Canaris was executed a few weeks before the end of the war. Hardcover , pages. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about Hitler's Spy Chief , please sign up. I have read, and believe, reports on how Canaris worked to undermine the Nazi regime years before WWII began due to his belief Hitler and the Third Reich were dragging Germany into a war it could not win. Are there any personal journals by Canaris proving this to be true? To my knowledge, even the British Government has not declared Canaris to have been aiding them in defeating Germany.

See 1 question about Hitler's Spy Chief…. Lists with This Book. This book is not yet featured on Listopia. Nov 18, Lewis Weinstein rated it it was amazing Shelves: It is an excellent portrayal of a complicated man with whom my fictional character Berthold Becker has a complicated relationship.

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I am intrigued by the fictional possibilities for Berthold suggested by these extracts from Bassett's book If Britain was ever to break with Soviet Russia it would need Canaris and the German opposition as an ally View all 5 comments. I read a decent bit about WWII. I knew of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris and the Abwehr but really nothing of substance. In that regard this book was very interesting. I am skeptical of some of the conclusions drawn, but to Bassett's credit whenever he is connecting the dots with only circumstantial evidence at hand, he informs the reader of such.

Wilhelm Canaris - Wikipedia

The overall thrust of the book was that Canaris was a good Christian and a loyal patriot who, after an initial honeymoon with the Nazi regime, fought it by ev I read a decent bit about WWII. The overall thrust of the book was that Canaris was a good Christian and a loyal patriot who, after an initial honeymoon with the Nazi regime, fought it by every means at his disposal, sometimes even overtly passing critical info to his enemies that meant the death of German soldiers.

And that is my biggest complaint about the book. No journal of Canaris survives and for that matter, very few records that give personal insight into this man's thoughts his family fled to Spain and refused to ever talk about the Admiral or the war. Consequently I would have preferred a more neutral book regarding his motives, with the focus instead being on his actions much how the early part of the book was with his growing up and WWI naval service.

Assigning intent to one of the key figures of the Nazi regime and repeating the Mantra of a good man stuck in a bad organization may actually do more harm for the point than if the biography had just been told. Still, if you are interested in this era, there were several insights into the lead up to and the war itself that are worth the read and as I mentioned the early years of his life are some of the most interesting to read about in the book.

Not a spectacular biography but enjoyable nonetheless. I give it a solid three stars. Jul 06, Kate Forsyth rated it liked it Shelves: Wilhelm Canaris was the enigmatic head of the Abwehr, the German secret service. This detailed and in-depth examination of his life and work is not for the c Wilhelm Canaris was the enigmatic head of the Abwehr, the German secret service. This detailed and in-depth examination of his life and work is not for the casual reader it assumes a wide knowledge of the Nazi era and the Valkyrie plot , but it is utterly fascinating and convincingly argues that Canaris had been feeding secrets to the British for many years and was in fact protected to some extent by them.

Jul 21, Tim Pendry rated it liked it Shelves: This a book with insights but, I am afraid, too few insights to recommend it to the casual rather than the specialist reader who may be unable to see through the speculation and the implicit ideological positioning. However, when we reach , there is a subtle shift in the book from a narrative well told to yet another strike in the never-ending war betwen revisionist conservatives and the mainstream over the conduct of events after Munich.

Interestingly, given the bias, the story has the odd ef This a book with insights but, I am afraid, too few insights to recommend it to the casual rather than the specialist reader who may be unable to see through the speculation and the implicit ideological positioning. Interestingly, given the bias, the story has the odd effect of giving some credence to the old Marxist theory of national socialism as the last refuge of a late imperial military-industrialism faced by the Bolshevik threat.

Canaris was not an aristocrat but he was part of a bourgeois class that had imbibed aristocratic values of war and duty values that, of course, would have been completely alien to actual aristocrats at any time before the rise of the middle classes. What we see here is an old story revisited almost by accident - one of classes who are perfectly prepared to go to war with one another as competing nation states for advantage but who rapidly collaborate internationally when a threat to their hegemony appears from 'below'.

