military plans and the political intentions of his foreign enemies. Britain and France, with their many high-level admirers of Hitler and their public policies of appeasement, were rich sources of information for Canaris’s Abwehr. Before the war Canaris boasted to Juan March (or was it a threat, given March’s dealings with the British?): ‘I have penetrated the [British] Naval Intelligence Division and MI6. So if any German, however important or discreet, felt tempted to work with the British, be sure I should find out.’ According to his own claim, Canaris had one very high-level source close enough to the British cabinet to enable him to assure Hitler in early 1936 that if Germany marched into the Versailles-protected demilitarised zone of the Rhineland, Britain would not energetically oppose this.
The Abwehr chief himself set the tone of his organisation from his Spartan office on the third floor of the Tirpitzufer. At one end of a room of modest proportions was Canaris’s desk, behind which were three full-length windows and a glazed door leading onto a small balcony looking over the Landwehr Canal. The desk was unadorned except for a routine scatter of papers, a model of his old cruiser the Dresden, and a small paperweight in the shape of the three monkeys – ‘See no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil.’ Otherwise the room was largely empty save for two or three chairs, a bookshelf full of books, many of them on music and the arts, and an iron camp bed on which Canaris would from time to time take a nap. Only three photographs hung on his walls – one of Franco, one of a handsome young Hungarian hussar, and one of his beloved dachshund Seppl, which took pride of place on the wall immediately opposite his desk.
The house near Berlin’s Schlachtensee in which Canaris lived with his wife Erika, their daughters Eva and Brigitte, a Polish cook, a Moroccan former prisoner of war who acted as the family servant, and two dachshunds, was frugal by the standards of high officials in Hitler’s Reich. It had six bedrooms but no grand reception rooms, a modest garden amongst trees and a shared fence with the Heydrichs next door.
Canaris’s style of management was relaxed. One of his senior colleagues described it as ‘passive leadership … under the pretence of the greatest apparent activity’. The Tirpitzufer was the only government building in Berlin where the familiar second-person pronoun ‘du’ was in common usage rather than the more formal ‘Sie’. Canaris (known affectionately as ‘old white head’ and ‘the little sailor’) was not a micro-manager. He set broad tasks, and then let his section chiefs get on with it. He hated bureaucracy, and often caused his subordinates despair by his inability to read and clear documents in a timely fashion. Erwin Lahousen wrote:
Canaris was the most difficult superior I have [ever] encountered. Contradictory in his instructions, given to whims, not always just [but] always mysterious, he had … intellectual and above all human qualities which raised him far above the military rubber stamps and marionettes that most of his colleagues and superiors were … He was not at all a technical expert in his work, rather he was a great dilettante. The underground circles that he … gathered around himself were as colourful and heterogeneous as his own personality. Men of all classes and professions, people whose horizons were broad and narrow, idealists and political adventurers, sober rationalists and imaginative mystics, conservative noblemen and Freemasons, theosophists, half-Jews or Jews, Germans and non-Germans … men and women – all of them united only [by their affection for him] and … by their resistance to Hitler and his system. This circle was by no means directed by secret orders. Rather it was an intellectual circle constantly influenced by slight or direct hints … which he guided by active intervention only in rare cases. Only a few initiates received concrete instructions, and even these were not always clear.
‘Old white head’ was also trusted and, it seems, genuinely loved by the more junior members of the Abwehr: ‘Admiral Canaris was absolutely trustworthy, clever, extremely gifted, honest, talented above [the] average and a person of sterling character,’ wrote one of his subordinates after the war. ‘He was well fitted for his position from a personal point of view. The things he [was] able to do for the Abwehr in the face of every obstacle could have been accomplished by no one else.’
