WITH THE ROTE Kapelle trials complete and the conspirators either dead or awaiting execution, Manfred Roeder’s stock was riding high. He had been the natural choice to take on the Abwehr investigation.
Taking over the file on April 3, 1943—two weeks after Gersdorff was foiled at the Zeughaus—he concurred immediately with the Gestapo officer Sonderegger’s conclusions that there was a major Canaris-led conspiracy. An inquiry such as this would need to be handled delicately, but its potential impact on an individual’s career was staggering. Roeder was delighted.
While not a member of the Gestapo, Roeder had built up a strong working relationship with it during the Rote Kapelle case, and he immediately requested—and was granted—the use of Sonderegger to partner him in the new investigation.
Roeder told Sonderegger he intended to waste no time. Together they reviewed a transcript of one of Sonderegger’s interviews with Schmidhuber in which the businessman had described a meeting with Hans Bernd Gisevius, the Abwehr’s man in Switzerland, who was angry with Canaris as he felt he was making life hard for Gisevius when he should be “looking out for himself.” According to Schmidhuber, the disgruntled agent had confided to him that Canaris had given military secrets about the German offensive in the East the previous summer to the Russians and had been aware that Oster had told the Dutch about the attack in the West in 1940.1 If this small reference in a long transcript were true, Roeder told his colleague, then they were looking at a prosecution for high treason. The Abwehr, Roeder felt, was full of “weak” people, and they were “going to clean the whole place out.”2
The two men drew up plans for a series of raids to take place on April 5.
They started at Abwehr headquarters, with Roeder cannily proceeding—given the political sensitivities of the case—in a quiet and unobtrusive manner. He and Sonderegger arrived at 10 a.m. and presented their paperwork authorizing the raid. Roeder, in his Luftwaffe uniform, did all the talking, while Sonderegger, in civilian clothes, stood back and observed.
An orderly escorted them immediately to Canaris’s office, where Roeder stated they planned to arrest Dohnanyi and search his room. Canaris politely asked on what grounds, and was told that Dohnanyi was suspected of corruption, abuse of authority, and numerous currency offenses. There were suspicions of treasonable activities, he added ominously, with his taller henchman watching the admiral’s reaction carefully.
Canaris appeared lost for words. Although he had known that investigations had been taking place into some of his staff, he appeared shocked now that the reality of it had hit him: A police search was being carried out in the heart of German military intelligence. Perhaps he considered whether to complain to Keitel, blustering at the outrage of it all, the impudence, the security risk, but instead he stood slowly and said he would witness the arrest and search.
The three men walked down the corridor to Oster’s office, where Canaris explained that Dohnanyi was to be arrested. Oster, who was wearing a civilian suit, turned on Roeder: “Then kindly arrest me too, because Herr von Dohnanyi has done nothing I don’t know about,” he said.3
Canaris told him to shut up, and all four walked through the communicating door to Dohnanyi’s office. Roeder arrested Dohnanyi and told him his room was going to be searched. Sonderegger remained just inside Oster’s office, almost unnoticed but watching everything.
Dohnanyi and Oster exchanged anxious glances. Like others who had dared oppose the regime, they had feared this moment, but were they prepared for it? For the last few weeks Oster’s energies had been consumed by planning for the coup that would have followed Hitler’s death in the aircraft bomb or at Gersdorff’s hands at the arsenal. Canaris had urged Oster to check that Dohnanyi—who had a lawyer’s obsession for keeping files that he thought would be key legal documents in his fight against Hitler—had destroyed his records, but he knew he had not followed up on the order vehemently enough. Dohnanyi knew that there were documents in his green safe that could form a charge of conspiracy against him, and he tried to conceal his horror when Roeder asked to see its contents. At first, he claimed to have mislaid the key, but as Roeder persisted, he “found” it.
Roeder opened the safe and placed file after file on Dohnanyi’s desk. Most were either genuine intelligence files or could be explained away as such: travel expenses claimed by political informants, foreign currency forms, and reports on the Jewish refugees smuggled out of the country, which Dohnanyi believed had the watertight cover story that they were being used to spread word that international press reports of atrocities against the Jews were untrue.