Our current condition is not too dissimilar from this although the ruling elite is more likely to be represented by a graduate euro-socialist or bureaucrat in an international agency or NGO than an officer in the imperial navy or a landed gentleman running a ministry.


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The evidence for this class interpretation lies everywhere in the first third of the book and beyond, pehaps most poignantly in the strange appearance of at least three Jews at different times as agents of German and national socialist espionage! There is Canaris' undoubted involvement in protecting the cold blooded murder of Luxembourg and Liebknecht and there is his personal network of alliances with arms manufacturers and bankers that played a critical role in Nazi support for General Franco.

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Indeed, one might reverse the usual claim that Hitler supported Franco in an ideological drive to expand international fascism into a far more realistic model where conservative nationalists inveigled the Nazi into supporting one of their own. Whoever Canaris was by , he was a ruthless player who may have pragmatically felt like many German conservative nationalists that the nasty little oik running the country was dragging the country to disaster but who was, equally, no stranger to criminal acts. The revisionism that fuels the book from this point on seems to be one of the recurrent 'problems' of history where inconvenient truths have to be explained to salvage an interpretation necessary for the self image of a particular element in society.

I am confidently expecting Labour memoirs and historiography to give thoroughly revisionist perspectives in due course on the alleged unwilling complicity of senior Labour left-wingers in the Blair 'regime' and to claim their 'secret resistance'. It is true I think Bassett demonstrates this that Canaris was horrified by the turn of events within Germany after Kristallnacht.

Canaris was not particularly anti-semitic and also understood better than his bosses that the early easy victories of Nazi aggression were not sustainable without some sort of peace with either the Reds or the Empires. Strategically, Germany can look to the West against the East or look to the East and security and both visions have played their part in German history since Bismarck - as they do 'sotto voce' even today. Canaris was firmly remember the violence against the Spartakists against the East because it was Bolshevik but he may well have had a different view had Russia been Tsarist.

Ideology infected strategy here as elsewhere.

Hitler's Spy Chief

Once Germany had bitten off more than it could chew, there was a relatively short period when flexible cynics might have tried to 'do a deal' with one set of enemies in order to crush collaboratively the other. Bassett concentrates on this 'window of opportunity' but too easily confuses the facts of the matter the 'is' of the story with an implied 'ought' - oh how much happier we would all have been if the generals had overthrown Hitler and a strong Germany resisted and beaten Stalin back.

Canaris was drawn to circles with a similar conservative anti-Bolshevik view in the West and this undoubtedly drew him into dialogues that any reasonable Nazi indeed, any reasonable German in a state of war might reasonably have called treacherous. It is this treachery that Bassett seems at pains to justify and it is true that all spies are 'treacherous' to a degree in that part of their job is to maintain lines of communication with the enemy - whether IRA or Taliban or 'C' in London - so that deals may be struck later. Unfortunately, this truth is spun here into something that the evidence simply does not support.

Bassett speculates so that we see information that could be interpreted more reasonably in one way being interpreted in another in order to praise the man for the ideological reasons that we will come to. It is the nature of espionage that we have very little evidence that is reliable and what evidence that we have may derive from a deliberate intent to tell a particular narrative.


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Similarly, any dealings with the enemy the separate peace feelers with London are part of an elaborate game of maintaining options and advantage in which we simply cannot KNOW what precisely was intended. Contacts with London could be interpreted in many ways and not all of them treacherous. The treacherous aspects do seem to have been there but it would also seem that senior Nazi figures were well aware of them and even almost certainly in the case of Himmler happy to take later advantage if they could.

Moreover, none of the acts that were designed to suggest the back door to London for conservative nationalists need be interpreted in quite so noble terms as Bassett implies. After all, to conservative nationalists sacrificing some of their own hoi polloi might be regarded as a perfectly reasonable price to pay for political advantage, Similarly, like good philosophers, spies can think two or more apparently inconsistent things at the same time and can over-reach themselves in doing so.

