Authors: John Bryden
November 1939–June 1940
Canaris earned high marks from Hitler for his part in the invasion and defeat of France, and rightly so. It probably would not have happened without him.
With the exception of Hitler, who was forever the optimist, things had looked pretty bleak to Germany’s military leadership when the British and French declared war at the beginning of September 1939. France alone had a larger army, and when her troops and tanks, backed up by the British Expeditionary Force, moved up to the Belgium frontier, Hitler’s generals were worried. A prompt attack while most of Germany’s air and ground forces were still in Poland would have brought a quick defeat, and none of them wanted that.1 No matter how much they despised Hitler, they could not forget that the French had gone out of their way to humiliate Germany after the Armistice of 1918, and it was not something they wanted repeated.
Fortunately for Germany, the French and British simply sat on their arms in the weeks needed to get the troops back from Poland. The two sides then lined up along the German and French frontiers, each waiting for the other to move. Hitler became restless and started pushing his generals to attack. It made them amenable to rebellion.
General Ludwig Beck, the former chief of the general staff who resigned in 1938 over Hitler’s plan to invade Czechoslovakia, began circulating secret memos disparaging Germany’s chances of winning against France and Britain, and predicting a war of attrition similar to that of the First World War. His fears were shared by many of the army’s leaders, including Beck’s successor, General Franz Halder, but when he began suggesting Hitler be deposed, there was reluctance. This changed when Hitler insisted that Germany take the offensive. Halder began talking of arranging an “accident” for the Führer.
The sixty-year-old Beck was a Prussian general of the old school, where the honour of the army and the Reich were intimately intertwined. He was appalled by the prospect of Germany once again violating the neutrality of Belgium, and worried about the damage this would do to Germany’s image before the world. He also argued that the United States would surely come on side with the British and French as it had in the First World War, making Germany’s defeat inevitable.2
Working with the Abwehr’s Colonel Hans Oster and his aide, Hans von Dohnányi, Beck came up with a plan reminiscent of the aborted coup attempt of 1938. It called for the troops stationed in Berlin under General Erwin von Witzleben to surround the government quarter the moment Hitler ordered the offensive against France. Beck would then become temporary head of state until a caretaker government was formed. Along with Witzleben and Halder, General Walther von Brauchitsch, the army’s commander-in-chief, and the quartermaster-general, Karl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel, were on side. There were important civilians, as well, including the former Reich minister of economics, Dr. Hjalmar Schacht. Canaris was on board, too.
The Abwehr’s role — as Colonel Lahousen described it after the war — was to use its own specially trained commandos to rush in to seize and arrest the members of Hitler’s entourage and Hitler himself, if possible. Meanwhile, in anticipation of the coup, Canaris was to put out peace feelers. This at first involved trying to set up the Pope as an intermediary between the conspirators and the British and French. Dr. Joseph Müller, a prominent Bavarian Catholic and lawyer, was given the task of making the approaches to the Vatican under the direction of Oster and von Dohnányi. Müller arrived in Rome in mid-September, and by mid-October had the Pope’s commitment to help.3
The tactic Canaris used in Holland was more direct. On October 17, the MI6 office in The Hague received a telephone call from a Colonel Teichmann on behalf of generals Gerd von Rundstedt and Gustav von Wietersheim, both just then finishing up their command assignments in Poland. An army-led coup d’état was in the works, Teichmann explained, and the two generals wanted to know what terms Germany could expect from Britain and France for a cessation of hostilities. Chamberlain’s government was delighted when told of the overture, and shot back that a withdrawal from Poland and respect for Czechoslovakia’s autonomy would be the principal conditions.4
The involvement of von Rundstedt was important. He was then Germany’s highest-profile commander, having served in senior posts with the Reichswehr — the peacetime army — throughout the 1920s and ’30s, and the British would certainly have known of him. He had been approached by the conspirators in 1938 but had turned them down. This time, however, in the wake of the SS carrying out Hitler’s policy of subduing Polish resistance by executing the civilian leadership classes, he had changed his mind. Both he and von Wietersheim had protested the killings, but Himmler’s and Heydrich’s Einsatzgruppen carried them out anyway.5
With the blessings of Chamberlain, and at the direction of his War Cabinet, the two MI6 officers at The Hague had several preliminary meetings with representatives of the two generals, giving them a wireless set and a secret cipher so that they could maintain contact inside Germany. On November 3, the Germans wirelessed that the generals agreed in principle to the British terms and wanted to know what kind of negotiators would be acceptable.6
On November 4 all seemed well. Halder issued a secret alert to the conspirators to make ready. Then, the next day, everything fell apart. General von Brauchitsch had taken it upon himself to give Hitler one last chance by trying personally to persuade him to give up launching the attack. Hitler turned on him like an angry dog.
