Killing Hitler (17 page)

Canaris may also have been fundamentally unconvinced that the plot would succeed.
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He had confided his pessimism to one contemporary, stating bleakly: “What you fellows are up to will not do you much good…one cannot prevent history from taking its course.” Then he added, “But carry on…It’s just that I don’t believe that you will achieve anything.”
¹⁰²
In addition, he was known to have been against an assassination and had privately expressed concerns about the plot’s feasibility. Yet on the very eve of the Munich Conference, he promoted Oster to be his second-in-command, thereby appearing to give tacit support for his subordinate’s clandestine plans.
¹⁰³
His role, therefore, was what one might call passive leadership. Though he would play no active role himself, he would serve as the spiritual leader of the resistance. As one historian has written, “His contribution was to provide cover for [conspirators]…who utilised the
Abwehr
as a means of movement and underground communication, and to close his eyes to [their] more energetically dissident activities.”
¹⁰⁴

What, then, of Canaris’s concerns? What can be concluded about the feasibility of Oster’s September Conspiracy? The first
thing to note is that most historians tend to give it short shrift. Though the plans were finally made public in a handful of postwar memoirs, they rarely feature in the primary chronicles of the Third Reich or biographies of Hitler. One of the standard works, for example, devotes only a paragraph to Oster’s plan,
¹⁰⁵
while the most recent synthesis dismisses it in one sentence as a “nascent conspiracy” hatched by “ill-coordinated groups.”
¹⁰⁶

The participants themselves, in contrast, were in no doubt as to their chances. Those that survived to pen their memoirs expressed the clear opinion that the coup would have been carried out had Chamberlain’s last gasp of appeasement not interceded. Halder would later rage to a British interviewer that “it was your Prime Minister, your Prime Minister, who ruined our hopes by giving in to Hitler.”
¹⁰⁷
The most famous of the conspirators, Hans Gisevius, was blunt: “Chamberlain saved Hitler,” he wrote.
¹⁰⁸
Only Erich Kordt was more circumspect in seeking a deeper truth: “Conscience,” he complained, “makes cowards out of all of us.”
¹⁰⁹

Later historians who have studied the events of that autumn in more detail are generally more divided in their assessments. Some are quite positive. They stress the plan’s attention to detail, and the favorable set of circumstances that accompanied it.
¹¹⁰
Others note that the plot marked the first emergence of a “concrete, organized resistance.”
¹¹¹
The veteran German historian Joachim Fest, for example, has concluded that “no other attempt to strike Hitler down…would come close to having as good a chance of success.”
¹¹²

Others are less convinced, however. They point to the lack of popular support, the minimal military participation, and the absence of any coherent political program to replace Nazism. In 1938, they would argue, the plotters were swimming very much against the tide. Most Germans were alarmed at the prospect of another war, but they were not yet ready to turn against the regime. For this reason, one of the authorities on the German resistance movement has dismissed the September Conspiracy as having only “minimal chances.”
¹¹³
One contemporary plotter went further, refuting the theory that Chamberlain “saved
Hitler” by suggesting that the reasons for the failure of the coup must be sought in Berlin rather than London. “Dissension and indecision at home,” he wrote, “not timidity abroad, doomed the plan.”
¹¹⁴

Yet a number of additional factors should also be considered. First, there must be a fundamental question mark about whether the coup would ever have been launched in the first place. Despite Oster’s energy and planning, that decision had been left in the hands of generals who, for all their good intentions and positive words, were fundamentally unable to think in the radical terms that Oster, Gisevius, and others did. As one contemporary observed of General Beck, for example: “[He] was a brilliant theoretician and a staunch moralist, but he lacked the revolutionary spirit which is the essential quality for anyone who aspires to lead a coup d’état.”
¹¹⁵
Though supportive, the generals still instinctively viewed the conspiracy as treasonous and were bound by their code of honor and oath of loyalty to disavow it. In the event, when their conscience came into conflict with their sense of duty, the latter would invariably win out. As the events of that autumn would show, they were the first weak link in the chain.

Second, the conspirators had predicated their plot on two factors over which they had no control: British support and Hitler’s declaration of war. The final decision, therefore, was completely out of their hands. This attitude was symptomatic of the caution exhibited by the German resistance in the early years, and it was most likely influenced by the “stab in the back” myth from the end of the First World War. If the alleged betrayal of a dying regime in 1918 could so poison public life in peacetime, the resisters reasoned, the effect of their betrayal (and indeed murder) of a successful leader at the height of his power would be catastrophic. As Witzleben had sarcastically mused: “History would have nothing else to report about us than that we refused to serve the greatest German when he was at his greatest.”
¹¹⁶

This “proxy syndrome” would become one of the defining features of the German resistance. They wanted to be rid of Hitler but lacked the popular support, will, or wherewithal to do the deed themselves, and were instead reduced to naively hoping
for a third party to act in their stead. Thus, Canaris privately berated the Austrians for not resisting the
Anschluss
, while Oster and many others were content to blame the failure of the September coup on British appeasement.
¹¹⁷
The most telling example, however, was the chief of the army General Staff, Halder, who often expressed the wish that Hitler should meet with an “accident” or be assassinated, yet balked at doing the job himself, although he was frequently in Hitler’s presence armed.
¹¹⁸

The uncomfortable truth of the matter was that for all its moral indignation, determination, and ingenuity, the German resistance was effectively hamstrung by Hitler’s diplomatic and military successes. Only when the tide of war had turned, in 1943, were they freed from this grievous affliction. Only then could they begin to plot with a reasonable expectation of success.

