Schellenberg cooperated with Bentivegni and the head of the Wehrmacht Central Office, Generalleutnant Paul Winter, who had received full authority from Keitel, to ensure the smooth transfer of the Abwehr into the RSHA apparatus.43 Bentivegni’s efforts to retain at least a small nucleus of the military intelligence centre paid off: Abwehr-Abteilung I and II were annexed to RSHA as ‘the Military Office’ (Amt Mil or Amt M). The new head of Amt Mil, Oberst Georg Hansen, a convinced anti-Nazi, became deputy to Amt VI (SD-Ausland) Chief Schellenberg, and vice versa – Abteilung III (counter-espionage) passed mainly to the corresponding office at RSHA IV (Gestapo). The front-line reconnaissance units and the competent offices monitoring the armed forces remained under OKW control together with elements of the former Abwehr II (Sabotage against Foreign Armies); civilian sabotage units passed to RSHA.44 At a castle close to Salzburg at the beginning of May 1944, Keitel and Himmler held a conference for all senior Abwehr and RSHA officers and officials to announce the new regulations officially. Himmler praised again ‘the valuable work of the military Abwehr’.45
By an edict of 10 June 1944, Hitler discharged Admiral Canaris from active military service with effect from the end of the month ‘with permission to wear his former uniform’. Shortly afterwards he countermanded this order and appointed Canaris admiral on standby from 1 July to head the virtually insignificant Special Staff for Anti-Shipping Warfare and Economic War Measures at OKW (HWK), Potsdam-Eiche.46 What lay behind this ‘comeback’ is not known, but it may have been an idea of Himmler to hold available a man with good contacts and of international renown.
According to the British secret service expert Anthony Cave Brown, the reason was the alleged contacts Canaris had to the French intelligence chiefs Arnould and Keun in May 1944. Cave Brown refers to statements by Arnould made in an interview after the war in which Canaris had given Keun a personal message from the Resistance to the head of British Intelligence, Menzies, concerning the retraction of the demand for ‘unconditional surrender’. Canaris met Arnould at a Paris convent to receive the answer, a two-page letter,47 with the answer in the negative. This story sounds unlikely and is unproven. As head of HWK, Canaris could not have travelled to Paris at that time, but fragments that do fit the story occur in the interrogations after 20 July. Baron Kaulbars,48 Canaris’s confidant and liaison to Stockholm and Moscow, made a written statement under interrogation that he had learned in Sweden that Canaris was to be removed, and was informed of the ‘attitude of foreign circles’. Kaltenbrunner observed of this statement: ‘With the removal of the admiral, the chance of any kind of accord if Germany was ready to negotiate with the enemy powers about the possibility of a peace acceptable to both sides, evaporated. The report that the admiral had gone would be a signal to those abroad to sever whatever cooperation existed with Germany. Canaris was one of the few men with whom other countries would still deal and cooperate.’49
This contradictory report raises more questions than it answers. The German readiness to negotiate was irrelevant if the Allies refused to talk. What cooperation existed to be severed? Even the question as to who might still have been interested in peace soundings from Canaris in the summer of 1944 remains unanswered. Attention focuses finally on Himmler, who showed a complete disdain for investigating the suspicions against Canaris, but also ensured that the accusations against him in connection with the prosecution of Dohnanyi and Oster did not proceed. What was behind his attitude towards Canaris and his closest circle, which endured until the beginning of April 1945, remains one of the great mysteries.
Canaris was not personally involved in the attempted coup and assassination plot of 20 July. He was too far from the centre of events, bereft of his power base and without contact to his former staff, and so it was not until early July that he was even apprised of the basics of the planned operation by Freytag-Lovinghoven and Schrader.50 Canaris knew Graf von Stauffenburg, the leader of the plot, from meetings since the end of 1943, when he had been chief of Staff at the General Army Office at OKH, but there had been no common ground between them, and according to Huppenkothen the relationship was so bad that sometimes Canaris’s friend Judge Sack had to step in as referee.51 Nevertheless, it was supposedly Stauffenburg who informed Canaris of the assassination attempt on 20 July 1944. According to the story, Canaris was entertaining his neighbour, the pianist Helmut Maurer, a regular guest at the Schlachtensee house, and also Baron Kaulbars and Judge-General Sack when Stauffenburg told him by telephone that the Führer was dead; a bomb had killed him. Suspecting that his line was tapped, Canaris answered: ‘Dead? For God’s sake who was it then? The Russians?’52 According to Abshagen, it came to light during the interrogation by Huppenkothen that the telephone conversation between Stauffenburg and Canaris had been monitored and documented, but this is doubtful because Stauffenburg could not have called at the time of day stated by Maurer. According to Höhne, Judge-General Sack was informed by a colleague of Olbricht in the Bendlerstrasse and hurried to tell Canaris;53 when Canaris went to his office at Potsdam-Eiche afterwards, his adjutant was already composing a letter of loyalty addressed to Hitler.