Brauchitsch was not a strong personality. Hitler threw one of his famous tantrums, which usually involved stomping about the room, slamming his fist on the furniture, and pounding on the walls, then alternating between raging at the top of his voice and holding his breath until his face went purple. The performance peaked with a slur about the defeatist “spirit of Zossen,” a direct allusion to the general staff then headquartered near the village of Zossen. Brauchitsch wilted. Then Hitler paused. His voice dropped and his eyes bore into those of the army chief: “What are you planning?” Brauchitsch left the room, shaking.
Halder panicked when Brauchitsch told him what happened. He called off the plot forthwith and ordered all involved immediately to destroy any incriminating evidence. If Hitler wanted an offensive in the West, he was to get it. The conspirators had no choice but to set their plotting aside and bend their energies toward beating the French.7
It was not going to be easy. An assault on the string of forts the French dubbed the Maginot Line between Luxembourg and Switzerland seemed unlikely to succeed, while a straight thrust through Belgium was bound to be halted sooner or later, just as Beck predicted, with the familiar war in the trenches following. What this meant in blood and misery was still a current memory from the First World War. Nevertheless, the army’s general staff dutifully resumed working on plans to attack through Belgium, as done in 1914, this time with Holland thrown in.
Hitler was aware of the army’s misgivings, and it irked him. He regarded France as a rotten apple to be knocked down with a tap, but he, too, could see that the formula of 1914 was problematic. At the end of October, this had led him to propose using armoured forces to try to punch a hole through the right wing of the Anglo/French armies where they rested on Luxembourg, the idea being to go through the forested area known as the Ardennes and break out into the open country in France around Sedan.8 The army general staff had been cool to the idea while it looked like the Nazis were to be overthrown; when the plot was shelved, they considered it more seriously. This, again, was where Canaris came in.
By late 1939, certainly thanks to Ast Hamburg’s spy A-3504 — Arthur Owens in England — and thanks to the network of Abwehr spies in France strung out along its northern frontier,9 Canaris was able to assure Hitler with great confidence that the British and French were grouping their forces along the western frontier of Belgium in expectation of a German attack through the Low Countries, and that they intended immediately to advance to meet it. Opposite the Forest of the Ardennes, however, the enemy was thinly spread. A blow there, Hitler was told, and the enemy front could split. By swinging to the west from the penetration, and driving toward the Channel, “the entire northern enemy group could be encircled and eliminated.”10
On November 12, Hitler unilaterally ordered two panzer divisions and a motorized infantry division to army Group A, then commanded by von Rundstedt and holding the line facing the Ardennes. Von Rundstedt and his chief of staff, Erich von Manstein, had been badgering OKH for more forces for some time, but unsuccessfully. Now they were told they were to undertake what was to be a second major thrust into France — an armoured strike out of the Ardennes and across the Meuse River at Sedan.11
The idea quickly gained traction. That previous summer, the British military theorist B.H. Liddell Hart had come out with a new book that seemed to state the obvious: if the Germans should attack France, their best bet was to go through Belgium. The Forest of the Ardennes was least best, Liddell Hart wrote, because its narrow roads and deep gullies were easily defended. Hart was considered the leading theorist in armoured warfare, a still-novel concept, and his writings during the 1920s and ’30s had made a deep impression on the German general staff, as well as with the staffs of other European armies. If Liddell Hart said the Ardennes was impractical for motorized forces, then the Germans could assume that the British and French thought so too. It was the perfect recipe for surprise.12
When Germany’s most respected mobile warfare strategist, General Heinz Guderian, declared that the Ardennes could be crossed, and the attack should be as powerful as possible, planning began in earnest. Even General Halder was won over. A really strong blow in the solar plexus of the French defence just might knock the enemy off its feet. The three divisions allocated to von Rundstedt by Hitler were upped to a corps, and then to three, two-thirds of the available armoured formations. Instead of the attack through Holland and northern Belgium being the main thrust, it was to be diversionary, and this is where Canaris again came in. It was the Abwehr’s job to ensure that the attackers had the best and latest information on the dispositions of the enemy. It was also the Abwehr’s job to hide the real plan. Canaris succeeded brilliantly on both counts.13
First, however, Canaris had an urgent problem to solve. Halder’s abrupt cancellation of the coup attempt had left the talks with the British in Holland dangling. They had got to the point where the two MI6 officers involved, Major Richard Stevens and Captain S. Payne Best, were poised to wrap things up whenever General Wietersheim became available in person. Now the whole thing had to be aborted. It could be many months before another coup attempt, and the longer it took, the more certain it was that something of the generals’ peace overtures would leak back to the Nazis. Von Rundstedt and von Wietersheim were in deadly danger.