After the failure of the conspiracies of 1938 and 1939, the plotters of the Abwehr went back to their day jobs serving the German military machine. They procured intelligence, planned “diversions,” and plotted sabotage, but this time in support of Hitler’s war—the war they had sought to prevent. Many of them received promotions and awards from the regime; Canaris was promoted to full admiral and awarded the German Cross in Silver for “exceptional contributions to the military conduct of the war.”
¹¹⁹
Oster was made a major general. Heinz was appointed to command a regiment of the élite Brandenburg commando division.

And yet, despite their outward conformity, many of them continued in their efforts to undermine the Nazi regime. Chief among them, as before, was Hans Oster. After passing military secrets to Germany’s opponents in 1940, Oster later hatched an aborted plot to assassinate Ribbentrop.
¹²⁰
He then developed a scheme, with his colleague Hans von Dohnanyi, that aimed to save a number of German Jews by posting them abroad as supposed Abwehr agents. In 1943, he procured explosives for an attempted assassination of Hitler, carried out by disgruntled officers of Army Group Center (see
Chapter 7
). In them, Oster had finally found some truly vigorous and determined allies.

Canaris, too, continued his shadowy double game, providing tacit support for Oster while outwardly maintaining the martial integrity of the Abwehr. His balancing act began to falter during the war, however. Abwehr operations in the West had been allowed to drift and had long degenerated into a state of endemic corruption and inefficiency. Its foreign networks had been penetrated by Western intelligence services to such an extent that it was becoming a liability. Indeed, the SS and SD had long been monitoring Abwehr activities, and Reinhard Heydrich had established a “Canaris file” to record the admiral’s failings. According to Walter Schellenberg, Canaris’s fate was sealed as early as the spring of 1942, when he failed to gain foreknowledge of a British raid on the German radar installation at Bruneval.
¹²¹

From that point on, the SS placed Canaris and the Abwehr under constant surveillance. In time, they found at least some of the proof they required. In the spring of 1943, Oster was implicated in an investigation into the activities of his colleague Dohnanyi. He was dismissed from the Abwehr and placed under house arrest while the investigations continued. The net was closing. The following February, after a number of defections of its agents, and having failed to anticipate the Allied landings at Anzio, the Abwehr itself was disbanded. As Schellenberg put it: “Canaris’s personal and professional failings had so incriminated him in Hitler’s eyes that he had him relieved of his post.”
¹²²
Canaris, too, was placed under house arrest, albeit in a medieval castle. The Abwehr was amalgamated into the party intelligence organization, the Reich Security Head Office (RSHA), and Schellenberg became its nominal head.

The spring and early summer of 1944 passed with both Canaris and Oster under arrest and investigation. Canaris appeared to have escaped serious censure when, in late June, he was appointed to a sinecure within the army high command and returned to Berlin. However, a month later, the fragile peace was shattered by news of a renewed plot to kill Hitler. Oster was brought in for interrogation the following day, Canaris two days later. His arresting officer was none other than his successor as head of the Abwehr, Walter
Schellenberg. Schellenberg described the scene in his memoirs: “I went to Canaris’s house in Berlin-Schlachtensee and he himself answered the door…. [He] was very calm. His first words to me were, ‘Somehow I felt that it would be you.’” Schellenberg claimed to have gallantly suggested that he would allow his prisoner to abscond, saying: “I shall wait in this room for an hour, and during that time you may do whatever you wish. My report will say you went to your bedroom in order to change.” But Canaris demurred:

“My dear Schellenberg,” he said, “flight is out of the question for me.”…He returned after about half an hour, having washed, changed and packed a bag…. He embraced me with tears in his eyes, and said, “Well then, let us go.”
¹²³

That autumn, Canaris and Oster joined the thousands of others caught in the SS dragnet. However, as archsuspects, they were subjected to an especially harsh regime. Imprisoned in the cellars of the Gestapo headquarters on Prinz Albrechtstrasse in Berlin, they were constantly manacled and placed on one-third of normal rations.
¹²⁴
Yet neither appeared to be fazed. Canaris, in particular, seemed to relish the opportunity to lead his interrogators on a wild-goose chase, admitting nothing, leading them off the scent, and swamping them with contradictory information. It was a virtuoso performance, which a former colleague described as “an artistic deformation of the truth.”
¹²⁵

The composure of the former Abwehr men was shaken only by the discovery that September of a cache of documents—the so-called Oster file—recording both the nefarious activities of the SS and the plans of the September conspirators. Now their carefully crafted covers and alibis were shot through, and a new group of conspirators was implicated. In the face of this apparently conclusive and incontrovertible evidence, Oster evidently broke down, giving vent to a “quasi-suicidal spate of admissions.”
¹²⁶
But Canaris continued doggedly to fight his corner, parrying every accusation and supplying plausible reasons for his actions.

This was the situation in early February 1945, when intensified Allied bombing on Berlin caused the prisoners held by the Gestapo to be dispersed throughout what remained of the Reich. Oster and Canaris were sent to the concentration camp at Flossen-bürg in northern Bavaria. There they were once again held under a harsh regime—manacled day and night and subjected to what was euphemistically called “vigorous” interrogation.

This continued until April, when the discovery of Canaris’s own diaries brought matters to an abrupt conclusion. A show trial was convened for the afternoon of 8 April, and Canaris and Oster were to appear together. Both were charged with high treason. In this, their darkest hour, the differences between the two men once again became clearly manifest. Canaris refused to give up. He disputed every count and claimed only to have humored the conspirators for the sake of surveillance. Oster then bitterly contradicted his former superior, claiming that Canaris had been involved in everything that his circle had undertaken. After a heated exchange, the prosecutor finally asked Canaris point-blank whether Oster was falsely incriminating him. Canaris paused and then quietly replied: “No.”
¹²⁷
The courtroom drama was instructive but legally superfluous. The sentence had been passed some days before, and it had come from the very top. Both Oster and Canaris had been condemned to death.