Wilhelm Canaris, head of Nazi intelligence during World War II, lived a life of intrigue, espionage, and betrayal. His story, marked by his ability to navigate between service to Adolf Hitler and conspiracy to overthrow him, culminated in his execution in 1945. What were his early years in the Imperial Navy and his relationship with Argentina, where he found refuge?
And one day, the fine wire along which his life had been walked, while he took steps like a tightrope walker between good service to Adolf Hitler and plots to overthrow or assassinate him, that fine and always taut wire of an expert tightrope walker broke. The once all-powerful admiral William Canaris, who had headed the intelligence office of the Führer's armies, He was hanged in the Flossenbürg concentration camp On April 9, 1945, with the war already lost, twenty-one days before Hitler committed suicide and the Reich, which was to last a thousand years, succumbed entirely to the onslaught of the Red Army. He was fifty-eight years old.
Canaris's story is grey, like that of every secret agent, spymaster, with a labyrinthine brain and an approach that always leaves doubts about which team the agent is playing for. It's a risky game. If all goes well, he earns an honorable and quiet retirement, with some medal awarded without fanfare and his identity protected by a lacerating and sullen anonymity. If it goes wrong, death kisses him on the lips. Unless you're Mark Felt and, already on the brink of death, you raise your hand and shout to the world: "I was Deep Throat." But that happens only once in a lifetime.
According to Ian Kershaw, Hitler's great biographer, Canaris was “a great professional con man”. The phrase doesn't define whether that is a merit or a disadvantage, but in any case it defines the essence of the adjective's owner: a survivor. His story, which took place during the Second World War behind closed doors, would not be worthy of further mention if it weren't for the fact that, in his years as a young sailor, Canaris was linked to Argentina: Here they saved his life and helped him return to Germany as a young hero. Here's the story.
Wilhelm Canaris was born in Aplerbeck, Westphalia, on January 1, 1987. He liked to say that his surname had Greek reminiscences because he said that his roots were linked to a famous admiral, hero of Greek independence, Konstantinos Kanaris. Other sources say that the surname was actually linked to the Italian Canarisi family, who had arrived in Germany in the XNUMXth century. At eighteen, Canaris enlisted in the Imperial Navy and, when the First World War broke out, he served as a young intelligence officer on the SMS Dresden. He was a boy of short stature, who in the 30s and 40s would be far from the Aryan ideal of physical excellence: they called him “The Little Admiral” and Canaris responded to jokes with another, he defined himself as “The Little Toilet” because he compared himself to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
Thanks to his childhood studies, Canaris spoke English and Spanish very well, a curiosity of the time that would be very useful to him as a young officer in the German Imperial Navy. In 1914, during the Mexican civil conflict Against Victoriano Huerta, Canaris arranged the transfer of German citizens living in Veracruz, which was about to be invaded by the United States and who did not recognize Huerta as president of Mexico. Canaris's perfect Spanish proved vital in this race against time. The young officer, already seen as more than daredevil, was a skilled negotiator, a diplomat of the sea who even served as an interpreter for the Mexican authorities.
When war broke out shortly after, the German fleet with the SMS Dresden was sailing in the Pacific. Canaris served as a lieutenant, information officer and assistant to the ship's commander, Fritz Lüdecke. His companions christened him "Kieka," which means voyeur, a nickname intended to praise his powers of observation and analysis. The imperial ships intended to reach Tsingtao, now called Qingdao, in Shandong Province, eastern China, a port city famous for its beer, a legacy of the German occupation between 1898 and 1914. The plan was cut short, and the German ships rendezvoused on Easter Island with the rest of the imperial fleet, under the command of Admiral Maximilian von Spee.