Canaris was famous among those close to him for his creativity in pulling hot irons from hot fires, and he demonstrated it this time. He and Germany’s most dangerous man, Nazi security service chief Reinhardt Heydrich, were close, like cobra and mongoose, both socially and in their work, the younger man treating the older with wary respect. It seems that Canaris now told Heydrich that he had a sting operation underway that could lead to the kidnapping of two British intelligence officers. Heydrich’s SD was just then in the process of amalgamating with the German police forces, including the Gestapo, to form the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA) — the Office for National Security. Canaris offered the new Nazi police and intelligence supremo-to-be an early chance to show his spurs.14 Naturally, there is no written record of their plan, but it can be seen through the sequence of events that followed.
Halder called the plot off on November 5. Nevertheless, two days later Stevens reported to London that General Wietersheim was prepared to meet with him shortly. Then, on November 8, at 9:20 p.m., a bomb exploded at a reunion of Nazi party faithful at the Bürgerbräukeller, a famous beer hall in Munich, killing eight people and injuring sixty-three. Hitler had been the evening’s speaker and had just left.
The Führer was shaken by the near miss. His train had just pulled into Nuremberg station when a pair of grim-faced officers boarded. Hitler met them in the corridor.
“What’s happened?” he asked.
“Mein Führer, I have just received a report from Munich that an attempt has been made on your life. Roughly an hour after you left the Bürgerbräukeller there was a powerful explosion. The people who were still there in the hall were buried under the falling ceiling.”
Hitler went pale. Gasping for breath, he asked for Himmler. He was told the SS chief was still in Munich. Hitler became excited. He ordered that Himmler stay until the criminals were caught: “Tell him that he should proceed ruthlessly and exterminate the whole pack of them, root and branch.”15
The next day, on November 9, Stevens telephoned London to say that he and Best were on their way to meet the “Big Man.” They never returned.
Best and Stevens arrived that afternoon at Venlo, a town on the border between Holland and Germany, enthused and full of hope, accompanied by a Dutch intelligence officer and a driver. The encounter with von Wietersheim was to take place in the patch of road between the crossing barriers. The Germans were waiting when the car carrying the English and Dutchmen pulled up. The parties got out.
Suddenly, the Germans sprang at Best and Stevens. They were manhandled into the German vehicles. Shots were fired. The Dutch officer fell. The German cars sped back over the border.
The kidnappings made headlines in Germany. Photographs of Stevens and Best were splashed across the newspapers next to that of Johann Georg Elser, an unemployed carpenter and sometime Communist who had been caught the same day. He had been held at the Swiss border a few hours before the explosion when found to be carrying some notes on making explosives, a postcard of the Bürgerbräukeller, and some suspicious metal parts. When news of the Munich bombing reached the frontier post, the officials there knew they had the man. In the newspapers, Best and Stevens were labelled the evil geniuses behind Elser’s cowardly act, nabbed by the new amalgamated Nazi police and intelligence service.16