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By 1938 Goerdeler, Beck and Canaris, together with other Berlin conspirators, were gathering regularly under the cover of the prestigious Free Society for Scholarly Entertainment, colloquially known as the Mittwochgesellschaft (Wednesday Society) after the day of the week on which it met. Slowly the ad hoc resistance network against Hitler was becoming a formal structure gathered around the three men who would be its initial driving force.

Carl Goerdeler was the movement’s Thomas More: formidably intelligent, spiritually resolute, unshakeably optimistic and driven by a burning sense of mission and the conviction that reason always triumphs over evil. But the superiority of his intelligence made him insensitive to others, brittle in personal relationships, uncomfortable in his certainties and annoyingly didactic (his colleagues called him ‘Pfaf’, German slang for preacher). His utopianism rendered him completely devoid of the worldly wisdom and darker political skills necessary to deal with a tyrant, especially one so pathologically barren of moral values as Adolf Hitler.

If Goerdeler was More, then Canaris was Talleyrand, but with charm in place of a repugnant personality, and a powerful moral compass where Talleyrand had none. His subtle, flexible spirit was quite capable of operating simultaneously at two contradictory levels without losing its way; the perfect mind for a spy chief. Canaris preferred the tangential rather than the direct route for dealing with Hitler, delivering little successes to his master, the better subtly to confound his grander megalomaniac designs.

The third member of this trio, ‘the philosopher general’ Ludwig Beck, was a soldier’s soldier in the tradition of Frederick the Great. He admitted no contradiction between his profession and a life sustained by the values of the Enlightenment. He was the man everyone trusted and everyone looked up to – but for his moral and intellectual qualities, not his soldiering ones.

Post-war opinion has often mistakenly believed that Hitler led a united nation into war. This is far from the truth. By the mid-1930s most Germans supported what Hitler had done through his much-vaunted ‘triumph of the will’ to restore German pride, redress the humiliations of Versailles and bring order to the chaos of the Weimar years. They wanted him to continue making Germany strong again, but not – definitely not – at the price of another war. Public support for Hitler’s policy of toughness with Germany’s neighbours was in large measure due to the fact that he successfully portrayed himself in each of the pre-war crises as the peacemaker, not the warmonger. The popular mood in Germany was in favour of the new chancellor, but it was also deeply fearful, and strongly opposed to another war.

Among the institutions of the German state, the picture was rather more mixed.

Obviously those around Hitler knew of his plans for war. Most, such as Himmler and Ribbentrop, supported the Führer. But some, like Göring, were more cautious. Others, such as the minister of economics and president of the Reichsbank Hjalmar Schacht, hovered in the outer circles of the resistance, without ever quite allowing themselves to be drawn fully in.

In 1938, after a spell as ambassador to London, Joachim von Ribbentrop was appointed as Hitler’s new foreign minister. In both jobs he acted as the faithful echo to his master’s opinions and demands. The German Foreign Office over which he presided was, by contrast, a hotbed of active resistance to the Führer and his plans. One of the most prominent of the Foreign Office conspirators was Ernst von Weizsäcker. The father of a future German president, von Weizsäcker believed that Hitler’s foreign policy would inevitably lead to war. Like Canaris, Weizsäcker had served as a naval officer in the First World War. Now, as state secretary, he was the most senior Foreign Office official under Ribbentrop. Also like Canaris, Weizsäcker chose, at least initially, to oppose Hitler by indirect means, through what he described as ‘feigned cooperation’, while conspiring ‘with the potential enemy for the purpose of ensuring peace’. A number of more junior Foreign Office officials shared von Weizsäcker’s views, but were more direct in their opposition, and more deeply engaged in the resistance cause. These included Oxford-educated Adam von Trott zu Solz and the brothers Kordt, one of whom, Erich, held a senior position in Ribbentrop’s Berlin office, while the other, Theo, served in the German embassy in London.

