Canaris
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On 23 October 1941, returning from a trip to Switzerland to arrange intelligence contacts with the Yugoslav Government in exile in Palestine, Canaris and Lahousen visited Keitel. The latter complained bitterly that Goering behaved as though he were the real OKW chief and went constantly over his head: ‘If I did not have people in my office who remain loyal to me as you do, Canaris, I would have long since shed the whole burden.’53 The day following this outburst, the three of them travelled to FHQ Rastenburg before Canaris and Lahousen went on to visit the Army Groups in the East.
At Riga they looked over the churches and buildings of the Old Town, and also the Jewish ghetto, which the inhabitants might only leave for the purpose of work. Following a conference at Abwehrstelle Ostland, they celebrated Lahousen’s forty-fourth birthday that afternoon with local fish specialities and vodka at the Hotel de Rome.54 From Riga they flew to Pskov (Pleskau) and then joined a convoy of vehicles to visit the ruins of Novgorod, occupied by the Spanish Division under Lt-General Augustin Muñoz Grandes. Novgorod was under Russian artillery bombardment and during Canaris’s stay there a Soviet attack was beaten off. Lahousen noted good morale, especially amongst the officers, despite the heavy casualty list; he also recorded that the Spanish ‘took no prisoners’. They travelled at a snail’s pace through woods and swamps, seated in a car with pistols cocked because of the danger from partisans, towards Korstyn, the headquarters of Armeeoberkommando 16, where the touring party dined on fish freshly caught in the Ilmensee and listened to the commanding general’s high praise for his troops.55 The next day they flew to the ruins of Smolensk, headquarters of Army Group Centre, where Lahousen saw more great streams of suffering prisoners: ‘If you give one a piece of bread, he will be knocked down and the food torn from his hands. This may sometimes be fatal, for whoever falls down seldom has the strength to get up again.’56
The talk came round to ‘the shooting of the Borissov Jews’: ‘Seven thousand Jews were liquidated there in the sardine-tin method. I cannot describe the scenes. Often even the SD cannot go through with it unless they are drunk. Spent the night in the Army Group sleeping car. Very nice and comfortable.’57 A Ju 52 next took the party on to Army Group South via Gommel and Kiev, but blizzards and fog prevented them from going any further East. After a stop at Warsaw, they presented a report to Keitel at FHQ Rastenburg; Lahousen saw Hitler stop while on the way to the map room and ask Canaris what the weather was like at the Front. ‘He responded to the answer “bad” with a gesture of annoyance. Everyone there has camp fever and noises and bad smells come from all directions all day.’58
When Canaris finally received an eye-witness report on the shooting of the Riga Jews, he met Hitler and read him the document. Hitler replied: ‘You want to be soft? I have to do it. After me, nobody else will.’59 Canaris’s reaction is not recorded. A report from the Eastern Front, discovered amongst Lahousen’s collection of material, painted a dramatic picture of the plight in which the German forces found themselves; it was a disaster unique for losses of materials, insufficient fuel and a sinking morale in men who recognised how miserably led they were. As a reprisal for the killing of Russian PoWs, the Soviets took German wounded from field hospitals during the withdrawal and hung them by the feet from trees, poured petrol over them and set fire to it.60 In January 1942, General von Sodenstern reported for the first time signs of panic at the Front, comparing it to Napoleon’s Army – if the Russians did not pause for breath, but simply kept coming, a repeat of 1812 was unavoidable.61
On 28 January 1942 Piekenbrock and Lahousen reported to Canaris that the OKW PoW Department had ordered that in future all Russian PoWs were to be branded on the left forearm with a cross using silver nitrate, but Canaris managed to have this order rescinded.62 When a similar idea was pursued by the head of the PoW Department a few months later, Lahousen, Piekenbrock and Bentivegni protested again on behalf of the Abwehr. The arrangement ‘would lead to severe difficulties in obtaining volunteers and agents from amongst the prisoners of war’.63 By now Canaris was probably aware that his enemies within the State were preparing to strike at him.
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The Struggle for Power with Heydrich
In the spring of 1942 the struggle for power in the National Socialist intelligence apparatus escalated into a battle between SS-RSHA and the Abwehr over jurisdiction, and between Canaris and Heydrich over Canaris’s personal future. Besides the pure jurisdictional struggle in which since mid-1940 Heydrich had maintained a strict division between RSHA counter-intelligence, Group IVE under Schellenberg and the Abwehr, and which was based on a ‘revision of the Ten Commandments’ requested in 1936 and forced through at the end of 19411, major conflicts arose involving the use of Jews as key Abwehr informers, and the protection of Jewish spies by the Abwehr.
