Abwehr chief Admiral Wilhelm Canaris
Prior to the arrival of Canaris, the Abwehr had been a small and not terribly successful organisation. It had largely contented itself with gathering information about the armed forces of other countries, rarely doing more than collate what was publicly available in newspapers. Canaris changed everything – and to do it he had a vast supply of money and resources supplied to him at Hitler’s direct orders. Canaris began by installing an agent in each German Embassy with specific instructions to recruit agents in that nation’s armed forces or armaments industry. He then established a new division devoted to planning sabotage and to producing the necessary equipment and recruiting agents able to fulfil the plans. Meanwhile, he forged close links with the Gestapo to trap foreign spies in Germany.
When he arrived at the Abwehr office block, Canaris found the organisation already had an effective spy ring in the armaments industry of the USA. The ring had been begun in 1927 with the aim of bribing workers to hand over secret plans, and it was doing remarkably well. A string of top secret weapon plans flooded into Germany from the spy ring, known as Operation Sexton from the false name used by the man running the network. The greatest coup of this ring was to filch the plans of the superbly accurate Norden bombsight, with which the Luftwaffe was quickly equipped. This enormously successful spy ring went entirely unsuspected by the American FBI, whose task it was to track down enemy agents.
The American spy ring was the most outstanding, but Abwehr had agents elsewhere. The military and political circles of France, Belgium, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Holland were riddled with Abwehr agents, who also had no scruples infiltrating the ranks of their own allies in Italy and Hungary.
Britain was, however, largely ignored by the Abwehr. Hitler was busy using German princes who were related to the British aristocracy and Royal Family to gain information and push the case for appeasement and peace. Although the recipients of such German flattery were friendly enough, the princes had to report there was little prospect of any British nobleman betraying his country, though some could be used to urge peace. The lavish attention poured on the Prince of Wales was effort wasted when he abdicated the throne he had taken as Edward VIII in 1936. The less glamorous, but robustly patriotic George VI became the new king.
German attempts to infiltrate the British political system also came badly unstuck. The British Fascist Party, led by former government minister Sir Oswald Mosley, showed great support for Hitler and his ideas. But as soon as war looked likely, the Blackshirts, as they were known, declared total loyalty to Britain. As a result, it was not until war had actually broken out that the Abwehr made any serious efforts to infiltrate agents into Britain. Their activities were to be marked by failure, though this was not immediately obvious to the Germans.
Hitler’s main problem with the Abwehr and with spying in general, was that Canaris and most of his men were officers of great deviousness, but also with an old school sense of honour. They served Germany, but were none too impressed by the Nazis, and unlike many regular army officers, the Abwehr was in a position to know exactly what was going on.
In September 1939, the Abwehr officers working in Poland reported back to Canaris that large scale executions of Jews, politicians, nobility and catholics were taking place behind the advancing units of the regular army. Canaris and his men were appalled but, like so many other Germans, did not believe Hitler knew about the killings being carried out on the orders of Himmler, head of the SS and Gestapo. Canaris went to see Hitler to raise the subject, but was stopped by General Wilhelm Keitel, head of the Wehrmacht general staff. Keitel told Canaris that the mass killings were being carried out on the orders of the Führer. Hitler had originally ordered the army to carry out the killings, but after Keitel refused he had turned to Himmler and the SS.
Canaris was shocked, and soon afterwards was staggered when Hitler went back on all his promises made before the invasion of Poland and declared that Britain had to be crushed. From his wide ranging contacts and spies, Canaris knew Britain would enjoy the support of the USA sooner or later. He also knew that if the USA declared war on Germany the war would be lost.
What happened next is unclear for Canaris was notoriously secretive. It is clear, however, that from October 1939 onwards the outstanding success of the Abwehr under Canaris began to go wrong. Mistakes were made, opportunities were missed and incompetence grew. For instance, the highly successful operation in the USA collapsed after a complete list of all German agents was sent to a radio operator in the ring who was known to be unreliable. Seeing a chance to get out of his double life, the agent, William Sebold, went to the police and turned over the names of the 37 top agents.
The impact of the many intelligence failures began to affect operations as the war progressed. Many believe that Canaris set out deliberately to undermine his own country and Hitler in particular. Certainly Hitler came to think so. In 1943 Canaris was removed as head of the Abwehr and in 1945 he was executed after being suspected of being involved in the July 1944 plot to kill Hitler.
By that time Hitler had long given up placing much faith in the intelligence reports he got from Abwehr. Instead he preferred to place his trust in the SD, the Sicherheitsdienst. This was the intelligence wing of the SS, as the Gestapo was the secret police wing, and it came under the control of Heinrich Himmler. The original purpose of the SD, founded in 1931, was to gather political intelligence for the Nazi Party but once in power Hitler transformed it into his private secret service. By 1941 the SD had 3,000 staff in Germany and a vast number of agents abroad.
German intelligence had its greatest failures in Britain. In December 1939 the British cracked the secret codes used by Abwehr radio operators. As a result every single German agent in Britain was arrested, as were all agents which the German tried to infiltrate thereafter. Some were shot, others imprisoned but many agreed to work for the British in an operation that became know as Double-X. They continued to send reports back to Germany, but these were all written by the British with an eye to deceive the enemy. Some German agents claimed to have recruited entire rings of agents in the British military or munitions works, none of whom actually existed.
