The decisive discussions had taken place in late February between Foreign Minister Neurath, Blomberg, Fritsch, Ribbentrop, Goering and Ulrich von Hassell, ambassador to Rome. Mussolini had indicated in January that he would not object to Austria becoming a German satellite; his invasion of Abyssinia had destroyed the Stresa front and the fact that he had only been punished by economic sanctions and a League of Nations resolution convinced Hitler that neither Britain nor France was interested in military intervention. Mussolini had told von Hassell that if there were further sanctions he would leave the League of Nations and tear up the Locarno Treaty, and in any case he would not support Britain and France against Hitler if Germany reacted to the French-Soviet pact. That was the go-ahead to march into the Rhineland, and from France itself came the signal that its ministers and Army were opposed to unilateral action there.5 In London, Foreign Minister Eden stated that since the demilitarised zone had been created for the security of Belgium and France, it was up to them to maintain it;6 Hitler knew therefore that in re-occupying the Rhineland he was running no great risk. Nevertheless, between December 1935 and March 1936 Canaris probably visited Hitler at the Reich Chancellery on seventeen occasions7 while a former Abwehr official stated that Gruppe I (Espionage) officers had been active on the left bank of the Rhine since 1935; they were to report from Trier to Generalkommando XI Kassel Abwehrstelle on the French military response, if any, to the re-occupation.8
On 13 March when a telegram from the London military attaché reached Berlin, advising of a worsening of the situation, Blomberg panicked and asked Hitler to pull troops out of Aachen, Trier and Saarbrücken, but Goering had already informed Hitler of the attaché’s report9 and criticised Blomberg for his lack of nerve. Blomberg than advised the attaché that in difficult situations ‘it was important for people to keep their nerve’10 while General Beck, chief of the General Staff, wrote to the military attaché, Geyr von Schweppenburg: ‘My personal opinion is that it was not you who lost his nerve, but quite different people.’11
Canaris took a dim view of von Schweppenburg’s intervention in the Rhineland situation12 because the attaché considered all espionage activity discreditable and had warned Canaris not to ask him to make auxiliary services available. That Schweppenburg had been admonished by Blomberg but supported by Beck highlighted the rivalry between the Reichswehrminister and the Army General Staff. In 1934 Beck had succeeded in having the military attachés transferred from the jurisdiction of the ministerial office to the Army office, a forerunner of the General Staff.13 If the attachés were now supplying the General Staff directly with intelligence reports and assessments, it could only damage further the fragile relationship between the ‘Foreign Armies’ section at General Staff and the Abwehr.
Beck had had for some time his own channels for foreign political information14 from Britain, Italy and its colonies, and Belgrade, where he encouraged the military attaché Moritz Faber du Faur to run a critical eye over Canaris’s analyses.15 Du Faur appreciated that the warnings of the military attachés were not welcome at the Reich Chancellery: ‘Hitler did not want us, he wanted only Ribbentrop and Canaris, and began to want Himmler, and they silenced a military attaché from the outset.’16.
On 17 July 1936 Canaris was as surprised as anybody else by the revolt of the Spanish generals against the far-left People’s Front government elected the previous February; the leader of the insurrection was former Chief of the General Staff Francisco Franco y Bahamonde,17 who had been thought to be no danger in the Canary Islands. Despite the legends there is no evidence that Germany was in any way involved.
Richard Claassen, a long-term agent at Cadiz, and Gustav Draeger, German consul at Seville, were both out of Spain at the time; agent ‘Bremen’ at Barcelona had prior knowledge but the coup had begun before he transmitted his report to Berlin.18 Canaris was then engaged in reinforcing ‘operational measures’ and enlarging the Abwehr base in Europe, Scandinavia and South America, and had no special plans for Spain,19 although in 1935 the Gestapo had signed the international secret protocol against Communist infiltration based on the 1928 police treaty to trade information referred by Canaris.
