Table Of ContentHITLER’S SPY CHIEF
Richard Bassett
PEGASUS BOOKS
NEW YORK
IN MEMORY OF
Julian, Alan and Nicholas whose world this was.
AND FOR
Beatrice and Edmund whose world this may, with luck, never be.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Preface
Author’s Note
Preface to the American Edition
Introduction
1 A Naval Tradition
2 The League of Gentlemen
3 A Gilded Youth
4 Finis Germaniae
5 Spy Chief
6 Spain
7 Fallen Bastions
8 Lines of Communication
9 Keeping the Empire Afloat
10 Total War
11 Duel to the Death
12 The Search for Peace
13 Unconditional Surrender
14 The End of the Abwehr
Conclusion
Sources Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
Preface
The would-be biographer of Canaris could hardly choose a more difficult
subject. Notwithstanding several excellent biographies on him, notably by André
Brissaud and Heinz Hoehne, the mystery of the German admiral who somehow
helped Britain win the war remains, even more than fifty years after his death.
Despite the thousands of words devoted to the admiral after the war, the riddle of
his links with Britain continue to cast shadows over almost every chapter of the
war’s history. It is therefore with some trepidation that I have attempted to shine
my torch into the already much visited and, by now, quite Stygian cellars of the
Abwehr.
The hazards of working with material related to secret operations are
immense. Long-standing friendships with this or that member of a particular
service are only a disadvantage, as events still covered by the Official Secrets
Act and therefore subject to archival embargo obviously cannot be discussed.
The consistency with which the most modest and oblique of enquiries have been
met with a wall of dignified and amicable silence in certain quarters, usually
quite voluble on other topics, is an impressive testament to the oaths of loyalty
that servants of the Crown, distinguished and undistinguished, embrace. If there
is one great lesson to be learnt by those who research the more obscure dealings
of the British secret services during the war, it is that the officers of those
services cannot, on the whole, be persuaded to break their vows. For those who
believe that a country without an efficient and loyal intelligence force is
automatically doomed, this is reassuring.
It is, however, always a pleasure to be able to talk to men who took part in
what Lewis Namier called, albeit in a less capitalist age, the ‘transactions’ of
contemporary history. Moreover, as he pointed out, a great many profound
secrets are always somewhere in print and easily detected when one knows what
to seek. Previous knowledge is a marvellous stimulant to cogent reasoning and
astute deductions. However, the published literature is pitted with inaccuracies
and false trails, and the unpublished archives are occasionally contradictory.
To illustrate this point, Namier recalled a story related by Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle on how, when crossing Paris from the Gare de Lyon to the Gare du Nord
on his way back from the Riviera, the taxi-driver acknowledged his generous tip
with the words, ‘Thank you, Sir Conan Doyle’. The author of the greatest
detective stories of his time was astounded. ‘How do you know who I am?’, he
asked, to which the driver replied, ‘I saw in the papers that you were coming
from Cannes by way of Marseilles and I see that your hair is cut in the Cannes
style and that on your boots is the mud of Marseilles.’
‘Is this all you recognise me by?’, the bewildered writer asked.
‘No,’ came the reply, ‘on your luggage is your name, printed in very large
letters.’
There is much in print to help those wishing to focus on links between Canaris
and his opposite number in the British secret service, Sir Stewart Menzies, and
there can be no doubt that both men worked together for an understanding
between Britain and Germany, with Churchill’s tacit encouragement, which
could, by 1943, have led to the war ending far sooner than it did.
As to whether Menzies and Canaris ever met, the reader must draw his own
conclusions. The circumstantial evidence appears to be against Menzies’ post-
war and oft repeated mantra to journalists that the meeting never took place,
though unsurprisingly, no documentation for such an encounter exists in the
public domain.
The criteria for decisions taken by those in power are rarely easily understood,
even when those decisions are taken in the full glare of modern democratic
transparency. This is especially the case in time of war. However, it is not the
purpose of this book – nor would it, in my view, be appropriate for those of my
generation, however well informed – to pass judgement on those statesmen and
servants of the Crown whose decisions vitally affected the duration of the
Second World War. As Leo Amery once noted, it requires practical experience of
great affairs to judge the conduct of public men fairly. In the intelligence world
there is the added problem of facing confusing and different sets of choices, a
situation which most people not in that world would have difficulty in
understanding.
