Nein!

Most permanent under secretaries at the British Foreign Office are unobtrusive, background men, whose voices are seldom heard. But Sir Robert Vansittart – widely known in Whitehall as ‘Van’ – was different. Knowledgeable, clever and very well informed, he was so influential over Eden that the foreign secretary was often maliciously referred to behind his back as ‘His Master’s Voice’ – the point of the barb being that ‘Van’ was the foreign secretary’s master, not the other way round.

Vansittart was, in short, anything but quiet and unobtrusive. His frequently-voiced concerns about the rise of Hitler were so contrary to the appeasement policy of His Majesty’s Government of the time that one of prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s close advisers referred to him as ‘an alarmist, [who] hampered all attempts of the Government to make friendly contact with the dictator states’.

A few days later, Goerdeler had a meeting with Vansittart, no doubt as a result of Young’s report on the National Liberal Club dinner. Afterwards, Van wrote a memorandum to Eden for circulation to the cabinet. In it he underlined Goerdeler’s warnings, referring to the visiting German as ‘an impressive, wise and weighty man [who by coming to Britain is] putting his neck in a halter’.

Vansittart’s minute got no further than Eden’s desk. It did not accord with the prevailing government policy of appeasement, and would therefore, the foreign secretary judged, not be welcomed by his cabinet colleagues.

The minute still exists in Van’s private papers. On it, in Vansittart’s hand, are written the words: ‘Suppressed by Eden’.

2
Ludwig Beck

If there was a soldier in the German army who embodied the antithesis of all that Hitler and the Nazi Party stood for, it was Ludwig Beck.

And yet, he was not one of life’s natural rebels. He was too intellectual, too thoughtful, too careful, too considered and too punctilious (that word again) to be a great plotter – and far too straightforward to be a successful conspirator.

And that was his problem. Like Carl Goerdeler, Ludwig Beck was a man made for a different age than the one in which he found himself.

Also like Goerdeler, Beck at first welcomed the arrival of Hitler and the Nazis on the German scene. In the autumn of 1930 he famously defended young officers in his unit who were court-martialled for being members of the Nazi Party, contrary to the rules of the time which prohibited army officers from political activity. When the Nazis seized power in 1933, Beck, whose Lutheran faith had incorporated a degree of anti-Semitism since the days of Luther himself, announced, ‘I have wished for years for the political revolution, and now my wishes have come true. It is the first ray of hope since 1918.’

Ludwig August Theodor Beck was born the son of a gifted metallurgical engineer on 29 June 1880 in Biebrich, then a small village on the opposite bank of the Rhine from Mainz. As a middle-class Prussian brought up in the long afterglow of the victories of the Franco-Prussian War and the ensuing unification of Germany, and living little more than a stone’s throw from Frankfurt, where the treaty which sealed these triumphs was signed, the young Beck’s career would probably have been decided from the moment he was born – he was to be a soldier.

What followed was an education in the classic Prussian military tradition. This produced officers of high professional ability, who regarded a commitment to their country as synonymous with loyalty to their regiment and to the brotherhood of their fellow officers. For these men the Prussian military code, characterised by the motto Üb Immer Treu und Redlichkeit* (Always practise loyalty and sincerity), was more than a slogan – it was a way of life that they were sworn to follow and protect. Later this sense of loyalty and brotherly solidarity among the officer corps would protect even plotters against the German state from discovery by the security services.

Ludwig Beck’s moral compass, founded on Üb Immer Treu und Redlichkeit, was different from that of Carl Goerdeler – but its pull was no less strong.

Tall, angular, thin, Beck’s physical appearance closely mirrored his personality. He had the look of an ascetic, with what one colleague described as ‘facial skin so tight as to seem ghoulish, especially on the rare occasions when he smiled’. Another noted his ‘tense, sensitive, finely chiselled face with slightly sunken, rather sad eyes’. To his contemporaries Beck seemed a solitary figure, set slightly apart from the crowd, as though close human contact was strange and uncongenial to him. A committed and practising Lutheran, for Beck, austerity, rectitude and restraint were the guiding principles of his life and the cornerstone of his religious beliefs.

