Paddy Ashdown - Nein!

After such a war, what could the thirty-one-year-old Canaris do next for adventure? He began casting around to find a stage on which he could use his talents and his love of conspiracy. Politics was the obvious answer, and there was more than enough of it to go round in the chaos and revolution of post-Versailles Germany. In the early post-war years Canaris was deeply involved in combating the threat of communism, which at the time seemed poised to overwhelm Germany. He was an early activist in the formation of the anti-communist Freikorps paramilitary units which roamed the country. In this role he almost certainly had dealings with his old Iberian adversary Basil Zaharoff, who was at the time busy selling weapons from his German factories to anyone who would buy them.

In the post-Bismarck German constitutional settlement, the army’s position was almost that of a state within a state. High-level politics and high-level military command occupied a deeply enmeshed common space at the pinnacle of the German state, and often flowed into each other in a way unknown in most other European democracies. Although still only a very minor player, this was the space in which Wilhelm Canaris had now arrived, and the space in which he would, with only brief exceptions, spend the rest of his life.

But the young naval lieutenant’s hyperactivity in 1919 was not confined to politics and conspiracies. He was also pursuing romance.

His first love had been an English girl, Edith Hill, the daughter of a wealthy northern industrialist to whom Canaris, a lifelong anglophile, had become more or less engaged. At the outbreak of war, however, Miss Hill terminated the relationship on the grounds that it would be improper to marry a citizen of her nation’s enemy. Around 1917, probably after his well-publicised escape from South America, he met and fell in love with Erika Waag, also the daughter of an industrialist. When peace came, he assiduously tracked her down and, three days after finding her, proposed. They married in 1919, and went on to have two daughters. The marriage was not on the whole a contented one. Erika’s passion for music and the arts, and Wilhelm’s for politics and plotting, did not always sit easily together. Canaris was never likely to be the kind of man who would submit himself to uxorious domesticity.

In June 1923, doubtless in an attempt to keep him away from more political mischief, Canaris was posted to the cadet-training ship the Berlin , a superannuated pre-war cruiser which should have been despatched long ago to the breaker’s yard. He found his fellow officers boorish, the job monotonous, and his enforced exclusion from intrigue unbearable. Depression – always quite close to the surface of the Canaris personality – set in. He believed his naval career was over, and toyed with resignation.

The one bright spot in his life on the Berlin was a slim, fresh-faced, fair-haired young man with an artistic temperament and a high-pitched voice (he was nicknamed ‘Billy Goat’). Despite the age difference between Canaris and Reinhard Heydrich, there was much which brought the two men together. Heydrich was teased by his fellow cadets because of his effeminate appearance, just as Canaris had been teased for his short stature. Both men were outsiders. Neither found the upper-class overlay of life in the German navy either comfortable or congenial. Observers noted the ‘father and son’ relationship that developed between the two. On some occasions young cadet Heydrich, an accomplished violinist, would visit the Canaris home, where he accompanied Erika on the piano, while her husband, complete with chef’s hat, cooked his favourite dish, saddle of wild boar in a croute made of crumbled black bread and red wine. In the years to come, after Heydrich, then the head of Himmler’s Sicherheitsdienst (SD), had himself married, the Canarises and the Heydrichs would twice choose to live as neighbours in the same street.

After the war, Heydrich’s wife Lina described the relationship between the two couples: ‘Mrs Canaris played the violin and so soon we came to see each other frequently, and this social intercourse … was not to be interrupted until the death of my husband … We used to see each other on our birthday parties; the two men went hunting together; no festivities in our houses passed without our taking part in them … We had a picture of the Dresden in the Battle of the Falkland Isles. It was a present from Canaris; he had painted it himself.’

It seems that the relationship between the two couples was actually rather more complex than Lina Heydrich’s post-war description makes it seem. By the time they were next-door neighbours in the area around Berlin’s Schlachtensee lake there was already an atmosphere of wariness between the two men, neither of whom was averse to using his wife or his private contacts to keep an eye on the other. On one occasion Erika Canaris was invited to her next-door neighbours’ for an afternoon coffee party. She did not want to go, but Canaris insisted ‘for appearances’ sake’. At the event, Lina Heydrich, who was well aware that the Canaris’s daughter Eva had been severely incapacitated by meningitis, insisted that, in line with Hitler’s new policy of racial purification, ‘We have to kill all disabled children.’ In any normal relationship, this would have caused a permanent rupture between the two families. Instead, the neighbours’ habit of regular, if guarded, social contact seems to have continued uninterrupted. One of his anti-Hitler co-conspirators would later comment on Canaris’s puzzling habit of socialising with even the most extreme Nazis: ‘Canaris considered them to be thugs and crooks, but he had no objection to observing them. It was like living in some well-written crime story.’

Canaris’s ‘penal servitude’ on his cadet-training ship did not last long. In the spring of 1924, to his huge relief, he exchanged naval uniform for civilian clothes and went undercover again, this time in Japan, where he was engaged in a secret joint enterprise with the Japanese for the construction of the U-Boats Germany was prohibited from having under the terms of Versailles. But the project was stillborn when German defence policy changed from trying to deceive the Royal Navy about the building of illicit U-Boats to cooperating with it, in the hope of achieving some relaxation of the Versailles straitjacket.

Canaris was brought back to a Berlin desk job, which he hated with a passion that left him with a lifetime aversion to staff work, bureaucracies and all sedentary jobs. One of his superiors of this time noted perceptively, ‘His troubled soul is appeased only by the most difficult and unusual of tasks.’

True to form, a Berlin desk job did not hold Wilhelm Canaris, now thirty-seven, for long. By the end of 1924, despite government jitters, he was once again deep in backstreet dealings with right-wing bankers and his old spy networks in Spain,creating a series of front companies to cover another attempt at secret ship- and U-Boat-building, this time in Spain and Greece. It was not long before Canaris, assisted by his Mallorcan fisherman friend Juan March, had woven a powerful network of influence in Spain which included Argentine venture capitalists, German industrialists, Spanish shipbuilders, film-makers, bankers, the chief of the Spanish secret police, corrupt officials, government ministers, right-wing members of the Spanish aristocracy, and even the royal family. Inevitably, Canaris’s old adversary-cum-partner, the king of arms dealers, Basil Zaharoff, got to hear what was going on, and tipped off the British.

It was not only the British who now moved against Canaris. Thanks to his right-wing activities, he had made powerful enemies at home. Their chance came when one of Canaris’s front companies, the film-making enterprise Phoebus, went bankrupt. In the ensuing hullabaloo, his attempts to bypass the Versailles Treaty were exposed, along with his right-wing links. An embarrassment to the navy at home and abroad, he was hurriedly withdrawn from Spain and given a posting away from the public eye on another elderly training ship, the Schlesien , on which he served initially as first officer and then, from 30 September 1932, as captain.