We must remember that this was a man who not merely collaborated with Heydrich, albeit as a bureaucratic rival, but who knew him well before he became a Party figure and who lived next door to the man and spent musical evenings with him. Canaris' knowledge of the man may have helped to create seriously defensive moral principles in his more conventional Abwehr but it might easily be interpreted that Heydrich's SD was there to 'do the dirty work' so that the old guard could keep its hands cleans.

What I cannot believe is that Canaris was so horrified by what Heydrich represented that he began to 'plot against the regime'. It really is not that simple. And whatever Canaris was, he was a highly intelligent and rational player who loved his career and being at the centre of things. It is equally probable that, like Gehlen later, he saw the way things were going a bit earlier than most and simply wanted to hedge his bets so that he had a job later. In the end, he miscalculated. It has to be said that he accepted his fate as far as we can understand with enormous dignity. In other words, the 'distance' of complicity and mentality between Canaris and Heydrich is simply not proven but is merely suggested by testimonies that owe a lot to the later need of his officer colleagues in the New Germany to distance themselves from the thugs with whom they had shared power.

They are not liars but they are not telling the total truth. I would have been more inclined to give Bassett, and so Canaris, the benefit of the doubt if there had not been the implicit ideological agenda in the Introduction to the book and in the closing comments and which begins to emerge in force in the account of matters after Again, we must not go too far.

My own view is that Bassett demonstrates sufficiently that Canaris did retain certain standards, did refuse to get down into the mud with his Nazi colleagues, was part of the German nationalist readiness to overthrow Hitler and did undertake a number of highly creditable acts in defiance of Nazi ideology and hegemony.

Where we seem to differ is that all this is not enough to exonerate him or his class because there is enough evidence even in this book that the conservative nationalists only started to take a serious interest in countering national socialism when it looked like defeat might bring crimes to account.

It is true that Canaris wisely saw Hitler's forward foreign policy as potentially disastrous but we should not make too much of this. After all, many loyal Party men I have been there! Yes, we have evidence of private horror at Nazi behaviour but much of this is cast in almost aesthetic and cultural terms rather than in terms of the sort of 'outrage' that affects or infects contemporary international relations discourse. The picture that Bassett seeks to paint is one where a noble class of conservative nationalists, implicitly transnational in their acceptance of chivalric values but proudly patriotic, are outmanouevred by a bunch of rabid gangsters and then nobly risk their lives to recover their country from the fiends' coming apocalypse.

The use of the term 'workers' attracted the attention of the German Army which was now involved in crushing Marxist uprisings. On September 12th, dressed in civilian clothes, Hitler went to a meeting of the German Workers' Party in the back room of a Munich beer hall, with about twenty five people. He listened to a speech on economics by Gottfried Feder entitled, "How and by what means is capitalism to be eliminated?

After the speech, Hitler began to leave when a man rose up and spoke in favor of the German state of Bavaria breaking away from Germany and forming a new South German nation with Austria. This enraged Hitler and he spoke out forcefully against the man for the next fifteen minutes uninterrupted, to the astonishment of everyone. We could use him. By 23 January , the British government received information that Germany intended to invade the Netherlands in February with the aim of using Dutch airfields to launch a strategic bombing offensive intended to achieve a "knock-out" blow against Britain by razing British cities to the ground.

In , Canaris created a new office of air intelligence in the Abwehr and assigned Hauptmann Nikolaus Ritter of the Luftwaffe to be the chief of I. Luft Chief of Air Intelligence. Lang, a spy who operated under the code name: Herman Lang worked as a machinist, draftsman, and assembly inspector for the Carl L.

Norden Company in New York where he had been contracted to manufacture an advanced, top secret military bomber part, the Norden bomb-sight.

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On 8 February , Ritter sent Sebold to New York under the alias of Harry Sawyer and instructed him to set up a shortwave radio-transmitting station to establish contact with the German shortwave station abroad. Duquesne and 32 Nazi spies on charges of relaying secret information on U. Items delivered were labeled 'valuable', and several 'good' and 'very good ' ".

