Canaris

by Mueller, Michael;

  An investigation was proceeding into suspected serious currency offences and customs fraud against Major Schmidhuber and Hauptmann Ickrath of Abwehrstelle Munich, which had come to the attention of Herzlieb’s group. Schmidhuber’s immediate superior at Abwehr headquarters was a friend of Dohnanyi and Oster’s enemies, and he knew that when in Berlin Schmidhuber was a regular guest at the Dohnanyi household and often gossiped about Dohnanyi’s suspicious activities.45 In 1939 Schmidhuber had restored the contacts with Josef Müller, who put out feelers for peace through the Vatican. In May 1940 Schmidhuber had betrayed the date of the German attack in the West to the Vatican at Müller’s instigation, and since the end of 1940 he had used Dietrich Bonhoeffer as an agent at Munich and had been useful to him in procuring visas for journeys abroad for Resistance purposes. Schmidhuber was an unstable personality who, in order to save his own skin, now put Müller and his supporters in the Abwehr in danger, even after they had got him away to Italy to prevent his arrest and interrogation.46

  When Schmidhuber’s superior officer at Abwehr headquarters, Luftwaffe–Major Walter Brede, went behind Canaris’s back and obtained the assistance of Manfred Roeder to arrest Schmidhuber in Italy on 31 October 1942, the situation threatened to run out of control. Canaris appointed attorney Walter Schoen to safeguard OKW interests during the interrogation of Schmidhuber, but unfortunately Schoen was also a fanatical Nazi and one of the closest associates of Herzlieb, who was his superior, with the result that the first thing he did was to discuss the affair with Roeder,47 and then propose the extension of the interrogation to include Dohnanyi, Oster and Müller.

  Under interrogation, Schmidhuber stated that the proven currency offences had been ‘ordered by his superior’, describing them as ‘the standard practice within the Abwehr, and are political necessities’. He continued: ‘For the heads of Amt Ausland/Abwehr, Dohnanyi set up a currency account abroad for the use of Dohnanyi and Oster for special political purposes (coup d’état).’ At the least the setting up of such an account for illegal purposes was planned by Dohnanyi;48 this was how the later trial in the Reich War Court came by the term ‘Cash Deposits’. Schmidhuber meant the Abwehr currency deposits set up by the Swiss banker Eduard von der Heydt, which were intended as ‘funds for the putsch’, but from which money for the financial support of the fourteen Jewish refugees saved in Unternehmen Sieben had been appropriated.

  In mid-November 1942, immediately after the German occupation of Vichy France, Canaris was at Toulon to observe the seizure of the French warships there. This operation failed when the French managed to scuttle the fleet before the German attack. On his return, Canaris met Josef Müller in Munich and asked him how the Schmidhuber affair was progressing. Müller noticed that Canaris ‘was very close to losing his nerve’; his anxiety was understandable, for before his arrest Schmidhuber had threatened ‘to give away everything and everybody without exception’.49

  At the end of November Schmidhuber was transferred from the Wehrmacht interrogation prison in Munich to Gestapo custody in Berlin, and in mid-January 1943 Franz Sonderegger took over the questioning. In the judgement of Roeder and his colleagues the focus of the inquiries should shift more and more from the currency frauds to the treason allegations surrounding the Vatican conversations in 1939 and 1940. Schmidhuber, who thought that the Abwehr had left him exposed, stated that he was prepared to talk, but he was careful not to incriminate himself. Mentioning that there had been Abwehr approaches to the British Government mediated by the Vatican, he left it open as to whether these were motivated by the Resistance or were intelligence activities to gauge the attitude of the enemy, and he pointed to the lack of interest shown by Heydrich and later Himmler in pursuing accusations against Dohnanyi and others.50

  After extensive investigation, Sonderegger drafted his report in mid-February 1944, implicating principally Oster, Dohnanyi, Müller and Bonhoeffer, and ended with the question, ‘Can Canaris have known nothing about all this?’51 Gestapo Chief Müller and Roeder agreed that the report should be forwarded to Himmler and Keitel for instructions. While Keitel took steps to have the matter tried by the Reich War Court because the accusations had been made against an admiral, namely Canaris, Himmler returned the report in mid-March with the observation, ‘Leave Canaris in peace. I will deal.’52 Gestapo Chief Müller called off Huppenkothen and Sonderegger after a talk with Himmler, who had meanwhile agreed with Canaris to keep RSHA out of the investigation and let the matter go before the Reich War Court. Ultimately this was a manoeuvre by Himmler to avoid becoming embroiled in investigating the fraud allegation, and on 3 April 1943 the president of the Reich War Court, Admiral Max Bastian, nominated Roeder as judge of inquiry into the ‘Cash Deposit’ affair. Two days later Roeder arrested Dohnanyi.