When it came to the German armed forces, the Luftwaffe, being the newest arm and therefore unencumbered with traditions, was in the main loyal to Hitler, and played no part in the resistance. The navy, the Kriegsmarine, with the exception of Canaris, preferred to steer well clear of politics.

It was in the German army that the resistance found its leading figures. These came mostly from the senior ranks and those who had belonged to the professional army before the war. Drawn in large measure from the old aristocracy and trained in the Prussian tradition, the army was an institution like no other in the German state. Sustained by its aristocratic roots, it had – at least in its own eyes – a degree of independence from the government of the day. This included, in extremis, the presumed right to unilateral action as the guardian and physical expression of the German nation. In normal times the army’s leaders enjoyed a large degree of autonomy in the conduct of their operations, and an entitlement to be consulted and listened to when it came to foreign policy and statecraft. Underpinning all this was the Prussian officer code Üb Immer Treu und Redlichkeit.

Hitler had offended against all these values and beliefs. He was an uncouth parvenu who lacked manners, education, culture and any of the attributes of refinement which army officers so valued in themselves. He demanded allegiance to himself, not the state. He first shamed and then sacked a head of the army (Fritsch), and used the opportunity to take personal command. He had led an assault on the values of decency, and unleashed his supporters and secret police to commit appalling violence against German citizens. Worst of all, he was marching Germany to a war which most senior military figures believed would end in defeat and disaster.

The problem for the generals, however, was that the army (known as the Reichswehr before the Fritsch crisis and the Heer afterwards*) was no longer the same organisation as the one in which they had grown up.

The army’s unwillingness to protest at the horrors of the Night of the Long Knives – even though one of its most senior brethren had been amongst the murdered – and its quiet acquiescence during Beck’s ‘blackest day’, when all the generals meekly lined up to take the oath of allegiance to Hitler, had weakened both its influence and its self-respect. The army’s leaders may have been trained to take bold decisions in battle, but their indecisiveness and hesitancy on the field of politics was – and would continue to be – a fatal brake on their ability to halt or change what all of them believed was a coming catastrophe. A British politician described the Wehrmacht leadership in 1938 as ‘a race of carnivorous sheep’. Even allowing for the fact that this was an easy criticism to make when you did not have to risk your life to oppose your government, there was much truth in the cruel epithet.

The composition of the Wehrmacht was also different from its predecessor. The old professional army, along with the traditional comradeship of its officer corps, had been diluted and submerged under the vast expansion of the army’s numbers. The flood of new equipment, much of it of world-beating quality, along with the attention, promotions, medals – and even in some cases money and estates – which Hitler showered on the Wehrmacht and its senior officers, sapped the army’s will to do what it knew it should to stop the headlong rush to war.

Nevertheless, pre-war opposition to Hitler remained strong amongst the most senior ranks of the Wehrmacht, even to the point of contemplating a coup to remove him. In 1938, those who supported Ludwig Beck’s view that if Hitler could not be stopped, he would have to be removed, included the commander-in-chief of the Wehrmacht, General Walther von Brauchitsch, and the majority of his senior generals, especially in the Reserve Army† based around Berlin.

Although active resistance to Hitler was variably scattered across most German institutions, its highest concentration was in the Abwehr, and particularly in the Tirpitzufer building (nicknamed the Fuchsbau, or Fox’s Lair), which was part of a large Berlin administrative complex called the Bendlerblock. This also housed the Naval Warfare Command and the headquarters of both the Wehrmacht and the Reserve Army. Though physically connected to the Bendlerblock, the closed enclave of Abwehr headquarters was in every other way a world apart. Here Wilhelm Canaris gathered together as many as he could of those who, like him, opposed Hitler. They formed such a tight-knit group that the Tirpitzufer was sometimes referred to in Berlin circles as ‘Canaris Familie GmBH’ (The Canaris Clan Inc.). Among those closest to the Abwehr chief were Hans Bernd Gisevius, a lawyer of formidable physical proportions whom his friends christened the ‘eternal plotter’; Hans von Dohnányi, a gifted young judge who was the son of the famous composer Ernst von Dohnányi and brother-in-law of Dietrich Bonhoeffer; and the impetuous, fanatical Hitler hater and member of Pastor Niemöller’s congregation, Colonel Hans Oster. Sleek, fearless, cunning and a gifted amateur cello player, Oster, who made a habit of referring to Hitler as ‘the Swine’, was described by one contemporary as ‘an elegant cavalry officer of the old school, handsome, gallant with the ladies and contemptuous of the national socialist leaders. He was all for striking when the iron was hot; but the admiral had a more hesitant nature.’

