Fighting to Lose (6 page)

Lahousen also said he only sent a handful of sabotage agents to England and Ireland, and only in token response to Hitler’s orders that the Abwehr do so. It was intended that they fail.

“It would seem that our views on the causes of the Abwehr’s ineffectiveness and inertia should be revised,” an American noted in sending along the Lahousen reports to Colonel Robertson, adding that the descriptions of the Abwehr working against Hitler were backed up by two other interrogations.12 The words must have made the Englishman wince. Robertson had been in charge of MI5’s double-agent operations during the war. Lahousen’s remarks about not running saboteurs indicated the captured saboteurs he had “turned” into double agents had been phonies in the first place. Indeed, all those enemy agents landed with sabotage assignments in 1940–41 must not have been genuine.

This was not something the architect of MI5’s already celebrated “double-cross system” would have wanted to hear. It suggested his first and star double agent, Arthur Owens, had really been working for the other side.

Most spectacular of all, Lahousen said he believed Canaris had been personally in touch with the Allied intelligence services, and specifically with MI6, through intermediaries in Switzerland. And he named names.

Frau SZYMANSKA — Wife of the last Polish attaché to Berlin. A very wise, also politically highly educated woman, whom CANARIS looked up regularly in Switzerland, and whose family in Warsaw was protected and especially looked after by the Abwehr. Her husband, Colonel or General SZYMANSKA, fought at that time with MONTGOMERY’s Army in Africa.

I have various indications that she was one of the most active supporters of CANARIS’ “counteractivity” just as, in general, I, and other like-minded persons, calculated that CANARIS maintained direct contacts via Switzerland to the Allied intelligence services.

Countess THEOTOKIS — a very clever Greek, Jewish or half-Jewish, perfectly clear in her political attitude, was along with her family supported strongly by CANARIS. She lived at that time 1941–42 in Corfu. CANARIS met her often in Rome or Venice. I believe she was connected with the British IS (Intelligence Service). The KO-Leiter Italy, Oberst HEIFFERICH, should know more about her.13

The Americans already had a dossier on the countess. A June 1944 OSS report on the Abwehr in Italy forwarded to the FBI mentioned that she had “received great assistance from the Germans in connection with her frequent trips from Greece to Italy, and from Italy to Switzerland and Germany. It was thought that the head of the German service, Admiral CANARIS, was particularly interested in her.”14

Anyone who read that report and then the one on Lahousen would know why.

Lahousen’s story about Canaris and his campaign to undermine Hitler’s Reich was stamped
SECRET
and filed away for the next half century. Some of what he disclosed came out at the Nuremberg Trials, where he was a star witness against the leading Nazis accused of war crimes, but his testimony then was dependent upon the questions asked of him. Consequently, only a limited picture of Canaris as an opponent of the Nazis emerged, leading most historians to conclude that he supported those who plotted against Hitler, but rarely got involved himself. Lahousen’s 1945 interrogation portrays him as the prime mover.15

2

1933–1939

Wilhelm Canaris was born in 1887 in a village in the Ruhr near Dortmond. His father was an engineer and both parents were decidedly middle class — well-educated, moderately patriotic, and moderately religious. Normally a son in such a family would go into business but the young Canaris joined the navy and the beginning of the First World War found him serving in the South Atlantic as a junior officer on the cruiser
Dresden
.

It was a dramatic voyage for the twenty-seven-year-old. The
Dresden
took part in the 1914 Battle of Coronel, where a German squadron under Admiral Graf von Spee sank two British heavy cruisers, HMS
Monmouth
and HMS
Good Hope
, only to be ambushed by a superior British force a few months later, with the loss of all of Graf von Spee’s ships save the
Dresden
. She was eventually cornered in a Chilean harbour and scuttled, her crew going into internment. Canaris, however, showed his resourcefulness by learning Spanish, disguising himself as a Chilean, and making his way back to Germany. He served out the rest of the war first in Spain, as a spymaster and agent recruiter, and then as a successful U-boat commander. Few could match his war record for bravery, cunning, versatility, and determination.

Canaris continued in the navy after the war, visited Japan in 1925, and then was named to the naval staff of the Defence Ministry, which involved him in secret shipbuilding and rearmament talks in Spain and Greece. In 1929 he got to know Count Theotokis, and visited him several times on the island of Corfu. He returned to a sea command aboard the battleship
Schlesian
, and in 1934 was appointed chief of the Abwehr, then still a modest-sized organization attached to the War Ministry. His reputation must have been a key factor in his getting the job; he was seen as astute, a good administrator, and a subtle manager of men. He was also known to be politically savvy and brave. This last quality was especially needed. He was being put at the focus of three of the most dangerous men of the century. Lahousen called them the three H’s: Hitler, Himmler, and Heydrich.

To appreciate the delicate game Admiral Canaris was to play over the next decade, the story of Hitler’s murder of Ernst Röhm must be told.

