Canaris

by Mueller, Michael;

  From the beginning, Canaris and his staff were deeply involved in planning the war of extermination; starting in January, von Brauchitsch had been discussing with Heydrich the deployment of Sipo units ‘after the occupation of enemy territory’.9 Before the French campaign, OKH had successfully prevented the installation and operation of such units following the experience in Poland, but there had been a major area of agreement since March 1941 regarding the Einsatzkommandos behind the front. On 6 and 7 March Oster and Bentivegni conferred with the representative Abwehr officer, Army Group Centre, Rittmeister Schack von Wittenau, to clarify the remaining details. The summary of this meeting confirmed the agreement that the Wehrmacht must be notified of all orders from Reichsführer-SS, and that to ‘avoid disturbing operations’ if possible, they should ‘allow orders setting out boundaries’ while ‘executions should be undertaken if possible away from the troops’.10 Before a final conference between OKH and officers of the Reichsführer-SS at the highest level, the competent OKH and SS-RSHA departments agreed that under certain conditions, Sipo and SSD units could operate in Army areas: ‘Einsatzgruppen and kommandos are authorised within the framework of their mission to take execution measures against the civilian population on their own responsibility. They are duty-bound to cooperate as closely as possible with the Abwehr.’11 Canaris was given a copy of this order for his information, which he accepted without changes.12

  While the preparations for Barbarossa were in hand, diplomatic efforts were also proceeding to attract more Balkan States into a pact with Germany. In November, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia had joined the Tripartite Pact, and Bulgaria joined the Axis on 1 March 1941. The Yugoslav Minister President Cvetkovic and his Foreign Minister Cincar-Markovic signed the pact in Vienna on 25 March, but several hours later the Cvetkovic government was overthrown in a coup by Serbian officers.13 Canaris, who since the cancellation of Operation Felix had expended much energy in negotiations between Greece and Italy to end the war between them and strengthen the Italians in their rearguard action against the British in North Africa14 was now obliged to recognise that Operation Marita, the invasion of Yugoslavia and the occupation of Greece, could no longer be stopped. Hitler set the date for the invasion of Yugoslavia for 6 April 1941 at o520hrs.

  On 16 April 1941 Canaris flew to Belgrade with his Abwehr heads. Since all bridges over the Danube and Save rivers had been demolished, the group and its luggage were crammed into a Fieseler-Storch aircraft that set them down in the centre of a city ruined by air attacks, lacking water, electricity and gas; Lahousen noted seven thousand dead and the stench of decomposing bodies hovered over the area. Late that afternoon ‘a totally dejected and battered Yugoslav division’ passed Canaris and his colleagues. Their general wanted to negotiate a surrender but he was sent away – the full surrender of the Yugoslav Army was being sought. The Abwehr party spent the night at Semlin, where talks were held the next day with the German embassy officials and resident Abwehr officers. Later they crossed the Donau aboard a makeshift ferry for a meeting with the Armistice Commission and Luftwaffe General Loehr, who reported on the destruction caused by air attacks under his orders.15

  During April the orders were formulated for the war in the East. On 13 May Keitel signed the order for the ‘Exercise of Military Law in the Barbarossa Region and Special Measures by the Forces’, the so-called Military Law Order (Kriegsgreichtsbarkeiterlass), which laid down that crimes committed by enemy civilians no longer came within the jurisdiction of military law, and it was not obligatory to prosecute for crimes committed by Wehrmacht members against civilians. Partisans were to be shot immediately, and collective reprisals were permitted if an individual offender could not be identified sufficiently quickly. At the beginning of June at the request of OKH the notorious ‘Commissar Order’ followed, by which all Red Army political commissars and all personnel working for the Communist Party or administration, and anybody else of significance who fell into German Army hands, were to be shot.16