Hans Oster

Canaris encouraged his senior lieutenants to do as he did, and recruit those sympathetic to the cause. His often-repeated instruction when it came to new recruits was ‘Being anti-Nazi is more important than any other quality.’ He also went out of his way to use the Abwehr as a refuge for Jews, placing them in posts outside Germany beyond the reach of the Gestapo, and claiming when challenged that they were essential to the Abwehr’s work in gathering foreign intelligence.

In the middle of the 1930s, the Abwehr over which Canaris presided as what one colleague referred to as the ‘grande éminence grise’ was probably the best foreign-intelligence service in the world. The French Deuxième Bureau, one of the most proficient interwar spy services in Europe, went through a series of convulsive reorganisations in the early 1930s which sapped its effectiveness. Britain’s MI6 was going through a difficult period too, after much of its network of intelligence stations across the Continent had been blown. A whole new British spy network was being constructed in great secrecy, and without the knowledge of anyone apart from the MI6 chief Sir Hugh Sinclair and his closest advisers. This was known, rather melodramatically, as the ‘Z Organisation’, after its creator ‘Colonel Z’, otherwise known as Claude Edward Marjoribanks Dansey. The Russian spy agencies, meanwhile, though still capable of effective work, were hobbled by the repeated waves of Stalin’s purges.

Canaris’s value to Hitler lay in the priceless information he was able to bring his chief, including, crucially, both the military plans and the political intentions of his foreign enemies. Britain and France, with their many high-level admirers of Hitler and their public policies of appeasement, were rich sources of information for Canaris’s Abwehr. Before the war Canaris boasted to Juan March (or was it a threat, given March’s dealings with the British?): ‘I have penetrated the [British] Naval Intelligence Division and MI6. So if any German, however important or discreet, felt tempted to work with the British, be sure I should find out.’ According to his own claim, Canaris had one very high-level source close enough to the British cabinet to enable him to assure Hitler in early 1936 that if Germany marched into the Versailles-protected demilitarised zone of the Rhineland, Britain would not energetically oppose this.

The Abwehr chief himself set the tone of his organisation from his Spartan office on the third floor of the Tirpitzufer. At one end of a room of modest proportions was Canaris’s desk, behind which were three full-length windows and a glazed door leading onto a small balcony looking over the Landwehr Canal. The desk was unadorned except for a routine scatter of papers, a model of his old cruiser the Dresden, and a small paperweight in the shape of the three monkeys – ‘See no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil.’ Otherwise the room was largely empty save for two or three chairs, a bookshelf full of books, many of them on music and the arts, and an iron camp bed on which Canaris would from time to time take a nap. Only three photographs hung on his walls – one of Franco, one of a handsome young Hungarian hussar, and one of his beloved dachshund Seppl, which took pride of place on the wall immediately opposite his desk.

The house near Berlin’s Schlachtensee in which Canaris lived with his wife Erika, their daughters Eva and Brigitte, a Polish cook, a Moroccan former prisoner of war who acted as the family servant, and two dachshunds, was frugal by the standards of high officials in Hitler’s Reich. It had six bedrooms but no grand reception rooms, a modest garden amongst trees and a shared fence with the Heydrichs next door.