Röhm was the head of the Sturmabteilung — usually simply the SA — a civilian army of malcontents, sociopaths, and labour radicals born from the street protests that became a daily feature of German life following the 1929 stock market crash. Germany under the Weimar Republic was then one of the most liberal democracies in Europe, but its elected politicians were blamed for the soaring unemployment and rampant inflation occasioned by the worldwide Depression. While still just a fringe political party, the Nazis organized the violent side of the protests along military lines and by 1931 the “Brownshirts” — the name given them for the quasi-uniforms the SA took to wearing — numbered some four hundred thousand, four times greater than the actual German army.

When Hitler finally won power, Röhm made the mistake of bragging publicly that he was the Nazi leader with the real clout, and that the new German chancellor would do well to pay him close attention. That Hitler most certainly did.

By all accounts, Röhm was an ugly character. He was a huge hulk of a man, encased in layers of flesh, with a red face and puffy cheeks divided by a domino moustache teetering on his upper lip. He was given to creature excesses — sex, food, alcohol, preferably all at once — and reports of his binges, sometimes involving hundreds of his SA followers, were graphic and gruesome. Such behaviour was perhaps not surprising for someone who ordered phalanxes of like-minded louts into innocent neighbourhoods to smash windows, kick in doors, and randomly beat up people.

They were, as one commentator of the period noted, “beefsteak Nazis” — brown on the outside but red inside. They were the German “Bolsheviks” of the Depression and Hitler harnessed their communist sentiments as a means to his political ends. He promised them a “revolution” that would transfer power from the corporate elites and bosses to the workers. The word
Nazi
, indeed, is a contraction of the first word of the party’s full German title, Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei — in English, National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Röhm expected Hitler to live up to this name.1

(It is one of the great fictions of the post–Second World War era that the Nazis were right-wing fanatics. In fact, they were zealous left-wingers imbued with a strong sense of nationalism.)

In the beginning, Hitler needed Röhm. His strategy was to take over government legally by manipulating the social instability fuelled by his followers. Elections in Germany were by proportional representation, leading to chronic minority governments that were short-lived and indecisive. The constitution stipulated that the Reich chancellor (prime minister) could rule by decree in a national emergency if given this power by the Reich president — at that time the eighty-five-year-old First World War–hero Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg.2 The role of the SA was to create so much violence and chaos in the streets throughout Germany that all sectors of society — big business, small business, landowners, merchants, churches — would long for the stability Hitler promised should the Nazi party win government, and be amenable to one-man rule when it did.

In the lead-up to the election of 1933, Röhm served Hitler well. There were window breakings, street fires, and beatings in abundance. The theme song of the Brownshirts as they marched by torchlight ran like this:

String up the old monarchists on lamp-posts

Let dogs bite at their bodies ’til they fall

Hang black pigs in all the synagogues

Let the churches have it with grenades.
3

A year later, after the Nazis won a majority in the Reichstag and a desperate and confused Hindenberg gave Hitler emergency powers, such sentiments were no longer needed, and not wanted. A stable one-leader, one-party Germany required the co-operation of the corporate and social establishments and Hitler immediately set about building these alliances. Röhm, however, publicly insisted that Hitler fulfil Nazi promises to nationalize the big industries and break up the holdings of large landowners. “Honour the Revolution,” he proclaimed. Röhm had to go.

Getting rid of the commander of one’s own private army is a tricky business, but Hitler had an enthusiastic helper. The minister in charge of Germany’s police, Heinrich Himmler, former chicken farmer turned top Nazi, also had assembled a private army for Hitler, the Schutzstaffel, better known simply as the SS. It numbered two hundred thousand in 1933, half that of the SA, but its members were a cut above, drawn to it for reason of personal prestige, rather than politics. The designer-created black uniforms of the SS were smart, gave a sense of elitism, and were popular with the girls.

Himmler’s army called for good, manly specimens, and an SS man needed only to look in the mirror to see confirmation of Himmler’s quack theories of Aryan superiority: blond, high cheeks, strong chin and noble nose, set off by a peaked hat with glamorous badges, and a black tunic with silver highlights. Good looks, at least in the eyes of the beholder, masked every other inferiority, and for this gift of self-esteem the SS man offered Himmler his absolute loyalty. If Himmler and Röhm had been driven to open battle it would have been a bloody affair.

Hitler opted for murder, with Himmler supplying the killers. In the early morning of June 30, 1934, Hitler arrived at a hotel in the spa town of Bad-Wiesee at the head of a truck convoy of SS troops. Röhm was there with some of his key subordinates for a weekend of partying. Hitler burst in on him in his bedroom, yelling curses as pistol shots sounded in the room next door. Röhm’s deputy and the chauffeur he was sleeping with were killed in their blankets. The rest of the SA in the hotel, including Röhm, were seized, manacled, loaded into the trucks and taken away. Simultaneously, elsewhere in the country, SS troops rounded up other leaders of the SA.

Röhm himself was flown to Berlin where he was taken to the fortress of Lichterfelde, stood against the courtyard wall, and shot by firing squad. The shootings continued all that Saturday and much of Sunday. People in the neighbourhood could hear the repeated volleys, accompanied by muffled cries of “Heil Hitler! It is the will of the Führer!”
Bam
!
Bam
! It was said that the wall in the courtyard remained stained with blood for months.4