After the People’s Front took power, the Gestapo and SS obtained permission from the Foreign Ministry to place an agent in the Madrid embassy to monitor leftist activities. In May 1936 SS/SD Oberinspektor Paul Winzer started work in Madrid but was surprised by the generals’ revolt even though the visit of General Sanjurjo to Berlin in the spring to buy weapons for an uprising had been reported in the Moscow newspaper Pravda.20 No documents can be found to suggest Canaris as an intermediary,21 and although in July 1936 rumours reached the Foreign Ministry regarding negotiations between Spanish conspirators and a German arms dealer, Josef Veltjens, to deliver weapons to the Falange by U-boat, Canaris’s name was not mentioned.22 The secret statistics of the Export Association for War Equipment (AFK) indicate the sale of only 150 light machine guns as at July 1934.23
Sanjurjo was killed in an air crash on 20 July 1936, and General Mola became the liaison officer to Germany. On 22 July the German military attaché, Kühlenthal, received a telegram from General Franco, in Spanish Morocco from where he was running the government,24 requesting ‘completely secretly’ and ‘very urgently’ the supply of ten aircraft for ferrying troops, to be flown to Spanish Morocco by German personnel.25
On 24 July, when General Mola asked Berlin if the Reich would supply aeronautical material to a Nationalist counter-revolutionary government in Burgos,26 Berlin already had firm indications that the French Government was planning to deliver bombers, bombs and field guns to the Republican government in Madrid.27
The following day, an aircraft arrived at Berlin-Tempelhof from Tetuan in Spanish Morocco. Two members of the NSDAP Overseas Branch, Adolf P Langenheim and Johannes E F Bernhardt,28 alighted with Franco’s envoy Capitan Francisco Arranz;29 the envoy carried Franco’s report for Hitler. No State department would receive Arranz, but eventually Rudolf Hess, acting for the NSDAP Overseas organisation, arranged for the delegation to meet Hitler at the Bayreuth Music Festival30 where he accepted the document.31
A report from the Madrid embassy had warned of the danger of a Spanish Soviet if Republican Spain joined the French–Soviet bloc, and that German interests would be prejudiced if the Republic won a civil war.32 It is not certain that Canaris was at Bayreuth at the time although Gauleiter Bouhle, head of NSDAP Overseas, mentioned ‘an admiral’ being there,33 and Wolfgang Kraneck, head of NSDAP Overseas legal department, told his deputy that the possibility of shipping German war materials to Morocco by sea had been discussed, which has led to the assumption that Canaris was the anonymous admiral.34 Hitler supplied Franco with twenty Ju 52 transport aircraft and six Heinkel biplane fighters, with the proviso that they were not to be used in hostilities unless attacked first. The aircraft flew to Spanish Morocco and then Cadiz, which was held by Franco,35 enabling him to receive troops for the Falangists.36
Canaris had a network of agents in place, set up in the Echevarrieta epoch in the late 1920s. One of these, Kapitän Lietzmann, had unofficial links to the Spanish Nationalists and sent information about French weapons deliveries for the Republicans; the reports were sent by courier to Berlin.37 Even the flow of information between General Mola, operating in the north of Spain, and General Franco, commanding the troops in the south, passed to some extent through Franco’s Berlin contact. Full details became more important as the civil war became of greater importance in Europe.38
In mid-August 1936, Canaris received a report that the leftist French Government was sending volunteers into Spain to support the Republicans: ‘100 to 170 men daily, total 30,000, mostly trained reservists’.39 Germany and Italy now decided to collaborate in support of the Nationalists. This was the beginning of the Berlin–Rome Axis that Mussolini announced on 1 November 1936. Franco was already being unofficially supplied by Italy, which the Germans learned only on 30 July when Hitler sent Canaris to Rome a few days after two
Italian aircraft destined for Franco crashed in French North Africa. His mission was to discuss with General Roatta, head of Italian military intelligence, how to share the cooperation with Franco.
In mid-August OKM complained: ‘At the moment, we are the only ones reaping the hate of Spain and the world, while others harvest the political fruits (Italy!). If Franco wins, they will not be so burdened as we will be if the Republicans win.’40 Canaris and Roatta agreed to supply Franco in equal proportions in exchange for foreign currency or goods; political allegiance was not to be demanded.