But then Roeder lifted out a folder that was marked “Z grau” on the front, and Dohnanyi tried to innocently flick through and remove three pages. Roeder saw him and told him to replace them before continuing his search.
Oster stood in front of the desk and, with his hand behind his back, removed the same pieces of paper and tucked them inside his jacket. Sonderegger watched it all from the doorway, then, stepping into the room, held out his hand and had Oster hand over the pages.
Roeder demanded Canaris order Oster to leave, and he did. Roeder then took a moment to look at the three pages that the Abwehr men were keen to hide. All three contained short typed reports. One outlined—without names—a conspiracy of people within the military and church groups who had agreed to overthrow National Socialism. The second was a proposal for a post-Hitler Germany in which the country was divided into a northern and southern state. Both, Roeder could see, were basic agreements of policy by opponents of the regime.
But it was as he read the third document that his face could not disguise a smile of satisfaction: “For a considerable time now, a small circle of prominent clerics in the German Protestant Church have been debating how the Protestant Church can help in this war to bring about a just and lasting peace and construct a social system based on Christian foundations . . . It is possible that the Pope enunciated his basic peace aims in his last two Christmas messages that the British and American (as well as the Dutch, Norwegian and French) Protestant Churches are already devoting very keen consideration to these same questions . . . It appears extremely important and desirable that a German Protestant cleric should be enabled, not only to hold discussions on the subject with representatives of the Catholic Church in Rome, but also to familiarize himself with the relevant activities of the worldwide Protestant Churches in Geneva or Stockholm.”
Roeder realized that with Sonderegger’s file he might now have enough to hang not only Dohnanyi, and perhaps Oster and Canaris, but also Bonhoeffer and Josef Müller.
Sonderegger called the Gestapo in Munich to have Müller arrested, while Roeder arranged for Dohnanyi to be taken into custody.
The pair then headed to Sakrow on the outskirts of the city to search Dohnanyi’s home and to arrest his wife, Christine. They would then head on to find Bonhoeffer.
Wanting to keep the whole operation to themselves, they had no time to waste: they had a busy day ahead.
DIETRICH BONHOEFFER HAD spent the morning writing in his study at his parents’ home. At lunchtime, he came downstairs and tried to telephone his sister. The receiver at the Dohnanyi home was lifted almost immediately and a man’s voice asked sharply who was ringing. Bonhoeffer quickly replaced the receiver. Christine von Dohnanyi was not answering her own telephone; a stranger was. Bonhoeffer knew immediately that the person he had spoken to must be a Gestapo agent and that the state police were searching the Dohnanyis’ home.
Bonhoeffer went back to his study and destroyed some documents, leaving others—which had been prepared to throw the Gestapo off the scent—on his desk. He then went next door to the house that his other sister, Ursula, shared with her husband, Rüdiger Schleicher, and told her that the Gestapo would almost certainly soon arrest him. He ate with Ursula and waited. The Gestapo arrived at the Bonhoeffer home at four in the afternoon and sent his father to fetch him. Bonhoeffer found the two men upstairs in his study, carefully leafing through his books and writing. One introduced himself as Judge Advocate Manfred Roeder and his colleague as a detective named Franz Sonderegger; he said Bonhoeffer was requested to accompany them to the police station.
Bonhoeffer looked closely at Roeder. The Rote Kapelle case had not been reported, but he knew through the family that this was the man who had sent his cousin Arvid Harnack to the gallows. Now here Roeder was for him. Reaching onto a table, Bonhoeffer picked up a Bible and asked if he could bring it with him. Roeder said he could.
The two men led Bonhoeffer downstairs and down the short path to the white picket gate. A black Mercedes sat waiting at the curb. Bonhoeffer got in the back. As the car moved off, he looked out at the family home. He would never see it again.
ON HIS RETURN to his office after a highly successful day, Manfred Roeder had one last task before he rested and came back refreshed and prepared for the interrogations of his prisoners.
Contacting Keitel’s office directly, he filed a complaint of negligence against Hans Oster. Within ten days Oster was dismissed from the Abwehr, and although still permitted to wear uniform as an officer in the Reserve Army, he was required to remain at his Berlin or Dresden home. His movements were kept under tight observation by Gestapo men seconded to Roeder. Canaris, suspecting correctly that he himself would be Roeder’s prize catch, did nothing to protect his former chief of staff.