  On 30 May 1941 Canaris discussed with Reichsleiter Alfred Rosenberg, designated Reichsminister for the Occupied Eastern Territory, the tasks that fell to the Abwehr during the planned attack on the Soviet Union. Rosenberg explained his geopolitical plan ‘by which the historical moment will be used to free Germany once and for all from the nightmare of a possible threat from the East, by dividing Russia into four States,’ Canaris wrote. Rosenberg’s concept was a Finland extended eastwards, a German Baltic Protectorate reaching into White Russia, an independent Ukraine and the Caucasus as a Federative State with a German head. To control and administer these territories the Reichsleiter would need the cooperation of‘suitable personalities, above all of unobjectionable character’ who ‘have a knowledge of the region, or come from minority groups with which the Abwehr Overseas Office has cooperated militarily (Ukrainians, Caucasians, etc)’. Canaris should make a list of such persons and forward the names to the Reichsleiter:

  I have assured Reichsleiter Rosenberg of the full support of my office in this direction, and mentioned to him especially that I can name personalities from Estonia known to me through my Abwehr contacts. Furthermore I would also have people in Lehr-regiment Brandenburg zbV 800 and the Ukraine Volunteer Groups who at the appropriate time can be placed at the disposal of the Reichsleiter as interpreters, administrative officials, commissioners, etc.17

  Four days after this conversation Canaris gave exact instructions for the special employment of Abteilung I in Operation Barbarossa and described in detail the armament, clothing and use of agents and fifth columnists whose task would be to procure and relay reports from the operational area of the front and up to fifty kilometres in advance of it.18

  On 5 and 6 June a conference was held in Berlin involving Heydrich, Schellenberg and SS-Standartenführer Hans Nockeberg, head of Amt II, SS-RSHA, and to which were invited all Ic officers of OKH and Abwehr up to divisional level and scheduled to take part in the campaign; the officers were informed as to the purpose of the Einsatzgruppen, with whom they had to cooperate.19 Nockeberg described their main activity as being ‘the rounding up of enemy political material and politically dangerous personalities ( Jews, emigrants, terrorists, political Church, etc)’ and moreover ‘provision for the final elimination of Communism will be made’.20

  Executions and mass murders do not seem to have been discussed; the Abwehr officers apparently did not intend to allow the Einsatzgruppen in their operational areas unrestricted freedom to do as they pleased and OKH even wanted to direct the SD squads.21 Until immediately before the attack on the Soviet Union, the Army was opposed to any useful cooperation between Sonderkommandos and Army Abwehr sections. No comprehensive extermination order was issued, as there had been before the Polish campaign, although it seems to have been clear to everybody that Jews, Communists, the disadvantaged and gypsies were the main targets.22

  On 9 June the Abwehr discussed closer cooperation with the Army in the field so as to avoid delays in the campaign due to involved channels of transmission. Abwehr I, responsible for reconnaissance, had set up a forward command staff (Walli I) at Warsaw, to which the Army Group sections were subordinate. Lahousen’s fifth columns, each with twenty-five men, had to reconnoitre up to three hundred kilometres inside Russia and prevent important junctions being destroyed by the Red Army. Abwehr II operations were concentrated in the former Polish regions of the Soviet Union, the Baltic States and the Caucasus with its enormous oil reserves.23 Abwehr III, together with the Foreign Ministry’s so-called Künsberg Group, had to secure certain files from Soviet government offices and foreign embassies. The Bandera and Melnyk Ukraine Nationalist groups were responsible for sabotage and the creation of diversions. Operations Tamara I and II were to foment revolts in Georgia in connection with securing the Caucasian oilfields.24

  Two days before the attack date, Reichsleiter Rosenberg addressed a circle of representatives from the Wehrmacht, party and State. Together with ministers Lammers and Fricke were Heydrich, Gener
al Thomas and admirals Frick and Canaris. Rosenberg’s aim was to obtain a ‘uniform inner attitude’ of the various offices required to liaise with the political leadership and administration of the region to be conquered,25 and to explain the ideological basis for the racial battle with the Soviet Union. The division of the Soviet Union into individual states, which Rosenberg had already explained to Canaris, would free Germany forever from the nightmare of attack from the East. With regard to its purpose there were clear priorities to be set: ‘The most important of all measures is the need to feed the German people, and we do not see any obligation to feed the Russian people as well. This recognition may be hard and bring the Russian people hard times, but it is necessary.’ Reichsleiter Rosenberg concluded his talk by pointing out that the task in the East involved the ‘most difficult colonial work and served two great goals, namely to feed the German people and safeguard the war economy’.26