But if Canaris was relaxed in his management style, he was utterly precise when it came to the standards he demanded of the Abwehr. His motto, borrowed from Germany’s great World War I spy chief Walter Nikolai, was ‘Le service de renseignements est l’apanage des gentilhommes. Si il est confié à d’autres, il s’écroule’ (The profession of spying should only be conferred upon gentlemen. If others get involved, disaster follows). He also discouraged an obsessional approach to the job: ‘An intelligence officer worthy of his profession,’ he once said to his staff, ‘should be in bed by ten. After that, all is nonsense and stupidity.’ While women spies were useful, in Canaris’s Abwehr any officer who slept with one would be dismissed. He made it clear to his officers that their job was exclusively to gather intelligence, and did not include assassination, torture, blackmail or coercion – such unpleasant things should be left to others. An ability to lie, on the other hand, was a prerequisite. ‘Lying is our trade,’ he instructed. ‘Lying is an art. If you cannot lie, there is no place for you in the Abwehr.’ The great theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose role as the ‘pastor’ of the resistance is often underestimated, famously gave this pragmatic philosophy theological underpinning by proclaiming that God required a lie if this was the only way to protect a deeper truth against evil.
The Abwehr expanded explosively under Canaris’s leadership, growing from 150 staff when he took it over in early 1935, to 1,000 in 1937. By 1943 it had surged in size to 30,000, with an annual budget in today’s terms of close to £100 million. The organisation was based around four ‘operational sections’: Section I, dealing with secret intelligence; Section II, sabotage and disruption; Section III, counter-intelligence; and a foreign department which took responsibility for overseas relations, including political and military evaluation. There was also an ‘administration’ section called ‘Section Z’. On the surface this dealt with mundane administrative matters such as archives, legal affairs, personnel and technical equipment. But Section Z, commanded by the Hitler-hating Hans Oster, was also the home of ‘the Abwehr within the Abwehr’ – a special and highly secret cell whose job it was to frustrate Hitler’s plans and undermine, first his march to war, and later, as things developed, his chances of victory. Known as ‘the Oster circle’ and ‘the Civilians’ – because of Oster’s habit of wearing civilian clothes (despite Canaris’s disapproval) and the culture of informality within his unit – Section Z was treated with some suspicion, even hostility, inside the Abwehr. In time it would become the nerve-centre of the entire high-level German conspiracy against Hitler.
One further addition hugely extended the power and reach of Canaris’s organisation. Though operating under a separate command, a military unit called the Brandenburg Division was attached to and tasked by the Abwehr. The ‘Brandenburgers’, as they were called, were arguably the first ever special forces unit. Unlike British special forces units, which in the early years of the war were used for pinprick raids, they were deployed, like special forces today, exclusively on strategic tasks. Multilingual, multinational (they included many Russian and Caucasian troops), highly mobile and superbly trained and equipped, their job was to operate behind enemy lines ahead of an invading force, disrupting communications and sabotaging bridges and command structures, in much the same way as Britain’s SAS did in the latter stages of the war in Europe.
As 1937 drew to a close, Hitler’s successful occupation of the Rhineland without, as Canaris had predicted, any serious international opposition or criticism, emboldened the Führer to annex Austria. Again, there was little reaction from Britain beyond a diplomatic shrug of resignation. Surely this would now be enough, London hoped, to satisfy the German dictator’s appetite. That was certainly prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s view. Writing to his sister Ida at about this time, he commented that if Hitler was appeased, then sooner or later he would become ‘sated, indolent and quiescent’.
But of course the opposite was the truth. Hitler’s generals understood what the rest of the world should have known: that victories do not satiate a tyrant’s appetite, they sharpen it. As Carl Goerdeler put it, presciently, ‘You know, a dictator must always be bringing along for breakfast a new kill if he is to thrive and survive. This time it is Austria. Next it will be Czechoslovakia, and so on and on.’
In April 1938 Goerdeler returned, accompanied by his wife and daughter, to London, where in two meetings with Vansittart he explained Hitler’s secret plans for the invasion of Czechoslovakia, and expatiated at length on the hostility of the Wehrmacht’s generals towards the Führer. But, following the line set by Chamberlain, Vansittart dismissed this as ‘treasonable talk’. There was also supposed to be a meeting between Goerdeler and Churchill, but this fell through at the last minute due to a misunderstanding over time and place.
