Killing Hitler (14 page)

Canaris himself cut a peculiar figure. A little over 152 centimeters (5 feet) in height, white-haired, and soft-spoken, with a distinctly unmilitary bearing, he initially failed to impress his new subordinates. He was indeed an enigmatic character. Born near Dortmund in 1887, the son of an industrialist, he had opted for a career as a sailor. After service in World War One, predominantly as an intelligence officer and U-boat commander, he had enjoyed a swift rise in the postwar navy, culminating in a posting as captain of the aged battleship
Schlesien
in 1932.

Yet for all his success in that most demanding of professions, Canaris had a number of peculiar traits. First, he was deeply superstitious, with a pronounced aversion to tall people and those who were garrulous, energetic, or talkative. In other words, he had a dislike for all those who were not like himself. Second, he was an incurable hypochondriac. An inveterate pill popper who suffered from neuralgia, insomnia, and a host of other, more or less imaginary ailments, he had a pathological fear of infection. This had evidently even been the case during his time at sea. In 1924, the ship’s doctor on the cruiser
Berlin
had described First Officer Canaris as having a “condition aggravated by a tendency to interpret all kinds of minor symptoms as signs of severe illness.”
²⁶

Canaris was also a natural spy. Even at school he had been dubbed “the peeper,” because of his insatiable curiosity.
²⁷
In later life, this trait was allied to inscrutability and a talent for deception. In his Abwehr office, Canaris gave pride of place to a statuette of three monkeys, which demonstrated the cardinal virtues for a successful agent—see all, hear all, say nothing.
²⁸
It was a mantra that he was to follow most assiduously. Many believed that he spied for fun or for its own sake. It has even been suggested that he had agents engaged within his own household to spy on his guests.
²⁹

In his political affiliations Canaris was no less enigmatic. He was a military man who abhorred violence.
³⁰
He was an impassioned nationalist and anti-communist who had initially welcomed the advent of the Nazis, though he never joined the party.
Indeed, his relationship to the Nazi Party would perplex both his contemporaries and a later generation of historians. The dilemma at its heart was typical of the entire German officer class—Canaris had welcomed Hitler’s anti-communism and his plans for expansion, rearmament, and a return to greatness, but at the same time he loathed the lawlessness and amorality of the SS and the degradation of the military. Upon his arrival at the Abwehr in 1935, therefore, Canaris gave a very good impression of being a Nazi sympathizer. He began parroting Nazi slogans and stressing the desirability of close cooperation with the Gestapo. His very appointment was thought to have been facilitated by Reinhard Heydrich, his archrival and head of the SS espionage agency, the SD. He was certainly close to Heydrich. The two shared their memories of service in the navy and were neighbors in the Berlin district of Schlachtensee, where they frequently rode together and where Heydrich was a regular visitor to Frau Canaris’s soirees.
³¹
It may well have been that this closeness was, for both of them, a matter of professional necessity. However, following Heydrich’s assassination in 1942, Canaris openly wept at his funeral and claimed to have lost “a true friend.”
³²

Despite all this, it has been suggested that Canaris had been a convinced opponent of the Nazis from the outset and, indeed, that he had taken the appointment at the Abwehr only to be able to frustrate Hitler’s aggressive plans. Though the opinion is contested, one of his colleagues claimed after the war that Canaris had started conspiring against the Nazis immediately after assuming command of the Abwehr. “The Canaris group,” he recalled, “…was the first united military clique working against Hitler with any semblance of a planned programme…. This rebellion,” he added, “began when Admiral Canaris was put in charge of the Abwehr.”
³³

Whatever the truth of that assertion, it is clear that by 1938, Canaris had undergone some sort of conversion to the anti-Nazi cause. He had been deeply shaken by the Fritsch affair, which was widely considered to have severely dented the independence and integrity of the military.
³⁴
The purges then under way in the USSR, meanwhile, had served to awaken in him a realization that
generals were destined merely to be exploited by politicians and scapegoated when necessary.
³⁵
Numerous firsthand accounts from the period point to his increasing hatred for the SS in particular, and his growing propensity to refer to them simply as “criminals.”
³⁶
By the time he recruited the former chief of the Austrian counterespionage office, Erwin von Lahousen, to the Abwehr in March 1938, his conversion appears to have been complete. Canaris laid down the following ground rule for his new section chief: “[Y]ou may not, under any pretext, admit to this section…or take on your staff any member of the NSDAP, the Storm Troopers or the SS, or even an officer who sympathises with the Party.”
³⁷
For a senior serving officer of the German Reich, these were brave words.