On hearing what had happened at Abwehr headquarters, Ulrich von Hassell noted that the central conspirators had “completely compromised” themselves. He feared now that “nothing will be achieved.”4
ROEDER TOOK BONHOEFFER to Tegel, a military prison in an area of forest and lakes on the northwestern edge of Berlin. On being processed, the pastor asked a guard why he had been arrested. “You’ll find that out soon enough,” the man told him.
At first, the guards treated Bonhoeffer badly, with the same cruelty and scorn meted out to the other prisoners. Bread was thrown into his cell as if he were an animal being fed at a zoo, and the blanket on the bed smelled so badly that he preferred to shiver in the cold. He was placed in an isolation cell in the top floor, denied visitors, letters, newspapers, or cigarettes. The guards were not allowed to speak to him, even when they opened the door to take away the bucket that he used as a toilet. He was to be treated as one of the prison’s most serious cases, sharing a wing with men who had been condemned to death. The cries of one kept him awake at night.
However, the attitude of the prison authorities soon changed. The guards at Tegel were not Gestapo staff but professional soldiers who were deemed to be too old or unfit for active service, and when word went around that Bonhoeffer’s mother was a close cousin of Paul von Hase, the military commander in Berlin, they were profoundly impressed. Few wanted to be seen treating someone who called Hase “my uncle” with anything less than respect. Bonhoeffer was moved to the third floor, into a cell with views across the prison yard to the pine trees of the Jungfernheide, which for centuries had been used as royal hunting grounds. His new cell had a plank bed and a bench along the length of one seven-foot-long wall. When one guard started to clean his cell for him every day, Bonhoeffer’s embarrassment at being treated differently than the other prisoners grew, and when he was offered larger rations, he refused—knowing that if he got more, someone else might get less.
A second reason attitudes to Bonhoeffer changed was due to Roeder and Sonderegger, who reasoned that if the pastor was allowed visitors and letters, he might give himself and others away. Roeder was confused about Operation 7, and he could not believe that highly educated men such as Dohnanyi, Bonhoeffer, and the others had been primarily interested in the fate of a small number of Jews. There had to be more to the money-laundering scheme than what they had so far uncovered. The more relaxed Bonhoeffer became and the more connection he had with others, Roeder reasoned, the more opportunities there might be for him to reveal some details of the treasonable activities that Schmidhuber had alleged. He believed the pious pastor might be the weak link in the chain. Roeder allowed Bonhoeffer to have his Bible, books, and writing paper, and encouraged him to write to his family and friends.
Roeder followed the same plan with Dohnanyi, who had been taken to the Wehrmacht officers’ prison on the Lehrter Strasse. He was told he would be allowed to write to Bonhoeffer. Dohnanyi assumed that Roeder would read any correspondence and saw the letter as an opportunity to present his own version of events to the Gestapo. Confident that his own legal expertise and cunning would put him at an advantage against Roeder, Dohnanyi reasoned that the most important strategy he could follow would be to protect Bonhoeffer from the investigators. He reckoned the conspirators must be continuing their plans to overthrow the Nazis, and so, if he could keep the Gestapo off the scent, he and Bonhoeffer might survive until the new regime took over. Dohnanyi’s letter to Bonhoeffer was warm and personal, subtly noting that “you can’t imagine how unhappy I am to be the reason why you . . . suffer like this.”5
Bonhoeffer understood: Dohnanyi wanted him to deny knowledge of anything incriminating. He chose to act the well-meaning pastor who found the world of military intelligence into which he had been recruited far too worldly and confusing. “I am the last person to deny that I might have made mistakes in work so strange, so new and so complicated as that of the Abwehr . . .” he said. His work for the Abwehr, he claimed, had been a way of “rehabilitating” himself in the eyes of the state, which had doubted his loyalty and that of all those associated with the Confessing Church. Hadn’t the SS newspaper Das Schwarze Korps dismissed members of the church as “treasonable action in clerical garb”?