However, in , he was so enticed by the attractive woman the Abwehr provided him that he switched his allegiance. Owens operated as an Abwehr agent under Nikolaus Ritter and went by the code name: Over the course of the war, the Twenty Committee grew to about double-agents.

However, when the Abwehr failed to take any demonstrable countermeasures, the Twenty Committee chose instead to provide its double-agents with disinformation to pass on to Germany. After the outbreak of war between Germany and Poland in September , Canaris visited the front, where he saw the devastation rendered by the German military—seeing Warsaw in flames nearly brought him to tears and it was reported that he exclaimed, "our children's children will have to bear the blame for this".

This made it possible for him to pose as a trusted man for some time. He was promoted to the rank of full Admiral in January With his subordinate Erwin Lahousen , he attempted in the autumn of to form a circle of like-minded Wehrmacht officers.


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At the time, this had little success. Keitel reminded Canaris that he was thinking in terms of "chivalrous war" which did not apply, as this was "a matter of destroying a world ideology". At a conference of senior officers in Berlin, in December , Canaris is quoted as saying "the Abwehr has nothing to do with the persecution of Jews. It is thought that during Operation Barbarossa , the invasion of the Soviet Union , he received a detailed report of all the enemy positions that was known only to the British.

The head of MI6 , Stewart Menzies , who shared Canaris' views opposing Communism, praised Canaris' courage and bravery at the end of the war. In December , Hitler sent Canaris to Spain to conclude an agreement through strong coercion if necessary with Franco for Spanish support in the war against the Allies, but instead of prompting the Spaniard to acquiesce to Hitler's desire, Canaris reported that Franco would not commit Spanish forces until Great Britain was defeated.

The mission was to sabotage American economic targets and demoralise the civilian population inside the United States. However, two weeks later, all were arrested by the FBI thanks to two Abwehr agents who betrayed the mission. Because the Abwehr agents were arrested in civilian clothes, they were subject to court martial by a military tribunal in Washington, D.

All were found guilty and sentenced to death. Two others who cooperated with the FBI received sentences of life imprisonment instead. After , Canaris visited Spain frequently and was probably in contact with British agents from Gibraltar. In , while in occupied France, Canaris is said to have made contact with British agents.

The Wilhelm Canaris Mystery: The Most Dangerous Intelligence Man in the World

Canaris wanted to know the terms for peace if Germany got rid of Hitler. Churchill's reply, sent to him two weeks later, was simple: During Heydrich's posting in Prague , a serious incident put him and Canaris in open conflict. It is also possible that Vatican contacts provided a third route to his British counterparts. Canaris also intervened to save a number of victims from Nazi persecution, including Jews , by getting them out of harm's way; he was instrumental, for example, in getting five hundred Dutch Jews to safety in May The evidence that Canaris was playing a double game grew and, at the insistence of Heinrich Himmler , Hitler dismissed Canaris and abolished the Abwehr in February The HWK coordinated resistance to the allied economic blockade of Germany.

Canaris was arrested on 23 July on the basis of the interrogation of his successor at Military Intelligence, Georg Hansen. Two of the men under suspicion as conspirators who were known in Canaris' circle shot themselves which incited activity from the Gestapo to prove he was, at the very least, privy to the plan against Hitler. Investigations dragged on inconclusively until April , when orders were received to dispose of various remaining prisoners in the 20 July plot. Canaris' personal diary was discovered and presented to Hitler in early April , implicating him in the conspiracy.

He was sentenced to death. Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Ludwig Gehre , Canaris was humiliated before witnesses. A prisoner claimed he heard Canaris tap out a coded message on the wall of his cell on the night before his execution, in which he denied he was a traitor and said he acted out of duty to his country. Erwin von Lahousen and Hans Bernd Gisevius , two of Canaris' main subordinates, survived the war and testified during the Nuremberg trials about Canaris' courage in opposing Hitler.

In , the German High Court upheld the execution of Canaris as legal because the Nazi regime had possessed the right to execute traitors. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. He also said the admiral told him through tapping on the wall of his cell that, "This is the end.