German Admiral was a Chief of the Abwehr, the military intelligence service of the High Command of the Armed Forces (OKW).
Background
Wilhelm Canaris was born in Aplerbeck on 1 January 1887. The son of a Westphalian industrialist, of Greek background. Canaris believed that his family was related to the 19th century Greek admiral, freedom fighter, and politician Constantine Kanaris, a belief that influenced his decision to join the Imperial German Navy. While on a visit to Corfu, he was given a portrait of the Greek hero that he always kept in his office. However, according to Richard Bassett, a genealogical investigation in 1938 revealed that his family was actually of Northern Italian descent, originally called Canarisi, and had lived in Germany since the 17th century. His name was of Italian origin, as was later shown in an elaborate family tree. His grandfather had converted from Catholicism to Lutheranism.
Career
In 1905, at the age of seventeen, Canaris joined the Imperial Navy and by the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 was serving as an intelligence officer on board the cruiser SMS Dresden, a light cruiser he had been assigned to in December 1911.
From seemingly having a career at sea, Canaris changed to military intelligence and by 1935, he was appointed to head the Abwehr Military Intelligence Unit – a position of great importance within the Nazi regime as the Abwehr was tasked, amongst others, with hunting out opponents to Hitler.
In the lead up to World War Two, Canaris was seen almost as a peacemaker. He tried in vain to persuade Hitler not to occupy Czechoslovakia in March 1939 and he used his position to contact General Franco of Spain in an effort to get him not to support Germany’s aggressive moves in Europe. Canaris believed that Germany would lose any war fought in Europe that involved the major powers.
War broke out with the attack on Poland on September 1st, 1939. Canaris visited the war front in Poland to see how the advance was progressing. What he witnessed – the massacre of 200 Jews at Bedzin shocked him. Intelligence officers informed Canaris that they had learned that more massacres had been witnessed and that specific groups (such as the nobility) had been singled out. On September 12th, he went to Hitler’s headquarters – a train stationed then in Upper Silesia – and formally protested to General Keitel, head of OKW. Canaris told Keitel that one-day the Wehrmacht would be held to account for the massacres. It is said that Keitel told Canaris not to take the matter any further and to basically keep quiet about all that he had been told.
While Canaris and the Abwehr were tasked with hunting out opponents of Hitler, he himself was working with some of the conspirators. He appointed his friend, Hans Oster, to be his deputy in the Abwehr. Oster played a key role in developing the resistance movement against Hitler in Nazi Germany. By doing this, the Abwehr could all but cover the tracks of these people from Himmler’s Gestapo.
From 1943 on, Canaris actively worked against Hitler and with the Allies in an effort to bring an end to the war. In April 1943, he secretly met Commander George Earle, F D Roosevelt’s personal representative for the Balkans in Turkey. They discussed ways in which the war could be brought to an end. In the summer of 1943, Canaris secretly met General Stuart Menzies, Chief of British Intelligence, and William Donovan, head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in Santander, Spain. Once again, Canaris discussed his ideas on how to end the war – a ceasefire in the west, the elimination of Hitler and the continuation of the war in the east. Roosevelt was greatly angered by the fact that Donovan had met a very high-ranking figure in the Nazi war machine and refused to discuss the proposals put forward by Canaris. Donovan was also brought to heel by the president who believed that the head of the OSS had exceeded his authority.
Himmler had never developed a positive relationship with Canaris and it is possible that the head of the SS actively worked to bring down the head of the Abwehr. In February 1944, Hitler dismissed Canaris and replaced him with Walter Schellenberg. Most of the Abwehr was then merged with the SD – giving Himmler far more influence in its work. Canaris was placed under house arrest and was in such a position when the attempted assassination of Hitler occurred in July 1944.
Canaris had used his position as head of the Abwehr to cover his tracks in all that he did. However, this all ended after the failure of the July Bomb Plot of 1944. Canaris, along with other senior figures in the Nazi regime, were arrested. Himmler, the great rival of Canaris, was effectively given carte blanch by Hitler to arrest anyone considered to be disloyal and Himmler needed little encouragement to arrest Canaris. He was imprisoned at the Gestapo headquarters in Berlin. Here he was kept in a cellar, in solitary confinement and in chains. Incriminating entries in his diary were considered to be all the evidence that the government needed to establish his guilt.
Because of his very high rank in the Nazi machine, Canaris had to endure far greater hardships than most of the others arrested. He was given just a third of the normal measly food rations for prisoners at the Prinz Albrechtstrasse jail, his cell was kept permanently illuminated and when the winter set in, his cell was not heated. The former head of the Abwehr was also made to scrub floors while SS men stood around mocking him.
On February 7th, 1945, Canaris was sent to Flossenburg concentration camp. Despite all manner of brutal treatment, Canaris denied any part in the July Bomb Plot. He also managed to ensure that people in the resistance movement who he knew about were not implicated. In the final few weeks of the war, two SS officers – Thorbeck and Huppenkothen – were sent to Flossenburg to kill Canaris and others who were there charged with involvement in the bomb plot. After a ‘trial’, Canaris, stripped naked, was hanged. Also hanged on the same day – April 9th 1945 – was his close friend Hans Oster. Their bodies were left to rot on the gallows that the SS had hastily erected.
Thorbeck and Huppenkothen stood trial after the war but a court in 1956 ruled that the Nazi government did have the right to execute those deemed to be traitors and that the execution of Canaris was, in effect, legal.
Politics
He appreciated Hitler’s anti-Versailles programme and his own pathological fear of Russia and communism found expression in support for open reaction under Weimar. Nonetheless, the cultivated Canans disliked the mob violence and brutality of Nazism and this equivocacy increased after his appointment as Chief of the Abwehr.
His opposition to some of Hitler’s policies and his contacts with Resistance circles did not prevent him from fulfilling his duties as head of counter-intelligence or even proposing such measures during the war as the identification of Jews by a yellow star.
He knew all about the crimes of the Gestapo and, though he had objected initially to SS methods in Poland (especially the brutal measures against the Polish intelligentsia, nobility and clergy), he obliged his subordinates to co-operate with the Security Services. His relationship to his former pupil Reinhard Heydrich, whom he had trained as a naval officer, was one of bitter rivalry while at the same time they were socially intimate neighbours. He protected himself and his men from the prying SD by obtaining documents concerning Heydrich’s alleged non-Aryan antecedents, yet at his funeral Canaris delivered a eulogy in which he described the Gestapo Chief as a ‘great man and a true friend’.
Canaris’s double role in the Abwehr and his desire to bring Hitler down, mixed with a patriotic dread of Germany’s defeat, prevented him from taking a clear-cut stand in the Resistance.
Personality
As head of the Abwehr, Canaris proved himself an incompetent dilettante whose judgement was consistently unsound and whose political and military information about the enemy was minimal. A pessimistic recluse, whose nerve failed before each Nazi adventure only to turn into effusive admiration for Hitler once it succeeded, Canaris was constantly beset by Hamlet-like doubts about his role.