Canaris was mistaken if he thought he could escape the immediate campaign of revenge. On 22 July he told a former subordinate he met on the street: ‘Yes, my dear boy, it can’t be done! Call me in a few days.’54 It would not be long before his name surfaced in the files of ‘Sonderkommission 20/7’. Canaris’s successor, Hansen, who was involved in the plot and had been taken into Gestapo custody on 22 July, made a written statement:
I see Canaris as the spiritual founder of the Resistance Movement which led to 20 July. Its beginnings are found in 1938. At that time the departure of Fritsch was used to usher in an internal revolution. Canaris himself continued substantially as the carrier of the essential contacts abroad. Canaris went to great lengths to get those people abroad who were opposed to the Nazi regime, amongst them numerous Jews, church people etc and clergy for the purpose of using them as contacts to church circles in Sweden, Switzerland or at the Vatican.55
Whatever was said in the Gestapo dungeons and how little it might have had to do with the events of 20 July 1944, nevertheless Kaltenbrunner included it all in his report to Martin Bormann on the foreign connections of the conspirators, and for Canaris it had catastrophic consequences.
On 23 July 1944 Schellenberg received orders from Gestapo Chief Müller to arrest Canaris. According to Schellenberg’s account he proceeded to Berlin Schlachtensee with an SS-Hauptsturmführer who knew Canaris, having been formerly with the Abwehr. Canaris was in the company of Baron Kaulbar and his nephew Erwin Delbrück. Canaris asked his visitors to leave the room while he spoke to Schellenberg: ‘Somehow I felt it would be you. Tell me, have they found anything in writing by that clown Oberst Hansen?’ When Schellenberg nodded and said a notebook had been discovered containing a list of those persons to be eliminated, but not about Canaris himself or his participation in a coup d’état, Canaris replied: ‘Those idiots in the General Staff cannot live without scribbling.’ If we accept Schellenberg’s account further, Canaris then made a remarkable request: ‘You must make me a promise on your word of honour to obtain for me within the next three days the opportunity for an interview with Himmler. The others – Kaltenbrunner and Müller – are no more than evil killers, out for my head.’56
Schellenberg promised and then offered to wait in the living room while Canaris did whatever he needed. He declined; he neither wanted to run for it nor shoot himself. Schellenberg then took him to the Frontier Police School Fürstenberg where twenty other senior officers suspected of complicity in the assassination attempt were being held under house arrest. Schellenberg stated that Canaris then invited him to stay for dinner and they drank a bottle of red wine while he instructed Canaris on how he should speak to Himmler. Next day, Schellenberg alleges that he spoke at length with Himmler and obtained his promise to grant Canaris an interview.57
Hans Oster was arrested on 21 July at the Schnaditz estate
after a list of conspirators was discovered at the General Army Office.58 Erwin Delbrück and Karl Ludwig Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg were arrested, while Dohnanyi, Bonhoeffer and Josef Müller were transferred from Wehrmacht custody to the Gestapo. Huppenkothen led the interrogations of Canaris and Oster from the beginning of August. He was assisted by Kriminalkommissar Sonderegger, who since the ‘Cash Deposits’ case had been handling the available prosecution evidence against the Abwehr headquarters staff members involved.
It was above all due to the skill and resistance of Oster that Huppenkothen and Sonderegger at first made little progress. Oster talked and tried to say nothing; he spoke about the mental and political attitude of Canaris:
Those of us of his time had a childish passion for soldiering that led us to become officers in the monarchy. That that kind of State could ever be destroyed was unimaginable for us. There was no politics. We wore the Kaiser’s uniform and that was enough59 . . . The collapse in 1918 was a hammer-blow to us, the abolition of the Wilhelminian monarchy into an uncohesive State of political parties.