Italian Foreign Minister Ciano informed Canaris that the Italian aviators – in contrast to Luftwaffe officers, who were limited to the warehousing and transport of materials and training of Spanish personnel – were at liberty to take part in aerial operations, and he asked Canaris to obtain permission to release German pilots to fight. This had also been requested by von Scheele, leader of the German volunteers in Spain, after it became apparent that Spanish pilots could not handle German bombers, and two of the Heinkel fighters had gone down; Hitler agreed on 28 August. On 12 September, War Minister Blomberg became convinced of the need to send panzers to Spain because Franco had no armour and the situation was deteriorating on account of Soviet military assistance to the Republic. The first German units came ashore on 1 October, a single panzer squadron with orders to train Franco’s tank crews and gather battle experience.41
In October at Berchtesgaden Hitler met Foreign Minister Ciano and promised him ‘that every effort was being made to guarantee that the road to Moscow will not be left open’.42 On 30 October the decision was taken in Berlin to help Franco with Luftwaffe units. On 6 November, Canaris and Generalmajor Hugo Sperrle, leader of German troops in Spain, head of Legion Condor with direct responsibility to Goering and Wehrmacht Plenipotentiary to Franco’s Staff,43 gave Franco Hitler’s conditions, which called for ‘the swift capture of Madrid’ to provide ‘the foundation for energetic measures of support’.44 Moreover, ‘the command of the German units in Spain’would be the responsibility of ‘a German commander’ who would be ‘responsible solely to General Franco personally for all measures’, but Spanish command would be maintained outwardly. In so far as ‘General Franco acknowledges these requirements unconditionally, further German assistance is in prospect’; Hitler took this decision alone and against the advice of his diplomats.
Canaris and Sperrle received Franco’s agreement to the German conditions on 14 November, and three days later the first steamer left Stettin for Seville45 with 697 German soldiers aboard. Canaris’s role in these first months of the Spanish Civil War was that of a chief negotiator handling difficult diplomatic missions in Burgos and Rome.46
On 6 December he arrived in Italy for talks on increasing German military assistance to Spain,47 in response to Franco’s having sent what the Political Department at the Foreign Ministry described as ‘a call for help’ in a letter pleading for two complete divisions, one Italian, the other German. Hitler was not prepared to commit a large Army group and Canaris was obliged to inform the Italians that the Reich wanted to actually reduce its support in proportion to Italy’s. Mussolini promised three thousand Blackshirts for Cadiz.48 Ambassador von Hassell reported to Berlin in December: ‘Since at the next meeting meaningful decisions have to be taken, Mussolini would welcome it if Canaris or whoever comes is not sent as observer, but has full powers;’49 Mussolini had sent officials and specialists for two more brigades and wanted Germany to match it.50 Goering went to the meeting instead of Canaris and agreed material support but declined any more units.51 Canaris appointed Korvettenkapitän Wilhelm Leissner as head of the Legion Condor Abwehr, and sent out personnel, including instructors to train Franco’s secret service, the Servicio Informacion Policia Militar (SIPM).52 Head of Abwehr-III Legion Condor (Counter-Espionage) was Major Joachim Rohleder.53
The principal interest of the Abwehr, soon joined by members of a new Wehrmacht police corps Geheime Feldpolizei (GFP),54 was the activity of Soviet agents in Spain and the routes by which the Republican Army received its arms shipments. Stalin had installed a large contingent of Soviet spies in Madrid, directed by the head of Red Army intelligence, General Jan Bersin. He and Michael Kolzow, editor of Pravda, had quarters in the Spanish War Ministry. Of the three thousand Soviets in Spain, only about forty were actually fighting, the rest were political or military advisers who kept an eye on opponents of Communism and the Soviet regime within the Republican camp.55
At the end of September 1936 General Kriwitzi, head of the Soviet People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) overseas service and operating from The Hague, received instructions to set up an organisation to buy weapons from anywhere in Europe, and the first deliveries were soon on the way from Czechoslovakia, France, Poland, Holland and even Germany. These German sales were arranged by Canaris and consisted of poor-quality and ill-repaired weapons that passed through Communist hands to the Spanish Republic. In 1938, the Nationalists protested to Berlin that weapons of German manufacture were captured from Republican and International Brigade soldiers.56