Bonhoeffer pretended to be flustered by the interrogations. “I often find it hard to follow the speed of your questions, probably because I am not used to them . . .” he told Roeder.6
Roeder’s investigation was watched closely by many in the Nazi high command. Not only was Himmler always weighing whether to move against the Abwehr, there also was a feeling that a prosecution of senior members of the Abwehr would taint the Wehrmacht, in the way Roeder’s exposure of Harro Schulze-Boysen had cast a slur on the Luftwaffe.
Roeder continued to tread carefully. His initial inquiries concentrated on whether the Abwehr should have enabled Bonhoeffer to be excused from military service and continue work relating to the church, his involvement in the travel arrangements for the Jewish people who had traveled abroad, and his own trips abroad. Bonhoeffer successfully argued that he was simply working for the Abwehr as part of his devotion to the state. Before his arrest, it had been agreed with the others that he would defer the details of the operations to them; he was just doing what he was asked, without seeing the wider picture. “It was my brother-in-law who suggested to me that with my church connections, I should enter the service of the Abwehr. Despite considerable inner scruples, I took advantage of his offer because it provided me with the war work that I had wanted ever since the beginning of hostilities, even making use of my ability as a theologian.”7
When his initial inquiries stalled, Roeder contacted Bonhoeffer’s fiancée, Maria von Wedemeyer, and told her she was invited to visit him.
Bonhoeffer had met Wedemeyer at her family’s Pomeranian family estate, an idyllic setting among picturesque lakes and tall forests. She was half his age and, despite her privileged background, dreamed of an independent life studying mathematics. Her family was also devoutly Christian and vehemently anti-Nazi. Tresckow was her uncle and Fabian von Schlabrendorff her father’s cousin. During her courtship with Bonhoeffer, both her father and brother were killed in action on the Eastern Front. Perhaps conscious that he himself was not in the military, Bonhoeffer had discussed his opposition to the regime with her, saying that there “must also be people able to fight from conviction alone . . . perhaps even by working against the regime.” Maria felt it was “very responsible of him to seek out the genuinely right course of action.”8
Although only nineteen, she had listened when Bonhoeffer explained how his conviction deepened. When word had reached him that, in despair, at the height of the deportation of Berlin’s Jews, Hugo Distler—a distinguished young composer of organ music—had killed himself with “Bible and cross in hand,” Bonhoeffer told Maria: “The life together, toward which through God’s goodness we hope to move, is like a tree that must grow from deep roots silent and hidden, strong and free.”9
Wedemeyer’s family, who had known so much grief, respected Bonhoeffer but feared how close he was to conspiracy. They worried for her. She had picked a dangerous time to fall in love. When Roeder contacted her, they were frightened. But Wedemeyer hid her fear. Several months had passed since Bonhoeffer had been arrested and, of course, Wedemeyer was desperate to see him. They had planned to get married as soon as they were able, and both still hoped that day would come.
Keen to outmaneuver Bonhoeffer, Roeder did not tell him that Wedemeyer was coming. Bonhoeffer was taken to a strange room and made to wait. After an anxious few minutes, the door opened and Roeder announced that he had a surprise. When Wedemeyer was brought in by the arm, Bonhoeffer was visibly shaken. His first thought was that Roeder had arrested her to try to get him to confess. Bonhoeffer fell silent, showing his own fear and adding to Wedemeyer’s discomfort. Roeder stayed in the room throughout, smiling when the pair held hands across the table.
But Roeder underestimated Wedemeyer’s intelligence and independence of spirit. She asked little and did nothing to force Bonhoeffer into making difficult explanations in the investigator’s presence, instead chatting about her hopes for the wedding and the furniture her grandmother in Stettin had promised them for their new home. She joked about her wish that he himself could be the pastor performing at his own wedding. When a guard took Bonhoeffer away by one door and Roeder led her by the arm to another, she pulled free and ran to the pastor to give him a warm embrace.
Roeder uncovered no evidence of treason in Bonhoeffer’s actions, but charged the pastor with avoiding military service—although the prosecutor recognized that Bonhoeffer’s presence on the exemption list was for others, including Dohnanyi, Oster, and perhaps Canaris, to justify.