Hitler’s secret instruction to his generals in November 1937 that they should prepare for an attack on Czechoslovakia in the following year now began to dominate the work of the planners in Berlin. Amongst the generals, however, there was consternation. This would be bound to lead to war, and that could ultimately end only in catastrophe for Germany. There was a united view that this time Hitler must be diverted; if this proved impossible, he should be removed – if necessary by force. Canaris issued instructions that Abwehr reports to Hitler should exaggerate the strength of the Czech defences, and stress the probability that Britain, France and Russia would go to war if Hitler attacked. On 30 May 1938 Ludwig Beck warned Hitler, ‘the campaign against Czechoslovakia can be very successful, but Germany will lose the war’. He followed this up on 3 June by sending the Führer a courageous memo opposing the planned invasion on military grounds. On 16 July he sent another, even more forthright, memo warning that an attack on Czechoslovakia would involve war with Britain and France. Finally, on 18 August, six weeks before the planned invasion, Beck resigned his post as chief of the army general staff and accepted a posting to command the German First Army on the Western Front. From his new position he opened up a secret and traitorous dialogue with foreign contacts in Basel.
It was around this time that Beck, Canaris, Goerdeler and their fellow conspirators concluded that the only way to stop the coming war was to send secret emissaries to European capitals – especially London and Paris. As Canaris put it to his friend Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin, ‘England must lend us a sea-anchor if we are to ride out this storm.’
* The term Wehrmacht was used for the entire armed forces.
† Known as the Ersatzheer, this had the responsibility of training soldiers to reinforce first-line divisions. Sometimes referred to as ‘the Replacement Army’.
6
The Emissaries
Suddenly they came upon a clearing bathed in sunshine. They stopped at the edge, astounded by the light. It seemed to them a symbol of hope, in contrast to the close-hemmed gloom of the trees and the heaviness of their spirits.
The day, 6 August 1938, was stiflingly hot and humid, even by the standards of a Baltic summer. It was evening now, and an offshore breeze blew softly through the stands of silver birch, causing their leaves to shiver and dance in the failing light.
The three men – two Germans and an Englishman – had been walking for nearly two hours. Their conversation had been earnest and conducted in confidential tones, despite their being out in the open and away from prying eyes and ears.
A few days earlier, Carl Goerdeler had sent a message to a mutual contact in Britain asking for an urgent meeting. Sir Robert Vansittart – now, after Anthony Eden’s resignation over appeasement, chief adviser to the new British foreign secretary Lord Halifax – decided that the man to go and see him should be A.P. Young, the host of Goerdeler’s dinner at the National Liberal Club almost a year earlier.
That afternoon, after a brief stay in Berlin, Young arrived at the station of the Baltic seaside resort of Rauschen-Düne. Stepping out onto the platform in a swirl of steam, sand and dust, he spotted the imposing, heavily-built figure of Goerdeler standing discreetly in the shade of the station awning. The two men walked the short distance to Goerdeler’s summer holiday house, a substantial, steep-roofed chalet-style building with shuttered windows set amongst trees and rhododendron bushes. A family supper with Goerdeler’s much-loved brother Fritz, his wife Anneliese and the couple’s two teenage sons followed. Afterwards, at Goerdeler’s suggestion, the three men set off for an evening walk through the woods, beyond the reach of possible Gestapo eavesdroppers.
Goerdeler’s message was sombre. Hitler was determined on war, and would march on Czechoslovakia within weeks. The German dictator had concluded that Britain and France were weak, and bluffing. They would, he was certain, not react if he occupied the German-speaking Czech Sudetenland. He would get away with it, just as he had done over his recent annexation of Austria.
Goerdeler had good news, too. The German public did not want war. Hitler’s closest advisers, from Himmler to Göring, were also against it, and with the economy in dire straits and army reservists only recently called up, Germany was not yet ready for conflict. The generals too were opposed. The message Goerdeler asked Young to transmit to London was that it was Hitler who was bluffing. If Britain stood up to him, then a powerful group, led by Goerdeler himself and including many of Germany’s top industrialists, a significant number of its Foreign Office officials and all of its most senior generals, would remove the dictator in a putsch, and replace him with a government which was ready to move away from the path to war. ‘A revolution is no place for children,’ Goerdeler added darkly, making it clear that the planned coup would be a violent one, if that was what was needed. This was the turning point, Goerdeler insisted. The German opposition to Hitler was ready to act, if Britain and France would do so too.