The story of Canaris illuminates in sharp relief the alternatives which faced
those in power at the twentieth century’s moment of supreme crisis. The reader
must decide for himself whether the very tangible chances of ending the conflict
two years earlier with the consequent saving of life, certainly many millions, can
be weighed successfully against the durable balance of power hammered out by
the victors in 1945, which kept the peace of the world for half a century – more
or less – though at a high price for the countries of central and eastern Europe.
One of the consequences of Canaris’ failure to achieve an understanding in
1943 is that the Germany that has emerged to take its place in the twenty-first
century, after the total destruction of the twentieth, is without any shadow of a
doubt a democratic, largely Christian country, committed to cooperation,
consensus and values that are the exact opposite of those espoused by the Nazi
regime. The Federal Republic, whatever its faults, has proved a stable and
moderate cornerstone of peace in Europe for two generations.
Such a conversion may well have been possible without the nearannihilation
of Germany that took place between 1943 and 1945. The desperate and often
painful experiences of those families in post-war Germany who had been
actively against the regime, and their often very difficult attempts at
reintegration into post-war German society in the 1950s, suggest on the other
hand that the virus of Nazism, with its powerful pagan hatreds, might have
survived all but the most comprehensive of inoculation programmes.
The Germany that has entered the twenty-first century would have been
recognisable to Canaris as a country more or less conforming to the Germany
‘within the fold of Western civilisation’, to quote Keynes, which he and his
fellow conspirators strove for and which ultimately they and the little admiral
died for.
Author’s Note
This biography of Admiral Canaris, the first to appear in English for nearly thirty
years, caused some controversy among those historians who reviewed it in
England on its arrival early in 2005. I am grateful to them for focusing, mostly to
the exclusion of anything else, on points which bore often little relation or
relevance to the basic narrative.
Certainly, with only limited knowledge of German, it is difficult for those
historians and critics to grasp perhaps the main themes of the German spy
chief’s career. I have found German sources often as enlightening as British ones
which on the whole are rather dismissive of the German resistance and Canaris.
Such are human affairs that even when they are most deserving of praise, they
are often the subject of sinister interpretation by those who sit in judgement on
the interior state of others.
More than fifty years after the end of the war, the enigma of Admiral Canaris,
like that of the man with the dark lantern of the ‘Powder Treason’ or that other
man of mystery in the iron mask, continues to baffle and perplex. The false but
oft-repeated mantra that the German opposition could have removed Hitler
whenever they wanted continues to cast a shadow over Canaris’ integrity. One
great advantage of generally accepted theory is that it is generally accepted. But
repetition, however endless, does not make truth and, as has been pointed out in
another context, where truth rests on evidence which is incomplete, it must be
subject to challenge and revision even at the expense of national mythology.5
This story of Canaris does not illuminate some great unrevealed truth about
the Second World War. Intuition and imagination suggest that is still to come.
But there are shafts of lightness in between patches of obscurity. Whether, once
the Moscow archives on the war are opened beyond 1941, there will be clarity,
remains to be seen. In London, the archives subjected as they are to intense
pruning on such delicate matters are of limited assistance and, as has been
showed recently, capable of mischief. In America, where the papers are more
complete, the recent changes in the intellectual climate there suggests access will
become in time less generous than hitherto. The least that can be said is that this
book is a reasonable interpretation of such evidence as survives. The most one
could say is that it is more plausible than any other.
The present received wisdom is that Britain and Germany fought each other
for six years without thought of compromise. Canaris’ career reveals, perhaps all
too clearly for some, that this thesis merits an alternative. There is another
related widespread misunderstanding concerning the role of Pius XII whose
actions highlighted here show not only how he personally intervened to save
Rome’s Jewish population but also how he saw his mission was to bring about
that compromise peace which this book shows was far from unthinkable even in
1943. Only in this way could the factory slaughter of the innocents and the
unique bestiality of the holocaust be brought to an end.
This book cannot attempt to give all the evidence, solve all the problems or
comment on all the documents but it is offered tentatively as a spotlight on a
career of one of the most fascinating figures of the twentieth century and one
whose story has been far too long neglected by historians in this country.
Richard Bassett, London
5
Francis Edwards, S.J., The Real Story of the Gunpowder Plot, London, 1969