Canaris’s style of management was relaxed. One of his senior colleagues described it as ‘passive leadership … under the pretence of the greatest apparent activity’. The Tirpitzufer was the only government building in Berlin where the familiar second-person pronoun ‘du’ was in common usage rather than the more formal ‘Sie’. Canaris (known affectionately as ‘old white head’ and ‘the little sailor’) was not a micro-manager. He set broad tasks, and then let his section chiefs get on with it. He hated bureaucracy, and often caused his subordinates despair by his inability to read and clear documents in a timely fashion. Erwin Lahousen wrote:

Canaris was the most difficult superior I have [ever] encountered. Contradictory in his instructions, given to whims, not always just [but] always mysterious, he had … intellectual and above all human qualities which raised him far above the military rubber stamps and marionettes that most of his colleagues and superiors were … He was not at all a technical expert in his work, rather he was a great dilettante. The underground circles that he … gathered around himself were as colourful and heterogeneous as his own personality. Men of all classes and professions, people whose horizons were broad and narrow, idealists and political adventurers, sober rationalists and imaginative mystics, conservative noblemen and Freemasons, theosophists, half-Jews or Jews, Germans and non-Germans … men and women – all of them united only [by their affection for him] and … by their resistance to Hitler and his system. This circle was by no means directed by secret orders. Rather it was an intellectual circle constantly influenced by slight or direct hints … which he guided by active intervention only in rare cases. Only a few initiates received concrete instructions, and even these were not always clear.

‘Old white head’ was also trusted and, it seems, genuinely loved by the more junior members of the Abwehr: ‘Admiral Canaris was absolutely trustworthy, clever, extremely gifted, honest, talented above [the] average and a person of sterling character,’ wrote one of his subordinates after the war. ‘He was well fitted for his position from a personal point of view. The things he [was] able to do for the Abwehr in the face of every obstacle could have been accomplished by no one else.’

But if Canaris was relaxed in his management style, he was utterly precise when it came to the standards he demanded of the Abwehr. His motto, borrowed from Germany’s great World War I spy chief Walter Nikolai, was ‘Le service de renseignements est l’apanage des gentilhommes. Si il est confié à d’autres, il s’écroule’ (The profession of spying should only be conferred upon gentlemen. If others get involved, disaster follows). He also discouraged an obsessional approach to the job: ‘An intelligence officer worthy of his profession,’ he once said to his staff, ‘should be in bed by ten. After that, all is nonsense and stupidity.’ While women spies were useful, in Canaris’s Abwehr any officer who slept with one would be dismissed. He made it clear to his officers that their job was exclusively to gather intelligence, and did not include assassination, torture, blackmail or coercion – such unpleasant things should be left to others. An ability to lie, on the other hand, was a prerequisite. ‘Lying is our trade,’ he instructed. ‘Lying is an art. If you cannot lie, there is no place for you in the Abwehr.’ The great theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose role as the ‘pastor’ of the resistance is often underestimated, famously gave this pragmatic philosophy theological underpinning by proclaiming that God required a lie if this was the only way to protect a deeper truth against evil.

The Abwehr expanded explosively under Canaris’s leadership, growing from 150 staff when he took it over in early 1935, to 1,000 in 1937. By 1943 it had surged in size to 30,000, with an annual budget in today’s terms of close to £100 million. The organisation was based around four ‘operational sections’: Section I, dealing with secret intelligence; Section II, sabotage and disruption; Section III, counter-intelligence; and a foreign department which took responsibility for overseas relations, including political and military evaluation. There was also an ‘administration’ section called ‘Section Z’. On the surface this dealt with mundane administrative matters such as archives, legal affairs, personnel and technical equipment. But Section Z, commanded by the Hitler-hating Hans Oster, was also the home of ‘the Abwehr within the Abwehr’ – a special and highly secret cell whose job it was to frustrate Hitler’s plans and undermine, first his march to war, and later, as things developed, his chances of victory. Known as ‘the Oster circle’ and ‘the Civilians’ – because of Oster’s habit of wearing civilian clothes (despite Canaris’s disapproval) and the culture of informality within his unit – Section Z was treated with some suspicion, even hostility, inside the Abwehr. In time it would become the nerve-centre of the entire high-level German conspiracy against Hitler.

