THE END OF GERMANYTHE END OF GERMANY
ON 22 AUGUST 1939, TEN DAYS BEFORE GERMANY INVADED POLAND, Hitler called his generals to his private Bavarian mountain. After passing through the security checks, the generals and admirals entered Hitler’s chalet, the Berghof, and settled into chairs in the reception hall. A picture window lowered hydraulically into the floor, opening the room to such an immense alpine panorama that one guest felt suspended in space. In the distance gleamed the teeth of the Untersberg Alps, guarding the rumored grave of Charlemagne. Hitler, leaning on a grand piano, spoke with barely a glance at the notes in his left hand.1
At the back of the room sat a mouse-like man, nervous and intense, with piercing blue eyes and a shock of white hair. He pulled out a pad and pencil. As chief of German military intelligence (Abwehr), Admiral Wilhelm Canaris could make notes on secret German military briefings. Other attendees later affirmed the substantial accuracy of his transcript, which would become an exhibit in the Nuremburg war crimes tribunal.2
“I have called you together,” Hitler said, “to give you some insight into the factors upon which I have decided to act. It was clear to me that a conflict with Poland had to come.” Germany would never regain her honor or restore her prestige until she reclaimed all lands lost in the last war. Therefore, Hitler had decided to attack. Though the British had pledged to protect Poland, they would probably not intervene: “Our enemies are kleine Würmchen [little worms].” Referencing a Radio Vatican appeal for peace talks, which the pope had made in Rome that morning, Hitler said he worried only “that at the last moment some pig-dog will yet submit to me a plan for mediation.”3
Hitler spoke for another hour, going into operational details, and then they all broke for lunch. After caviar on the terrace, served by SS officers in snow-white summer uniforms, Hitler resumed in an even more fanatical mode. Canaris’s pencil sped across the paper again. “We must shoulder this risk. . . . We are faced with the harsh alternatives of striking or of certain annihilation. . . . Eighty million people must obtain what is their right. Their existence must be made secure. . . . The moment is now favorable for a solution, so strike! . . . Execution: Harsh and ruthless! Close your hearts to pity!”4
What Hitler said next shocked his generals. Canaris dared not put it to paper, but Field Marshal Fedor von Bock later confided the details to a colleague. Special SS Death’s Head formations, Hitler revealed, would snuff out the least flicker of Polish strength by liquidating thousands of Catholic priests. As one of Bock’s colonels recounted, Hitler asserted “that the Poles would be treated with merciless severity after the end of the campaign. . . . [H]e did not want to burden the army with ‘liquidations’ necessary for political reasons, but rather to have the SS undertake the destruction of the Polish upper stratum, that is, above all the destruction of the Polish clergy.”5
“The victor will not be questioned afterwards whether his reasons were just,” Canaris’s transcription continued. “What matters is not to have right on our side, but simply will to win.” Hitler ended by saying: “I have done my duty. Now do yours.”6
There followed a long beat of what Bock remembered as “icy silence.” Finally Walther von Brauchitsch, commander in chief of the armed forces, said, “Gentlemen, return to your posts as soon as possible.” Canaris closed his notebook and went back down the mountain.7
THAT NIGHT HITLER PACED THE TERRACE, STARING AT THE HORIZON. “The eerie turquoise colored sky to the north turned first violet and then blood-red,” his adjutant recalled. “At first we thought there must be a serious fire behind the Untersberg Mountain, but then the glow covered the whole northern sky in the manner of the northern lights. Such an occurrence is exceptionally rare in southern Germany. I was very moved and told Hitler that it augured a bloody war.”8
“If it must be so, the sooner the better,” Hitler replied. “No one knows how much longer I shall live. Therefore, better a conflict now. . . . Essentially all depends on me, on my existence, because of my political talents. Probably no one would ever again have the confidence of the German people as completely as I have. My existence is therefore a factor of great value. But I might be eliminated at any time.” He feared that “some fanatic armed with a telescopic-sighted firearm” would shoot him.9