Beck the young officer was no moustachioed, boneheaded Prussian militarist of the sort beloved of cartoonists and popular legend. He was what was known in the Germany of the time as an ‘educated officer’. Like Frederick the Great he was keen on music, and played the violin well. Widely read, knowledgeable and engaged in all aspects of German cultural life, he was fluent in English, an admirer of French culture and, unlike most in the Prussian officer class, engaged freely with politicians. Intellectually disciplined, he was widely recognised as a man of refinement and integrity; in later life he would earn the nickname ‘the philosopher general’.

But Ludwig Beck had his flaws too – they were the flaws which can often weaken the soldier who has more intellect than is needed for the job. He was a man of thought rather than of action, who weighed every step so carefully that he could sometimes miss the fleeting opportunity whose lightning exploitation is the true test of the great commander. One contemporary put it more prosaically: ‘Everyone who knew him, knew he could not be persuaded into a cavalry charge.’ Men looked up to Beck not for his battle-readiness, but for his deep spiritual and intellectual qualities, and for his unshakeable integrity.

Ludwig Beck

By the time the First World War came, Ludwig Beck was an experienced thirty-four-year-old professional soldier, widely regarded as a man on the way up. He spent most of the first three years of the war as a staff officer on the Western Front, earning a reputation for diligence and an extraordinary capacity for hard work. He worked such long hours at the front that he was forced to give up his beloved violin. In May 1916 he took a few days’ leave from the front to marry Amalie Pagenstecher, the daughter of a Bremen merchant and, at twenty-three, twelve years Beck’s junior. Nine months later the couple had a daughter, Gertrud. Then, in November 1917, tragedy struck when Amalie suddenly died. Beck arranged for Gertrud’s care and swiftly returned to his duties at the front line. After the war ended he took over his daughter’s upbringing himself, throwing himself into the task with typical dedication and energy.

A period commanding an artillery regiment in present-day Baden-Württemberg followed, before Beck was posted to the Department of the Army in Berlin in 1931. He arrived in the capital just in time to have a ringside seat for the final stages of the collapse of the Weimar Republic, and the rise of Adolf Hitler.

Beck’s job was to lead a team tasked with producing the German army’s new operations manual, the Truppenführung, which first appeared in 1933. A modified version of this widely acclaimed work is still in use in the German Federal Army of today. In 1932 Beck was promoted to lieutenant general, and in 1933, the year Hitler became chancellor, he was made head of the army department. By this time the army department had effectively become the German general staff, despite an explicit prohibition against the creation of such an organisation in the Versailles Treaty. Beck threw himself into his new task with his usual ferocious energy. He rose each morning at 5.30 and rode from six to eight, before being driven to army headquarters on Bendlerstrasse at 8.30. He worked in his office overlooking the courtyard from 9 a.m. until seven in the evening, when he returned home to dine. After dinner he did paperwork for a further three hours, before retiring to bed punctually at midnight.

These long hours were not spent only on military matters. By this stage of his life Beck was fully engaged in his second great love – politics.

It did not take him long to realise that his hope that Hitler would be a necessary and passing evil after the chaos of the Weimar years was to be confounded. Like Goerdeler and many others, Beck and his army colleagues were horrified by the lawlessness and bloodletting of the Night of the Long Knives, especially when one of the army’s own, Hitler’s predecessor as chancellor, General Kurt von Schleicher, and his wife were cold-bloodedly murdered in their home.

Three weeks later, an attempted putsch by Austrian Nazis to overthrow their government, in which Hitler’s hand was clearly visible, failed disastrously.

To Beck, who had close contacts in the German Foreign Office, the failed coup confirmed what he had feared for some time: that the long-term consequence – and probably intent – of Hitler’s foreign policy was war. Shortly afterwards, he wrote a memo to his superiors warning that premature foreign adventures would ultimately result in a ‘humiliating retreat’.

Beck, however, went further than predictions. Basing his arguments on religious and moral convictions similar to those of Goerdeler, he asserted, in a way that foreshadows the Nuremberg trials of more than a decade later, that legitimate action by the state and its servants in the army had to be based on morality. To prevent modern conflict becoming total war, he wrote, what was needed was ‘a policy with moral bases which knows to retain its supremacy on the foundation of a new moral idealism in the state itself and in its relations with other nations’. It goes without saying that if such a moral context for state policy and action was what Beck hoped for, he must have known that it could never be found in Hitler and his associates.

