Fighting to Lose (5 page)

What he said was totally unexpected.

Lahousen revealed that he had actually discouraged sabotage against the Americans and British. Instead, he had been a member of an inner circle around Admiral Canaris whose members conspired against Hitler and did everything they could to undermine the Nazis. The story he told was incredible.1

Lahousen was Austrian. He came from an aristocratic family with a long tradition of military service. At the time of the
Anschluss
— Germany’s annexation of Austria in early 1938 — he was a forty-one-year-old senior intelligence officer with the Austrian General Staff, specializing in Czechoslovakia. To his surprise, shortly after the takeover he was invited to join the German intelligence service, known universally by its short title, the Abwehr. This did not make much sense, since he was an Austrian patriot, without much sympathy for the Nazis, and the Abwehr was Germany’s most secret of secret organizations. He was soon to learn, however, that it was precisely because of his dislike of the Nazis that he had been sought out.2

Admiral Wilhelm Canaris did not fit the picture of a secret service chief. On arriving at Abwehr headquarters in Berlin, in one of the several stately homes that had been converted to army offices on tree-lined Tirpitzuferstrasse, Lahousen faced a small man, standing five-foot-four, with white hair and bright blue eyes, dressed in the dark blue uniform of a naval officer.

The office at 74–76 Tirpitzuferstrasse was modest — simple furniture, a small safe, a sofa, and an iron bedstead so that its occupant could take a nap in the afternoon, perhaps, or for sleeping over in times of crisis. Instead of the usual portrait of Hitler on the wall, there was a signed picture of the Spanish dictator General Francisco Franco, a Japanese woodblock print, and a picture of Colonel Walter Nicolai, Germany’s spymaster of the First World War. A map of the world over the sofa completed the decor.3 The rest of the room was plain, almost tawdry, yet here Lahousen was, at the command centre of what he knew to be the largest and most sophisticated secret intelligence organization in Europe, and possibly the world.

At that very first interview — as Lahousen told his American interrogators — the Abwehr chief took him deeply into his confidence. Czechoslovakia was next on Hitler’s list, Canaris said. The Nazi leader was going to use the excuse of the Sudeten Germans to invade. As the Western powers and the Soviet Union would never stand for it, it would mean a European war. Lahousen was being drafted to help dampen Hitler’s enthusiasm for the venture. The Austrian officer was suddenly faced with the proposition that Germany’s chief of secret intelligence was planning to act against his own government.4

Canaris explained his strategy. He had in mind that the Abwehr should overvalue the intelligence reports coming out of Czechoslovakia. The strength of its fortifications and army, the will to resist of its people, the determination of its government — all this was to be deliberately exaggerated. The likelihood of British, French, or Russian intervention was to be emphasized. Lahousen’s role was to endorse the reports as an intelligence specialist on Czechoslovakia. This would give them tremendous credibility and might put Hitler off his plan.

Lahousen was taken aback. Canaris was sharing a mortally dangerous scheme with a stranger and non-German. Only someone with great confidence in his own judgment would dare such a thing. If the Nazis ever got hint of what Canaris was saying, he was a dead man.

They shook hands. Lahousen would do it. Thereafter a bond of absolute trust sprang up between the two men. Lahousen stuck by Canaris for the next five years, through plot after plot against the Nazis, until Canaris’s arrest and execution separated them forever.

General Lahousen’s opening remarks must have been riveting to his American listeners. And there was more, much more.

First of all, Canaris’s plan was all for nought. Hitler won what he wanted from Czechoslovakia without invasion. The Western powers, England and France, caved in to his demands with the infamous Munich Agreement of 1938 whereby the western edge of Czechoslovakia was shaved off and attached to Germany without the consent of the Czechs. The British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, came home from his meeting with Hitler waving a piece of paper and declaring “Peace in Our Time.” The generals opposed to Hitler were poised to oust him the moment he gave the invasion order. However, Hitler won what he wanted without having to give it and the rebellion melted away.

Hitler’s success over Czechoslovakia emboldened him and he next made territorial demands of Poland. Lahousen recalled Canaris’s very words at the time:

I am convinced that the other [G]reat Powers will not be caught this time by the “political sleight-of-hand tricks of this pathological liar.” War means a catastrophe far greater and beyond comprehension for Germany and all mankind [should there] be the victory of this Nazi system. This must be prevented under all circumstances.5

When Hitler invaded Poland in September 1939, Britain and France did indeed stand their ground and the general war that Canaris feared followed. It made him all the more determined to topple Hitler.

What Canaris next had in mind, now that the war had actually started, was a coup d’état. On formally naming Lahousen the new chief of Abwehr II (Sabotage), he assigned him his share of the enterprise. He was to devise a plan for seizing key members of Hitler’s entourage and of the Nazi security service. He was also to be prepared to take over the broadcast radio stations. Canaris was to look after forming a special Abwehr commando unit to carry out any gunplay. The necessary small arms and explosives were already on hand, hidden next door at 80 Tirpitzuferstrasse, headquarters of OKW/Chi, the German army’s cipher branch.6

What went wrong, Lahousen explained, was that success came too early to the commandos. Later to gain fame as the Brandenburg Regiment, the recruits were mainly Germans who had grown up outside the fatherland and who were fluent in the languages of their adopted countries. High standards of resourcefulness and physical fitness were demanded. Their first great test came during the 1940 invasion of Belgium and Holland when small bands of Brandenburgers donned enemy uniforms and by ruse seized key bridges and other objectives in advance of the German armies. They were so proud of their small role in Germany’s victorious conquest of France and the Low Countries, Lahousen explained, that if they had been given any cause even to suspect their commanders of disloyalty, “they would have shot them out of hand.”