Only when the reports from these agents diverged too greatly from reality did the Germans suspect they might have a problem. But by that time Hitler was relying on the SD for information, and their reports tended to be coloured both by Nazi ideology and by a desire to please Hitler.
As well as using espionage to undermine potential enemies, in the 1930s Hitler also aimed to use propaganda to gain advantage. The majority of Nazi propaganda was aimed at the Germans themselves, boosting their enthusiasm for the war and promising eventual victory. But propaganda was also directed outwards to potential enemies, friends and neutrals. Hitler’s use of propaganda was to be stepped up enormously once war was under way, but even in the 1930s it was a weapon of first resort.
It had been a central belief of Hitler and many other Germans that the German army had not, in fact, been defeated in 1918. Instead, it was believed, Germany had surrendered because the army had been stabbed in the back by traitors and defeatists in Germany. The blame for this was laid at the door of the communists and Jews who had, supposedly, been able to convince the civilian government to surrender. In Mein Kampf, Hitler also laid a large slice of the blame on British propaganda.
Directed through press reports in neutral countries, British propaganda had, indeed, reached large numbers of German civilians. Its effectiveness from 1914 to 1918 had been limited, but once the German war economy began to crack the propaganda aimed at civilians began to be effective. Likewise, British leaflets dropped by aircraft on to German units in the trenches were largely ineffective until morale began to falter in the summer of 1918.
The British then came up with an effective message. It urged the Germans to surrender to enjoy a good supply of food for themselves and also to ensure that their families had a bread-winner after Germany’s inevitable defeat.
The message was made more effective by the fact that on occasion, when a German attack was expected, the front line trenches were stocked with large quantities of good quality food and the men given orders to abandon the trenches quickly. The Germans capturing the positions found the food and contrasted it with their own meagre rations.
Hitler would have seen all this at first hand in the summer of 1918 before he was wounded, and it may well have played a part in his obsession with propaganda and his determination to use it on his own people to counter the expected British efforts. He was also to use it abroad, though with rather less success.
A prime target for propaganda was the effort to keep the USA neutral in any future conflict. Ironically, the task for Hitler and his propaganda chief Josef Goebbels, was made much easier by the fact that the British had been so much better at propaganda than the Germans.
In the First World War British propaganda aimed at neutral states, especially the USA, had often concentrated on what became known as ‘atrocity propaganda’, that is spreading stories about the dreadful behaviour of the German armed forces. In some instances, such as the sinking of the passenger liner Lusitania or the execution of the nurse Edith Cavell, the British simply embroidered the truth. On other occasions the British made up entirely false stories, faked evidence and misled their target audience. And it worked. By 1917 the USA had declared war on Germany, in part due to the urgings of British propaganda.
Hitler was determined this would not happen again. Goebbels was given funds to set up organisations in the USA to win the propaganda war, even before the shooting had started. This drive took two main forms. The first was the establishment of an organisation of Americans of German descent called The Bund, led by the German–American Fritz Kuhn. The aim was to ensure friendly relations between Germany and German-Americans. Mutual exchange trips were organised and determined efforts made to woo the American press and plant stories extolling the merits of Germany and Hitler.
Hitler also played a leading role in subverting any credence that might be given to news and views from France or, more particularly, Britain. As so often, Hitler used his heroic war record to good effect. During the 1920s the British had been forced to admit that many of the stories of German soldiers raping women or bayonetting babies had been fabricated. German diplomats and press men were instructed to lose no opportunity to ensure the Americans were made aware of these admissions.
Hitler himself made the point that front-line soldiers of both sides knew these atrocity stories were simply lies made up by clever, slick propagandists safe in an office miles from the shooting. Strenuous efforts were made to cultivate links between old soldier organisations in Germany and the USA. Whenever veterans from the USA visited Germany they were entertained by a high-profile Nazi who was likewise a veteran. Hitler and Göring themselves met many hundreds of such men, swapping jovial anecdotes about military service. Baldur von Schirach, the Youth Leader of the German Reich, also played a part in the Nazi propaganda offensive. Fresh-faced and charming, he had like Churchill an American mother, and counted two signatories of the Declaration of Independence among his forebears.
These propaganda efforts worked extremely well, but only so long as there was no war. When Germany invaded Poland in 1939 the British again began their stories of German aggression and atrocities. Germany responded by pointing out that Britain had declared war in 1939, not Germany, and anyway these were the same stories as in 1914, and those were now known to have been British lies.
Unfortunately, for such German efforts, Hitler then took a hand. He demanded that the more subtle tactics be abandoned. Now that the shooting had started, the Bund organisation was instructed to make open appeals to German–Americans to show solidarity with Germany. ‘Blood calls to Blood’ was the slogan. It failed dismally. Messages that worked effectively on Germans in Germany were quite unsuitable for those of German parentage in the very different social scene of the USA. By the end of 1940, despite the efforts of certain US citizens, most notably the aviator Charles Lindbergh, American public opinion was hostile to Nazism and to Hitler.
