Like Ludwig Beck and Carl Goerdeler, Wilhelm Canaris had at first welcomed Hitler as a necessary evil to put Germany back on its feet. Also like his two soon-to-be fellow conspirators, he would become horrified by the blood, conflict and criminality of Hitler’s behaviour in power. But Canaris’s journey from naïve belief in Hitler to understanding the threat he posed to all that he himself stood for was a slow one – for which history has often criticised him.
The turning point in Canaris’s loyalty to his Führer finally came with the Fritsch affair in January 1938. This was the moment when it became evident to Canaris, as to so many of his fellow Germans, that Hitler’s demonic will would not be restrained by the norms of accepted behaviour, by the constraints of the law, or by the limits of democratic government. ‘If you are looking for one specific event that shook Canaris’s allegiance to Hitler, then there [in the Fritsch affair] you have it,’ commented his predecessor as chief of the Abwehr. Canaris’s subordinates in the Abwehr noted the change too: ‘Hitler’s criminal procedure against … Fritsch had a [profound] effect upon the Wehrmacht and the Abwehr. The result … split … opinion … The systematic organisation … among Hitler’s opponents began at this point. The final decision to work for the regime’s overthrow … by the [Canaris] group was … made [at this time],’ one reported after the war.
From this watershed onwards all the formidable energy and cunning of this part Hamlet, part moral mystic, part German patriot, part conspirator at the court of Cesare Borgia, would be directed towards undermining and frustrating his master, Adolf Hitler.
* Its full title was the Amtsgruppe Auslandsnachrichten und Abwehr.
4
The couple, he magnificent in the red-lined grey cape and gold-trimmed shako of a lieutenant colonel in the Austrian army, and she radiant in a spring dress, seemed like kingfishers flashing along a muddy river as they pushed their way through the tide of humanity pressing – panicking – to find a place on the train to Switzerland.
He led her to the platform and they said their goodbyes as lovers do when they are uncertain whether they will ever see each other again. Then he took her into a carriage, found her a seat amidst the crush, and left.
Three days previously, on 12 March 1938, she had watched the German troops marching into Vienna under brilliant skies. She had felt the tramp of their boots in the pit of her stomach, and heard their chants: ‘Today Vienna; tomorrow Prague; later Paris.’ And Madeleine Bihet-Richou, thirty-six years old, daughter of a French government official, native of Toulouse, divorcee, mother of a son, teacher of French in Vienna and for the last four years the lover of Erwin Lahousen Edler von Vivremont, the head of the Austrian Abwehr, had been frightened.
As Madeleine watched Hitler’s troops streaming into Vienna that day, her lover was with Wilhelm Canaris in Abwehr headquarters not far away. The admiral had dashed to the city by plane ahead of the forward troops in order to seize documents in Lahousen’s files. It would have been embarrassing, to say the least, if these had fallen into the hands of SS chief Heinrich Himmler, for they revealed the extent of cooperation between Canaris and his Austrian counterpart, which had included warnings and plans of the coming German invasion. With the German takeover imminent, Canaris asked Lahousen to gather as many of his most trusted colleagues as possible and join him in the Tirpitzufer in Berlin, adding, ‘Above all, don’t bring in any Nazis to our Berlin headquarters, bring me true Austrians, not thugs.’
Lahousen decided that it would be too dangerous to take Madeleine with him to Berlin – and too dangerous to leave her in Vienna without his protection. She would have to return to France and await events.
On the day of the invasion, Lahousen asked her to take a message to the French military attaché, Colonel Roger Salland, whom he had warned the previous night of the forthcoming German assault. She was to tell her countryman that Lahousen would have to ‘break off all contact with his French friend’. Salland was surprised to receive this message, and on questioning Madeleine he was even more surprised – and interested – to hear of her relationship with the chief of the Austrian Abwehr, who was now to take up a senior post in the German Abwehr in Berlin.
The weather over the three days of the Anschluss seemed to mock the tumult and terror of the times. A high-pressure zone centred near Vienna brought frosty champagne mornings, sparkling blue skies, balmy days and evenings that made the blood sing. The cherry trees in the city’s Hainburger Weg and Stadtpark hung heavy with blossom, as Jews were rounded up and gangs of uniformed paramilitaries hunted down their prey.
With Vienna reeling under the chaos of the German invasion, the two lovers prepared for their enforced separation. Lahousen, tall, athletic and, at forty, four years older than Madeleine, warned her that all those trying to flee were being robbed by the SS gangs roaming Austria; she should leave her valuables in his safekeeping, save for the few Austrian schillings she would need for the journey. The couple also agreed a plain-language code system they could use to keep in touch by telephone, letter and postcard. Finally he bought her a ticket to Switzerland, and they waited for the trains to start running again.
On the morning before her departure, making her way to the French embassy on a last visit, Madeleine was caught up in a vast crowd gathered in Heldenplatz and heard Hitler announce the end of Austria with the triumphant words, ‘The oldest eastern province of the German people shall be, from this point on, the newest bastion of the German Reich.’ Two hundred thousand voices hurled repeated Heil Hitlers back at the diminutive figure standing above them, alone on the balcony of the Hofburg Palace. Madeleine noted that among the women in the crowd were ‘several vulgar uneducated harridans wearing luxurious furs which a few days previously would have been the property of Jews’. She was glad she was leaving, even if it meant leaving her lover behind.
As Lahousen had predicted, the journey from Vienna’s Südbahnhof station to Switzerland was neither quick nor easy. At two in the morning Madeleine’s train, overcrowded well beyond its normal capacity, clanked to a stop at Salzburg station, where armed SS soldiers lined the platform. By the light of torches, the luggage in the baggage wagon was pillaged. Two young men with SS armbands and pistols entered Madeleine’s carriage, demanding papers. A Jew sitting opposite her had the contents of his wallet minutely examined before being left in peace; an Italian singer, mistaken for a Jew because of his olive skin, was badly man-handled, and an old man reduced to a state of quivering panic by the threats and insults.
Their indignities over, the passengers were allowed to continue their journey to the German–Swiss border crossing at Feldkirch, where they arrived at eight in the morning to find their train once again surrounded by a cordon of armed SS guards. Ordered onto the platform with their hand baggage, they were subjected to another, even more violent and intrusive, search.
‘Where is your money?’ an SS man demanded of Madeleine after rifling energetically through every item in her suitcase.
‘I knew you would steal everything,’ she replied coolly, ‘so I left my money in safe hands.’ For her cheek, she was forced to stand naked while her clothes were inspected. Many passengers, especially Jews, were arrested and taken away.
Finally the train was allowed to cross over the Rhine into Switzerland. In due course it reached Basel, whose cavernous, high-arched station hall, lit by blue stained-glass windows, was about to become the first refuge of freedom and safety for thousands fleeing their homelands in terror.
Madeleine arrived in Paris ten days later. The peace and order of the city seemed somehow unreal after the turbulence and violence of Vienna.
Four months later, on a July holiday in La Rochelle, Madeleine received an unexpected message from a certain Colonel Louis Rivet, who, though she did not know it at