Abwehr

The Abwehr was created in 1920 as part of the German Ministry of Defence when the German government was allowed to form the Reichswehr, the military organization of the Weimar Republic. The first head of the Abwehr was Major Friedrich Gempp, a former deputy to Colonel Walter Nicolai, the head of German intelligence during World War I, who proved mostly ineffectual. At that time it was composed of only three officers and seven former officers, plus a clerical staff. When Gempp became a general, he was promoted out of the job as chief, to be followed by Major Günther Schwantes, whose term as the organization's leader was also brief. Many members of the Reichswehr (a significant portion of them Prussian) declined when asked to consider intelligence work, since for them, it was outside the realm of actual military service and the act of spying clashed with their Prussian military sensibilities of always showing themselves direct, loyal, and sincere. By the 1920s, the slowly growing Abwehr was organised into three sections:

The Reichsmarine intelligence staff merged with the Abwehr in 1928. While the Treaty of Versailles forbade Germany from engaging in any form of espionage or spying, during the Nazi era the Abwehr disregarded this prohibition, as they saw it as hypocritical.

In the 1930s, with the rise of the Nazi movement, the Ministry of Defence was reorganized; surprisingly, on 7 June 1932, a naval officer, Captain Conrad Patzig, was named chief of the Abwehr, even though it was staffed largely by army officers. Proving himself quite a capable chief, Patzig swiftly assured the military of his intentions and worked to earn their respect; he established good connections with the Lithuanian clandestine service against the Soviets, forged relations with other foreign agencies—except for Italy, whose cipher he distrusted. His successes did not stop the other branches of the military services from developing their own intelligence staff.

After the Nazis seized power, the Abwehr began sponsoring reconnaissance flights across the border with Poland, under the direction of Patzig, but this led to confrontations with Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS. Army leaders also feared that the flights would endanger the secret plans for an attack on Poland. …

Before he took over the Abwehr on 1 January 1935, the soon-to-be Admiral Canaris was warned by Patzig of attempts by Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich to take over all German intelligence organizations. Heydrich, who headed the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) from 1931, had a negative attitude towards the Abwehr – shaped in part by his belief that Germany's defeat in the First World War was primarily attributable to failures of military intelligence, and by his ambitions to control all political intelligence-gathering for Germany.

Canaris, a master of backroom dealings, thought he knew how to deal with Heydrich and Himmler. Though he tried to maintain a cordial relationship with them, the antagonism between the Abwehr and the SS did not stop when Canaris took over. Not only was competition with Heydrich and Himmler's intelligence operations a hindrance but so too were the redundant attempts by multiple organizations to control communications intelligence (COMINT) for the Reich. For instance, Canaris's Abwehr controlled the Armed Forces Deciphering operation, while the navy maintained its listening service, known as the B-Dienst. Further complicating COMINT matters, the Foreign Office also had its own communications security branch, the Pers Z S.

Matters came to a head in 1937 when Hitler decided to help Joseph Stalin in the latter's purge of the Soviet military. Hitler ordered that the German Army staff should be kept in the dark about Stalin's intentions, for fear that they would warn their Soviet counterparts due to their long-standing relations. Accordingly, special SS teams, accompanied by burglary experts from the criminal police, broke into the secret files of the General Staff and the Abwehr and removed documents related to German-Soviet collaboration. To conceal the thefts, fires were started at the break-ins, which included Abwehr headquarters.

Before the reorganization of the OKW in 1938, the Abwehr was merely a department within the Reichswehrministerium (Ministry of Armed Forces), and it was not until after Canaris was appointed chief that its numbers increased and it gained some independence. Experiencing an explosion of sorts in personnel, the Abwehr went from fewer than 150 employees to nearly one thousand between 1935 and 1937. …

Before the war began, the Abwehr was fairly active and effective as it built a wide range of contacts; they developed links with the Ukrainians opposed to the Soviet regime, conducted meetings with Indian nationalists working against British rule in India, and established an information-sharing agreement with the Japanese. There was even some significant penetration into the extent of the United States industrial capacity and economic potential, and data was collected by the Abwehr concerning American military capacity and contingency planning.

Sometime in March 1937, senior Abwehr officer Paul Thümmel provided a vast array of significant information about the German intelligence services to Czech agents who in turn, forwarded the data to SIS London, whom they codenamed agent A-54. Thümmel provided data about "military capabilities, and intentions" as well as "detailed information on the organization and structure of the Abwehr and SD" along with "the near-complete order of battle of the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe, and German mobilization plans"; and, later "he gave advanced warnings of the German annexation of the Sudetenland as well as the invasions of Czechoslovakia and Poland."