A key problem for all the services outside the army was that Hitler did not really understand them and had little interest in doing so. Given the way the Nazi state worked, few resources were allocated to anything in which Hitler was not interested. Promotion and rewards came only to those who caught Hitler’s eye, so the navy, the intelligence services and so many other vital parts of the modern military were starved of both funds and high quality recruits. Failing to appreciate the wider picture, a lack of interest in anything unfamiliar and a lack of flexibility in approach were all key weaknesses of Hitler as a military commander.
CHAPTER THREE
Military Alliances
ITALY – THE PACT OF STEEL
When Hitler came to power in 1933, Germany was still suffering the pains of defeat in the Great War. The new regime was determined to raise Germany to the status of a great power, despite the country’s economic and financial weakness. Hitler knew that moving openly to secure his aims would attract unwelcome attention from those nations still wary of Germany. Rearmament of Germany was begun secretly, while economic reforms were pushed forward as if seeking a better standard of living for the German people.
Hitler knew he would need friends abroad, and that he would also need to woo potential enemies into neutrality or browbeat them into submission. In his search for friends, Hitler felt himself constrained. The Nazi movement was entirely homegrown within Germany so, unlike the Communists, there was no pre-existing international network of which to take advantage. There were, however, plenty of regimes which had reason to fear the Communists, as did Hitler. And there was already one nationalist, right wing dictatorship in existence in Europe. It was only natural that Hitler would turn to Benito Mussolini, Fascist dictator of Italy, in his search for a foreign friend.
Unfortunately, the campaign to woo Mussolini got off to a bad start. In April 1933 Hitler announced a boycott of Jewish businesses. Mussolini sent the Italian ambassador in Berlin to Hitler with a message urging him to soften the anti-Semitic policies of Nazism. Eager as he was to make friends with Mussolini, Hitler was not to be put off. He told the Italian ambassador that there were very few Jews in Italy, so Mussolini did not understand the problem.
In October, Hitler upset Mussolini again when he took Germany out of the League of Nations. The Italian dictator had long viewed the League of Nations as a useful talking forum and shop window through which to present a reasonable face to the world. For a fellow right wing dictator to treat the world’s largest international organisation with contempt was, Mussolini felt, not merely a mistake but a blow to his own prestige.
Hitler and Mussolini in conference, 18 March 1940
Nevertheless, Mussolini was as keen to find an ally as was Hitler. In June 1934 he invited the German leader to Venice, tactfully including in the tour the Palazzo Vendramin where Hitler’s favourite composer, Richard Wagner, had died. Hitler accepted, but must have regretted the decision the moment he arrived. Hitler landed in Venice dressed in a blue suit and an old raincoat. Mussolini met him in a glittering uniform of gold braid and mirror-polished jackboots and backed by an honour guard in the most gorgeous uniforms the fashion designers of Italy could produce. The world’s press was on hand to take photos which were, at best, unflattering to Hitler.
Hitler was furious and tried to regain dominance by subjecting Mussolini to a two hour speech the following day when they were supposed to be making complimentary statements to each other. Mussolini, in his turn, was now angry. Little progress was made on the main point of the meeting, which was to reach some form of agreement over the status of Austria.
Before the Great War, Austria had ruled substantial swathes of northern Italy, parts of which had sizeable German-speaking minorities. Hitler had made no secret of his ambition to absorb Austria into the Reich and to embrace all ethnically German peoples into the German state. Mussolini was understandably nervous
about his northern borders, particularly the area around Bolzano and Trent and wanted an agreement with Hitler. At Venice he got a vague promise from the Germans to respect Austrian independence, but it was far from being a firm pledge.
Almost as soon as Hitler got back to Germany he stepped up the financial aid he was sending the Nazi Party in Austria, and further increasing the pressure by sanctioning a terrorist campaign of bombs and shootings in the hope of destabilising the Austrian state. In July 1934 the Austrian Nazis took matters to an extreme, murdering the Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss and launching a coup.
Mussolini reacted swiftly. He rushed divisions of troops, backed by aircraft and tanks, to the Italian border with Austria and announced that he would intervene if any other power tried to invade Austria. ‘Hitler is the murderer of Dollfuss,’ declared Mussolini. ‘Hitler is the guilty man and a dangerous fool. It would mean the end of European civilisation if his country of murderers and pederasts were to overrun Europe.’ Asked his opinion of the Nazi movement, Mussolini replied, ‘It is the revolution of the old Germanic tribes in the primeval forest against the Latin civilisation of Rome.’
But Mussolini was no fool. He told his colleagues in private that, ‘Hitler will arm the Germans and he will make war. We cannot stand up to him alone. We must do something and we must do something quickly.’ At first Mussolini tried to alert other nations to the German danger, but was met only with distrust. After the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, now Ethiopia, in 1935 the democratic powers gave Mussolini the cold shoulder. Like it or not, the Italian dictator realised his only potential powerful friend was Hitler. They would have to find a solution to the Austrian problem.
Hitler: Military Commander Page 4