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 around Berlin’s Schlachtensee lake there was already an atmosphere of wariness between the two men, neither of whom was averse to using his wife or his private contacts to keep an eye on the other. On one occasion Erika Canaris was invited to her next-door neighbours’ for an afternoon coffee party. She did not want to go, but Canaris insisted ‘for appearances’ sake’. At the event, Lina Heydrich, who was well aware that the Canaris’s daughter Eva had been severely incapacitated by meningitis, insisted that, in line with Hitler’s new policy of racial purification, ‘We have to kill all disabled children.’ In any normal relationship, this would have caused a permanent rupture between the two families. Instead, the neighbours’ habit of regular, if guarded, social contact seems to have continued uninterrupted. One of his anti-Hitler co-conspirators would later comment on Canaris’s puzzling habit of socialising with even the most extreme Nazis: ‘Canaris considered them to be thugs and crooks, but he had no objection to observing them. It was like living in some well-written crime story.’
Canaris’s ‘penal servitude’ on his cadet-training ship did not last long. In the spring of 1924, to his huge relief, he exchanged naval uniform for civilian clothes and went undercover again, this time in Japan, where he was engaged in a secret joint enterprise with the Japanese for the construction of the U-Boats Germany was prohibited from having under the terms of Versailles. But the project was stillborn when German defence policy changed from trying to deceive the Royal Navy about the building of illicit U-Boats to cooperating with it, in the hope of achieving some relaxation of the Versailles straitjacket.
Canaris was brought back to a Berlin desk job, which he hated with a passion that left him with a lifetime aversion to staff work, bureaucracies and all sedentary jobs. One of his superiors of this time noted perceptively, ‘His troubled soul is appeased only by the most difficult and unusual of tasks.’
True to form, a Berlin desk job did not hold Wilhelm Canaris, now thirty-seven, for long. By the end of 1924, despite government jitters, he was once again deep in backstreet dealings with right-wing bankers and his old spy networks in Spain,creating a series of front companies to cover another attempt at secret ship- and U-Boat-building, this time in Spain and Greece. It was not long before Canaris, assisted by his Mallorcan fisherman friend Juan March, had woven a powerful network of influence in Spain which included Argentine venture capitalists, German industrialists, Spanish shipbuilders, film-makers, bankers, the chief of the Spanish secret police, corrupt officials, government ministers, right-wing members of the Spanish aristocracy, and even the royal family. Inevitably, Canaris’s old adversary-cum-partner, the king of arms dealers, Basil Zaharoff, got to hear what was going on, and tipped off the British.
It was not only the British who now moved against Canaris. Thanks to his right-wing activities, he had made powerful enemies at home. Their chance came when one of Canaris’s front companies, the film-making enterprise Phoebus, went bankrupt. In the ensuing hullabaloo, his attempts to bypass the Versailles Treaty were exposed, along with his right-wing links. An embarrassment to the navy at home and abroad, he was hurriedly withdrawn from Spain and given a posting away from the public eye on another elderly training ship, the Schlesien, on which he served initially as first officer and then, from 30 September 1932, as captain.
It was in this post that, at Hitler’s review of the fleet in 1933, Canaris first met the new German chancellor. Hermann Göring too paid a visit to the Schlesien that year, but it was far less successful. The future head of the Luftwaffe, who was violently and incessantly seasick, took exception to being the butt of some rather laboured inter-service jokes at his expense from one of the Schlesien’s officers. Canaris had to discipline the officer to save his own career, after which the threat quickly passed.
The next crisis was more serious. Canaris liked to be in command, not under it – he was famous for his tetchy and truculent relations with his senior officers. In the late summer of 1934 his immediate superior complained to the head of the navy, Admiral Raeder, about Canaris’s behaviour. Raeder, who had already had to deal with the fallout from his difficult subordinate’s escapades in Spain and elsewhere, decided that enough was enough, and banished the troublemaker to command an isolated Napoleonic naval fortress at Swinemünde on the Baltic coast. Here Canaris whiled away his time cantering his horse along the deserted beach and waiting for something to come along.
In due course it did. In the last weeks of 1934, after an internal struggle between the army and the navy as to who should fill a vacancy at the head of the Abwehr, Canaris got the job. The fact that he was well known to be on very bad terms with Raeder may have helped. Although the Abwehr was officially the German foreign intelligence service, it was organisationally attached to the army general staff, making Canaris, though a senior naval officer, effectively an ‘adopted son’ of what was known at the time as the Reichswehr (the German army). Appointing Canaris, the Führer, an avid devotee of British spy novels, said, ‘What I want is something like the British Secret Service – an order, doing its work with passion.’
What Hitler saw in the forty-seven-year-old rear admiral (Canaris was promoted on his appointment) was a master right-wing conspirator who could be put to his service. What he didn’t see was the subtly independent spirit, sustained by a strong moral code and firm principles, that was hidden below.
The event which marked the greatest single service Wilhelm Canaris rendered his master during his early years as Abwehr chief began on 25 July 1936.
Returning that evening from Wilhelm Furtwängler’s triumphant production of Wagner’s Die Walküre at Bayreuth’s Festspiel opera house, Hitler was handed a personal letter from a largely unknown forty-three-year-old Spanish colonel called Francisco Franco Bahamonde. Franco, as he soon became known, was trapped in Morocco with 30,000 troops, unable to transport them over the Straits of Gibraltar to the Spanish mainland, where they were desperately needed to stem the advance of Republican forces threatening Seville, because of an embargo enforced by the Spanish navy. What he needed – and desperately – was aircraft to fly him and his men to the beleaguered Spanish city. He had appealed to Mussolini for help, but was refused. He now turned to Hitler.
Though the hour was late, Hitler called in Göring and the armed forces’ commander-in-chief, Werner von Blomberg. At the conclusion of discussions which ended in the early hours of the following morning, Hitler decided to throw his weight behind Franco. It now fell to Canaris to deliver the aid his master had promised. The one-time spy was in his element, using his old contacts in the Spanish government and secret police.
Twenty Junkers 52 transports (ten more than Franco had asked for) and six Heinkel 51 fighters, some flown by British pilots, were swiftly chartered through London – probably with the help of Basil Zaharoff – and despatched to Tetouan airfield in northern Morocco. This was followed by a massive build-up of military aid and arms from Berlin, including the deployment of the German Condor Legion, whose destruction of the defenceless little town of Guernica by bombers in April 1937 was to prove a harbinger of the fate of so many innocent towns and cities across Europe in the years to come. Canaris’s intervention tipped the balance of the Spanish Civil War in Franco’s favour. On 28 March 1939, Franco occupied Madrid. Three days later he was able finally to declare the victory that put an end to Spain’s long and bloody years of conflict.
Hitler’s gamble had paid off – he had now extended his influence to the westernmost limit of Europe. It had