Withstanding Hitler by Michael Balfour

Author:Michael Balfour [Balfour, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General
ISBN: 9781136088681
Google: cwcC1UxN8lYC
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-06-20T15:56:16+00:00

6 Wilhelm Canaris1

Canaris was born near Dortmund in 1887, the son of a steel industry technician. The family had come from Italy several centuries earlier; it amused Wilhelm to play up a connection with another branch which had provided Greece with a national hero and he was often known as ‘the little Greek’. He himself went into the Navy and, as a First Lieutenant on the light-cruiser Dresden, took part in the defeat of Admiral Cradock’s squadron by that of Graf von Spee in the Battle of Coronel in November 1914. When the rest of von Spee’s ships were sunk a month later in the Battle of the Falkland Islands, the Dresden managed to escape and, thanks largely to the ingenuity of Canaris in procuring fresh supplies of food and fuel, to lurk for three months in obscure Chilean bays. It was he again who, when the British finally caught up with the fugitive, managed by a show of negotiation to secure enough time for the Germans to scuttle their own ship. Six months later he managed to get home on a Chilean passport. He was then sent to Spain to organise a clandestine supply service for U-boats and afterwards sank two British ships near Gibraltar as captain of a submarine operating from the Adriatic. This was the only time he ever commanded a ship at sea.

He got back to Germany in November 1918 to find the Navy in a state of anarchy. What he regarded as a lack of patriotism on the part of the crews and the resulting break-down of order instilled in him an enduring aversion to Communism and in the next few years he had much to do with those who organised right-wing para-military forces to frustrate alike Germany’s democrats and her conquerors. He was close to the murderers of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht even if he did not join in the actual operation. Having got himself on to the court-martial to try the accused, he actively assisted their leader to escape. He was hand-in-glove with the murderers of Erzberger and Rathenau and the instigators of the right-wing Kapp Putsch in 1920. In 1926 he spent a considerable time in Spain helping to bring off a deal by which German ship-builders would provide the Spanish Navy with submarines and thereby prevent the art of turning out such vessels from being forgotten in Hamburg and Kiel; he got to know not only the Spanish secret service but also many people destined to hold high positions ten years later under Franco. In between times, he more or less pursued a naval officer’s normal career. But not only did he have difficulty in getting on with his superiors and winning the confidence of his men, but his past kept on catching up with him, either in the shape of the Luxemburg-Liebknecht murder or of financial scandals connected with Spain. Although he had reached the rank of Captain by 1934, his prospects of rising higher seemed to have vanished,

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