a difficult period too, after much of its network of intelligence stations across the Continent had been blown. A whole new British spy network was being constructed in great secrecy, and without the knowledge of anyone apart from the MI6 chief Sir Hugh Sinclair and his closest advisers. This was known, rather melodramatically, as the ‘Z Organisation’, after its creator ‘Colonel Z’, otherwise known as Claude Edward Marjoribanks Dansey. The Russian spy agencies, meanwhile, though still capable of effective work, were hobbled by the repeated waves of Stalin’s purges.
Canaris’s value to Hitler lay in the priceless information he was able to bring his chief, including, crucially, both the military plans and the political intentions of his foreign enemies. Britain and France, with their many high-level admirers of Hitler and their public policies of appeasement, were rich sources of information for Canaris’s Abwehr. Before the war Canaris boasted to Juan March (or was it a threat, given March’s dealings with the British?): ‘I have penetrated the [British] Naval Intelligence Division and MI6. So if any German, however important or discreet, felt tempted to work with the British, be sure I should find out.’ According to his own claim, Canaris had one very high-level source close enough to the British cabinet to enable him to assure Hitler in early 1936 that if Germany marched into the Versailles-protected demilitarised zone of the Rhineland, Britain would not energetically oppose this.
The Abwehr chief himself set the tone of his organisation from his Spartan office on the third floor of the Tirpitzufer. At one end of a room of modest proportions was Canaris’s desk, behind which were three full-length windows and a glazed door leading onto a small balcony looking over the Landwehr Canal. The desk was unadorned except for a routine scatter of papers, a model of his old cruiser the Dresden, and a small paperweight in the shape of the three monkeys – ‘See no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil.’ Otherwise the room was largely empty save for two or three chairs, a bookshelf full of books, many of them on music and the arts, and an iron camp bed on which Canaris would from time to time take a nap. Only three photographs hung on his walls – one of Franco, one of a handsome young Hungarian hussar, and one of his beloved dachshund Seppl, which took pride of place on the wall immediately opposite his desk.
The house near Berlin’s Schlachtensee in which Canaris lived with his wife Erika, their daughters Eva and Brigitte, a Polish cook, a Moroccan former prisoner of war who acted as the family servant, and two dachshunds, was frugal by the standards of high officials in Hitler’s Reich. It had six bedrooms but no grand reception rooms, a modest garden amongst trees and a shared fence with the Heydrichs next door.
Canaris’s style of management was relaxed. One of his senior colleagues described it as ‘passive leadership … under the pretence of the greatest apparent activity’. The Tirpitzufer was the only government building in Berlin where the familiar second-person pronoun ‘du’ was in common usage rather than the more formal ‘Sie’. Canaris (known affectionately as ‘old white head’ and ‘the little sailor’) was not a micro-manager. He set broad tasks, and then let his section chiefs get on with it. He hated bureaucracy, and often caused his subordinates despair by his inability to read and clear documents in a timely fashion. Erwin Lahousen wrote:
Canaris was the most difficult superior I have [ever] encountered. Contradictory in his instructions, given to whims, not always just [but] always mysterious, he had … intellectual and above all human qualities which raised him far above the military rubber stamps and marionettes that most of his colleagues and superiors were … He was not at all a technical expert in his work, rather he was a great dilettante. The underground circles that he … gathered around himself were as colourful and heterogeneous as his own personality. Men of all classes and professions, people whose horizons were broad and narrow, idealists and political adventurers, sober rationalists and imaginative mystics, conservative noblemen and Freemasons, theosophists, half-Jews or Jews, Germans and non-Germans … men and women – all of them united only [by their affection for him] and … by their resistance to Hitler and his system. This circle was by no means directed by secret orders. Rather it was an intellectual circle constantly influenced by slight or direct hints … which he guided by active intervention only in rare cases. Only a few initiates received concrete instructions, and even these were not always clear.
‘Old white head’ was also trusted and, it seems, genuinely loved by the more junior members of the Abwehr: ‘Admiral Canaris was absolutely trustworthy, clever, extremely gifted, honest, talented above [the] average and a person of sterling character,’ wrote one of his subordinates after the war. ‘He was well fitted for his position from a personal point of view. The things he [was] able to do for the Abwehr in the face of every obstacle could have been accomplished by no one else.’
But if Canaris was relaxed in his management style, he was utterly precise when it came to the standards he demanded of the Abwehr. His motto, borrowed from Germany’s great World War I spy chief Walter Nikolai, was ‘Le service de renseignements est l’apanage des gentilhommes. Si il est confié à d’autres, il s’écroule’ (The profession of spying should only be conferred upon gentlemen. If others get involved, disaster follows). He also discouraged an obsessional approach to the job: ‘An intelligence officer worthy of his profession,’ he once said to his staff, ‘should be in bed by ten. After that, all is nonsense and stupidity.’ While women spies were useful, in Canaris’s Abwehr any officer who slept with one would be dismissed. He made it clear to his officers that their job was exclusively to gather intelligence, and did not include assassination, torture, blackmail or coercion – such unpleasant things should be left to others. An ability to lie, on the other hand, was a prerequisite. ‘Lying is our trade,’ he instructed. ‘Lying is an art. If you cannot lie, there is no place for you in the Abwehr.’ The great theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose role as the ‘pastor’ of the resistance is often underestimated, famously gave this pragmatic philosophy theological underpinning by proclaiming that God required a lie if this was the only way to protect a deeper truth against evil.
The Abwehr expanded explosively under Canaris’s leadership, growing from 150 staff when he took it over in early 1935, to 1,000 in 1937. By 1943 it had surged in size to 30,000, with an annual budget in today’s terms of close to £100 million. The organisation was based around four ‘operational sections’: Section I, dealing with secret intelligence; Section II, sabotage and disruption; Section III, counter-intelligence; and a foreign department which took responsibility for overseas relations, including political and military evaluation. There was also an ‘administration’ section called ‘Section Z’. On the surface this dealt with mundane administrative matters such as archives, legal affairs, personnel and technical equipment. But Section Z, commanded by the Hitler-hating Hans Oster, was also the home of ‘the Abwehr within the Abwehr’ – a special and highly secret cell whose job it was to frustrate Hitler’s plans and undermine, first his march to war, and later, as things developed, his chances of victory. Known as ‘the Oster circle’ and ‘the Civilians’ – because of Oster’s habit of wearing civilian clothes (despite Canaris’s disapproval) and the culture of informality within his unit – Section Z was treated with some suspicion, even hostility, inside the Abwehr. In time it would become the nerve-centre of the entire high-level German conspiracy against Hitler.
One further addition hugely extended the power and reach of Canaris’s organisation. Though operating under a separate command, a military unit called the Brandenburg Division was attached to and tasked by the Abwehr. The ‘Brandenburgers’, as they were called, were arguably the first ever special forces unit. Unlike British special forces units, which in the early years of the war were used for pinprick raids, they were deployed, like special forces today, exclusively on strategic tasks. Multilingual, multinational (they included many Russian and Caucasian troops), highly mobile and superbly trained and equipped, their job was to operate behind enemy lines ahead of an invading force, disrupting communications and sabotaging bridges and command structures, in much the same way as Britain’s SAS did in the latter stages of the war in Europe.
As 1937 drew to a close, Hitler’s successful occupation of the Rhineland without, as Canaris had