Three examples of top agents of Jewish origin were Ivar Lissner, Richard Kauder and Edgar Klaus.2 Klaus, born in Riga in 1879 of Jewish parents who had converted to Christianity, had studied geology in Russia, worked there for several banks and, after returning home, made a small fortune from an estate agency. In the First World War he had been deported to the Volga area and worked there and later in Siberia for the Russian Red Cross as an interpreter in PoW camps, where he became acquainted with German and Austrian Social Democrat activists and, as he later admitted, Stalin.3 After the war he worked for the Danish consulate in Riga, and between April and October 1919, he used an identity document legitimising him as ‘secretary of the Royal Danish Consulate at Riga’, which enabled him to pass in and out of Germany, where as a courier he established contacts within the German Foreign Office.4 The intelligence services of the Western Allies considered that he was probably an informer.5
At the end of 1919, in possession of a Danish passport, Klaus fled from the civil war in Latvia to Germany, to where he had already transferred his money. After the German invasion of Poland in 1939 he worked in Lithuania as an informer and liaison man for the Abwehr representative at the Germany embassy, where he was noticed by the SD. An RSHA list dated February 1940 had pinpointed him as a baptised Jew and Communist working for French and Russian intelligence, but despite these suspicions, in January 1940 the German embassy had issued him with a passport, and in March he even received an expedited ‘German immigrant passport’ from Himmler’s Volksdeutsch agency, enabling him to flee to the Reich before the attack on the Soviet Union.6
On 30 March 1941 Klaus left Kovno in Lithuania and was received in Berlin by Hans-Ludwig von Lossow, a member of Abwehr I staff. A few days later he was introduced to Canaris, masquerading under the name Prittwitz von Gaffron; the two men discussed the situation in Russia and the strength of the Red Army, Klaus warning emphatically against the invasion of the Soviet Union. He was then led to a conference room where a dozen senior commanders were gathered, amongst whom Klaus thought he recognised Brauchitsch and Manstein. In a two-hour discussion he answered the generals’ questions on the Soviet Union. Two years later, in Stockholm, he recalled how he had warned them against breaking the German–Soviet Pact: ‘but they did not wish to hear the voice of reason.’7 As he himself expected, Canaris’s attempt to win the commanders over by using the arguments of an agent who knew the country failed.
Klaus and Canaris met again at the beginning of May when Canaris asked him if he would be confident about working with representatives of the Soviet embassy in Stockholm whose leader was Alexandra Michailova Kollantai, a Bolshevist from Lenin’s entourage. When Klaus agreed, Canaris asked him to contact the important Soviet diplomats in Stockholm, and if possible as many other Russians as he could, for the purpose of collecting information about the circumstances and military situation in the Soviet Union, and relaying it to Berlin through an Abwehr man at the German embassy. This individual was Werner G Boening, officially the ‘film attaché’, but unofficially ‘Berger’ of K-Org Sweden.8
Klaus arrived in Stockholm a month before Operation Barbarossa; the city was considered to be an ‘intelligence metropolis’, like Madrid,
Lisbon, Istanbul and Berne. Since 1936, Canaris had maintained relations with the Swedish General Staff head of intelligence, Lt-Colonel Helge Jung. A year later Canaris made an agreement with the long-serving Swedish attaché in Berlin, Carlos Adlercreutz – nominated as Jung’s successor – that he would not work against Swedish interests on Swedish territory, and until 1944 the Abwehr exercised a strict prohibition on ‘all activities against Sweden’. In September 1940 Canaris discussed with Adlercreutz in Stockholm mutual intelligence measures against Soviet aggression, and until his arrest Canaris continued secret contacts with Adlercreutz’s successor, the Swedish military attaché in Berlin, Curt Juhlin-Dannfeldt.9