  Canaris and Oster did everything possible to shift the burden from Dohnanyi. The first thing was to explain away the ‘Note’, which Dohnanyi implored him by roundabout means from jail to identify as an official paper.53 Canaris and Oster now supported Dohnanyi’s explanation that it contained rough guidelines for what the agent appointed to the Vatican negotiations had to say. In order to justify Bonhoeffer’s role, Canaris stated that he was an Abwehr spy who sent ‘useful agent’s reports’.54

  As interest in Unternehmen Sieben and its prior history grew in succeeding weeks, Canaris found himself being drawn in ever deeper; Dohnanyi was pressured under interrogation to ‘spill the beans’ about Canaris and the Abwehr, which he would not do. On 15 June 1944, under official questioning by Roeder in the presence of attorney Alexander Kraell,55 Canaris declared that ‘with regard to the selection of agents for Unternehmen Sieben, he had not had them vetted by headquarters since he already knew some of them because they had lived in Zehlendorf and the others were recommended by Dohnanyi and were known to Oster. He had not considered an approval of the use of the foreign currency account as especially necessary because a counter-balance had been struck against money paid by the Unternehmen Sieben agents into the Reich Exchequer.’56 None of this was very convincing, and Roeder felt certain of victory – Canaris’s fall from power was only a matter of time.

  Canaris advised his deputy Bürkner that the whole Abwehr apparatus was now threatened with collapse. Finally his friend Judge Sack approached Keitel and convinced him that the trial and subsequent departure of Canaris could not be in the interests of the OKW chief. Keitel was forced onto the back foot but knew it would be difficult to stop the wheels of justice once they were rolling. However, Roeder now came up unwittingly to his assistance by submitting an interim report in which he stated that crimes of a non-political nature had been committed but that the political misdeeds were difficult to prove even though more or less serious discrepancies had come to light.57

  Ultimately it was Himmler who kept Canaris in the saddle. After a conference with the Reichsführer-SS, Keitel noted on a copy of Roeder’s interim report: ‘Himmler refused to read the report, he stated he was not interested in prosecuting Canaris, moreover he gave his personal consent to Canaris for the Unternehmen Sieben operation and holds to his promise: furthermore Canaris will finally purge the unreliable elements around him and work more effectively in future.’58

  The process against Canaris was abandoned. Himmler had good reasons beyond Reich frontiers for not toppling the Abwehr chief, while Canaris knew that he was indebted to Himmler; this was going to mean his personal agreement to Himmler’s appointees in key Abwehr posts, and Lahousen’s removal as head of Abwehr II could not long be postponed. He also had to steer clear of the trial against the other defendants, particularly Dohnanyi. The latter’s wife recalled: ‘Canaris reassured my husband that he had gone to the limits of the possibilities, but his position was no longer so strong that he could pound his fist on the table. My husband had another opinion to the last.’59 Canaris was saved, but Dohnanyi was doomed.

  Although these events and investigations threatened to cripple the Abwehr and the work of its head, Canaris was not tied to his office nor
restrained in his activities. Immediately after the capitulation in Tunisia on 13 May 1943 — when 250,000 German and Italian troops were taken into captivity and the southern flank of ‘Festung Europa’ was now exposed to Allied attack — Canaris saw his nephew Constantin, head of Sipo and SD in Brussels, for the last time. The admiral told him resignedly that he had discussed the hopeless situation with von Arnim in Tunis a week before the collapse, and been told that Tunis could not be held in the face of overwhelming Allied superiority. Three days before the surrender he had relayed this assessment to Keitel, who waved it aside with the observation that Britain would suffer a second Gallipoli far worse than the first. 60

  Canaris believed that the defeat in North Africa did not necessarily mean that the war was lost, but if it were followed by a second successful Allied landing, then defeat was only a matter of time. Constantin Canaris spoke later of a cryptic remark by his uncle that he had known where the next landings would be, but he had refused to say where.