Yet, for Canaris, doubts and obstacles clearly remained. For one thing, he may have been hamstrung by his belief in the sanctity of the oath of allegiance.
³⁸
But, much more importantly, he faced an awkward yet fundamental dilemma. His sense of duty and honor dictated that, in the face of his profound misgivings about the regime, he should resign his post. Yet he knew that if he did, he would be succeeded by one of the new breed from the SS, who would destroy the network that he had established. This was the predicament shared by many others. “How could we hope to bring about change,” they would argue, “if every important position was voluntarily abandoned to the Nazis?”
³⁹

Canaris’s solution was to remain in office and to serve as a facilitator to the opposition circles that he had fostered, while playing no perceptible role himself. After all, what better vehicle was there for a conspiracy than an intelligence service, where secrecy was paramount and clandestine operation was the norm? Thus Canaris remade the upper echelons of his department in his own image, surrounding himself with men of a mind similar to his own. The senior staff that he recruited almost all shared his unashamedly independent view of German politics. They would become the core of what might be called the Abwehr opposition. These included Helmuth Groscurth, head of Section II (sabotage); his Austrian-born successor, Erwin von Lahousen; Hans von Dohnanyi, deputy head of Central Section; and Hans Gisevius,
later head of “special projects” and one of the primary chroniclers of the German resistance movement. But foremost among them was Hans Oster.

A career soldier, Oster had served in the First World War and in the Reichswehr before a romantic scandal brought about his resignation in 1932. The following year he was employed in the Abwehr in a civilian capacity and so was already active there prior to the appointment of Canaris. Contemporaries described him as “an absolutely sound and decent fellow,” and all were agreed on his mental ability and intelligence.
⁴⁰
A Christian, patriot, and monarchist, he had a profound sense of justice, which the “new morality” of the Nazis could not corrupt. But beyond that, his character was in many ways the antithesis to that of Canaris. Oster had something of the show-off about him. Tall and elegant, he liked to dress well and occasionally sported a monocle. In stark contrast to his mentor and master, he could be audacious, impatient, and sometimes unwisely vocal in his opinions.

Oster would become the “soul” of the German resistance movement.
⁴¹
His conversion to the cause came earlier than most. From the outset, he viewed the lawlessness of the SA with outright contempt. But it was the execution of his former colleague and superior General Kurt von Schleicher in the summer of 1934 that began his transformation into an active opponent of the Nazis.
⁴²
From that time, he developed a fanatical hatred of the SS. And from his position within the Abwehr he had the ideal vantage point from which to watch its gradual penetration of German society and to collect documentary evidence of its crimes. By 1937, it was said, Oster had already decided that Hitler—whom he customarily referred to as “the pig”
⁴³
—had to be killed.
⁴⁴
By 1938, therefore, when many other future resisters were barely opening their eyes to the grim realities of the Nazi regime, Oster was already a veteran. The events of that year would suffice to push him from passive opposition into active resistance.

Like Canaris, Oster gathered to him would-be resisters and others critical of the regime. His office, a colleague later confided, was “a port of call for all those members or associates of the Abwehr
who were self-acknowledged opponents of National Socialism.”
⁴⁵
Another contemporary described it as “a pigeon coop, filled as it was with mysterious persons.”
⁴⁶
But Oster’s network of contacts spread much farther than that. For all their apparent determination, the disparate opposition groups of the 1930s could barely be described as “the resistance.” They were not one body of men. They did not speak with one voice. In fact, they barely spoke at all. Those who conspired even to express criticism of the regime did so only in small groups of trusted friends and confidants. Concerns would be aired during a walk in the park or at a private dinner party. The presence of a stranger or a supposed “new recruit” would be cause for profound alarm. Some went to great lengths to avoid detection. A series of code words was developed to disguise sensitive discussions: Oster was code-named “Uncle Whitsun”; Hitler was “Emil”; his headquarters was “Mount Olympus.”
⁴⁷
Two resisters met regularly in a Berlin swimming pool, where they found they could catch up on events without fear of eavesdroppers.
⁴⁸
Another, fearing being caught in possession of incriminating documents, learned the wording of memoranda and telegrams by heart before passing them on verbatim to his superiors.
⁴⁹