On 2 August 1934, a month after the Night of the Long Knives, the death occurred of the eighty-six-year-old President Paul von Hindenburg, the only person whose status and position could act as a counterbalance to Hitler’s growing command of the German state. A little over two weeks later, in a referendum called the day before the old president’s death, 89.9 per cent of Germans voted to combine the offices of president and chancellor, conferring absolute power on Adolf Hitler. All civil servants and members of the armed forces were now required to attend mass rallies and swear an oath of personal allegiance to Hitler (rather than, as previously to ‘the People and Fatherland’): ‘I swear by God this sacred oath, that I will render unconditional obedience to Adolf Hitler, the Führer of the German Reich and people, Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, and will be ready as a brave soldier to risk my life for this oath.’ Beck, who claimed to have been unaware of the full form of the oath until he arrived at the ceremony, declared to a friend afterwards, ‘This the blackest day of my life.’ Later, in a classic Beck afterthought, he confided to another, Hans Bernd Gisevius, that he ‘could never rid himself of the awful thought that at the time he should not, perhaps, have given his oath’.

Very few felt as Beck did. The average officer in the Wehrmacht was delighted by the new mood of militarism in Germany, by the respect the army appeared to receive from Hitler and by the physical consequence of this: increased budgets for the latest arms and equipment, and a massive expansion in numbers. True, some were concerned that the flood of new recruits – especially members of the Hitler Youth, for whom the notion of Üb Immer Treu und Redlichkeit was as alien as it was quaint – would alter the nature of the German army. Most officers consoled themselves with the thought that the army would change the newcomers before they changed the army; and anyway, since the man to whom they had just sworn absolute fealty clearly needed them, what had they to fear?

Beck was one of very few who understood that the imposition of Hitler’s Führerprinzip (the leader principle), with its demand for absolute obedience, meant the destruction of the normal checks and balances of a democratic state. His answer to this threat was for the army, as Germany’s strongest and most revered institution, to play its role as the essential counterweight needed to keep the state on a safe course. In a normal democratic state, he suggested, military action was tasked and constrained by the political leaders. But if this balance was broken or dysfunctional, the roles should be reversed, and it should become the responsibility of the army to set its own limits for the politicians. ‘It is not what we do,’ he wrote to one of his subordinates in 1935, ‘but how we do it which is so bad. [It is a] policy of violence and perfidy.’ National confidence in Germany’s most illustrious arm, its military, depended, Beck asserted, on the army’s refusal to allow itself to be used as the tool of a foreign policy built on naked adventurism. The army, in short, had a duty to act as the emergency brake on political folly or evil.

Beck was now on territory which was dangerously close to rebellion. Writing to his superior Werner von Fritsch in January 1937, he insisted, ‘All hope is placed in the army. The Wehrmacht will never permit adventure – for able and clever men are its head. Total responsibility rests [on us] for future developments. There is no escaping that.’

It did not take long for Beck to be cruelly disabused of these elaborate niceties.

Hitler’s long-term intentions had for some time been strongly hinted at for those with ears to hear. As early as May 1935, Beck, as chief of staff, had been ordered to start planning for Operation Schulung, an ‘imaginary’ invasion of Czechoslovakia. In the first months of 1937, responding to the mood in Hitler’s Chancellery, Beck began considering how he would implement an order to bring Austria into the German fold.

On 5 November 1937, Hitler finally made plain what had so far only been implied. In a long monologue delivered at a secret meeting with his key military leaders, the chancellor announced that his intention was indeed to go to war with his neighbours: ‘The first German objective … should be to overthrow Austria and Czechoslovakia simultaneously … the descent upon the Czechs [should be carried out] with lightning speed [and might take place] as early as 1938.’ Hitler stressed that he was not predicting a short conflict – his long-term aim, he warned, was to acquire more ‘living space’ (Lebensraum) for Germany’s population by 1943.