  At midday on 21 June 1941, Lahousen noted in the Abwehr II service diary: ‘The codeword “Dortmund” signalled the commencement of Fall Barbarossa.’27 The following day, Lahousen’s old confidants from the Ukraine, who until shortly before had been out of favour, now saw that their hour had come: ‘Rittmeister Jary, active for some time as an Abteilung II spy . . . sent a telegram to the Führer requesting the inclusion of the Organisation of Ukraine Nationalists into the German Wehrmacht to fight for a free Ukraine.’28 On 25 June 1941 Lahousen learned that Lehr-Regiment ‘Brandenburg’ had succeeded in holding a series of important bridges, but with heavy losses, twenty-three dead and twenty-seven wounded, and the fighting groups in the Eastern Baltic area suffered 160 dead in the first few days while protecting strategically important objectives against the Red Army.29 Lahousen’s Lithuanian activists had not been able to take the Memel bridges held by the Russians, but managed to hold twenty-four important bridges on the line of the German advance – for the loss of four hundred men.30

  A summary of Abwehr II operations to the end ofJune 1941 was submitted to Keitel shortly afterwards. Along the entire Front, sabotage troops drawn from ‘foreign peoples’ had been infiltrated behind enemy lines to engage the objectives ordered while the Ukraine Nationalists of the Bandera group had ‘cooked up the first insurrections in cooperation with German troops’.31 Cooperation with the Ukrainians had not been easy because elements of the movement were not prepared to subordinate themselves unconditionally to German interests – members of the group around Stepan Bandera had declared openly that they would work against the Germans if their wishes were not met.32

  On 30 June elements of Lehr-Regiment ‘Brandenburg’ were involved in an assault on the Ukrainian city of Lemberg and on 3July they were the first to reach the city centre, occupy important buildings and prevent the food warehouses from being destroyed by Soviet troops or looted by the populace. Lahousen wrote in his service diary: ‘The battalion reported again on unimaginable Bolshevist atrocities committed against Ukrainian prisoners and also German prisoners of war. A number of prisoners were freed from the still-burning jail.’33 Thousands of people murdered by the Soviets were found in other towns; the Abwehr strategy of provoking a coup in the Ukraine by fifth-columnists and Ukrainian Nationalists played their part in these murders.34 Most of the insurrectionists were killed by the Red Army before their retreat since they did not want to take prisoners eastwards with them.35 Freshly raised national militia, the mob and the Einsatzgruppen now took a fearful revenge on the Jews, who were seen as supporters of the Soviet system; by mid-July, Einsatzgruppe ‘C’ alone had shot seven thousand Jews.36 On 8 July Canaris went with Bentivegni and Abwehr officer Major von Gamm to visit i.Armee General Staff. He was informed of the massacre at Jasi initiated by the Romanian secret police where, by the end of June, up to five thousand Jews had been murdered in the putting-down of a non-existent Jewish rebellion; the Abwehr ‘Hauskapelle’ in Bucharest was involved in planning the pogrom.37 Also on 8 July 1941, the chief of the General Wehrmacht Office at OKW, Generalleutnant Hermann Reinicke, who also ran the PoW Department there, signed an order stating the principles for the treatment of Soviet PoWs:38 ‘The use of weapons on Soviet PoWs will in general be considered lawful.’ On carrying out orders, ‘whoever does not make use of his weapon, or makes insufficient use of his weapon, is liable to punishment’. This order, which provided for the ‘Aussonderung’ (elimination), that is to say the murder of politically unacceptable prisoners by Sipo and SD, led to a conference in July to which Reinicke invited, amongst others, Gestapo Chief Müller, Canaris and staff from the PoW Department. Canaris preferred not to attend personally and sent Lahousen with instructions to oppose the order, or at least see if he could get it moderated. Lahousen stated later that the admiral detested Reinicke, whom he considered ‘the prototype of the eternally obsequious Nazi general’ and correspondingly ‘did not wish to meet him personally’.39 At the conference, Reinicke said that the Soviet soldier was not a soldier but the deadly enemy of National Socialism. This had to be ‘made clear to the Wehrmacht and very especially to the officer corps, which gave the appearance of still having an Ice-Age mentality, and not thinking in the National Socialist present’.40

