Canaris

The Life and Death of Hitler's Spymaster

Michael Mueller

• Publisher: Frontline Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781473894334
• eBook ISBN: 9781473894662
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military Biographies
• Index: History

This biography of the Nazi intelligence chief who spied both for and against Hitler examines the life of one of WWII's most intriguing figures.

An early supporter of Adolph Hitler, Wilhelm Canaris became chief of German military intelligence before secretly turning against the Nazi regime at the start of World War II. Throughout his career, few who knew him ever understood his plans. Even today, historians find Wilhelm Canaris a man of mystery among Hitler's top lieutenants.
The great protector of German opposition to Hitler, Canaris was also the one who prepared the Third Reich's major expansion plans. While he motivated those who were eager to bring down Hitler, he also hunted them as conspirators—one of the many contradictions he was forced to live with in order to stay in control of the Nazi spy network.
This superbly researched biography follows Canaris's career from his first dabbling in the intelligence business during World War I through his time as head of the Abwehr to his execution in 1945 for his role in the July Plot. A highly readable account, it tells the story of an apparently old-fashioned naval officer, drawn into the web of the Nazi regime.

PART I

OFFICER OF HIS MAJESTY

1

A Naval Cadet from the Ruhr

Wilhelm Canaris was born on 1 January 1887 ‘with a silver spoon in his mouth’, as his biographer Abshagen wrote, to an upper-class, wealthy family in Dortmund Applerbek.1 His father was technical director of the Applerbek metal plant and became later a board member of a large foundry at Duisburg, part of the Rheinisches Bergbau-und Hüttenwesen A.G. Metallurgy. Mining was the family tradition, going at least as far back as a maternal great-grandfather.

The Canarisi family itself can be traced back to fourteenth-century Como. In the seventeenth century several branches of it left Italy for the Kur-States of the Rhine.2 In 1880, Wilhelm’s father Carl Canaris married Auguste Amelie Popp, daughter of a senior forester at Altershausen in the Duchy of Saxony, and brother Carl and sister Anna were born in 1881 and 1883 respectively, after which the family moved to Dortmund. (Carl graduated in mining at Berlin and was eventually director-general of the August-Thyssen metal plant at Duisburg, and of Krauss-Maffei at Munich. Anna Canaris married engineer Rudolf Buck, later head of the Buderusschen ironworks).3

The political ideas of the technical elite in nineteenth-century Germany were invariably national-liberal or conservative and loyal to the monarchy. Kaiser Wilhelm II saw himself as a ‘naval emperor’ whose destiny was to make Germany into a world naval power.4 Shortly after ascending the throne, the twenty-nine-year-old Kaiser assured naval officers that his ‘last thought would be with the Navy just as grandfather had once said that his dying thoughts would be for the Army’.5 Naval propaganda infiltrated ‘all political forces, from the conservatives to the liberal left to the social democrats’.6 In 1897 when Admiral Alfred Tirpitz became state secretary at the Reich Admiralty, he coordinated a naval building programme aimed primarily at matching the British Royal Navy. This enforced build-up of a High Seas Fleet robbed German foreign policy of its freedom to manoeuvre and led Germany into that encirclement by Britain, France and Russia so feared by Bismarck. Ultimately, it would bring about the First World War in 1914.7

The Kaiser’s enthusiasm for the sea lured an increasing number of the sons of middle- and upper-class families, including Wilhelm Canaris, into careers as naval officers. In April 1898 after three years in pre-secondary school he passed the acceptance examination for the Steinbart-Real High School Duisburg, and the next day took his place in a class of thirty-six pupils.8 His fellow students remembered him as calm, reserved, even occasionally taciturn, but well liked.9 He was amongst his own kind, sons of the upper class, whose fathers were judges, doctors or businessmen. A high point of the first two school years was the annual sports festival at Kettwig. A contemporary report evinces the militaristic character of the institution:

At six in the morning the headmaster would face his troop of scholars, paraded in two military files, for ‘Appell’. The ‘platoon leaders’ would deliver their reports and then came the order ‘Off caps for prayer’. Accompanied by the impressive town band, hundreds of strong, youthful voices would then sing the hymn of the day. After terse military commands, the squad of fresh, happy young men marched off . . .10

The festivals were discontinued in 1900, probably replaced by ‘terrain games’ on set afternoons when the military spirit would be encouraged by orienteering, map-reading, distance estimation and bivouac-making.11

Canaris was the only pupil of his class with ambitions to be a career officer, although many boys who obtained their Abitur (matriculation certificate) at the Steinbart High School later joined the Navy as officer cadets. The Ruhr with its trade and heavy industry had always had close links to the Navy and shipbuilding. In an age of great technical strides the demand was now for naval applicants with a good education in science. This was in contrast to the Army officer corps, where noble origins or a family tradition of service was more important than education, but even in the Army the modern military – though opposed by the traditionalists – had begun to recruit Abituriente with good technical and scientific backgrounds. Between 1898 and 1905, the year when Canaris began his naval career, the percentage of Abituriente of each annual intake rose from 21 per cent to 55 per cent, and by 1909 75 per cent of the officer entry was Abitur-based.12 Kaiser Wilhelm II supported this new development. By his Cabinet Order of 29 March 1890, those of ‘noble mind’ in addition to ‘noble birth’ were eligible to be ‘officer aspirants’. As ‘bearers of the future’, sons of such ‘honourable bourgeois houses in which love of King and Fatherland, a warm heart for the soldierly profession and a Christian upbringing and education’ prevailed were now to be admitted.13

