Wilhelm Franz Canaris (1 January 1887 – 9 April 1945) was a German admiral and the chief of the Abwehr (the German military-intelligence service) from 1935 to 1944. Initially a supporter of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, Canaris turned against Hitler and committed acts of both passive and active resistance during World War II following the German invasion of Poland in 1939.
Being the head of Nazi Germany's military-intelligence agency, he was in a key position to participate in resistance and sabotage the Nazi war effort. As the war turned against Germany, Canaris and other military officers expanded their clandestine opposition to the leadership of Nazi Germany. By 1945, his acts of resistance and sabotage against the Nazi regime came to light and Canaris was hanged in the Flossenbürg concentration camp for high treason as the Allied forces advanced through southern Germany.
Early life Canaris was born on 1 January 1887 in Aplerbeck (now a part of Dortmund) in Westphalia, the son of Carl Canaris, a wealthy industrialist, and his wife, Auguste (née Popp). Canaris believed that his family was related to the 19th-century Greek admiral and politician Konstantinos Kanaris, a belief that influenced his decision to join the Imperial German Navy. On a visit to Corfu, he was given a portrait of the Greek hero, which he always kept in his office. However, a genealogical investigation in 1938 revealed that Canaris and his patrilineal ancestors were actually of Northern Italian descent, the family name had originally been Canarisi, and they had lived in Germany since the 17th century. His grandfather had converted from Catholicism to Lutheranism. However, even after learning this fact, he insisted that the Greek admiral Kanaris was his ancestor. He kept his portrait up and continued to tell visitors that the Greek admiral was, in fact, his "grandfather".
Canaris graduated from the Steinbart-Real High School in Duisburg. From an early age, he aspired to be an officer in the Imperial Navy, but his father encouraged him to join the Imperial Army. The death of Carl Canaris in 1904 removed the only obstacle to Canaris pursuing a naval career, which he did a month after his March 1905 graduation. Accepted at the naval academy in Kiel, Canaris began his naval education aboard , a training ship on which sea cadets learned basic seamanship. He attained midshipman's rank in 1906, and beginning in April 1907 attended the academic course required of aspiring naval officers. In the autumn of 1908 he began service aboard , which cruised the Atlantic near Central and South America. In February 1909, Canaris received Venezuela's Order of the Liberator (Knight's Class) from President Juan Vicente Gómez. The circumstances are not known, but may have included Canaris facilitating discussions between representatives of the German government and then-Vice President Gómez in early 1908.
In August 1910, he received his commission as a lieutenant.
World War I By the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, Canaris was serving as a naval intelligence officer on board , a light cruiser to which he had been assigned in December 1911. This was the only warship of Admiral Maximilian von Spee's East Asia Squadron that managed to evade the Royal Navy for a prolonged period during the Battle of the Falkland Islands in December 1914.
After the Battle of Más a Tierra, the immobilized Dresden anchored in Cumberland Bay, Robinson Crusoe Island and contacted Chile with regard to internment. While in the bay, Royal Navy ships approached and shelled Dresden, and the crew scuttled the ship. Most of the crew was interned in Chile in March 1915, but in August 1915, Canaris escaped under the name "Reed Rosas" by using his fluency in Spanish. With the help of some German merchants he was able to return to Germany in October 1915. On the way, he called at several ports, including Plymouth in Great Britain.
Canaris was then given intelligence work as a result of having come to the attention of German naval intelligence, possibly because of his clever escape from Chile. German plans to establish intelligence operations in the Mediterranean were under way and Canaris seemed a good fit for that role. Eventually, he was sent to Spain, where, in Madrid, his task was to provide clandestine reconnaissance over enemy shipping movements and to establish a supply service for U-boats serving in the Mediterranean. After being assigned to the Inspectorate of Submarines by the Naval Staff on 24 October 1916, he took up training for duty as a U-boat commander and graduated from Submarine School on 11 September 1917.
He ended the war as a U-boat commander from late 1917 in the Mediterranean and was credited with a number of sinkings and even came to the attention of the Kaiser. As a result of his exploits in Spain, he was awarded the Iron Cross First Class.
Canaris was fluent in six languages, including English. As a naval officer of the old school, he had a great respect for Britain's Royal Navy, despite the rivalry between the two nations.
Inter-war years
During the German Revolution of 1918–19, Canaris helped organise the formation of Freikorps paramilitary units to suppress the communist revolutionary movements, whose members were attempting to spread the ideals of the Russian Revolution into Germany. Canaris was also a member of the military court that tried and in many cases acquitted those involved in the murders of the leftist revolutionaries Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg for their involvement in the Spartacist uprising. He helped one of those convicted in the murders, Kurt Vogel, escape from prison and although Canaris was imprisoned for four days over this, he was never prosecuted. Despite these actions, Canaris was eventually appointed to the adjutancy of Defence Minister Gustav Noske.