By giving Klaus his mission, Canaris now had an experienced ‘expert’ as a liaison man between the German military opposition and the Soviets, and he protected Klaus from the Reich-wide Gestapo hunt for him. Under the pretext that Klaus was a fraudster, forger and cheat, SS-RSHA had ordered the Gestapo to arrest him. Since RSHA knew, however, that Canaris had used Klaus to warn senior military commanders against invading Russia, it was their intention to bring him under their umbrella; Klaus was to become the ball in a power game between the RSHA and the Abwehr.10 In the remaining four weeks until Barbarossa, Klaus established no useful contacts in the Soviet embassy in Stockholm, but after the German invasion he reported through Boening under the cover name ‘General Schönemann’ on the Soviet offensive capability and warned against the illusion of a quick collapse of the Soviet Union. Operationally the reports had no great value, but the assessments were generally correct and Klaus supplied details of Soviet divisions, tanks and artillery that corresponded with Boening’s data. Nobody in the Reich political and military leadership wanted to believe in him and he reacted by making a satirical announcement that Alexandra Kollontai was prepared to defect to Germany if she were given guarantees, also alleging that she had a private fortune of 3 million dollars and wanted to buy a house in Germany. Klaus sent Boening with this report to Canaris, who merely shook his head but forwarded it to Hitler. After Canaris had seen him on 20 July 1942, Jodl informed the Foreign Ministry that Hitler had ordered every effort to be made to accommodate Frau Kollontai (with freedom from taxes, absolute security).11
Besides this kind of theatre, Klaus supported Canaris principally by reporting on the readiness of the Soviet Union to negotiate, which Canaris could use as an argument for a separate peace, irrespective of how true such information might be. The first real initiative and peace feelers put out by Canaris with Klaus’s cooperation occurred in the spring of 1942, when the high point of the struggle for power between Canaris and Heydrich had already passed.
The lawyer Ivar Lissner, born at Riga, Latvia, arrived in Germany as a refugee in 1920 with his parents. Ivar and his brother Percy were NSDAP members by 1933 and later joined the SS. Well known as a travel writer, Ivar Lissner wrote leading articles and commentaries for Goebbels’s broadsheet Der Angriff, mainly on the political and military situation in the Far East. Not until 1939 did he become aware of the Jewish ancestry of his father, who was then a successful businessman in Berlin.12 When the head of the Soviet state security service for the Far East defected to the Japanese, Lissner was by chance in Manchuria, and offered his services to the Japanese as interpreter. Later he assisted in the interrogation of the defector in Tokyo and was the first journalist to interview him for Der Angriff; subsequently he had excellent contacts with Japanese intelligence and Army officers. From the spring of 1939 as Far East correspondent of the Völkischer Beobachter and Der Angriff, he followed Japan’s war in China and beat the press drum for the Berlin-Tokyo Axis. When Ivar Lissner’s father was denounced, the Gestapo realised the Jewish origin of the author and journalist and arrested him, causing the ‘half-Jew’ to lose all his offices, be expelled from the Reich Chamber of Writers and banned from having his work published. All attempts by Ivar and Percy Lissner on behalf of their father remained unsuccessful.
Canaris and Oster had been made aware of Lissner in 1938 when he addressed journalists. An initial attempt to recruit him through his schoolfriend Abwehr-Hauptmann Werner Schulz in 1939 failed, but when Schulz was sent by Canaris to set up a K-Organisation in Shanghai, where Ivar’s brother Percy was living, Ivar agreed to work for the Abwehr as a spy on the condition that his father was freed and his family allowed to leave Germany. Despite the tremendous difficulties – the Gestapo ‘chain of proof’ was watertight – the Abwehr Overseas Office eventually succeeded in obtaining for Robert Lissner and his wife safe passage out of Germany. Their daughter Sigrid, a secretary at OKW, was obliged to remain behind; the circumstances of her death in 1943 were never clarified.
Lissner now erected for Canaris at Harbin in Manchuria an espionage network that reached to eastern Siberia. White Russian emigrants, a fascist Cossack ataman with links to senior Soviet officers in the Far East, German journalists and bar-girls were amongst his informants and complemented his good relationship with the Japanese secret service. Punctually for the invasion of the Soviet Union, Lissner supplied Canaris with reports from the eastern regions of the Soviet Union via the German embassy at Hsinking, from where they were transmitted by telegraph to the Foreign Ministry in Berlin.13 When by the spring of 1943 Lissner had submitted more than two hundred reports, Canaris wrote of him in a signed longhand memorandum: ‘Agent Ivar is the only Amt Ausland/Abwehr source who sends comprehensive information on Asiatic Russia and the Manchuria/Russia border. His reports, especially the more recent ones, are extraordinarily comprehensive and provide the only reconnaissance enabling the reserves, new installations etc, especially the Soviet Air Force in the Siberian area, to be assessed.’14 Dohnanyi relied on the anti-Communist Lissner’s information when preparing military and political situation reports or lecture notes for Canaris.