Bonhoeffer became optimistic that he was over the worst, but also was adamant that his actions—always disguised in his letters—had been honorable. He wrote to his friend Eberhard Bethge that, looking back to 1939, when he had rejected the chance to stay in the United States, he found that he did not regret “for a moment” coming back or “any of the consequences.”
“I knew quite well what I was doing, and I acted with a clear conscience . . .” he wrote. He regarded his prison sentence as “being involved in the fate of Germany in which I was determined to share.”10
With a letter to his fiancée, Maria von Wedemeyer, he enclosed a poem with the words “While all the powers of good aid and attend us / boldly we’ll face the future, come what may.”
ROEDER HAD PUT aside the third document he had seized from Dohnanyi’s office at first, hoping further investigations would establish who had written it. Both he and Sonderegger agreed that the contents of it were evidence of a conspiracy by members of the Abwehr to negotiate with the Allies—through the Vatican—the political shape of Germany after the Nazi government had been overthrown.
But when they sat across the interrogation table from Dohnanyi, the thin, bespectacled Abwehr lawyer said he understood exactly why they thought that—that was exactly what the document was meant to look like. It was actually a coded memo, he said, and he freely admitted that he had written it with the help of Bonhoeffer. It actually meant the opposite of what it seemed to imply. It constituted covert instructions to Bonhoeffer to approach the Vatican and probe for whatever information he could get on the Allies’ intentions toward Germany after the war. It was simply part of an intelligence-gathering operation and had been approved by Oster.
Dohnanyi seemed to have persuaded Roeder and Sonderegger, but when they approached Oster, he did not tell the same story. He said he had no knowledge of the document and also contradicted Bonhoeffer’s evidence about his being dispatched abroad as an Abwehr agent.
Then, having had to submit his questions in advance to his chief at the RKG, Roeder was allowed to question Canaris himself. The admiral seemed weak and dejected. He denied using Bonhoeffer as an agent or having an intelligence department in any way associated with ecclesiastical affairs. He then refused to answer any other questions. Although he had not yet been officially accused of anything, it was Canaris’s head that Roeder most prized.
Roeder then searched Abwehr files. He could find no record of Bonhoeffer being listed in its agents’ card index and no copies of any agent reports being filed by the pastor. Was this evidence of a man helping his brother-in-law evade military service—a serious enough offense in wartime—or was it indicative of something even worse?
But Roeder knew he still had no definite evidence on which to risk his career on a prosecution of what Schmidhuber had termed the “generals’ clique.”
DOHNANYI SAW A way out. He was well-known for his poor ability with money and his constant need to meet the demands of his own spending.
On facing the questions on Bonhoeffer’s military exemption, he encouraged Roeder to steer the interrogation in the direction of a number of wealthy friends who had also been exempted from military service on Dohnanyi’s recommendation. These friends had gifted Dohnanyi money or helped him obtain funds in other ways. Schmidhuber himself had assisted Dohnanyi with letters of credit, while a broker who also employed Dohnanyi as a legal adviser had arranged a loan at a vastly reduced rate of interest with which the Dohnanyis had bought their home.
Buoyed by the news that Roeder had released his wife from custody, Dohnanyi believed that if he could keep Roeder’s interest in an investigation into what could effectively be seen as bribes, he might escape the noose.
BUT STILL INTENT on breaking the grand conspiracy, Roeder turned his attention to Josef Müller.
The Gestapo had been suspicious about the staunchly Catholic Müller’s relationship with the Vatican for three years, and Roeder believed he must know a great deal about the third document’s reference to “discussions” with Rome.
Bonhoeffer had met Roeder with a feigned naïveté about the intelligence work he had been asked to carry out, while Dohnanyi had sought to confuse him with a mix of courtroom argument and the doublespeak of the intelligence world.
The broad-shouldered, barrel-chested Müller simply refused to budge from a position of sure-footed obstinacy.
“Well, are we both agreed,” Roeder began slyly at their first encounter, “that Germany would be inconceivable without the Party?”
“Yes, certainly, Colonel!” Müller responded, apparently sincere in his blind obedience to the state. He then went on, at length, to list his many friends in the SS.