  Lahousen explained to the conference that the order made the Abwehr role very difficult since it interfered with the recruitment of agents from within the national minorities and would render ineffective all propaganda directed towards the Red Army. This opinion caused a violent argument with Gestapo Chief Müller, who defended the measure, while Reinicke also advocated ruthless harshness. Lahousen was therefore compelled to report the total failure of his mission.41

  Canaris lodged an official protest. Helmut Graf von Moltke, who worked in the International Law Department at Abwehr headquarters, composed with colleague Günther Jaenicke a paper signed by Canaris and addressed to Keitel stating the legal principles in international law respecting the treatment of prisoners of war as being the prevention of their further participation in hostilities: neither revenge nor punishment were lawful. All armies recognised that ‘it was contrary to military concepts to kill or maim unarmed prisoners. It was in the interest of any belligerent to know that its own soldiers were protected against mistreatment in the event of capture.’42 Keitel dismissed all objections: ‘The doubts expressed correspond to the soldierly conception of chivalrous warfare! We are dealing here with the destruction of a world view! Therefore I approve the measures and support them. 23 September K[eitel]’.43 The atrocities committed during the German advance had precisely the effect on the enemy’s will to resist that Canaris had feared.

  On 20 July 1941 at FHQ Rastenburg, Canaris noted that the mood was exceptionally nervous because the campaign was not going ‘according to the rules of the game’. The expected internal collapse of the Soviet Union had not occurred, but on the contrary the assault was fortifying Bolshevism. Canaris was aware of the possibility that the Abwehr might be held responsible for not having supplied sufficiently accurate estimates of the strength and fighting capacity of the Red Army. Hitler had apparently remarked that, had he known of the existence of the new heavy Russian tank (T-34), he would not have begun the war; Canaris took the precaution of having Piekenbrock, Lahousen and Bentivegni immediately assemble all material proving that the Abwehr had long before given notice of all problems now under scrutiny.44

  From late summer 1941, ever more reports were received by Canaris and his staff regarding inhumanities committed during the German advance; the leaders of Abwehr units attached to Army Groups and armies were reporting regularly ‘on the mass executions of Jews and Soviet PoWs, and the repulsive and inhuman nature of these executions, which were being carried out at the front and rearward areas of Army Groups and armies’.45 Copies of these reports were certainly forwarded to Dohnanyi for filing in his ‘Rarities Folder’, the collection of documentation regarding the crimes of the National Socialist regime.46

  According to Lahousen after the war, Brauchitsch, Goering and Raeder were kept constantly informed of the excessive party involvemen
t and illegal measures ordered by Hitler in the areas of jurisdiction,47 and to judge by his report dated 23 October 1941 entitled ‘Observations and Facts from a Tour of the Operational Area in the East’48 it would appear that Lahousen went to the Front and saw for himself. The lines of Russian PoWs he passed reminded him of ‘herds of cattle’; prisoners who had collapsed by the wayside and could not be helped forward by their comrades were left where they fell to be shot later on the authority of a 6.Armee directive. Since this happened at the roadside and in towns and villages, the populations witnessed these murders; he also reported that cases of cannibalism had increased in PoW camps. As to the ‘resettlement of Jews’, Lahousen wrote:

  The Jews get an order at short notice to assemble the next night at a predetermined spots wearing their best clothes and jewellery. No distinction is made as to age, sex or position in the community. From the meeting place they are then brought to a previously selected and prepared place outside the town or village. Under the pretext of certain formalities, they have to take off their clothing and jewellery before being led away from the street and liquidated. The situation that develops is so ghastly that I cannot describe it. The effect on the German squads is intolerable. In general the executions are carried out under the influence of drink. An SD officer ordered to witness a mass execution stated that he had the most fearsome nightmares the following night.49

  ‘A nightmare of violence’50 reigned in the conquered territories during the last four months of 1941. Coinciding with Lahousen’s report, Abwehr interpreter Oberwachtmeister Soennecken gave an eye-witness report describing the mass murder of seven to eight thousand Jews between 20 and 21 October 1941 in the White Russian town of Borissov that almost certainly ended up in the ‘Rarities Folder’51 and on Canaris’s desk.52