And so it went. Lahousen was invited to put his thoughts on paper and it made gripping reading. He said all of the Abwehr’s division heads — Oster, Pieckenbrock, Bentivegni, Bürkner, and himself — were party to the conspiracy to undermine the Nazis. He told of two bomb plots against Hitler before the disastrous attempt of July 20, 1944; of repeated efforts to persuade senior army generals to arrest Hitler; of alerting Germany’s Axis partners and neutral countries to Germany’s military intentions; of only pretending to undertake missions; of secretly working with resistance movements in Austria and Czechoslovakia.

One of the most significant items was the revelation that in 1940 Canaris had personally blocked Hitler’s effort to seize Gibraltar, the British fortress colony overlooking the narrow western entrance to the Mediterranean. This was decisive. The sweeping victories of Erwin Rommel in the Western Desert were recent memory. So, too, was his final expulsion from North Africa in 1943 due primarily to his not being able to keep his lines of supply from Italy open. They were straddled by Malta with its air bases, and the sea between Italy and Tunisia became a graveyard of Italian freighters. Malta had been supplied and sustained by British convoys from Gibraltar. Had that not been possible, Rommel would have reached Cairo. No one in Lahousen’s audience would have thought otherwise.

Lahousen told how Canaris was sent to Spain several times by Hitler because he had made many friends there during the First World War, and because of the help he had given the dictator, Franco, during the Spanish Civil War. Instead of promoting Hitler’s proposal that Spain join the war, or at least allow German troops to cross Spanish territory, Canaris spoke against it. He needed to be persuasive because Spain had long lusted for return of “The Rock,” which the British had occupied in the eighteenth century and used as a naval base ever since. The outcome of his talks with the Spanish foreign minister, General Gomez Jordana, was never in doubt. As Lahousen explained:

The report to the Foreign Office (through Amt Ausland, OKW) which I made up according to a directive from CANARIS, before his meeting with JORDANA went approximately as follows:

“Spain will continue to support, as heretofore, the Axis powers, but retains her status as “Non-belligerent,” and will defend herself against
every
attack on her territory, even, if the case should arise, against Germany.”

JORDANA actually expressed himself far more carefully and hesitantly in the attendant conversation when it did take place …7

In other words, on this occasion Canaris replied for Spain before meeting with its government. As the Spanish were notoriously savage guerrilla fighters and the civil war had just concluded, Hitler dropped the initiative.

The “secret tasks” assigned to Lahousen as head of Abwehr II also included

• Passive
  conduct of Abwehr II work with external show of great activity;
  
• Failure to carry out enterprises whose execution can be avoided in any way;
  
• Extensive alleviations of the hardships created by the brutalities of the Nazi regime .
  

Examples of the first two included the supplying of false reports on vessels sabotaged in the Mediterranean, the covert disobeying of an order to sabotage the French fleet at Toulon, contriving not to carry out Hitler’s order to murder the French general, Henri Giraud, and tipping off the Italian secret service to a Nazi plan to kill the Pope. The Abwehr II War Diary, Lahousen said, was largely composed of “puffery” and information faked by his trusted aide, the former German journalist Karl-Heinz Abshagen.

As to the third task, Lahousen’s American audience must have been surprised at the extent of the Abwehr’s aid to the victims of the Nazis, especially Jews. Canaris himself sheltered Hans von Dohnányi, a distinguished German jurist dismissed from the civil service because of his part-Jewish parentage, putting him to work in the office of his chief of staff, Hans Oster. These two, in turn, Lahousen said, used the Abwehr as cover to help Jews get out of Germany, sending them abroad as spies and then fabricating reports from them. Jewish “V men” were also used by Canaris in “counter-activity” exploits. This must really have raised the eyebrows of Lahousen’s American listeners. They would have had fresh in their minds the horrors of the recently discovered death camps, grim witnesses to Nazi extermination policies. Yet here they were, being told that the Abwehr — the German army’s secret service — had absorbed what Jews it could in order to save them.8

Lahousen revealed that the conspiracy against the Nazi dictator extended well beyond the Abwehr. He named as involved several high-ranking army officers, including Field Marshal Erwin von Witzleben, the first commander in the West after the fall of France, as well as two chiefs of the general staff, General Ludwig Beck and General Franz Halder. There were others outside the army, as well: some in the Ministry of Justice, the Reich Foreign Office, and even a few senior officials in the Nazi security services.

Canaris’s secret channels of influence extended nearly everywhere in the army, and especially to the military intelligence officers attached to the armies and army groups, and to Fremde Heere, the military intelligence–collating agency of the German army high command. For a time, from January 1941 to November 1942, he even had a fellow-conspirator in the top job at Fremde Heere, the former military attaché to Japan, General Gerhard Matzky, whom Lahousen described as being in the inner circle of Canaris’s “counter-activity.”9

Another item Lahousen disclosed must have been disappointing to British intelligence, especially to MI5’s Lieutenant Colonel T.A. “TAR” Robertson, who chaired the Allied committee that oversaw the collection and distribution of espionage-related interrogation reports.10 In describing how Canaris wanted quietly to discourage sabotage against Britain and the United States, Lahousen told of replacing an efficient Abt II officer in Paris with an ineffective one who never did anything other than send one agent code-named FRITZSCHEN to England. Lahousen said he was convinced from the start that the man was a British double agent, and so he was: FRITZSCHEN was the British double agent ZIGZAG, the English felon and con man, Eddie Chapman. In January, 1943, MI5 staged an elaborate deception, complete with phony photographs and phony reports in the press, aimed at convincing the Germans that FRITZSCHEN had successfully set off an explosion at an aircraft factory. Lahousen revealed he had paid no attention.11