  Whether Canaris actually did have this information is unknown. Criticism of the performance of his office had led to a considerable loss of authority for Canaris and the British knew this. At the end of May 1943, the British signals monitoring service reported: ‘The Abwehr in Madrid is sending commander-in-chief West their estimate of enemy intentions on the basis of reports between 16 May 1943 and 31 May 1943 — the main thrust will be in the western Mediterranean.’ This confirms that the Abwehr had no clear idea of where the next major attack would come,61 although Canaris had received a report from Madrid at the same time that General Campos saw no threat to Spain, Morocco or the Balearics, the British informer being well aware of how highly the Germans valued Campos’s opinion.62

  On 9 July British Intelligence noted the OKH complaint that no information or Abwehr reports had been received from Tunis, as a response to which Abwehr headquarters ordered Abwehr Madrid to link up all the centres in the region for intelligence purposes. The tentacles had extended as far as Spanish Morocco and Algeciras; the British SIS agent commented: ‘Algeciras has no connection to Tunis, but they took note of the instruction.’63

  With amusement the British watchers followed the trail of a German report from Algeciras about the Allies’ plans for Gibraltar. The message went through the Italian representatives in Tangiers to the Italian embassy in Madrid, and then secretly to the German embassy in Madrid with the observation, ‘From a Moroccan source, good up to now.’ The German embassy passed it to Madrid Abwehr which, unaware that it originated from German agents in Algeciras, forwarded it to Abwehr headquarters. The Germans thus believed for some time that they had the same information from two independent sources.64

  In the first half of June 1943, ever-more alarming reports reached Abwehr headquarters and Abwehr Rome as to Allied intentions in the Mediterranean, indicating an invasion of Sicily. While the British monitoring service knew everything with only a marginal time delay,65 Abwehr reports generally came in too late. The British reported: ‘Abwehr headquarters reports the receipt of various reports which by comparison provided precise details of the landings in Sicily. These arrived after the event because of sluggish reporting. As a result, the Abwehr in Spain and Portugal has been ordered to speed up their reports on enemy intentions.’66 British and US forces landed in Sicily on 10 July 1943. Canaris’s apparatus had been informed accurately and early, but the transmission of information lacked the required urgency; British intelligence observed that on 30 June a British informer working for an Abwehr agent in Lisbon had passed details as to troop movements for an operation against Sicily, but the information did not reach Abwehr headquarters until 12 July.67 A source in Gibraltar had also reported that a large contingent of paratroops was expected on the Rock, with the objective of Sicily.68 On 10 July a message dated the 9th was received in Madrid from Melilla, reporting the departure of an Allied invasion fleet from Algiers and Tunis, heading for Sicily. Not until later did Abwehr headquarters establish that correct information had been passed but had failed to reach Kesselring’s staff in Rome in time.69

  On 25 July 1943 Mussolini was arrested, Marshal Badoglio took over the government of Italy, and on 28 July the Italian Fascist Party was disbanded. On 29 July Canaris flew with Lahousen and Oberst Freytag-Loringhoven to Venice to confer with General Amé, head of Italian intelligence.70 This j ourney was Lahousen’s last foreign venture as head of Abwehr II, and he vacated the office to Freytag-Loringhoven on 1 August; Lahousen took over a regiment on the Eastern Front following a last visit with Canaris to FHQ.71

  In Venice the future prosecution of the war was discussed, a subject that came very low on the list of Italian priorities, but a joint communiqué was issued nevertheless, stating the contrary. Canaris and Amé knew that the Italians were about to abandon the Axis, but Canaris did nothing to convince the Italians to reconsider; he wished them well and warned of a possible German invasion.72

  Schellenberg maintained later that shortly afterwards he laid a dossier before Himmler alleging that Canaris had not conveyed to Berlin the true nature of his conversations with Amé. He had reminded Himmler three times about the file and his promise to show it to Hitler, but Himmler had done nothing.

  Himmler advised Schellenberg that the errors of the Abwehr chief and his attitude towards the regime were ‘on another page’, and Schellenberg should not worry about it.73 This was not the first occasion on which he had inferred from Himmler’s reaction that currently he was no longer interested in toppling Canaris, if ever he had had such an interest in the past. The reasons for Himmler’s reticence since the spring of 1943 are unknown; Christine von Dohnanyi stated that Himmler always had a surprisingly ‘normal’ working relationship with her husband.