Off the Chilean coast, on November 1, 1914, they engaged and defeated a British fleet that had departed from the Falklands in the "Battle of Coronel," so named because it took place off that port in the Gulf of Arauco. Von Spee's fleet then anchored in Valparaíso, and Canaris served as von Spee's interpreter to the Chilean authorities. Then disaster struck. Emboldened by victory, the Germans reached the Falklands and were defeated by the British on December 8, 1914. The Dresden was one of the few ships, if not the only one, to survive and take refuge in the southern channels of Chilean Patagonia while seeking to elude its British pursuers. Finally, the British found the cruiser on what is now Robinson Crusoe Island, in the Juan Fernández Archipelago, and before it fell into enemy hands, the crew sank it. A paradox: twenty-five years later, also in the southern seas, off Montevideo, the crew of a German ship decided to sink it before it fell into the hands of its pursuers, the British fleet. It was the battleship Admiral Graf von Spee, named after the commander of the fleet lost in 1914 in the Falklands.
The survivors of the Dresden were interned in Chile, on Quiriquina Island, off the port of Talcahuano. Formally, they were prisoners, but it was an open-door prison for German sailors. From the embassy in Buenos Aires, the German intelligence began to move to expatriate their captive sailors, especially Canaris. They obtained a Chilean passport for him, authentic or perfectly forged, in the name of Reed Rosas, an Anglo-Chilean salesman.
Canaris left Quiriquina Island and traveled by train to Osorno, where he arrived on August 6, 1915, after showing off his knowledge of Spanish throughout the trip, just like the merchant Reed Rosas. Osorno was home to a significant German colony that had settled there in the mid-XNUMXth century: the place was relatively close to the Argentine border. There, he received lodging at the home of the Von Geyso family, who referred him to the Eggers family ranch in the town of Puyehue, in the Los Lagos area. Afterward, He crossed the mountain range on horseback and alone. On the other side of the border, at one end of Lake Nahuel Huapi, another member of the Eggers family was waiting for him and took him across by boat to San Carlos de Bariloche. There he was received by the German Consul, Chilean Carlos Wiederhold Piwonka, a settler who had established a warehouse and maintained intense trade with Chile. Bariloche was founded by General Julio A. Roca on May 3, 1902, and legend has it that the San Carlos that precedes Bariloche's name was a tribute from the Argentine Congress to that Chilean consul. Bariloche was thus linked to the influence that the German colony remained in that city, which served as a refuge for several Nazi leaders arrived in Argentina after the Second World War.
Canaris passed briefly by Buenos Aires, only to board a Dutch freighter that landed him in Rotterdam, from where he returned to Germany where he was received as a hero and promoted to captainHe was transferred to the fledgling intelligence offices of the Navy and then assigned, due to his knowledge of the Spanish language, to work in the German Embassy in Madrid: He always used the passport that identified him as Reed Rosas and, when asked, he said he was born in a small town in southern Chile: Osorno.
During the Weimar Republic, the revolutionary period that erupted in 1918 after Germany's defeat in World War I, Canaris collaborated with the organization of the "Freikorps," the paramilitary groups that fought communists in the streets. He is credited with planning and overseeing the execution of two notorious communists: Rosa Luxemburg and Karl LiebknechtThis is what Baldur von Schirach, who had been the leader of the Hitler Youth, said word for word while he was imprisoned in Spandau after the Nuremberg trials.
Canaris' military career clashed with, and also benefited from, the rise of Nazism to power. He was a furious anti-communist whom the Nazis always viewed favorably; he had encouraged Reinhard Heydrich to join the navy. He would remain Hitler's successor until his assassination in Czechoslovakia in 1942. In 1934, with Hitler already in power, he became Chief of Staff of the German North Sea Fleet.
Hitler made him head of the Abwehr, a key organization in the complex web of intelligence, counterintelligence, and espionage armed by the Nazis. Canaris came into conflict with Heydrich and the increasingly powerful Heinrich Himmler, who were in charge of the Reich Main Security Office, the RSHA: both saw in Canaris, who He was neither anti-Semitic nor had he joined National Socialism., a potential enemy. And Canaris was horrified by Nazism after the atrocities committed by German troops in Poland at the beginning of World War II.