Hitler did not think an attacker would act alone. If he suspected there was a plot to remove him, he told his deputy Martin Bormann, he would take urgent measures against the one faction he suspected would most likely sponsor a coup. “Spiritual factors are decisive,” Hitler had said in his speech that day. Neither bourgeois nor Marxist elements could motivate true idealists, willing to risk their lives to kill him. The greatest danger would instead come from “assassins whipped up by the black crows in confessionals.” The “dunderheads” who opposed him, Hitler said, included “particularly [the leaders] of political Catholicism.” If anyone ever tried a coup, he vowed, he would “round up all the leaders of political Catholicism from their residences, and have them executed.”10
THE NEXT DAY, BACK IN BERLIN, CANARIS BROODED IN HIS ABWEHR office. While his dachshunds slept on a blanket-piled cot, Canaris worked his notes into a coded digest of the Führer’s remarks. Then, in a meeting with his closest colleagues, Canaris read out the crucial passages in his characteristic slight lisp. Only then did they notice the extent of his despair. “He was still utterly horrified,” Abwehr officer Hans Gisevius wrote. “His voice trembled as he read. Canaris was acutely aware that he had been witness to a monstrous scene.”11
Canaris hated Hitler with the fervor of one who once had loved him. Hitler had promised to preserve Germany’s religious and military traditions, but delivered a pagan mockery of the old ideals. Canaris’s epiphany came in 1938, when Hitler removed Germany’s two ranking generals after impugning their sexual honor. Rather than resign in protest, Canaris stuck to his post as spy chief, giving Hitler’s conservative enemies a secret weapon to destroy the monster they had helped create. Directing covert activities, privy to state secrets, Canaris and his comrades were perfectly positioned to damage the Nazis. They could strike at Hitler from within.12
After Canaris read out his notes to his colleagues, they debated what to do. His deputy Hans Oster wanted to leak the text of Hitler’s speech. Perhaps it would spur the regime’s opponents into a peace-preserving coup d’état. If London and Paris reacted sharply enough, Germany’s generals might follow the advice of their chief of staff, Franz Halder, who had told the British ambassador to Berlin, “You have to strike Hitler’s hand with an ax.”13
It seemed worth a try. On 25 August Oster smuggled the document to Alexander C. Kirk, the American chargé d’affaires in Berlin, who said, “Oh, take this out of here. . . . I don’t want to get involved.” Oster then sent a copy to a British embassy official; but the unsigned text, on plain paper, did not impress him. In dealing with foreign powers, Oster decided, the plotters must seek some imprimatur, some stamp of legitimacy, some way of guaranteeing German goodwill.14
Canaris meanwhile tried more active measures. Canaris linked with deputy Foreign Secretary Ernst von Weizsäcker, who wrote in his diary after learning that war loomed: “It is an appalling idea that my name should be associated with this event, to say nothing of the unforeseeable results for the existence of Germany and for my own family.” On 30 August Weizsäcker met Hitler in the Reich Chancellery and begged for peace. In his pocket he carried a Luger pistol, loaded with two bullets. Later he said that he had meant to kill Hitler and then himself. He lost his nerve and left in a sweat. As Weizsäcker told Canaris’s intermediary, “I regret that there is nothing in my upbringing that would fit me to kill a man.”15
Hitler issued an order to attack Poland in twenty-four hours. Abwehr officer Hans Gisevius drove to headquarters, raced up the stairs, and met Canaris and other officers descending. Canaris let his companions proceed as he drew Gisevius into a corridor. Choked with tears, Canaris said, “This means the end of Germany.”16
ON 1 SEPTEMBER 1939, A MILLION GERMANS POURED INTO POLAND. Two days later, Hitler boarded a train to tour the front. There his henchmen began to liquidate what he had called the “spiritual factors” that might inspire resistance. “We will let the small fry off,” SS spy chief Reinhard Heydrich said, but “the Catholic priests . . . must all be killed.”17
Canaris flew to Poland to protest. On 12 September he reached Illnau, where Hitler’s train had stopped, and confronted General Wilhelm Keitel in the conference car. “I pointed out that I knew extensive executions were planned in Poland,” Canaris recorded, noting that “clergy were to be exterminated.” Keitel replied “that this matter had already been settled by the Führer.”18