Kaltenbrunner wrote
According to Oster, the 1933 Revolution was a relief from the conflict of conscience which for them had begun in the early period of the Weimar system! The return to strong national parties, rearmament, the reintroduction of general conscription, these things were for officers a return to the earlier traditions. Whereas the soldier in the Weimar system only did what he was duty-bound to do, Oster had warmly welcomed these points of the National Socialist expansionist programme.
In a written statement Oster described the cracks which appeared in the relationship of the conservative officer towards the new regime: the murders of Schleicher and Bredow in June 1934, the Blomberg affair and Fritsch trial, the rise of the Waffen-SS to be the elite Wehrmacht branch. And it went on and on in this vein.
For a while Oster entangled his interrogators in an irrelevant political and historical analysis that had nothing to do with the criminological investigation into who was involved in the plot to kill Hitler on 20 July 1944. When he was confronted with the statements of Alexander von Pfuhlstein and Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz, in which particularly Pfuhlstein implicated Canaris, Oster came under pressure and was forced into attempting to lay on Canaris the portion of the blame that he could not shift on the dead Olbricht.60 From the interrogations of Pfuhlstein and Heinz, the impression grew that Canaris must have played a more significant role in the revolt: ‘Canaris had been, if extremely lacking in perception, totally pessimistic. He had seen the general military collapse approaching month by month, as for example Christmas 1943. Even Heinz confirmed that in the Abwehr a pronounced “tired industry” had reigned. Canaris always made on him “a melancholy impression”.’61
Although all these statements did not connect Canaris directly with the events of 20 July, they tightened the noose about his neck. He relied on denials, reinterpretations and the devaluation of his fellow-travellers’ explanations, and kept this tactic going when he was finally confronted by his accusers. His former subordinates had got it wrong, he explained; he did not implicate them, but tried to blunt the sharpness of what they said by giving their allegations a more harmless meaning. Kaltenbrunner’s report sounded slightly resigned: ‘Although Oster, Pfuhlstein and Hansen maintained their allegations when confronting Admiral Canaris, Canaris disputes the assertions of Pfuhlstein, for example that he predicted certain collapse for Christmas 1943.’62 With reference to peace discussions and the necessity ‘to remove the present government at least for a while’,63 Canaris admitted that such considerations had been uttered in conversations with Oster, but they had been ‘only incidental’ and were discussed in connection with reports received. Here Canaris played the naive man:
I placed no value on these reports and never accepted them as serious. As far as I was concerned it was just talk to pass the time. For me there was never any doubt that a change in the government during the war would be considered a stab in the back, and would destroy the Home Front. It would be a repeat of 1918, but in a much worse form.
In a comprehensive extract from a statement during interrogation, which Kaltenbrunner added to his report of 21 September 1944, he quoted Canaris as saying:
For me, one thing was clear above all else, and I explained it to the officers who discussed the point with me, that a war of such enormous dimensions was willed by Fate and could not have been prevented. Moreover I never doubted, and I often emphasised in conversation that the great sacrifices that our people have made in this war at the Front and at home under a tight uniform leadership could never have been in vain, and would still turn out well even if the war does not end favourably as the optimists think it will.64
One day after Kaltenbrunner had completed his report on the former Abwehr chief – a report which would not have sent Canaris to the gallows – certain documents were discovered at Zossen. Hitler’s revenge would now run its course, and the last chapter in the life of Wilhelm Canaris began.
PART VI
HITLER’S REVENGE
***
Within a few months of the failed assassination attempt and coup of 20 July 1944 Hitler’s revenge machinery, operated by ‘20 July Special Commission’ at RSHA, was running full out; hundreds had been rounded up, dozens already executed.1 Graf von Stauffenburg, Albrecht Ritter Mertz von Quirnheim, Friedrich Olbricht and Werner von Haeften had all been shot dead on the same night in the courtyard at the Bendlerblock; others such as Ludwig Beck and Hening von Tresckow had committed suicide. Canaris was arrested on 23 July, his name having been mentioned by several of those incarcerated in connection with the plot. He had been confined initially in the Frontier Police School at Fürstenberg, then brought to the cells of the RSHA at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse in Berlin.2
Although accused by former colleagues, Canaris denied any involvement in the conspiracy. Since it had not been possible to obtain documentary proof to support the oral statements, the members of the ‘20 July Special Commission’, particularly SS-Standartenführer Walter Huppenkothen and Kriminalkommissar Franz Sonderegger – both long-term enemies of Canaris – made no further progress. Their principal interest was in his vanished diaries. During a search of Canaris’s last service office at Potsdam, a portion ending at October 1942 was discovered in a safe. Huppenkothen thought that this was probably an attempted deception.3
As a result of this find by Huppenkothen and Sonderegger, and the statements of close colleagues of Canaris, they could be certain that such a diary existed. Only a small circle knew that he had documented his activities as Abwehr chief, and the military and political developments in Germany since 1937. The material was intended, as Canaris had explained to his co-conspirators, ‘to show the world and the German people with what criminal amateurism, and with what unlimited self-overestimation this war was created from a row about trifles’:4 ‘The world must know of the guilt of these people.’5 Now the ‘guilty’ ones were searching high and low for evidence proving the involvement of the former Abwehr chief in the failed coup of 20 July 1944.
