Wilhelm Canaris was Hitler’s master spy, the man who organized intelligence for the Third Reich. His covert operations caused chaos and destruction, and he set the stage for World War II. But all was not what it seemed. He provided information to the British and was directly involved in helping Jews leave Germany.
Most people from my generation don’t understand how, over 70 years ago, a small group of Nazis could start a war that killed 60 million people. I wanted to find out. To help me, I used playing cards. Today, they’re used by both the military and law enforcement to identify their targets.
But nobody has ever put together a pack of cards for the most notorious group of killers in history. Working with experts, I wanted to know where each of these Nazis ranks in the hierarchy of evil. My name is James Ellis. This is Hitler’s Most Wanted: Wilhelm Canaris.
Canaris is a guy that most people probably never heard of. He doesn’t have any of the notoriety of people like Himmler, Göring, or Goebbels. So I think it’s important to start by saying who this guy is and why he’s important. Anthony, do you want to start off?
Canaris was a spy. He operated in the shadows, and in terms of his career, his ideology, and his actions, he’s an opaque figure. I’d like to pick up on that. I think that too often with the Third Reich, these characters can be painted in black and white.
And here we’ve got a figure who’s got so many shades of gray. There’s so much ambivalence here. And actually, for historians, it becomes a really interesting figure to look at. So what muddies the water with Canaris?
We know that Canaris was opposed to aspects of the German war effort. And we know that he acted to undermine Hitler and Nazi Germany. For me, he becomes a particularly interesting figure because he’s been so good at keeping secrets about himself under wraps. It seems that nobody on either side knows exactly what his motives are.
Historians aren’t able to understand his goals. Psychologically speaking, that itself says something to me about the type of person he likely was. I think he raises really big questions about how we would all behave in wartime. He’s obviously got a really plum job and he wants to keep it.
Yet at the same time, some of what he sees he finds morally repugnant. There are so many ways of interpreting Canaris’s career and his actions. So I think we really need to drill down very deeply. I started my investigation at the German Spy Museum in Berlin.
I wanted to find out as much as I could about Canaris’s tenure as Hitler’s spy master, both before and during the Second World War. Spying is famously called the second oldest profession in the world. Yeah, it definitely is. Florian Shimikovski is a scientific associate here.
So, where are you taking me? We’re now going to the Second World War section, where people like Canaris were working. Canaris is the head of the Abwehr. That is the German military intelligence unit, and he’s the boss.
It’s his job to gather military intelligence. The Abwehr has its tentacles in lots of parts of the military all over the Third Reich. It’s a really big player. What are we looking at first?
We’re going to have a look at the spy radio set especially constructed for agents of the Abwehr operating abroad. Wow. So that’s an actual Abwehr radio. Yeah.
And as you can easily see, it has been in use. Spying is all about getting your intel back to home base. That made this a vital tool of the trade. The Abwehr only produced like 500 pieces of this radio.
So it’s very rare then. It’s quite rare actually. It’s built like a tank, so it’s really hard to destroy. They used to throw radio heads like this down from planes with parachutes.
We’ve got parachutes just above us, actually. Okay. Because it was complicated to smuggle the radio sets inside. So the agents would have already infiltrated the country, and then they would wait for the radio to come after they had arrived.
Most of the time, as you can see, the writings are in English to disguise where the radio was actually coming from. So when an agent gets caught with the radio, they can’t follow it back to Germany. You see the Morse button down here. Canaris and the Germans wanted to get hold of as many secrets as possible.
They wanted military secrets. They wanted to get hold of technological secrets. Countries have been doing this to each other for centuries, millennia. Radios like that, where were they being used?
They have been used by German agents working in France, Great Britain, or even in the eastern countries to spy on people and to send the messages home. The other half of Canaris’s job was to prevent enemy spies from gathering German secrets. I understand that one of the jobs of the Abwehr led by Admiral Canaris was counterintelligence. Canaris arranged the whole Abwehr system’s counterintelligence.
That was one of their tasks. Yes. Under Canaris, Abwehr counterintelligence agents were sent to infiltrate enemy spy units, to destroy evidence, and to spread misinformation. This was real-life cloak-and-dagger work that called for secret weapons from the pages of a spy novel.
