Paddy Ashdown - Nein!

It was in this post that, at Hitler’s review of the fleet in 1933, Canaris first met the new German chancellor. Hermann Göring too paid a visit to the Schlesien that year, but it was far less successful. The future head of the Luftwaffe, who was violently and incessantly seasick, took exception to being the butt of some rather laboured inter-service jokes at his expense from one of the Schlesien ’s officers. Canaris had to discipline the officer to save his own career, after which the threat quickly passed.

The next crisis was more serious. Canaris liked to be in command, not under it – he was famous for his tetchy and truculent relations with his senior officers. In the late summer of 1934 his immediate superior complained to the head of the navy, Admiral Raeder, about Canaris’s behaviour. Raeder, who had already had to deal with the fallout from his difficult subordinate’s escapades in Spain and elsewhere, decided that enough was enough, and banished the troublemaker to command an isolated Napoleonic naval fortress at Swinemünde on the Baltic coast. Here Canaris whiled away his time cantering his horse along the deserted beach and waiting for something to come along.

In due course it did. In the last weeks of 1934, after an internal struggle between the army and the navy as to who should fill a vacancy at the head of the Abwehr, Canaris got the job. The fact that he was well known to be on very bad terms with Raeder may have helped. Although the Abwehr was officially the German foreign intelligence service, it was organisationally attached to the army general staff, making Canaris, though a senior naval officer, effectively an ‘adopted son’ of what was known at the time as the Reichswehr (the German army). Appointing Canaris, the Führer, an avid devotee of British spy novels, said, ‘What I want is something like the British Secret Service – an order, doing its work with passion.’

What Hitler saw in the forty-seven-year-old rear admiral (Canaris was promoted on his appointment) was a master right-wing conspirator who could be put to his service. What he didn’t see was the subtly independent spirit, sustained by a strong moral code and firm principles, that was hidden below.

The event which marked the greatest single service Wilhelm Canaris rendered his master during his early years as Abwehr chief began on 25 July 1936.

Returning that evening from Wilhelm Furtwängler’s triumphant production of Wagner’s Die Walküre at Bayreuth’s Festspiel opera house, Hitler was handed a personal letter from a largely unknown forty-three-year-old Spanish colonel called Francisco Franco Bahamonde. Franco, as he soon became known, was trapped in Morocco with 30,000 troops, unable to transport them over the Straits of Gibraltar to the Spanish mainland, where they were desperately needed to stem the advance of Republican forces threatening Seville, because of an embargo enforced by the Spanish navy. What he needed – and desperately – was aircraft to fly him and his men to the beleaguered Spanish city. He had appealed to Mussolini for help, but was refused. He now turned to Hitler.

Though the hour was late, Hitler called in Göring and the armed forces’ commander-in-chief, Werner von Blomberg. At the conclusion of discussions which ended in the early hours of the following morning, Hitler decided to throw his weight behind Franco. It now fell to Canaris to deliver the aid his master had promised. The one-time spy was in his element, using his old contacts in the Spanish government and secret police.

Twenty Junkers 52 transports (ten more than Franco had asked for) and six Heinkel 51 fighters, some flown by British pilots, were swiftly chartered through London – probably with the help of Basil Zaharoff – and despatched to Tetouan airfield in northern Morocco. This was followed by a massive build-up of military aid and arms from Berlin, including the deployment of the German Condor Legion, whose destruction of the defenceless little town of Guernica by bombers in April 1937 was to prove a harbinger of the fate of so many innocent towns and cities across Europe in the years to come. Canaris’s intervention tipped the balance of the Spanish Civil War in Franco’s favour. On 28 March 1939, Franco occupied Madrid. Three days later he was able finally to declare the victory that put an end to Spain’s long and bloody years of conflict.

Hitler’s gamble had paid off – he had now extended his influence to the westernmost limit of Europe. It had paid off for Canaris, too, who had achieved unrivalled influence and leverage with the Spanish dictator and his new government. Spain had become the Abwehr chief’s private playground and refuge – Franco even gave him a villa for his private use as a mark of his gratitude.

Like Ludwig Beck and Carl Goerdeler, Wilhelm Canaris had at first welcomed Hitler as a necessary evil to put Germany back on its feet. Also like his two soon-to-be fellow conspirators, he would become horrified by the blood, conflict and criminality of Hitler’s behaviour in power. But Canaris’s journey from naïve belief in Hitler to understanding the threat he posed to all that he himself stood for was a slow one – for which history has often criticised him.

The turning point in Canaris’s loyalty to his Führer finally came with the Fritsch affair in January 1938. This was the moment when it became evident to Canaris, as to so many of his fellow Germans, that Hitler’s demonic will would not be restrained by the norms of accepted behaviour, by the constraints of the law, or by the limits of democratic government. ‘If you are looking for one specific event that shook Canaris’s allegiance to Hitler, then there [in the Fritsch affair] you have it,’ commented his predecessor as chief of the Abwehr. Canaris’s subordinates in the Abwehr noted the change too: ‘Hitler’s criminal procedure against … Fritsch had a [profound] effect upon the Wehrmacht and the Abwehr. The result … split … opinion … The systematic organisation … among Hitler’s opponents began at this point. The final decision to work for the regime’s overthrow … by the [Canaris] group was … made [at this time],’ one reported after the war.

From this watershed onwards all the formidable energy and cunning of this part Hamlet, part moral mystic, part German patriot, part conspirator at the court of Cesare Borgia, would be directed towards undermining and frustrating his master, Adolf Hitler.

*Its full title was the Amtsgruppe Auslandsnachrichten und Abwehr.

The couple, he magnificent in the red-lined grey cape and gold-trimmed shako of a lieutenant colonel in the Austrian army, and she radiant in a spring dress, seemed like kingfishers flashing along a muddy river as they pushed their way through the tide of humanity pressing – panicking – to find a place on the train to Switzerland.

He led her to the platform and they said their goodbyes as lovers do when they are uncertain whether they will ever see each other again. Then he took her into a carriage, found her a seat amidst the crush, and left.

Three days previously, on 12 March 1938, she had watched the German troops marching into Vienna under brilliant skies. She had felt the tramp of their boots in the pit of her stomach, and heard their chants: ‘Today Vienna; tomorrow Prague; later Paris.’ And Madeleine Bihet-Richou, thirty-six years old, daughter of a French government official, native of Toulouse, divorcee, mother of a son, teacher of French in Vienna and for the last four years the lover of Erwin Lahousen Edler von Vivremont, the head of the Austrian Abwehr, had been frightened.

As Madeleine watched Hitler’s troops streaming into Vienna that day, her lover was with Wilhelm Canaris in Abwehr headquarters not far away. The admiral had dashed to the city by plane ahead of the forward troops in order to seize documents in Lahousen’s files. It would have been embarrassing, to say the least, if these had fallen into the hands of SS chief Heinrich Himmler, for they revealed the extent of cooperation between Canaris and his Austrian counterpart, which had included warnings and plans of the coming German invasion. With the German takeover imminent, Canaris asked Lahousen to gather as many of his most trusted colleagues as possible and join him in the Tirpitzufer in Berlin, adding, ‘Above all, don’t bring in any Nazis to our Berlin headquarters, bring me true Austrians, not thugs.’