Wilhelm Canaris was a prototype of this future naval officer, but his family did not approve, for there had never been a career officer in the family before. His father attempted to force the boy to abandon his naval dreams by making him apply for entry to the Bavarian 1st Heavy Cavalry Regiment at Munich.14 Fate took a hand, though, when Carl Canaris died unexpectedly, aged fifty-two, on 26 September 1904 while on vacation at Bad Nauheim.15 In March 1905 Wilhelm obtained his Abitur. His good grades in English, French, Latin and Greek laid the foundations for his future intelligence career but he also did well in Natural Science, Geography and History; his form-master laid emphasis on his enthusiasm for laboratory work. In German he obtained a ‘satisfactory’, in Art ‘unsatisfactory’.16

On 1 April 1905 Canaris went with his certificate to the old Deck-Officers’ School at Kiel, one of 159 members of ‘Crew 05’, as the naval cadet entry was designated in the training ship tradition. His mother had yielded to her son’s wishes and taken him before the Sea Cadet Acceptance Commission even before he had matriculated, and she agreed to foot the not inconsiderable cost of the first four years’ naval training, a social safeguard to keep undesirable elements out of the naval officer corps.17

After completing the initial course of infantry training, Canaris was drafted with fifty fellow cadets aboard the Imperial Navy training ship SMS Stein (2,850 tonnes, a fully rigged three-master with steam auxiliaries) and made voyages to Skagen, Iceland and the Mediterranean.18 The ship’s complement was twenty officers, 449 NCOs and ratings, fifty naval cadets and 210 boys. Stein was notorious for its harsh regime.19 Before breakfast the cadets had to climb to each of the three topmasts. They were required to scrub the decks with sand and stone like common mariners, learned to ward off sleep in standing night watches, were instructed in reefing, furling and generally handling the ship’s rig in all states of wind and weather.20 Young Canaris’s will to master the fatiguing training routine met with approval from one of his instructors, Richard Protze,21 who in later years became his subordinate at the Abwehr, and found him reserved and adaptable with a dry sense of humour.22

At the beginning of 1906 Stein completed her voyage and Canaris was promoted to Fahnrich zur See, midshipman.23 On 1 April 1906 at the Kiel Naval College24 he began the twelve-month course in which ‘Training as an Officer and a Gentleman’ was very important.25 As future representatives of the military and social elite, the midshipmen were introduced to the rigorous code of honour of the naval officer corps and the strict caste system: deck officers at the bottom, above them torpedo and ordnance officers, then the engineers and finally at the top were the navigators. The officers’ course included gunnery, torpedo and infantry training.26 Finally in the autumn of 1907 came the passing-out ceremony in which the cadets swore the oath of allegiance to the Kaiser in the courtyard of the Naval College.27

On 1 November 1907 Canaris shipped out on the steamer Cap Frio to report twenty-four days later aboard the small cruiser SMS Bremen on the East American Station where its duty was to protect German interests in the Central and South American region. In his first service assessment signed on 10 June 1908 by Kapitän zur See Alberts, the opinion was that ‘he had trained his seamen well and treated them correctly, but could be more energetic. Towards superior officers Canaris is always tactful and modest. He integrates well into the officers’ mess and has made an earnest and composed social impression. He has good qualities of character and is a well-liked member of the mess.’ This assessment shows the value placed on social integration in ships of the Imperial Navy. Alberts continued: ‘He is good at Theory, talented in Practice and during the shipyard lay-up delivered a well-prepared address to his platoons. Speaks fairly good English . . . leadership very good. Knowledge of ship very good. Navigational calculations sure and conscientious, very reliable support for the navigation officer. Gunnery very good, nautical knowledge good.’28 On relinquishing command of Bremen to Kapitän zur See Albert Hopman at Punta Arenas, the retiring captain wrote of Canaris: ‘He had been trained as captain’s adjutant and promises to become a very good officer as soon as he gains more self-confidence. Military and social forms blameless. Despite a certain shyness socially very well liked for his modest manner.’29 This may not have fitted the desired image of daring and Prussian impetuosity but accurately summed up Canaris, of whom it was generally said later that despite having gained the soldierly attributes, there remained something unsoldierly about him. He was promoted Leutnant zur See on 28 September 1908.30 Kapitän Hopman, who had accepted Canaris as his adjutant, agreed with his predecessor’s opinion and spoke of Canaris’s ‘iron industry and unconditional reliability’.31 He seemed destined for a glittering career.

From Punta Arenas Bremen rounded the Horn and showed the flag at Buenos Aires, receiving the typical fanatical welcome accorded to German warships by the patriotic and nationalistic expatriate community of those pre-First World War years. At the time there were 10,000 Germans in Buenos Aires and 30,000 in Argentina as a whole; they were mostly business people, engineers, technicians and farmers, and German instructors trained the Argentine Army. ‘The German colony gave us a wonderful welcome,’ Hopman recalled, ‘quite apart ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Foreword
• PART I: OFFICER OF HIS MAJESTY
• PART II: THE STRUGGLE AGAINST THE REPUBLIC
• PART III: RISE UNDER THE SWASTIKA
• PART IV: FINIS GERMANIAE
• PART V: THE TRIUMPH OF THE BARBARIANS
• PART VI: HITLER’S REVENGE
• Notes
• Sources and Bibliography
• Plate section