Hitler himself then entered the meeting. One witness, Lieutenant Colonel Erwin Lahousen, recalled that Hitler deemed it “especially necessary to eliminate the clergy.” Lahousen added, “I don’t remember the exact term that he used, but it was not ambiguous and it meant ‘kill.’” To expedite his plans, Hitler would put Poland under the control of one of his party cronies, attorney Hans Frank. “The task I give you, Frank, is a Satanic one,” Canaris overheard Hitler say. “Other people to whom such territories are handed would ask: ‘What would you build?’ I will ask the opposite. I will ask: ‘What did you destroy?’”19
The results of these orders Canaris soon saw firsthand. On 28 September he wandered the ruins of Warsaw, where rats ate corpses and smoke turned the sun red. An old Jew stood over his dead wife, shouting, “There is no God! Hitler and the bombs are the only gods! There is no grace and pity in the world!” From the roof of a sports stadium, one of Canaris’s friends recalled, Hitler watched his artillery pound the city, “and his eyes nearly popped out of his head and he became quite a different person. He was suddenly seized by a lust for blood.” Canaris took to his quarters and vomited. A friend said that he returned to Berlin “entirely broken.”20
Hitler had by then decided to invade France. “Revolutions by their nature may accelerate but cannot slow down,” one of Canaris’s colleagues reflected. “It became increasingly clear that, just as a cyclist can only stay aright through forward motion, so Adolf Hitler could only stay in power through continuation of the war.” With the attack on France slated for late October, those who opposed it had a four-week window to spike the revolution’s wheels. The generals as a group “fought tooth and nail against the French campaign,” General Dietrich von Choltitz recalled, while the bolder among them diverted troops to stage a coup in Berlin.21
Canaris initialed the coup plan. Two panzer divisions would hold Berlin while sixty Abwehr commandos stormed the chancellery. Although the order stated blandly that Hitler would “be rendered innocuous,” the commandos meant to shoot him like a mad dog. The military would install a civilian junta, schedule elections, and open peace talks. To dramatize the change, the new rulers would lift the wartime blackout, and the lights would go on all over Germany.22
The plan presented obvious obstacles. It required knowing Hitler’s schedule and movements, which he himself often decided at the last minute. The generals, further, would have to break their oaths to Hitler and revolt against civilian authority. They would hardly take such an unprecedented action if it might cause their own defeat and enslavement. They would remove Hitler only if the Allies agreed beforehand to a just peace.
Linking domestic plans to foreign forces posed a further challenge. The plotters faced here a double dilemma: convincing the Allies they spoke the truth, and keeping the Nazis from learning the truth. They needed credibility, and they needed cover. Canaris found an answer to both puzzles in the person of the pope.
CANARIS HAD ROMANTIC AND FANCIFUL VIEWS ABOUT THE CHURCH. Raised as an evangelical, he came to admire the Roman religion, its organization, the strength of its faith; he deviated into a vague mysticism that led him to wander Gothic cathedrals in mute awe. “He was greatly influenced by Italy and the Vatican,” a colleague recalled, and “many of his conspirational activities could be traced back to this influence.” By some accounts, Canaris’s cross-and-dagger complex dated to the First World War, when he mounted a secret mission to Italy in the company of a priest. In one variant of the story, he escaped an Italian jail by killing the prison chaplain and donning his cassock. Yet these perhaps confused associations did not decide Canaris’s view of the pope. His choice lay in realistic calculation.23
Canaris knew and trusted Pacelli. During the 1920s, when the future pope was the “best-informed diplomat in Berlin,” they had shared horse rides on a mutual friend’s estate. Canaris admired Pacelli’s realism and discretion—and his dislike for Hitler. If the pope joined the conspiracy, Canaris thought, the plotters would at least have a hearing in the West. Conversely, if Pius could broker peace terms in advance, this might spur the army to change the regime.24
In late September, Canaris set out to recruit Pius into the plot. But he needed some way to raise such a sensitive issue with the pope. Canaris himself could not travel to the Vatican without rousing suspicion, even if Pius agreed to see him. The plotters needed a go-between, a “cutout.” Because the Abwehr was an adjunct of the Protestant-dominated Prussian military, Canaris’s deputies hardly knew where to look for intermediaries with the Holy Father. As it happened, however, one of the Abwehr’s Catholic contacts in Munich yielded the name, and then the file, of a man who seemed born for the mission.25