In 1919, he married Erika Waag, the child of an industrialist, with whom he had two children.
On 20 July 1920, Canaris became admiral's staff officer at the Marinestation der Ostsee (Baltic Naval Station) command.
In the spring of 1924, Canaris was sent to Osaka, Japan, to supervise a secret U-boat construction program in direct violation of the Treaty of Versailles. When that project was shelved by Vice Admiral Adolf Zenker in favour of a more co-operative relationship with the British, Canaris began making deals. Aided by Captain Walter Lohmann, the son of a powerful German shipping magnate, they negotiated with Spanish merchants, German industrialists, some Argentinian venture capitalists and the Spanish Navy so the Germans could continue their clandestine naval activities. Canaris made some enemies within Germany during the course of his secret business and intelligence negotiations, partially as a consequence of the bankruptcy incurred by the film-maker Phoebus Film in his dealings with Lohmann (the 'Lohmann Affair'). Suddenly, the former involvement with the "Liebknecht affair" re-emerged and placed Canaris in an unfavourable light, which ended up costing him his position in Spain. Instead, he was sent to Wilhelmshaven. From his new post, Canaris haplessly discovered that Lohmann's "investments" had cost upwards of 26 million marks in total losses.
At some point in 1928, Canaris was removed from his intelligence post and began two years of conventional naval service aboard the pre-dreadnought battleship , becoming captain of the vessel on 1 December 1932. Just two months later, Adolf Hitler became Germany's new chancellor. Canaris was enthused by that development and was known to give lectures about the virtues of Nazism to his crew aboard the Schlesien.
Detached from the previous government of Weimar, whose republican principles never appealed to Canaris, he looked to the Nazi Party to shape the future. Two things stood out for Canaris about the Nazis: they represented a return to state-centered authoritarian government led by a charismatic leader, which he supported; and they were determined to throw off the shackles of the Treaty of Versailles. Hitler proselytised a return to world-power status, which for Canaris implied constructing a super-fleet and the preservation of a virtuous soldier-based society, a "community under arms". In contrast to his later actions in which he sought to undermine Germany's far right in the form of Hitler and the Nazis, in the turmoil after the First World War, while the Weimar government was fledgling, Canaris helped establish home guard units in contravention of the treaty, sympathised with the Freikorps movement and participated in the Kapp Putsch.
Another aspect of the Nazis that appealed to Canaris was their anticommunism. Many of his friends joined the Nazi crusade, and Canaris "likewise came to be regarded as an enthusiastic National Socialist". A former SS general, Werner Best, once described Canaris as an "inveterate nationalist" and correspondingly asserted that Canaris felt the Nazis were much better "than anything that had gone before". Even after the Night of the Long Knives, Canaris "preached wholehearted cooperation with the new regime". Canaris once said, "we officers... should always recognize that without the Führer and his NSDAP, the restoration of German military greatness and military strength would not have been possible... the officer's duty is to be a living example of National Socialism and make the German Wehrmacht (Armed Forces) reflect the fulfillment of National Socialist ideology. That must be our grand design".
Taking a position as the fortress commander at Swinemünde on 29 September 1934, Canaris seemed to be near the end of his career as he settled into a sort of "provincial exile" with his family. Then, in short order, Canaris caught wind of the dispute in the Reichswehr Ministry over the impending successor to the Abwehr chief, Captain Conrad Patzig, who was forced to resign. Patzig recommended Canaris as his replacement because of his outstanding service record and because he considered him best suited for the position from his previous experience in intelligence operations. His aspirations were quickly being realized, and in his zeal for his new job, Canaris paid "little heed" to the warnings from Patzig about the "fiendish" machinations of the party and its police organs. The admonitions principally concerned Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the SS intelligence service known as the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), who was not well-disposed towards the Abwehr since he believed that Germany's defeat during the First World War was attributable to military intelligence failures by the organization. Moreover, Heydrich had aspirations to oversee all aspects of political intelligence-gathering for Germany.
On 1 January 1935, a little less than two years after Hitler had taken control of the German government, Canaris was made head of the Abwehr, Germany's official military intelligence agency. Records suggest that Canaris was approved in his role as Abwehr chief as a compromise candidate since the commander-in-chief of the German Navy, Admiral Erich Raeder, a staunch navy man, was initially opposed to his appointment but caved when Patzig manipulated the situation by suggesting an army officer for the post if Canaris was rejected.
With the seemingly-amicable relationship between Heydrich and Canaris that then existed, according to former Abwehr Secretary Inge Haag, it is possible that Heydrich supported the installment of Canaris as head of the Abwehr at least based on their behaviour toward each other. The two remained "friendly" rivals, but Canaris considered Heydrich a "brutal fanatic" and was likewise aware that Heydrich's SD constantly monitored the telephone traffic of the Abwehr. Heydrich was suspicious of Canaris, referred to him as a "wily old fox", and cautioned his colleagues never to underestimate the man.