So we opened it up so you can actually see the constructions inside. It was a one-bullet gun with just a small bullet, just four to six millimeters. But sometimes that could be the bullet that saves your life. So this wouldn’t be maybe a gun to really do an assassination, but more kind of a self-defense.
So if you get disguised as a spy, maybe that bullet gets you free. So something to defend yourself if you were suddenly discovered. Yeah. Can I get my hands on it?
Of course. Thank you very much. Wow. It’s amazing.
It’s quite heavy for a pipe. So if you want to fire it, you have to remove the mouthpiece and the security wire. So this is like the equivalent of a safety catch. Exactly.
If you want to fire it, you hold it and then twist. So you’d be given this already preloaded with a bullet. Yeah. And then if you needed to use it, you would then remove this safety catch.
Exactly. And then you would aim it at your target and twist this, and it would fire. Yeah. Wow.
You can fire a single bullet. That might save your life. And I imagine if I needed to use this, I would have to be pretty close to the subject. Yeah.
Because with really small bullet guns, the distance where it’s really aiming correctly is like 10 to 15 meters. And after that, it gets complicated. You’d have to be in quite a bit of trouble to use this thing. You only get one shot.
You don’t get a second chance. And I would not want to have to use this. This was the world of espionage in the 1930s, with Wilhelm Canaris sitting like a spider at the heart of a vast intelligence web. But I wanted to know how he became head of the Abwehr, and if there are any clues in that story which might explain why he later turned against the Nazis.
Canaris had spent time in Latin America before World War I. And when World War I started, he was on a ship fighting the British in Latin America. He served in the German Navy, first as an intelligence officer on a cruiser and later as a submarine commander. He was captured and interned on an island in Chile.
And because he spoke Spanish, he managed to escape from internment and make his way back to Germany. He served with distinction, but after the war, like so many German veterans, he returned to a homeland he no longer recognized. This is Michael Tramer. He’s a photojournalist who can help me understand the nation’s turbulent post-war period.
Germany was struggling with the leftovers from the First World War. Times were tense. Political violence was a very regular thing. He’s going to tell me about the events that transformed Wilhelm Canaris from a naval officer into a political firebrand.
Because I understand World War I’s coming to an end. Germany’s defeat is in sight. All of a sudden, this new ideology that erupted in Russia, communism, comes on the scene. People were trying to set up a Soviet-style communist republic.
Germany’s centuries-old power structure found itself facing a large-scale communist uprising. Canaris was an old-school monarchist. He hated the communists and feared they might seize power over Germany in its weakened state. So he helped organize a fighting force to combat them.
Part of what became known as the Freikorps. The Freikorps were right-wing paramilitary groups formed by ex-soldiers who saw it as their mission to be counterrevolutionaries, to fight and stamp out radicalism, communism, and revolution in Germany. So you have right-wing militias populated with former soldiers doing battle in the streets with advocates of this declared Soviet-style republic. They were performing basically a counterrevolution.
The support of the Freikorps. Buying right-wing ex-soldiers. Yeah. To fight communists, train them at the weapon.
Even though we are after World War I in Germany, nobody’s supposed to bear a weapon at that time. The Freikorps used deadly force to crush the communist uprising, but they weren’t finished yet. In January 1919, Canaris and the Freikorps themselves tried and failed to overthrow Germany’s government. This was a man who wasn’t afraid to use violence to get what he wanted.
And at that time, he was far from alone. The Freikorps and the actions of the Freikorps laid the foundation for the rise of the Nazis and the rise of that far-right violence and political feelings. Yeah, I would completely agree on that. It set up the basis for the armed wings of the Nazis that were really, really important for taking the power and also ruling the streets and conducting attacks on those that do not fit into their idea.
In March 1933, Hitler and the Nazis completed their rise to power. A relentless campaign filled with anti-Semitic and anti-communist propaganda and deadly violence. Canaris approved of Hitler. He approved of a strong leader to sweep away what he saw as the weakness of Weimar democracy.