Any hope that the army would act as Beck’s hoped-for ‘emergency brake’ on what was now plainly revealed as Hitler’s headlong dash to war vanished in the early months of 1938, when the German army suffered a double blow to both its prestige and its power. It began with a carefully engineered ‘scandal’ which on 27 January ended the career of the then minister of war and commander-in-chief, Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg. Eight days later the head of the army, Colonel General Fritsch, the man to whom Beck had written a few weeks earlier asserting that the army would never permit ‘adventure’, was forced to resign because of an alleged, but entirely manufactured, homosexual encounter with a male prostitute in a backstreet close to a Berlin railway station. The army, in which Beck had invested ‘all hope’, stood silently by and uttered not a squeak of protest at these public crucifixions of two of its most respected officers, or at the step-by-step emasculation of its power and position which ensued. On 4 February, Hitler, seeing this weakness, seized direct personal control of Germany’s military machine, declaring, ‘I exercise henceforth immediate command over the entire armed forces.’

Following the Fritsch affair and Hitler’s takeover of the army, whispered talk began to circulate about the possibilities of taking direct action. Carl Goerdeler lobbied some generals to initiate a coup d’état by using the army to seize Gestapo headquarters. But Ludwig Beck had not yet crossed the Rubicon. Asked at a meeting about this time if he had any comment on the recent events, he responded that the question was improper: ‘Mutiny and revolution are words which will not be found in a German soldier’s dictionary.’

Despite all the evidence to the contrary, Beck, still failing to understand the true nature of Hitler’s demonic will, continued to believe that he could divert the coming war by persuasion and legal means.

Again, he was soon proved wrong.

Hitler swiftly consolidated his mastery of the German machine by appointing his most loyal acolyte, Wilhelm Keitel, as chief of the newly created high command of the armed forces, and Joachim von Ribbentrop as his new foreign minister. Then, following the annexation of Austria in March, he convened a secret meeting with his generals on 30 May, and proclaimed: ‘It is my unalterable decision to smash Czechoslovakia by military action in the near future.’

For Beck, this was the last straw. In a minute to his superior, Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, he wrote: ‘The Führer’s remarks demonstrate once again the total insufficiency of the existing military hierarchy at the highest level … If the lever is not applied here soon … the future fate … [of] peace and war and with it the fate of Germany … can only be seen in the blackest colours.’

Now at last Ludwig Beck understood that all attempts to alter Hitler’s ‘unalterable resolve’ were in vain. If war was to be prevented, the time had come, the philosopher general concluded, to pass from protests to the preparation of coups and assassinations.

* The motto is taken from a song of this title that from 1797 to 1945 was played every hour by the bells of Potsdam’s Garrison Church, the burial place of Frederick the Great. The words, by the eighteenth-century poet Ludwig Hölty, were set to the tune of Papageno’s song ‘Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen’ from Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute. The motto became closely associated with Prussian values and the creed of Freemasonry.

3
Wilhelm Canaris

At a little before eight o’clock on the morning of 2 January 1935, a slight and rather unprepossessing man with sad china-blue eyes and prematurely white hair for a forty-eight-year-old walked through the front door of Tirpitzufer 72–76, an imposing five-storey granite building a kilometre or so from Hitler’s Chancellery. Standing by the small concierge’s kiosk just inside the front door, a casual observer not in the know (the visitor’s presence that day was a state secret) would not have marked the small figure down as anyone of particular importance. True, his admiral’s uniform and his complexion, ruddy with the lash of salt breezes, told of a life at sea. But senior military figures were two a penny in Berlin these days. This man’s dress looked ‘shop-soiled and old’, and his bearing far from military, so that the observer might have imagined that he was perhaps retired, rather than someone at the very top of Chancellor Hitler’s hierarchy. ‘He gave the impression of a civilian, rather than a senior German officer,’ said one commentator.

The admiral walked up a flight of steps set between two fluted Doric pillars and across the glistening tiled floor of the Tirpitzufer entrance hall to a creaky lift with a reputation for breaking down, positioned to one side of a balustraded stairway sweeping down from the first floor. He entered the lift and, pressing the button for the third floor, was duly deposited in front of a pair of heavy oak doors which led through an outer office to an empty, high-ceilinged room, which echoed to his footsteps. Looking around, the newcomer would have noted to himself, with the habit of a man used to taking over other people’s jobs, that his predecessor had taken all the furniture.