Agreeing only with Roeder’s repeated attacks on any conspiracy against the state and denying everything else, Müller caused his interrogator to quickly descend into personal insults and abuse. Müller took it, as he knew then that he had won.
And later, when the Gestapo used the very worst of its “legal” and illegal torture methods on Joe the Ox, he still refused to give anything or anyone away.
GISEVIUS’S INTERVIEW WITH the investigator also descended into a stand-up row after Gisevius vehemently denied telling Schmidhuber that Canaris and Oster had given military secrets to the Russians and Dutch. Soon after, Gisevius disappeared back over the border to his Abwehr office in Switzerland, and he told Allen Dulles and the American journalist Mary Bancroft, with whom he was secretly writing his book, that he would only return when he received the signal that a strike was about to be made on Hitler.11
When Canaris heard about the row with Gisevius, he complained about Roeder’s attitude and approach to his men. But powerful friends, sympathetic with the anti-Nazi Abwehr men, including the senior Reich Court-Martial counsel Judge Karl Sack, advised Canaris not to make too much of a fuss for two reasons: First, they believed the whole investigation might well just peter out, and second, if Roeder were taken off the case, all investigations into the Abwehr might be handed over to the Gestapo.
By now, it seemed the troubled Abwehr had virtually ceased to function as an intelligence organization, and when British and US forces landed in Sicily on July 10, 1943, the Judge Advocate General Rudolf Lehmann and Roeder’s chief, Alexander Kraell—who were both loyal to Canaris—decided on an audacious plan. With Germany’s ally Italy facing collapse, the two men managed to persuade Keitel that the investigation was a distraction, that there appeared to be no prospect of getting to the bottom of it, and there was no possibility of a conviction for treason. All political aspects of the investigation should cease.
The proposal was submitted at just the right moment: as news came in on July 25 that Mussolini had been removed from power and the pressure of the war increased. But Lehmann and Kraell were still amazed when Keitel agreed to it without hesitation and, thanking Roeder for his hard work, ordered him to remove the “burden” of his investigation from the Abwehr.
Privately livid, Roeder obediently agreed. There was little else he could do: Himmler had approved Keitel’s decision. Roeder produced a list of charges devoid of political content. Schmidhuber, Ickrath, and Dohnanyi were charged with currency offenses and malfeasance, while Dohnanyi was also accused of “undermining the war effort.” Oster was accused of complicity, released from active service, and put under observation by the Gestapo; Bonhoeffer was charged with evading military service.
Roeder walked away from the case disappointed but with a promotion to soothe his anger.
Canaris had escaped, although Keitel saw to it that more of his old allies—such as Lahousen—were also removed from their posts. Beck asked Canaris to send Gisevius to Rome to brief the pope, through Father Leiber, that the German opposition had suffered a blow but had not been neutralized completely.
HAVING ESCAPED ROEDER’S investigation, Canaris went back to work with his energy apparently renewed. He had played his cards close to his chest, not putting himself at risk by attempting to defend others if he knew his lies could be disproved, and refusing to answer questions that he had not needed to. But with the war at a crucial stage, he was about to take a risk that would bring him back to the attention of his enemies.
Only days after Roeder’s political investigation was shelved, Keitel instructed him to go to Venice and liaise with the head of Italian military intelligence, General Cesare Amè. Keitel vitally needed confirmation from Amè that Italian fascists would fight on at Germany’s side under the new leader, Pietro Badoglio. The Germans were already moving three divisions into Italy in case Badoglio defected to the Allies.
Canaris and Amè met among the Gothic columns, artwork, and antique furniture of the luxurious Hotel Danieli, and the German immediately sensed that, despite reassuring words, Amè knew his new government was looking for a way out of the war. Without letting on that he knew the Italians were lying, he agreed with Amè on a communiqué to send to Hitler describing the Italians’ determination to fight on.
The words agreed upon, Canaris suggested a breath of air, and the pair walked along the Palazzo Dandolo with their aides some distance behind.
“Heartiest congratulations,” Canaris said when he was sure they were out of earshot. Amè turned to him, not understanding, but the admiral went on: “Congratulations on your July 25. We could use one too. Germany’s one dream is to get rid of Hitler.”