Wilhelm Canaris became one of Hitler’s devoted followers and would soon put his skills to work for the Third Reich. Hidden radio transmitters and German spies, Hitler wanted to know every American secret. This was a spy chief who had to be reckoned with. I’m in Berlin on a mission to determine where Nazi spy master Wilhelm Canaris ranks in Hitler’s hierarchy of evil.
I’m about to investigate one of his early operations as head of the Abwehr, one that changed the course of European history. During the period between World War I and World War II, Canaris was working on plans to secretly build weapons, things that Germany was forbidden to produce under the Treaty of Versailles. Canaris even supervised a secret plan to build U-boats in Japan. In 1935, Canaris’s many years of service were rewarded when he was made head of Germany’s military intelligence organization, the Abwehr.
Hi, James. Oh, hi. Very nice to meet you. Yes, you too.
So, I know you’re an expert on Admiral Canaris. Oh, yes. Canaris was one of the only German officers who was able to speak Spanish at that time. This is Haiko Sour.
He’s a historian and author of a recent in-depth biography of Wilhelm Canaris. What’s this monument? That’s the International Brigades Memorial, and it’s erected in 1968 and dedicated to the Germans who fought in the Spanish Civil War. The Spanish Civil War saw the fascist forces under General Franco try to seize power in Spain in the mid to late 1930s.
As a result, it kind of becomes a proxy war. Combatants from all over the world poured into Spain to fight for their chosen side, and Germany was no exception. So this would have been the Germans who were fighting on the side of the left-wing Republicans against the conservative right-wing forces of Franco. Oh yes.
But back in 1936, those men were considered outlaws here in Germany because the Nazis were clear about what side they supported. Hitler wanted to help his fellow fascist, Franco, and he wanted to make sure that if anybody was going to win the Spanish Civil War, it was going to be a fascist and not a communist. Obviously, Canaris was on Franco’s side. Yes, he was.
So, how was Canaris involved in the Spanish Civil War? Canaris was the one who organized intelligence, who organized military support from Germany and also from Italy to Franco. Canaris was working entirely in the service of the Nazi regime when he coordinated the delivery of weapons to the nationalists under Franco. Canaris was also involved in spying on enemy shipping and working on the supply network.
The rest of the world started to watch the Spanish Civil War very, very closely when they realized that the Germans were waging it as well. Canaris’s work was instrumental in establishing Franco’s brutal authoritarian regime that would hold Spain hostage for nearly 40 years. But even as the war in Spain raged, Canaris was hard at work planning for a much larger conflict, a global battle for supremacy between Germany and the United States. The Duquesne spy ring was actually a brilliant and bold plan executed by Canaris, named after its chief operative, Fritz Duquesne.
Now this was a spy ring of about 30 agents peppered in key tactical locations throughout the eastern United States, in dockyards and in various sorts of offices that were important. What it was there to do was to gather as much intelligence as they could about the United States, military intelligence, other sorts of secrets, and send it all to Berlin. Their mission was to identify the structures, industrial centers, and institutions that would be vital to any American war effort and plan their sabotage. But a double agent recruited by the FBI infiltrated the ring.
The man walking up and down the street is Harry Sawyer, a naturalized German American citizen, and prevented any secrets from making it back to Canaris. A spy trap was set. Sawyer was working for the FBI. The Duquesne spy ring was essentially busted by the FBI.
Spies beware. Hiding their faces and under guard, 33 were seized. 19 pleaded guilty. 14 went on trial.
The evidence was there, reams and reams of it, gathered by the ingenious men of the FBI. Hitler wanted to know every American secret, but dug up only grief for his blundering agents. And it’s one of the early uses of covert footage. Walking into this trap is Colonel Fritz Duquesne.
He is describing the gas operating principles of the M1 rifle, a secret which might have made a difference in the lives of a lot of Americans had it reached Germany. And so we can see the Duquesne spies going about their business. Tot has brought the blueprints of the steamship America, showing the plans of a secret gun in placements. Ultimately, it was a failure for Canaris, but it shows how bold he was.