Wilhelm Canaris’s journey to his new post as head of the Abwehr,* Germany’s principal foreign intelligence service, had been a long and romantic one. It had taken an inexperienced young naval officer and made him into what a contemporary described as ‘one of the most interesting phenomena of the period … a combination of disinterested idealism and of shrewdness such as is particularly rare in Germany. In Germany one very seldom finds the cleverness of a snake and the purity of a dove combined in a single personality.’

Born to a wealthy industrialist near Dortmund on 1 January 1887, Wilhelm Franz Canaris was a few years younger than both Ludwig Beck and Carl Goerdeler. According to family legend he was a descendant of the nineteenth-century Greek admiral, liberation hero and politician Constantine Kanaris. Canaris liked to repeat this story in preference to the truth, which was that his ancestors were the Canarisi family from the area around Lake Como in northern Italy, who took their winemaking skills to the Mosel region of Germany in the late seventeenth century. There was indeed something not quite German – something more of the south – about Wilhelm Canaris. In later life he would express a dislike of cold northern climes, and a preference for the warmth, charm and easy living of the south. His personality too seemed more in tune with the sinuosity and subtlety of the Mediterranean than with the eternal search for logic, resolution and mastery of the Atlantic races.

A pious Protestant all his life, he was nevertheless fascinated by the spiritualism and rituals of the Catholic Church, and believed in the supernatural. Moral precepts played an established part in his life – though not as clearly defined a part as with Goerdeler or Beck. Canaris’s compass, unlike theirs, gave him a firm general direction of travel built on strong principles. But when it came to the application of these, he was serpentine, flexible and full of ruses and devices. A few meanderings here and there were of little consequence, provided his basic moral foundation remained uncompromised. His character was founded on a deep strain of ambivalence. One observer commented, ‘Canaris had a profound sense of adventure, including the adventure of evil itself.’ His was a mind capable of coping with paradox, and, in the right circumstances, he did not find it difficult to accept that ends could justify means, provided they were carefully chosen and judiciously applied.

One other unusual feature marked Canaris’s personality. He never looked back. What had gone had gone, and was of no consequence.The only thing that mattered to him was what was ahead.

Wilhelm Canaris had a gentle disposition. ‘He hated violence in itself,’ a friend noted. ‘[He] was repelled by war … [and had] an exaggerated love for animals. “Anyone who does not love dogs, I judge out of hand to be an evil man,” he once announced … I never witnessed in Canaris a trace of crudity or brutality … only sudden revelations of his deep-seated humanity.’ Another of his contemporaries noted that he was, in all his dealings and whatever the provocation, invariably ‘a kind person’. His wife Erika described him as a man of ‘tender emotions’.

Wilhelm Canaris

Politically, Canaris was a natural conservative. But his views were moderately held, and tempered always with an instinct for humanity and an internationalist world view. Later on, possibly under the influence of Goerdeler, he believed that after the war there should be a United States of Europe led by a triumvirate of Britain, France and Germany.

Physically, he was small and slight. Frequently mocked for his lack of stature by his classmates, he left school to enlist in the Imperial German Navy at the age of eighteen, later claiming that his choice of this career was due to his famous (but entirely unrelated) Greek ‘ancestor’.

The young Wilhelm Canaris first came to prominence in Germany (and Britain) as a result of a First World War game of hide-and-seek played out along the west coast of South America between the Royal Navy light cruiser HMS Glasgow and the German light cruiser Dresden, on which Canaris was a junior officer. On 14 March 1915 the Glasgow finally found the Dresden sheltering in a bay on an isolated island in Chilean waters. Following negotiations between the two warships, in which Canaris (who spoke excellent English and had a reputation for exquisite manners) was involved, the Dresden’s captain, realising he was cornered, opened her sea-cocks, scuttled his ship and surrendered his German crew to internment. Canaris, who also spoke perfect Spanish (he was said to be fluent in six languages) did not remain behind bars for long. On 4 August 1915 he escaped captivity and made his way disguised as a peasant by train, foot, boat and horseback over the Andes to Buenos Aires. From there, assuming the identity of a Chilean widower, ‘Señor Reed Rosas’, young Lieutenant Canaris took a slow boat home through, among other places, Falmouth (where he assisted British immigration officials with information on a fellow traveller). He finally arrived back in Germany on 30 September 1915.