The rivalry between Canaris and the Nazi hierarchy, the competition for the management of the information circulating in the intelligence services and, above all, the possibility that the Hitlerian adventure would end in disaster, aroused resistance in the German armed forces. Army Chief Ludwig Beck had resigned even before the war, Canaris was cautiously expressing his distrust, and Secretary of State Ernst von Weizsacker was opposed to the decisions of his superior, Chancellor Joachim von Ribbentrop. Canaris's deputy, General Hans Oster, had been one of the first opponents of Nazism and one of the leaders of the German resistance between 1938 and 1943. Oster, supported by the always cautious and silent Canaris, made the Abwehr the center of a opposition network to the Hitler regime.
There was an attempt to overthrow Hitler on the eve of his “attack on the West,” as non-Nazi generals called the Nazi idea of invading France, which took place in 1940.
Hitler asked Admiral Canaris for an almost impossible mission: to convince the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco to join the Axis forces and enter the war. Once again, his command of Spanish earned the Abwehr chief a place in history. Franco, who perhaps hoped to enter the war in exchange for territorial conquests, Gibraltar and French possessions in Africa, would ultimately reject Hitler's proposal when the two met in Hendaye in October 1940. Canaris was almost Franco's confidant, gave him a golden piece of advice: “You can’t say no to Hitler,” and suggested a couple of strategies so that the Spaniard could evade Hitler’s demands without offending him. Franco was always grateful to Canaris and even sent his widow an autographed portrait and granted him a economic pension until his death.
Despite his caution, prudence, and discretion, Canaris clashed with Hitler. During a conference of Nazi leaders on the state of the war, Canaris let slip a comment that cast doubt on the German victory. Hitler, furious, He grabbed him by the lapels and shouted at him if the Army's own intelligence chief was suggesting the war could be lost. Canaris withdrew, offended, or pretended to be offended, without responding.
After several episodes involving personal assassination attempts against Hitler, attempts to overthrow the Nazi government, various plots, and intrigues uncovered by Gestapo intelligence, the Nazis decided to put an end to the Abwehr. Canaris, the tightrope walker, the expert on walking on tightrope, was left hanging by a very thin thread: The Nazis distrusted him, and his opponents did not believe much in his opposition to Hitler. In February 1944, the Abwehr Foreign Department, headed by the virulent General Oster, passed into Himmler's hands and Canaris was placed under house arrest under Gestapo surveillance.
The end came with the failure of “Operation Valkyrie,” the attempt to assassinate Hitler in his “Wolf’s Lair,” Hitler’s headquarters in Rastemburg, Prussia, now Poland. On July 20, 1944, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg placed a powerful bomb hidden in a briefcase at Hitler's feet, Engrossed with other Nazi leaders in studying maps of the course of the war, Stauffenberg immediately fled to take his plane to Berlin and launch the second phase of the uprising, now that Hitler was dead. On the way out of Wolf's Lair, he heard the explosion that destroyed part of Hitler's bunker and boarded his plane, certain that the Führer was dead. But Hitler lived. Someone had placed the briefcase containing the bomb on the other side of the enormous wooden leg of the large study table, and that had saved his life.
The plan to install a new government in Berlin failed. Von Stauffenberg was shot that same night and a wave of denunciations and arrests It shook the structure of the Reich's armed forces. Some plot leaders committed suicide, others endured terrible torture at the hands of the Gestapo and denounced more than six hundred conspirators. Hitler, who had been thinking of a small clique of opposing officers, realized his mistake and ordered summary trials and executions: “Hang them like cattle in a slaughterhouse.” That's what they did. After a mock trial, the main conspirators were hanged from meat hooks attached to a railroad track.
There was no concrete evidence against Canaris and Oster. Both of them, along with other conspirators, were sent to the Flossenbürg concentration camp in Bavaria, Germany: the camps set up by the Nazis in Eastern Europe had been dismantled or liberated by the Allies. Investigators found a diary among Canaris's papers that shed further light on the plot to assassinate Hitler.
On April 8, 1945, when Russian cannons were already shaking the ground of Berlin, when Hitler had been locked in his bunker in the Chancellery for three months, when the war was already lost for Germany, Canaris, Oster, and other conspirators were tried and sentenced to death. They were hanged the next day, naked and with piano wires to slow down their agony.
For Canaris, the young sailor who had briefly passed through Argentina in 1915 and had become a spymaster, the game was over.