  26

  The Undoing of Canaris

  Although it seems that there was no further direct contact between Canaris and emissaries of the OSS, in Istanbul US naval attaché Earle, who had conferred with Canaris in January 1943, contacted Canaris’s man, Leverkühn, who – according to his own account – reported the approach at once to the Gestapo.1 At about the same time Archbishop Spellman of New York attempted to obtain an interview with ambassador von Papen, but was turned down by Ribbentrop.2 On 17 June 1943, Adam von Trott zu Sulz travelled to Istanbul immediately after the third meeting of the Kreisau circle to discuss their foreign policy outlook, to sound out the terrain for Moltke and to open channels for a possible offer by the German Resistance to the United States.3 Trott sought out Consul-General Dr Fritz von Twardowski and made contacts with German émigrés – after 1933 many university lecturers had resettled in Turkey and now taught at the University of Istanbul – and in Ankara attempted to win over von Papen to an active participation in the German Resistance. Trott also met Leverkühn, who probably used the opportunity to ask Trott’s help for a young member at K-Organisation Istanbul, lawyer Erich Vermehren, son of an old friend of Leverkühn, now a legal adviser and stenographer on his staff. Vermehren’s wife Elisabeth, the former Countess Plettenberg, was still in Germany and needed an exit visa to come to Turkey; Trott could help. It is not certain whether he suspected that the Vermehrens were talking to British intelligence at this time and planned to defect.4

  On 5 July 1943 Moltke arrived in Istanbul as an Abwehr agent. His contact people to OSS Istanbul, headed by Lanning MacFarland, were the economics expert Hans Wilbrandt and the sociologist Alexander Rüstov who, using the cover names ‘Hyacinth’ and ‘Magnolia’, were part of the German Freedom Movement based in Istanbul cooperating with the US secret service. These two were also involved in the US spy ring ‘Dogwood–Cereus Circle’, so-called for the US agents ‘Dogwood’ (Alfred Schwartz) and Cereus (Archibald Coleman) active in other parts of Europe.

  In the summer of 1943 all attempts to discuss peace had failed because of American lack of interest and the indifferent attitude of von Papen, who was unable to commit himself to the Resistance.5 It was probably Moltke’s efforts to convince the US Government to lift its demand for ‘unconditional
surrender’ that had resulted in a refusal to talk and a ban on Moltke making contact with the US ambassador to Cairo, Alexander C Kirk, whom Moltke knew and was hoping to enlist as intermediary.

  In the summer of 1943 Canaris may have attempted to contact his British counterpart Stewart Menzies. Through Baron Oswald von Hoyningen-Huene, the German ambassador in Lisbon, and another middleman, he made an offer to meet Menzies on neutral territory. Menzies himself confirmed the invitation after the war, but Foreign Minister Eden had forbidden the meeting on the grounds that if the Soviets found out they might suspect that Britain and Germany were negotiating a separate peace. Not all suggested attempts at contact with London and Washington are actually proven, but the OSS files at least show that during 1943 several serious attempts were made in this direction and were unsuccessful for one reason or another.

  Moltke’s second trip to Turkey in December 1943 had Canaris’s knowledge;6 contrary to his expectations no meeting with ambassador Kirk could be arranged, but he put out feelers to various US journalists and to Wilbrandt and Rüstow. After he left, they set out his proposals in the so-called ‘Herman’ Plan that they passed to William Donovan through the agents ‘Dogwood’ and ‘Cereus’.

  The primary platform of the Herman Plan was the coordination and cooperation of the German democratic opposition. The German defeat and territorial losses were declared inevitable and necessary for Germany’s future. Moltke and his friends proposed to help the Allies not only win the war, but also the peace, and to avoid an Allied invasion resembling the Italian campaign.7

  Since Moltke undertook his mission with Canaris’s support, the proposals presumably coincided with Canaris’s own ideas. The Herman Plan concept of a capitulation and cooperation with the Western Powers, coupled with an unconditional resistance to the peril of a Bolshevist occupation in the East, can be traced back to Canaris, and correspond to what he had stated to military attaché Earle in January 1943, although no certain proof exists.8