And it shows that this was a spy chief who had to be reckoned with. And the stakes in this espionage game were about to get much higher. In 1939, the Abwehr, which was led by Canaris, was creating a situation that could be used as a pretense for Hitler to invade Poland and pretend he was doing it defensively. Canaris provided Polish uniforms, weapons, and ID cards to members of the SS.
And these SS men use these Polish documents and uniforms to attack a German radio tower on the border with Poland. Canaris’s Abwehr is partly responsible for this dummy attack. The Germans say that this supposed Polish raid was an act of Polish aggression against Germany and gives Germany the reason to go to war against Poland. The ruse worked.
The people of Germany gave Hitler their blessing to send their sons marching into yet another war. The invasion also began a surge in Nazi action against the Jews. I know that some historians have suggested that Canaris was responsible for the idea of the Jews wearing a badge. Is that true?
I’m on a mission to find out where Nazi spy master Wilhelm Canaris ranks in Hitler’s hierarchy of evil. I’m about to investigate one of the most disturbing chapters of his life story. On September 1st, 1941, the Nazis issued a decree ordering that all Jews over 6 years of age living in Germany and conquered territories like Poland must wear a yellow Star of David badge. It’s an infamous moment in history.
Many say that Canaris was responsible for suggesting to Hitler that Jews be required to identify themselves by wearing a yellow star. I’ve come to Berlin’s Jewish Museum to find out more about the stars and Canaris’s connection to them. So, Christoph, where are you taking me? I’m going to take you to a showcase where we present yellow stars, yellow badges.
Oh, wonderful. So, these are going to be original badges that Jews were made to wear. Yeah. During the war, that were actually worn between 1941 and 45.
Oh, wow. Christoph Kitz Müller is the curator here. Thank. So, these were badges that were actually worn by Jews.
Yeah. During the Second World War. Yeah. By a certain family living in Berlin.
Gork Marcus, his mother, and Eric Marcus, and the brother, and they actually had to buy them for 10 pfennigs. So you actually had to buy them. You were being forced to wear them, but you had to physically buy them. Yeah.
Wow. Nazi policies towards the Jews were intended not only to strip them of their rights, but also of their identity. They were all required to put the same yellow star on their chest. This removal of an individual’s identity has a profound effect on your psyche.
It likely influenced their ability to fight back, their resolve to fight as well. I find there’s an incredible irony with these badges that the Nazis claimed that they could identify Jews just on the street, presenting them as a separate racial group. Yet, when it came to it, they actually had to physically mark them themselves to identify them as a segregated part of society. They said all the time, “Oh, you can recognize them.
” Mhm. And then felt, no, of course you can’t. No. So they needed these badges.
Yeah. And the yellow badges were a prelude to the deportations. Yeah. And a tool.
Wow. It’s sickening to think that Jews had to pay for what was essentially their ticket to a concentration camp. But my visit has left me wondering, did Wilhelm Canaris, a career spy, really create the infamous badge? Making them wear badges.
I’ve caught up once again with Canaris biographer Haiko Sour to get his take on the claim. I know that some historians have suggested that Canaris was responsible for the idea of the Jews wearing a badge. Is that true? No, it’s not true.
It’s not true. It’s told in German books and in British books for about 50 years now, and it’s repeated constantly, but it’s not a German invention. It’s a very long and old tradition in Europe to mark Jews with badges. It’s a tradition from the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages.
Forcing Jews to wear a yellow Jewish star is something that has historical precedent in medieval Europe. But there weren’t any examples of Jews being forced to wear a yellow Jewish star until the Nazis revived the practice. Someone in the party had clearly done their history homework to revive the Jewish badge. The question is who?
In 1941, Goebbels himself had the idea to introduce the Jewish Star for the Jews in Germany. Joseph Goebbels was Hitler’s infamous minister of propaganda. He was perhaps the Führer’s most fanatical follower, a virulent anti-Semite. For years, Goebbels had been pushing Hitler to approve a mandatory ID mark for Germany’s Jews.