Like Klaus, Lissner came under fire from the party and SS apparatus. With the help of his immediate superior Major Friedrich Busch, he survived a party tribunal hearing to expel him in the spring of 1941; it also appears that an attempt was made to lure him to Germany to seize him. OKW drew up a document stating that Hitler had declared him to be ‘assimilated to a person of German blood’15 but further intrigues against him were continued principally by the police at the German embassy in Tokyo, SS-Standartenführer Josef Meisinger.16
Richard Klatt, alias ‘Engineer’ or ‘Major’, by the end of 1941 headed Meldekopf (report centre) Sofia, Abwehrstelle Vienna, and controlled from there the only direct Abwehr connections into the Soviet Union. His true name was Richard Kauder, born in 1900 of Jewish parents in Vienna. A qualified architect, he fled to Hungary in the summer of 1938 on an Austrian passport, was arrested in December and expelled into the hands of the German border police in February 1940. He escaped being sent to a concentration camp only because in the summer of 1939 at his mother’s insistence he had met one of her friends from Abwehrstelle Vienna and had volunteered himself to Oberstleutnant Roland von Wahl-Welskirch for employment. The Abwehr not only prevented his incarceration in a camp, but sent him back to Hungary, from where he made service journeys on their behalf to Austria, Romania, Yugoslavia and Slovakia.
On the orders of the RSHA counter-espionage section, in September 1941 the Sipo and SD Einsatzgruppe stationed in Yugoslavia arrested a Fritz Kauders ‘on suspicion of treason against the State, sending false information, falsification of documents and inter-racial sexual activity’.17 Actually Richard Kauder18 had brought this unwelcome attention upon himself at Agram in Croatia by posing as a journalist and offering to exchange information with a Gestapo spy. He claimed to be acting in Croatia on the instructions of Wilhelm Hottl, SD official of Vienna, and was moreover in the service of the Meldekopf Budapest. At the end of September he was given into the custody of the state police at their Vienna headquarters, who were to process the treason charge. How Kauder the remanded traitor became Klatt the head of the Abwehr Meldekopf at Sofia within the next few weeks is unknown, but he took over the remains of the espionage system, including a partial radio
network built up before the war by White Russian general Anton Turkul.19 One of these radio cells was in Moscow, and the reports from its agent ‘Max’ made Klatt into a legend and one of Canaris’s top agents. At the beginning of November 1942, ‘Max’ reported on a meeting of the Soviet War Council chaired by Stalin, and also from the theatres of the planned Soviet offensives. His reports coincided with the assessment of the Foreign Army East section of the General Staff, and OKW eventually informed Canaris that the regular and punctual delivery of reports from ‘Max’ were of decisive importance for the war.20 Another of Klatt’s agents was ‘Moritz’, and this led to the results of the ‘Klatt Bureau’ going down in history and literature as the ‘Max and Moritz Reports’.
Klatt’s most deadly enemy was Otto Wagner who, as ‘Dr Delius’ was head of K-Organisation Bulgaria and also held the rank of SS-Hauptsturmführer. Wagner had made strenuous efforts to unmask Klatt as a Soviet double-agent and at the end of 1942 even put a member of his staff exclusively on permanent surveillance of him.21 Klatt, known to the Abwehr as ‘Jew Klatt’, was also anxious to be certified ‘assimilated to a person of German blood’, but this could only be granted to a person of mixed blood, and not a full Jew. Canaris ordered absolute secrecy to be kept on Klatt’s racial origins and had a furious encounter with Otto Wagner at the beginning of 1943 for supplying him with a dossier on Klatt. Canaris tore it up without opening it, but later he agreed that Wagner could continue to keep Klatt under observation on the strict understanding that it did not prejudice Klatt’s work.22
Canaris used three Jews – Klaus, Lissner and Klatt – to spy on the ‘Jewish–Bolshevik’ Soviet Empire for Hitler. Two of them provided the constant supply of vital war information about the Soviet Union, while the third was used to extend feelers for peace towards the Soviets. Canaris’s protecting these Jewish spies gave his opponents ammunition in their struggle against him for supremacy in the espionage apparatus. Another Jewish spy shielded by Canaris was the banker and race-track owner Waldemar von Oppenheim, who between the autumns of 1941 and 1942 was one of the most important informers on the American armaments industry.23