After the assumption of absolute control over the OKW in February 1938, Hitler declared that he did not want men of intelligence under his command, but men of brutality, an observation which did not sit well with Canaris. Whether he was deeply troubled by Hitler's comment or not, Canaris and the Abwehr still busied themselves preparing the ideological groundwork for the annexation of Austria which occurred in March 1938.

A month later, Canaris and the Abwehr were set to work subverting the Czechs as part of Hitler's strategy to acquire the Sudetenland. Before the spring of 1938 came to an end, the conservative members of the German Foreign Office and many ranking officers in the military began sharing their fears over an impending international disaster and the threat of another catastrophic European war based on Hitler's actions. A conspiratorial group formed around General Erwin von Witzleben and Admiral Canaris as a result. Throughout the process, Canaris and subordinates such as Helmuth Groscurth worked to prevent war to the extent feasible. …

Under Canaris, the Abwehr expanded and proved to be efficient during the early years of the war. Its most notable success was Operation Nordpol, which was an operation against the Dutch underground network, which at the time was supported by the Special Operations Executive. Concomitant to the period known as the Phoney War, the Abwehr collected information on Denmark and Norway. Shipping in and out of Danish and Norwegian ports was placed under observation and over 150,000 tons of shipping was destroyed as a result. Agents in Norway and Denmark successfully penetrated their military thoroughly enough to determine the disposition and strength of land forces in both countries and deep-cover Abwehr operatives kept the German forces, particularly the Luftwaffe, intimately informed during the invasion of Norway. Against both of these nations, the Abwehr mounted what one would call a successful intelligence operation of some scale and proved itself critical to the success of German military endeavors there.

Fear over the drastically low levels of available petroleum at the beginning of 1940 prompted activity from the German Foreign Office and the Abwehr in an attempt to ameliorate the problem "by concluding an unprecedented arms-for-oil" deal, brokered to push back the "Anglo-French dominance in the Ploiești oilfield." Abwehr operatives also played on Romanian fears, making them more amenable to Hitler's offer to shield them from the Soviets—through which the Germans acquired cheap oil. In this regard, the Abwehr provided some semblance of economic utility for the Nazi regime.

In March 1941, the Germans forced a captured SOE radio operator to transmit messages to Britain in a code that the Germans had obtained. Even though the operator gave indications that he was compromised, the receiver in Britain did not notice. Thus the Germans were able to penetrate the Dutch operation and maintained this state of affairs for two years, capturing agents, and sending false intelligence and sabotage reports until the British caught on. …

On 10 September 1943, the incident which eventually resulted in the dissolution of the Abwehr occurred and came to be known as the "Frau Solf Tea Party". Hanna Solf was the widow of Wilhelm Solf, a former Colonial Minister under Kaiser Wilhelm II and ex-ambassador to Japan. Frau Solf had long been an anti-Nazi in Berlin. Members of her group were known as members of the "Solf Circle". At a tea party hosted by her on 10 September, a new member was included in the circle, a handsome young Swiss doctor named Paul Reckzeh. Reckzeh was an agent of the Gestapo (Secret State Police), to which he reported on the meeting, providing several incriminating documents. The members of the Solf Circle were arrested on 12 January 1944. Everyone involved in the Solf Circle—except Frau Solf and her daughter Lagi Gräfin von Ballestrem—was executed.

One of those executed was Otto Kiep, an official in the Foreign Office, who had friends in the Abwehr, among whom were Erich Vermehren and his wife, the former Countess Elizabeth von Plettenberg, who were stationed as agents in Istanbul. Both were summoned to Berlin by the Gestapo in connection with the Kiep case. Fearing for their lives, they contacted the British and defected.

Hitler had long suspected that Abwehr had been infiltrated by anti-Nazi defectors and Allied agents, and the defection of Vemehren after the Solf Circle arrests all but confirmed it. It was also mistakenly believed in Berlin that the Vermehrens absconded with the codes of the Abwehr and turned them over to the British. That proved to be the last straw for Hitler. Despite the efforts of the Abwehr to shift the blame to the SS or even to the Foreign Ministry, Hitler had had enough of Canaris and he told Himmler so, twice. He summoned the chief of the Abwehr for a final interview and accused him of allowing the Abwehr to "fall to bits". Canaris quietly agreed that it was "not surprising", as Germany was losing the war.

Hitler fired Canaris on the spot, and on 18 February 1944, Hitler signed a decree that abolished the Abwehr. Its functions were taken over by the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) and the senior RSHA official Walter Schellenberg replaced Canaris within the RSHA. This action strengthened Himmler's control over the military.

Canaris was cashiered and given the empty title of Chief of the Office of Commercial and Economic Warfare. …