Hitler’s Spymaster, Allied Sympathizer, and German Patriot

The famous mystery writer, Rex Stout, creator of Nero Wolfe, played a major role in producing American propaganda during WWII. He once made the point that there was no room in this for anything but hatred for the Germans; anything like the British chivalry of burying downed German airmen with full military honors was foolish and wasteful. This seemed to resonate with the American people with their strong characteristic of aggressive self-righteousness. But where does this attitude leave the German resistance to Nazism? What of figures like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Oskar Schindler, Thomas Mann, Claus von Stauffenberg, who attempted to assassinate Hitler and overthrow the Nazis, Cardinal Graf von Galen, who condemned Nazi euthanasia of the disabled and mentally retarded, physicist Werner Heisenberg, often credited with Germany’s failure to pursue the atomic bomb, and many, many others– including Adm. Wilhelm Canaris, chief of Hitler’s “Abwehr” – Military Intelligence. Schindler and Bonhoeffer are saints today, but the others, at least insofar as their resistance to the Nazis goes, are seldom remembered. Why? Perhaps because they were conservatives, German patriots or nationalists, and thus nearly as reprehensible as the Nazis themselves to Americans then and now.

Little known is Canaris’ saving of many hundreds of individual Jewish people via a Raoul Wallenberg-type bureaucratic subterfuge. Canaris has always been mostly of interest to students of wartime intelligence and espionage; he has been called the greatest intelligence asset the Allies had in WWII. He was in close touch with Stewart Menzies, head of MI6 and Allen Dulles of the OSS – he met personally with Dulles in Switzerland during the war. His goal and that of the German “Black” or conservative resistance was, naturally, to end the war before the total destruction of Germany. But the Allies were simply not interested in a negotiated peace with Germany – even an anti-Nazi Germany. Canaris realized this and tried to convince the Allies otherwise. But he remained totally loyal and forthcoming with them – though they were not to him.

Who was this Canaris? He is often called an enigma – a person of many faces, sides, intellectual gifts – it’s always been hard to discern the “real Canaris” through the smokescreen of his many deceptions. But Johnson presents a complete, consistent life story for him, and makes it possible to see through the apparent contradictions – to a man who morally at least was very simple, a person of overwhelming personal integrity.

Inspired by the deeds of Konstantinos Kanaris, hero of the Greek War for Independence, whom he (incorrectly) imagined to be an ancestor, from his teens Canaris sought a naval career. Impeded by his poor health and short stature, assisted by his mental and personal gifts, he had a successful career as a young officer. Before and at the beginning of W. W. I while serving in the cruisers Bremen and Dresden, he had been assigned to form a network of intelligence agents in South America. With von Spee’s squadron in 1914, his intelligence reports from Chile enabled them to locate and defeat a pursuing British squadron at Coronel. After von Spee was defeated at the Falklands, Canaris’ contacts helped the Dresden keep supplied and avoid British pursuit until finally hunted down.

Ship commands and more intelligence assignments followed into the postwar period. Suffice it to say Canaris was not happy with the defeat, the Versailles Treaty, and the Weimar Republic. Nationalist and anti-communist, he supported Hitler from the beginning, and helped set up the U-boat design bureaus in Holland, Japan, and Spain to assist rearmament. As a naval cadet, the young Reinhard Heydrich became his close friend and protege. So when did Canaris turn against Hitler – with Heydrich to become his deadliest enemy? He was shocked by the Blomberg/Fritsch affair, where Hitler framed and expelled two leading generals, to create an opportunity to take personal control of the German army. He was made aware of the falsity of the accusations by his friend Hans von Dohnanyi, brother-in-law of Pastor Bonhoeffer. But his disillusionment, furthered by the killings of “The Night of the Long Knives” and the anti-Jewish violence of “Kristallnacht” - turned to total opposition and active resistance with the invasion of Poland.

“He was given firsthand reports of mass executions of Polish ‘undesirables’: Jews of all social levels, university professors …, members of the old Polish aristocracy…, Catholic priests…Hitler had ordered his commanders to act without mercy or compassion toward all men, women and children ‘of Polish derivation and language’.” He said to a friend “this means the end of Germany.”

But why did early attempts to warn the US and Britain of these atrocities (through the Vatican, Count Ciano, Hjalmar Schacht, for example) get no response? Perhaps because the Nazis were doing them in alliance with the Soviets, who were doing even worse – such as the Katyn Forest mass murder. A large percentage of Western intellectuals (including many New Dealers) were Marxist in sympathy, and they and the western communist parties were officially on the German side against the Allies. And few had any sympathy for Catholic priests or Polish aristocrats.

Canaris’ long, thorough wartime campaign to communicate all major German moves to the Allies, dissuade Franco from entering the war, and conceal all major Allied moves from the Germans began – leading Hitler to lose confidence in military intelligence in general, until his abolition of the Abwehr, after its failure to give any warning of the Anzio landings. How did Canaris conceal his activities while in constant personal contact with Hitler and his associates? By a carefully contrived appearance of incompetence: “I could not believe that this rumpled, tongue-tied, absent-minded little man was the new chief of the Abwehr” said a journalist.

Many of his wartime activities are of the highest interest – in particular his personal meetings with Allen Dulles, head of the OSS, in Switzerland. Some security people including Heydrich dogged his trail, but were unable to pin anything on him, in spite of the fact that some highly placed people – Keitel and Himmler for example – were aware of his disaffection but said nothing. Only with the Stauffenberg plot was he uncovered – and quickly imprisoned, interrogated, tortured, and hung from a meat hook to die.

Why? We have no records of Canaris’ inner reflections and soul-searching, but this reviewer can only conclude that he was, like Churchill, a nineteenth-century man, with absolute and traditional moral values. This is in contrast to the vast majority of 20^th century intellectuals, with no belief in anything but science and pseudo-scientific ideologies, such as Naziism’s social Darwinism, or leftism’s Marxist sociology. With both supposedly good ends justify ruthless means, oppressing and killing those who oppose their respective “Truths”. Canaris is perhaps an enigma not because there are any mysteries about him, but because he was a person of courage and moral stature beyond the grasp of us 20^th-century people. (I can’t speak for you 21^st-century youngsters!) Unlike the intellectuals of his time and ours, he really believed in human goodness and had the courage to fight and die for it. And to the disgust of many Americans, part of that goodness was Germany. At the end, he could have escaped to Spain – Franco owed him much, and collaborated in his plan to save many Jews – but as he said to his wife: ”I want to share Germany’s fate.” By showing us his many faces, David Johnson shows us the single, remarkable man behind them all.

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Our Reviewer: Robert P. Largess is the author of USS Albacore; Forerunner of the Future, and articles on the USS Triton, SS United States, the origin of the towed sonar array, and the history of Lighter-than-Air. He has contributed book reviews to ‘The Naval Historical Foundation’ (http://www.navyhistory.org) and The International Journal of Naval History (http://www.ijnhonline.org). His earlier reviews here include The Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command, King Arthur’s Wars: The Anglo-Saxon Conquest of England, Clouds above the Hill: A Historical Novel of the Russo-Japanese War, Winning a Future War: War Gaming and Victory in the Pacific War, The Fate of Rome, "Tower of Skulls", A History of the Asia-Pacific War, Volume I: From the Marco Polo Bridge Incident to the Fall of Corregidor, July 1937-May 1942, Nathaniel Lyon’s River Campaign of 1861, Korea: War without End, and Exterminating ISIS.

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