Towards the end of that year, the slight figure of ‘Señor Reed Rosas’ turned up again, this time in Madrid, where he took out a lease on a flat not far from the German embassy. Wilhelm Canaris, alias Reed Rosas, alias ‘Carl’, codename ‘Kika’ (a childhood nickname which means ‘peeker’), was on a spying mission for his country.

Despite suffering recurrent bouts of malaria, exacerbated by the excessively hot summers and bleak winters of Madrid, Canaris found that his posting to Spain was the start of a love affair with the Iberian peninsula and its people that would last the rest of his life. ‘I like Italians, just as I like Greeks and Spaniards,’ he told a friend. ‘If a Spaniard gives me his word of honour, I place confidence in it. I am much more cautious towards the Greeks and especially the Italians. In Italy sincerity is often camouflaged behind different colours, like the slices on a Neapolitan cake.’

Ordered home through Italy, Canaris, still masquerading as Señor Rosas, and accompanied by a Spanish priest also travelling under a false identity, left Spain for France on 21 February 1916. Both men claimed to be travelling to Switzerland to take the cure for tuberculosis (an illness it was easy for Canaris to feign because of his malaria). After crossing the French–Italian border without difficulty, the pair headed for Domodossola on the Swiss–Italian border, thirty kilometres north of the Italian lakes.

By now, however, the French and the British had alerted the Italian border guards to look out for a Chilean passport in the name of Reed Rosas. The fugitives were arrested on 24 February, and summarily thrown into jail. An extensive period of interrogation in the none-too-gentle hands of Italian counter-intelligence followed, during which Canaris took to biting his lip so that he could convincingly spit blood to back up his claim to tuberculosis. Soon German and Chilean diplomatic wheels began to turn in Madrid. Under pressure from the Chilean government, the Italian authorities agreed not to hang the pair, and bundled them on board a freighter bound for Cartagena. On 15 March, Canaris arrived back in Madrid, emaciated, convulsed with shivering and racked with a roaring malarial fever.

The experience of being arrested, jailed, very nearly hanged and struck down with malaria ought to have put him off spying forever. But it didn’t. Over the next year he made the contacts and put together the spy networks in Spain and Portugal that would form the foundation of his later work on the Iberian peninsula during the 1930s and 40s.

He swiftly became a familiar of the shadowy demi-monde of spies, corrupt officials, bankers, money-launderers, arms traders, adventurers, and all the hangers-on who circle like scavengers around rotten meat in the neutral spaces of any conflict. Among these were two men who would be of special interest to him in the future. The first was Basil Zaharoff, a director of the British engineering company Vickers Armstrong, an occasional British agent and one of the world’s most notorious arms salesmen. The second was a Mallorcan fisherman and tobacco-smuggler called Juan March. March, whose fingers were in almost every dubious Iberian pie and who ended his life a very rich man because of it, was one of Canaris’s most important agents. According to rumour and the voluminous files held on him in the British National Archives, he also performed the same function for the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, also known as MI6), a fact of which both sides were probably very well aware.

In late 1916, with his work in Spain finished, Canaris made a second attempt to get back to Germany, finally reaching safe territory on 9 October 1916, when he was landed from the German submarine U-35 at the Croatian port of Cattaro.

On his return to Germany he was awarded the Iron Cross First Class and immediately posted back to regular service, commanding a succession of U-Boats in the Mediterranean and sinking several Allied ships before the war ended.

After such a war, what could the thirty-one-year-old Canaris do next for adventure? He began casting around to find a stage on which he could use his talents and his love of conspiracy. Politics was the obvious answer, and there was more than enough of it to go round in the chaos and revolution of post-Versailles Germany. In the early post-war years Canaris was deeply involved in combating the threat of communism, which at the time seemed poised to overwhelm Germany. He was an early activist in the formation of the anti-communist Freikorps paramilitary units which roamed the country. In this role he almost certainly had dealings with his old Iberian adversary Basil Zaharoff, who was at the time busy selling weapons from his German factories to anyone who would buy them.