At the heart of a group of active Resistance workers in Germany opposed to Nazi policy in Spain was the later legendary ‘Rote Kapelle’ (Red Band) organisation headed by married couple Harro and Libertas Schulze-Boysen. Harro spent his childhood on the Kiel naval base; the son of a Fregattenkapitän, he came from proud naval origins, being a great-nephew of Admiral Tirpitz. But he was an opponent of National Socialism, and when his newspaper Der Gegner was blacklisted by the regime in 1933 he allied himself with the Communist underground movement. In April 1934 he infiltrated the Reich Aviation Ministry with the unwitting assistance of Goering, for whom he wrote articles based on photographs, cuttings and secret documents to which he was allowed access.57
Amongst the spies in the Rote Kapelle ring was United Press journalist Gisela von Pöllnitz.58 In 1937 she prepared leaflets about the Spanish Civil War, using information obtained by Schulze-Boysen, hand-posted by her employer Elfriede Paul through letter-boxes across Berlin. The risk was great because the Gestapo, SA and police were alert to many members of the circle. The same year, when Schulze-Boysen was put together with a Communist spy, Werner Dissel, at Gestapo Headquarters in the hope that something incriminating would be said, Schulze-Boysen passed a message in a cigarette packet to Dissel telling him that the Gestapo did not suspect Dissel of having passed information about troop movements in Spain, and nothing further came of it.59
Schulze-Boysen collected all the information he could about ‘Sonderstab-W’, which coordinated German aid measures to Franco, and Gisela von Pöllnitz posted it into the letter-box at the Soviet Trade Mission in Berlin,60 enabling the Soviets to focus their efforts against the German Abwehr in Spain. Eventually Pöllnitz was arrested by the Gestapo in the act of posting a document, but she kept quiet and nothing incriminating could be found during police searches. Schulze-Boysen escaped with a reprimand at the Reich Air Ministry, although the Gestapo had demanded his dismissal.61
In 1936 Canaris concluded with Estonia a reciprocal intelligence agreement against the Soviet Union62 and consolidated the link with Hungary. In 1935, the Foreign Ministry, Blomberg and Goering all wanted a Sino-German alliance to secure raw materials for the armaments industry, but the driving force for a Japanese-German pact was Ribbentrop, who headed Dienststelle Ribbentrop, an NSDAP office founded in 1934 with jurisdiction in foreign policy matters and employing 160 staff.
Friedrich Wilhelm Hack was an arms lobbyist active for Heinkel in Japan.63 The Japanese military attaché in Berlin, Hiroshi Oshima,64 an ardent proGerman, saw in German–Japanese cooperation the opportunity to weaken German influence in China and so gain for Japan a powerful ally against the Soviet Union.65 Hack and Oshima were introduced by Ribbentrop and after discussing ideas for cooperation on 17 September, advised Canaris and Blomberg.66 Oshima wanted an anti-Soviet front embracing Britain, Germany, Poland and Japan; Blomberg was concerned that such a pact would prejudice
Germany’s position in China.67 In November, Ribbentrop received Hitler’s agreement to such a pact, but directed against Komintern for diplomatic reasons, not against the Soviet Union directly,68 and after Hitler informed Neurath the Foreign Ministry abandoned its objections. The German ambassador to Tokyo, von Dirksen, wrote to Berlin on 1 January 1936: ‘The Oshima negotiations were not begun as the result of a massive initiative but correctly and clearly by two senior German officials, Canaris and Ribbentrop. It is impossible to overstate the achievement of the two gentlemen . . . others wanted to conduct the negotiations in such a way that they would collapse.’69
The diplomats ridiculed the draft treaty as ‘the private adventure of amateurs’,70 but the Komintern Pact was signed on 25 November 1936;71 a defensive alliance,72 it provided for the exchange of information on Komintern activities, and resistance to them. Within a year, Italy, Hungary and Franco’s Spain also signed. In a secret protocol, Germany and Japan agreed to remain neutral in the case of unprovoked attack or threat of attack by the Soviet Union, and to make no political treaty with the Soviets.73 The ‘two strongest militarist and expansionist world powers had found each other’.74
In December 1936 when Oshima proposed a ‘German–Japanese Military Convention’ that would turn the pact into an offensive alliance against the Soviet Union, the idea was successfully opposed by the Foreign Ministry, the Reich War Ministry and industry in favour of Chiang Kai-shek’s China, which had supplied ‘speculative shipments of war material’75 the previous year, and whose modern Army was being trained by German generals. Canaris received open encouragement from Blomberg and Keitel to continue the cooperation with Japan and to agree ‘an exchange of intelligence information and infiltration methods’.76 He was also appointed an intermediary to the Japanese military attachés, and in future the three Wehrmacht branches of service had to pass all questions of German–Japanese cooperation through Canaris and the Wehrmacht Office. A year later, Abwehr officers in Tokyo assisted at the interrogation of the captured NKVD chief in the East, General Lyushkov, who had been brought to Japan.
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