As wily as Canaris, Amè quickly assessed the situation. He decided that trusting the German might be worth the risk.
Telling Canaris he was counting on his discretion, he said, “All we’re doing today is trying to gain time. An armistice [with the Allies] will be offered very shortly, but it’s essential that Italy isn’t paralysed by a harsh and immediate Nazi occupation.”
“There is only one way of achieving that,” said Canaris, believing that Italy’s end might hasten Hitler’s. “Prevent the Wehrmacht from reinforcing its troops in Italy by every possible means. To put it in a nutshell, try and let as few German soldiers into Italy as you can.”
Amè hesitated. The admiral was saying far more than he had expected. Perhaps it was a trap after all. He started to turn away. But Canaris held his arm softly. “My dear General Amè,” he said, “you can rest assured that I shall say nothing of this in Berlin. On the contrary, I shall strongly emphasize that Italy intends to fight on at our side.”
Canaris watched two young Italian soldiers pass by, then continued, his voice more urgent: “It’s impossible for you to hold out longer than a month. You must withdraw from the fray, you don’t have any choice. But remember: Allow as few German soldiers across the Brenner as you possibly can.”12
Canaris returned to Berlin and took his next risk. He reported in the strongest terms his belief that Italy would stay in the war on the German side and that there was no need to transfer German forces in anticipation of an Italian collapse.
A copy of Canaris’s written report reached Walter Schellenberg at the SD, who had been keeping a file on the Abwehr’s failings since before Heydrich had left for Prague. Schellenberg and his chief, SS Lieutenant-General Ernst Kaltenbrunner, shared the same ambition: to create a single German secret service under SS control. Himmler had so far demurred over the request.
Thirty-three-year-old Schellenberg was an instinctive spy. The product of a middle-class household—his father had owned a business making pianos until the firm went bankrupt during Germany’s interwar economic collapse—he had dreamed of the life of a diplomat, traveling the world and hearing and sharing international gossip. While he attended Bonn University, two of his professors had asked him to write secret reports on fellow students for the SS. It was a role that he greatly enjoyed, and it proved his passport into the ranks of the SD. Charming and quick-thinking, he combined daring and skill with intelligence and caution. Grand adventures like the capture of the two British agents at Venlo had made him a favorite of Himmler.
Schellenberg was an old friend and admirer of Canaris. They enjoyed riding horses together. But as well as being ambitious, Schellenberg was a deeply mistrustful man, and believing what Canaris was saying about Italy was a lie, he sent his own agents to Rome. They made discreet investigations at first, then—uncovering Amè’s homosexual relationship with his chauffeur—forced the Italian to admit what was really going on and Canaris’s part in it. Schellenberg reported to Himmler, who asked for the SD file to be left with him. Himmler was again intrigued more than alarmed by Canaris’s possible links to the Allies and held the file on his desk.
The Italian capitulation on September 3 did not lead to an uprising against Hitler as Canaris optimistically had hoped. The war in Italy settled into one of bloody attrition.
And Schellenberg, scenting blood back in Berlin, learned of another way in which the Abwehr was being exposed to scandal.
ABWEHR AGENT MAJOR Otto Kiep was a regular visitor at the home of Hanna Solf, widow of the Weimar Republic’s ambassador to Japan, Dr. Wilhelm Solf. An experienced diplomat, he had known Solf for many years, but the visits were not social. Fifty-six-year-old Solf was a committed anti-Nazi who sheltered Jews, liaised with friends in the Kreisau Circle, and created her own group in Berlin. Middle-aged or retired, the members of the Solf Circle discussed ideas rather than planned coups, but their beliefs ran counter to the regime, and they met so they could talk freely in a relaxed atmosphere without fear of being denounced.
The group included Solf’s daughter, Countess Ballestrem; Countess Hannah von Bredow, a granddaughter of Bismarck’s; and Karl Ludwig Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg, who had published a subtly antifascist Catholic magazine called Weisse Blätter (White Pages), for which both Klaus Bonhoeffer and Ulrich von Hassell regularly wrote articles. Although wartime paper shortages had put the magazine out of business, Guttenberg remained friends with former advisers Carl Goerdeler and Ludwig Beck, and knew of their plans for a post-Hitler government.