Yet for all the precautions employed by some, there was also some shocking laxity. Hans von Dohnanyi, for example, rightly insisted on keeping documentary evidence both of the crimes of the Nazis and of the resistance’s discussions and plans. However, his files were kept not in a locked safe but in a simple filing cabinet in the corner of his office. According to one contemporary, the security failings went further:

The lack of caution exercised by Dohnanyi and Oster was truly devastating. They used to like meeting their friends and other like-minded people in the kind of upmarket bars where anybody with a grain of sense would suspect that the various intelligence services had long ago installed listening devices. Furthermore, had the Gestapo or the SD bothered to install a couple of agents equipped…to monitor the coming and going at Abwehr headquarters, then they would surely have grasped sooner rather than later what was afoot.
⁵⁰

Nonetheless, it took tremendous courage to attempt to bring the groups together, to forge contacts between them, and to seek to do more than merely air grievances and share horror stories. This was to be the role taken on by Hans Oster. Through countless phone calls and meetings in Berlin apartments, restaurants, and parks, Oster forged the basis of the German resistance movement. Standing in his office beside a bank of telephones, he once outlined to a colleague his own perception of the position that he held. “This is what I am,” he said, “I facilitate communications for everyone everywhere.”
⁵¹

Oster really did speak to just about everyone. He courted the politicians, sounded out the generals, kept in touch with the monarchists, and even entertained disgruntled former Nazis. Like a spider at the center of its web, he was the liaison man, linking the various parties who wanted Hitler removed. But he also played a more active role, cajoling, persuading, and stiffening the resolve of the waverers. Without Hans Oster, many of the resisters of 1938 would simply have been unaware of one another’s existence.

Shortly after 4:00 on the afternoon of 12 March 1938, Adolf Hitler entered Austria. In a cavalcade of gray, open-topped Mercedes vehicles “bristling with weapons,” he crossed the border at his birthplace, Braunau am Inn.
⁵²
He was returning not as a tourist but as a self-proclaimed “liberator.” Yet for all the swagger, the Führer was nervous. His “invasion” of Austria would be a test of his boldness and of his theory of the quiescence of the Western powers.

The “invasion” had begun that morning. The previous day the Austrian chancellor had caved in to German pressure and resigned, to be replaced by a prominent Nazi. German troops and tanks then moved off at dawn. They were greeted by enthusiastic crowds, peals of church bells, and a carpet of flowers. Their advance
soon slowed to a crawl. Following in their wake, Hitler proceeded to Linz and thence to Vienna, where he was greeted by crowds “delirious with joy.”
⁵³
Two days later, he addressed a quarter of a million people gathered in the city’s Heldenplatz. “This land,” he said, “is German; it has understood its mission, it will fulfil this mission, and it shall never be outdone in its loyalty to the great German national community.” “As the Führer and Chancellor of the German nation and the Reich,” he concluded, “I now report to history that my homeland has joined the German Reich.”
⁵⁴
Once again, the enthusiasm of the Viennese was undeniable. They endorsed Hitler’s “invasion” en masse; their republic would become a province of the greater German Reich, their army would be absorbed into the Wehrmacht, and their new Führer would return to Berlin a conquering hero. Hitler had carried out a classic bloodless coup. By his bluster and guile, he had removed one of the most hated clauses of the Treaty of Versailles—that forbidding the
Anschluss
, the union of Austria and Germany—at one stroke. And yet war had not been declared. The Western powers had not intervened and not a drop of blood had been shed. Hitler was at the peak of his powers.