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

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СКАЧАТЬ the end of that year, the slight figure of ‘Señor Reed Rosas’ turned up again, this time in Madrid, where he took out a lease on a flat not far from the German embassy. Wilhelm Canaris, alias Reed Rosas, alias ‘Carl’, codename ‘Kika’ (a childhood nickname which means ‘peeker’), was on a spying mission for his country.

      Despite suffering recurrent bouts of malaria, exacerbated by the excessively hot summers and bleak winters of Madrid, Canaris found that his posting to Spain was the start of a love affair with the Iberian peninsula and its people that would last the rest of his life. ‘I like Italians, just as I like Greeks and Spaniards,’ he told a friend. ‘If a Spaniard gives me his word of honour, I place confidence in it. I am much more cautious towards the Greeks and especially the Italians. In Italy sincerity is often camouflaged behind different colours, like the slices on a Neapolitan cake.’

      Ordered home through Italy, Canaris, still masquerading as Señor Rosas, and accompanied by a Spanish priest also travelling under a false identity, left Spain for France on 21 February 1916. Both men claimed to be travelling to Switzerland to take the cure for tuberculosis (an illness it was easy for Canaris to feign because of his malaria). After crossing the French–Italian border without difficulty, the pair headed for Domodossola on the Swiss–Italian border, thirty kilometres north of the Italian lakes.

      By now, however, the French and the British had alerted the Italian border guards to look out for a Chilean passport in the name of Reed Rosas. The fugitives were arrested on 24 February, and summarily thrown into jail. An extensive period of interrogation in the none-too-gentle hands of Italian counter-intelligence followed, during which Canaris took to biting his lip so that he could convincingly spit blood to back up his claim to tuberculosis. Soon German and Chilean diplomatic wheels began to turn in Madrid. Under pressure from the Chilean government, the Italian authorities agreed not to hang the pair, and bundled them on board a freighter bound for Cartagena. On 15 March, Canaris arrived back in Madrid, emaciated, convulsed with shivering and racked with a roaring malarial fever.

      The experience of being arrested, jailed, very nearly hanged and struck down with malaria ought to have put him off spying forever. But it didn’t. Over the next year he made the contacts and put together the spy networks in Spain and Portugal that would form the foundation of his later work on the Iberian peninsula during the 1930s and 40s.

      He swiftly became a familiar of the shadowy demi-monde of spies, corrupt officials, bankers, money-launderers, arms traders, adventurers, and all the hangers-on who circle like scavengers around rotten meat in the neutral spaces of any conflict. Among these were two men who would be of special interest to him in the future. The first was Basil Zaharoff, a director of the British engineering company Vickers Armstrong, an occasional British agent and one of the world’s most notorious arms salesmen. The second was a Mallorcan fisherman and tobacco-smuggler called Juan March. March, whose fingers were in almost every dubious Iberian pie and who ended his life a very rich man because of it, was one of Canaris’s most important agents. According to rumour and the voluminous files held on him in the British National Archives, he also performed the same function for the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, also known as MI6), a fact of which both sides were probably very well aware.

      In late 1916, with his work in Spain finished, Canaris made a second attempt to get back to Germany, finally reaching safe territory on 9 October 1916, when he was landed from the German submarine U-35 at the Croatian port of Cattaro.

      On his return to Germany he was awarded the Iron Cross First Class and immediately posted back to regular service, commanding a succession of U-Boats in the Mediterranean and sinking several Allied ships before the war ended.

      After such a war, what could the thirty-one-year-old Canaris do next for adventure? He began casting around to find a stage on which he could use his talents and his love of conspiracy. Politics was the obvious answer, and there was more than enough of it to go round in the chaos and revolution of post-Versailles Germany. In the early post-war years Canaris was deeply involved in combating the threat of communism, which at the time seemed poised to overwhelm Germany. He was an early activist in the formation of the anti-communist Freikorps paramilitary units which roamed the country. In this role he almost certainly had dealings with his old Iberian adversary Basil Zaharoff, who was at the time busy selling weapons from his German factories to anyone who would buy them.

      In the post-Bismarck German constitutional settlement, the army’s position was almost that of a state within a state. High-level politics and high-level military command occupied a deeply enmeshed common space at the pinnacle of the German state, and often flowed into each other in a way unknown in most other European democracies. Although still only a very minor player, this was the space in which Wilhelm Canaris had now arrived, and the space in which he would, with only brief exceptions, spend the rest of his life.

      But the young naval lieutenant’s hyperactivity in 1919 was not confined to politics and conspiracies. He was also pursuing romance.

      His first love had been an English girl, Edith Hill, the daughter of a wealthy northern industrialist to whom Canaris, a lifelong anglophile, had become more or less engaged. At the outbreak of war, however, Miss Hill terminated the relationship on the grounds that it would be improper to marry a citizen of her nation’s enemy. Around 1917, probably after his well-publicised escape from South America, he met and fell in love with Erika Waag, also the daughter of an industrialist. When peace came, he assiduously tracked her down and, three days after finding her, proposed. They married in 1919, and went on to have two daughters. The marriage was not on the whole a contented one. Erika’s passion for music and the arts, and Wilhelm’s for politics and plotting, did not always sit easily together. Canaris was never likely to be the kind of man who would submit himself to uxorious domesticity.

      In June 1923, doubtless in an attempt to keep him away from more political mischief, Canaris was posted to the cadet-training ship the Berlin, a superannuated pre-war cruiser which should have been despatched long ago to the breaker’s yard. He found his fellow officers boorish, the job monotonous, and his enforced exclusion from intrigue unbearable. Depression – always quite close to the surface of the Canaris personality – set in. He believed his naval career was over, and toyed with resignation.

      The one bright spot in his life on the Berlin was a slim, fresh-faced, fair-haired young man with an artistic temperament and a high-pitched voice (he was nicknamed ‘Billy Goat’). Despite the age difference between Canaris and Reinhard Heydrich, there was much which brought the two men together. Heydrich was teased by his fellow cadets because of his effeminate appearance, just as Canaris had been teased for his short stature. Both men were outsiders. Neither found the upper-class overlay of life in the German navy either comfortable or congenial. Observers noted the ‘father and son’ relationship that developed between the two. On some occasions young cadet Heydrich, an accomplished violinist, would visit the Canaris home, where he accompanied Erika on the piano, while her husband, complete with chef’s hat, cooked his favourite dish, saddle of wild boar in a croute made of crumbled black bread and red wine. In the years to come, after Heydrich, then the head of Himmler’s Sicherheitsdienst (SD), had himself married, the Canarises and the Heydrichs would twice choose to live as neighbours in the same street.

      After the war, Heydrich’s wife Lina described the relationship between the two couples: ‘Mrs Canaris played the violin and so soon we came to see each other frequently, and this social intercourse … was not to be interrupted until the death of my husband … We used to see each other on our birthday parties; the two men went hunting together; no festivities in our houses passed without our taking part in them … We had a picture of the Dresden in the Battle of the Falkland Isles. It was a present from Canaris; he had painted it himself.’

      It seems that the relationship between the two couples was actually rather more complex than Lina Heydrich’s post-war description makes it seem. By the time they were next-door neighbours in the area СКАЧАТЬ