On September 10, 1943, the Solf Circle met for tea and conversation at the home of Elisabeth von Thadden, a longtime member of the group who ran a school for girls near Heidelberg. Thadden had invited, for the first time, a Swiss doctor named Paul Reckzeh from the Charité Hospital in Berlin. Reckzeh was a very pleasant man with stories of Switzerland, where many of the group had spent time on vacation. He appeared to share their own hatred of the Nazis, and on hearing the group knew many anti-Nazi Germans who had fled to his country, he offered to take letters from the group members to them when he went back to Switzerland. Thadden was among those who were delighted with the offer, handing Reckzeh a letter for a German friend working with the World Council of Churches.
The group of friends broke up and went their separate ways, having enjoyed a lovely evening. In the darkness, Reckzeh was happier than most. A Gestapo spy, he had uncovered a den of what he saw as semitreasonous discussion. When he reported to his chiefs, it was decided to keep the group under observation. Telephone lines were tapped and Reckzeh continued to attend the meetings. Each event brought fresh evidence against the group, including Major Kiep, and letters sent for friends in Switzerland made it no farther than Gestapo headquarters.
Then, early in the new year, Captain Ludwig Gehre, of the Abwehr, learned about Reckzeh from a Gestapo contact and warned his friend Helmuth James Graf von Moltke, whom he knew to be friends with Solf. Moltke warned Solf and Kiep, but telephone calls between the group were intercepted by the Gestapo, who swooped in to arrest Solf and her friends on January 12. A week later, after agents reviewed a transcript of a telephone call made by Moltke himself, he, too, was arrested.
The operation again turned unwanted attention on the Abwehr. Not only had Kiep been arrested, but Gehre, too—his warning to Moltke having been discovered.
This time Canaris would not escape his enemies.13
NEWS OF THE Abwehr connection to the Solf Circle reached Schellenberg just as details of another Abwehr failing were being added to his file.
In Italy, aircraft reconnaissance had reported a large buildup of Allied shipping in Naples harbor, and military commanders had asked the Abwehr for an assessment as to whether an amphibious operation was being planned. Canaris investigated and gave them a personal assurance that it was not. When on January 22 three hundred Allied landing craft struck the beaches at Anzio, fifty miles behind the German lines, an investigation into the intelligence failure naturally centered on the Abwehr.
Schellenberg added to his file complaints from Ribbentrop about Abwehr sabotage operations in Argentina and Spain interfering with the work of his foreign service, and the defection of an Abwehr officer, Erich Vermehren—a close friend of Adam von Trott’s—in Turkey to the British. Exaggerating Vermehren’s importance, Schellenberg wrote a report that Kaltenbrunner used to brief Hitler.
The Führer stewed in anger over Canaris. Himmler sensed the admiral’s days were over. Having vacillated between stepping in hard to take over the Abwehr and standing back to see where its approaches to the Allies took it, Himmler now had his senior officer at Hitler’s headquarters, Brigadier-General Hermann Fegelein, casually suggest that the Führer allow the Reichsführer-SS to take over the “whole works” as a single, unified intelligence service. The answer provided a simple solution for Hitler. With a wave of his hand it was to be done, and he could think of something else.
Canaris was removed from his post and ordered to remain at the thirteenth-century Burg Lauenstein, a castle in the mountainous Frankenwald where the Abwehr’s forgery department was based. Staff there had been told that the admiral had freedom to move around the winding corridors of the building and walk his two dachshunds on the grounds, but he would have restricted contact with the outside world. It was house arrest, albeit in grand surroundings.
Meanwhile, in a meeting on Himmler’s special train, Heinrich, the Reichsführer plotted the complete takeover of the military intelligence service with Kaltenbrunner, Schellenberg, and Gestapo Müller and the expansion of the empire of the SS.
A few weeks later Schellenberg visited Burg Lauenstein to explain that the Abwehr had been dismantled. Schellenberg might have not sought the personal humiliation of his old friend, but it appeared to be an unintended consequence of his triumph in a battle of wits.