One further addition hugely extended the power and reach of Canaris’s organisation. Though operating under a separate command, a military unit called the Brandenburg Division was attached to and tasked by the Abwehr. The ‘Brandenburgers’, as they were called, were arguably the first ever special forces unit. Unlike British special forces units, which in the early years of the war were used for pinprick raids, they were deployed, like special forces today, exclusively on strategic tasks. Multilingual, multinational (they included many Russian and Caucasian troops), highly mobile and superbly trained and equipped, their job was to operate behind enemy lines ahead of an invading force, disrupting communications and sabotaging bridges and command structures, in much the same way as Britain’s SAS did in the latter stages of the war in Europe.

As 1937 drew to a close, Hitler’s successful occupation of the Rhineland without, as Canaris had predicted, any serious international opposition or criticism, emboldened the Führer to annex Austria. Again, there was little reaction from Britain beyond a diplomatic shrug of resignation. Surely this would now be enough, London hoped, to satisfy the German dictator’s appetite. That was certainly prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s view. Writing to his sister Ida at about this time, he commented that if Hitler was appeased, then sooner or later he would become ‘sated, indolent and quiescent’.

But of course the opposite was the truth. Hitler’s generals understood what the rest of the world should have known: that victories do not satiate a tyrant’s appetite, they sharpen it. As Carl Goerdeler put it, presciently, ‘You know, a dictator must always be bringing along for breakfast a new kill if he is to thrive and survive. This time it is Austria. Next it will be Czechoslovakia, and so on and on.’

In April 1938 Goerdeler returned, accompanied by his wife and daughter, to London, where in two meetings with Vansittart he explained Hitler’s secret plans for the invasion of Czechoslovakia, and expatiated at length on the hostility of the Wehrmacht’s generals towards the Führer. But, following the line set by Chamberlain, Vansittart dismissed this as ‘treasonable talk’. There was also supposed to be a meeting between Goerdeler and Churchill, but this fell through at the last minute due to a misunderstanding over time and place.

Hitler’s secret instruction to his generals in November 1937 that they should prepare for an attack on Czechoslovakia in the following year now began to dominate the work of the planners in Berlin. Amongst the generals, however, there was consternation. This would be bound to lead to war, and that could ultimately end only in catastrophe for Germany. There was a united view that this time Hitler must be diverted; if this proved impossible, he should be removed – if necessary by force. Canaris issued instructions that Abwehr reports to Hitler should exaggerate the strength of the Czech defences, and stress the probability that Britain, France and Russia would go to war if Hitler attacked. On 30 May 1938 Ludwig Beck warned Hitler, ‘the campaign against Czechoslovakia can be very successful, but Germany will lose the war’. He followed this up on 3 June by sending the Führer a courageous memo opposing the planned invasion on military grounds. On 16 July he sent another, even more forthright, memo warning that an attack on Czechoslovakia would involve war with Britain and France. Finally, on 18 August, six weeks before the planned invasion, Beck resigned his post as chief of the army general staff and accepted a posting to command the German First Army on the Western Front. From his new position he opened up a secret and traitorous dialogue with foreign contacts in Basel.

It was around this time that Beck, Canaris, Goerdeler and their fellow conspirators concluded that the only way to stop the coming war was to send secret emissaries to European capitals – especially London and Paris. As Canaris put it to his friend Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin, ‘England must lend us a sea-anchor if we are to ride out this storm.’

* The term Wehrmacht was used for the entire armed forces.

† Known as the Ersatzheer, this had the responsibility of training soldiers to reinforce first-line divisions. Sometimes referred to as ‘the Replacement Army’.