A hectic search began for the diaries that were believed to hold the key to everything.6 At first all that could be established was that Oberstleutnant Werner Schrader at Abwehr had retained the diary for later use in a history of the Abwehr.7 The search spread, and in mid-September a member of Otto Strasser’s anti-Hitler ‘Black Front’, Kurt Kerstenhahn, came to Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. Known to the Gestapo, he had been Schrader’s chauffeur. Schrader had committed suicide after 20 July and Kerstenhahn feared that his own name might come up during the research of the Sonderkommission into 20 July.8 He admitted that in 1942–3 he had on many occasions driven Schrader and Friedrich Heinz to the ‘Haus der Preussischen Seehandlung’ run by Heinz’s half-brother. In the vaults there they had lodged certain Abwehr papers, which Kerstenhahn and Hans Oster had later removed to a safe in the underground bunkers at OKH headquarters, Zossen,9 and he told Sonderegger exactly where to find them.10
On 22 Sep
tember, Sonderegger went to Maybach II at Zossen where he located and had the safe forced open.11 The files, sketches, reports and notes that Sonderegger found represented ‘an explosive of a quite special kind’.12 Apart from a few copied pages, the Canaris diaries were not amongst them, but now the Gestapo had a substantial portion of the chronicle that Hans von Dohnanyi had been assembling regarding the misdeeds of the regime and the activities of the Resistance circle since 1933.13
Since his arrest in 1943, Dohnanyi had kept saying that the files should be destroyed: ‘Every jotting about the business is a death sentence.’14 Why Oster and other conspirators ignored him is a mystery, but it is probable that the wishes of the former Chief of Staff Ludwig Beck, who wanted to preserve the documents for posterity, played a not insignificant role. Another reason was certainly that the plotters no longer felt safe with the idea of going to Zossen to destroy the papers; after 20 July those involved and still at large were ultracautious. Perhaps it was simply believed that the files were somewhere else.15
Huppenkothen and Sonderegger had the files from the 1938–40 period proving that the plans to overthrow Nazism began earlier than previously suspected, in the spring of 1938, and that they originated not in the military circle around Stauffenburg, but with Canaris and his immediate staff. The link between the earlier conspirators and the would-be assassins of 20 July was now clear. In the loose pages of Canaris’s diary found in the armoured safe there appeared – as conversational partners – names of such high-ranking military officers as von Witzleben, Halder, Brauchitsch, Thomas and Reichenau. Papers from the 1938 Blomberg and Fritsch affairs documented the first considerations for a coup, Oster’s and Dohnanyi’s thoughts on the consequences and discussions with Beck and Canaris, and they also included a three-page handwritten plan drawn up by Oster listing the post-coup executions and a list of persons supporting the conspiracy. Also found were Dohnanyi’s notes about the negotiations that Josef Müller had had at the Vatican to extend peace feelers to the Western Powers, including the ‘X-Report’, in which Dohnanyi had summarised Müller’s efforts. Besides comprehensive notes to various coup plans, there was Abwehr Gruppe IIIF material betraying the attack date for the Western offensive in the spring of 1940. From the files it was clear that the liaison officer to the Vatican, Josef Müller, previously above all suspicion, was a traitor.16 Most of those implicated by the material – Canaris, Oster, Dohnanyi, Bonhoeffer – were in custody and the new evidence against them was devastating. Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz said of the Zossen find after the war: ‘When Prussian officers plot revolution, they not only keep a careful diary, but also a travel log and all bureaucratic files.’17
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