Nein!: Standing up to Hitler 1935–1944. Paddy Ashdown

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       Wilhelm Canaris

      At a little before eight o’clock on the morning of 2 January 1935, a slight and rather unprepossessing man with sad china-blue eyes and prematurely white hair for a forty-eight-year-old walked through the front door of Tirpitzufer 72–76, an imposing five-storey granite building a kilometre or so from Hitler’s Chancellery. Standing by the small concierge’s kiosk just inside the front door, a casual observer not in the know (the visitor’s presence that day was a state secret) would not have marked the small figure down as anyone of particular importance. True, his admiral’s uniform and his complexion, ruddy with the lash of salt breezes, told of a life at sea. But senior military figures were two a penny in Berlin these days. This man’s dress looked ‘shop-soiled and old’, and his bearing far from military, so that the observer might have imagined that he was perhaps retired, rather than someone at the very top of Chancellor Hitler’s hierarchy. ‘He gave the impression of a civilian, rather than a senior German officer,’ said one commentator.

      The admiral walked up a flight of steps set between two fluted Doric pillars and across the glistening tiled floor of the Tirpitzufer entrance hall to a creaky lift with a reputation for breaking down, positioned to one side of a balustraded stairway sweeping down from the first floor. He entered the lift and, pressing the button for the third floor, was duly deposited in front of a pair of heavy oak doors which led through an outer office to an empty, high-ceilinged room, which echoed to his footsteps. Looking around, the newcomer would have noted to himself, with the habit of a man used to taking over other people’s jobs, that his predecessor had taken all the furniture.

Wilhelm Canaris’s journey to his new post as head of the Abwehr,* Germany’s principal foreign intelligence service, had been a long and romantic one. It had taken an inexperienced young naval officer and made him into what a contemporary described as ‘one of the most interesting phenomena of the period … a combination of disinterested idealism and of shrewdness such as is particularly rare in Germany. In Germany one very seldom finds the cleverness of a snake and the purity of a dove combined in a single personality.’

      Born to a wealthy industrialist near Dortmund on 1 January 1887, Wilhelm Franz Canaris was a few years younger than both Ludwig Beck and Carl Goerdeler. According to family legend he was a descendant of the nineteenth-century Greek admiral, liberation hero and politician Constantine Kanaris. Canaris liked to repeat this story in preference to the truth, which was that his ancestors were the Canarisi family from the area around Lake Como in northern Italy, who took their winemaking skills to the Mosel region of Germany in the late seventeenth century. There was indeed something not quite German – something more of the south – about Wilhelm Canaris. In later life he would express a dislike of cold northern climes, and a preference for the warmth, charm and easy living of the south. His personality too seemed more in tune with the sinuosity and subtlety of the Mediterranean than with the eternal search for logic, resolution and mastery of the Atlantic races.

      A pious Protestant all his life, he was nevertheless fascinated by the spiritualism and rituals of the Catholic Church, and believed in the supernatural. Moral precepts played an established part in his life – though not as clearly defined a part as with Goerdeler or Beck. Canaris’s compass, unlike theirs, gave him a firm general direction of travel built on strong principles. But when it came to the application of these, he was serpentine, flexible and full of ruses and devices. A few meanderings here and there were of little consequence, provided his basic moral foundation remained uncompromised. His character was founded on a deep strain of ambivalence. One observer commented, ‘Canaris had a profound sense of adventure, including the adventure of evil itself.’ His was a mind capable of coping with paradox, and, in the right circumstances, he did not find it difficult to accept that ends could justify means, provided they were carefully chosen and judiciously applied.

      One other unusual feature marked Canaris’s personality. He never looked back. What had gone had gone, and was of no consequence.The only thing that mattered to him was what was ahead.

      Wilhelm Canaris had a gentle disposition. ‘He hated violence in itself,’ a friend noted. ‘[He] was repelled by war … [and had] an exaggerated love for animals. “Anyone who does not love dogs, I judge out of hand to be an evil man,” he once announced … I never witnessed in Canaris a trace of crudity or brutality … only sudden revelations of his deep-seated humanity.’ Another of his contemporaries noted that he was, in all his dealings and whatever the provocation, invariably ‘a kind person’. His wife Erika described him as a man of ‘tender emotions’.