On his way back to London on 9 August, Young wrote an extensive report on his conversations for Vansittart, who passed it on to both prime minister Chamberlain and foreign secretary Halifax.
Six days after Young’s return to London, at 7.15 a.m. on 17 August, a large black saloon carrying the insignia of German Army Supreme Headquarters cruised past the imposing monumental façade of Berlin’s newly-constructed Tempelhof Airport. It swung into a side entrance which was already open and waiting for its arrival. It did not stop for checks of papers or personnel, but swept on, bypassing customs and immigration, to the steps of the Hansa Airlines 0800 flight from Berlin, via Amsterdam, to London. The Junkers 52 was parked under the airport’s huge semi-circular cantilevered roof, waiting for its passengers to arrive. Two men got out of the limousine, one in the full uniform and regalia of a Wehrmacht general, the other a middle-aged civilian with a cadaverous frame, a receding hairline, and an ascetic face with hard, gimlet-grey eyes which matched his suit. A close observer might have noted from their body language that there was an unusual closeness between the two, for they were in fact uncle and nephew. The general accompanied his charge to the aircraft steps. The captain, in uniform and cap, welcomed the older man with a salute, led him up the steps and settled him into his seat before the other passengers boarded. His task over, the general returned to his car, which swung round and sped away.
Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin
The subject of all this preferential treatment was a Prussian landowner called Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin, and he too was a secret envoy. A long-time and vocal opponent of the Nazis, who had narrowly escaped being murdered on the Night of the Long Knives and was closely watched by the Gestapo, Kleist-Schmenzin was not travelling under his own name, but under a false identity provided for him, complete with documents and sterling currency, by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris.
Von Kleist-Schmenzin’s mission to London had been well prepared. His task, like that of Goerdeler, was to warn the highest echelons of the British government of Hitler’s imminent plans to invade the Sudetenland, and to inform them on behalf of Hitler’s most senior generals of the putsch they were preparing to launch if Britain would commit to defending Czechoslovakia. Kleist-Schmenzin had received his instructions a few days before his departure from Ludwig Beck: ‘Bring me certain proof that England will fight if Czechoslovakia is attacked and I will make an end of this regime.’
The Gestapo may not have been aware of Kleist-Schmenzin’s travel plans. But London was.
On the day before his departure, the appeasement-supporting British ambassador to Berlin, Sir Nevile Henderson, sent a coded telegram to Whitehall reporting that Kleist-Schmenzin would be travelling to the British capital claiming to represent the ‘moderates of the German Staff’. Henderson advised: ‘It would be unwise for [him] to be seen in official quarters.’
What the ambassador did not know was that he was already too late to block the secret visitor’s access to senior officials in London.
Two days before his departure Kleist-Schmenzin had asked for a meeting with the Central European correspondent of London’s News Chronicle, the well-informed and well-connected Ian Colvin. It was not their first encounter. Three months previously the two men had met in Berlin’s fashionable Casino Club. Colvin would write of that meeting: ‘For the first time, I heard spoken in a whisper the name of the man who was protecting them [the resistance] and furthering their efforts: the name of Canaris.’ During their earlier discussion Kleist-Schmenzin had asked Colvin’s advice about how to reach senior British politicians, explaining that Canaris was looking for a means to make direct high-level contact with them, but did not want to go through the normal intelligence channels. ‘I must warn you against the British Secret Service for several reasons,’ Canaris had said. ‘Should you work for them it will most probably be brought to my notice, as I think I have penetrated here and there. They will want to send messages about you in cipher and from time to time we can break a cipher. Your names would appear in files and registers. That is bad too. It would be difficult to overlook such activities in the long run. It has also been my experience that the British Secret Service will reward you badly – if it is a matter of money, let me tell you, they do not reward services well, and if they have the least suspicion, they will not hesitate to betray you to me or to my colleagues of [Himmler’s] Reich Security Service.’