Goebbels asked his right-hand man Leopold Gutterer to organize some kind of conference with almost all important institutions in Germany. Leopold Gutterer was Goebbels’s subordinate and a loyal party member since 1925, and they discussed the question if it’s possible to introduce a Jewish star, and Leopold Gutterer directed the way of the discussion. According to Haiko, Gutterer suggested the centuries-old badge be revived to identify Jews living in the Reich. He was the one who pushed Goebbels, and then Goebbels pushed Hitler to introduce a Jewish star.
Okay. Leopold Gutterer survived the conflict, was sentenced to hard labor for his war crimes, and died in 1996. The yellow badge went on to become perhaps the most infamous symbol of oppression of all time. So where did this story that Canaris was responsible for suggesting the Jewish badge come from?
In 1949, Gutterer told it in court that Canaris was the one who pushed Hitler to introduce that badge, the Jewish star. So he actually successfully managed to pin the blame on Canaris. Yes, very successfully. One of the newest biographies on Canaris, written in 2006, repeated that story again, but the evidence is clear that Canaris is not the one who introduced the Jewish star.
So he had nothing to do with that. No, nothing. The implication is enormous. Gutterer would have known that by shifting blame to the Abwehr chief, he was painting him as an unspeakable villain for all history.
But why Canaris? Canaris engaged in numerous forms of resistance. He’s going against one of the major tenets of Nazi policy, which is to exterminate Jews. I’m in Berlin on a mission to determine where Nazi spy chief Wilhelm Canaris ranks in Hitler’s hierarchy of evil.
I’ve seen how a fellow Nazi falsely identified him as the creator of the infamous Yellow Star badge. But why Canaris? The answer may be found here at Berlin’s Resistance Museum. This building was established in the year between 1911 and 1914.
Professor Johannes Tukho is the museum’s director. And this wonderful space was a place where the residence of the war ministry at the time was in the Second World War. It was here the head of the reserve army and part of the command of the army. According to Johannes, in the late 1930s, as Hitler steered Germany towards a new war in Europe, Canaris feared for the nation’s future.
You can place Canaris as a very well-informed man. People described him as a dark personality, as a man who was very skeptical about the chances of the war. Will Germany win the war? Canaris wasn’t alone.
He was one of a number of high-ranking Nazis who had deep misgivings about Hitler’s increasingly aggressive posture in Europe. The situation came to a head in 1938 when he threatened to invade Czechoslovakia. Canaris was in contact with people who were involved in the coup d’état preparations. Also in 1938, a clandestine group led by Canaris’s Abwehr subordinate, General Hans Oster, planned to kill Hitler and seize power to prevent the invasion from happening.
A plot that became known as the Oster Conspiracy. But before they could move, Hitler struck the infamous Munich Agreement with Britain and France that allowed him to begin annexing Czechoslovakia without firing a shot. The coup plans were quietly shelved, and Canaris continued to lead the Abwehr as though nothing happened. In order to be a good spy, you need to be able to be different people in different situations.
You need to be pretty comfortable lying. You need to be able to hold multiple personas and remember those personas and when you were one and when you were the other. This is something that most people have a very hard time with and would find extremely stressful. Canaris was once again the head of the German intelligence service.
That is the complicated picture I can paint you about Canaris and the German resistance movement. Canaris opposed Hitler’s drive to war for strategic reasons. He didn’t think Germany was prepared to win a war. This opposition didn’t derive from moral qualms.
It was more about strategy. But that view would change just weeks into the fighting. Shortly after the war began, Canaris visited German soldiers in Poland and he saw what was happening there on the ground. He saw the murder of Jews and other civilians.
And this action really showed him what this war was going to be like. In the city of Będzin, Canaris was confronted with the image of German soldiers forcing 200 Jews into a synagogue and then setting it on fire. The experience shook him to his core. He was deeply depressed about the war crimes and he was very skeptical for the future of Germany.
The incident drove Canaris to step up his efforts to undermine Hitler’s plans. Canaris engaged in numerous forms of resistance, ranging from sort of micro resistance to networking to covering up the activities of people engaged in resistance plots. We do know that he did provide information to the other side, to the British, but it was very unclear as to whether the British were ever going to act upon what he told them because, of course, they could have thought that Canaris was sending false information. During the war years, Wilhelm Canaris led a bizarre double life.
On one hand, he was still hatching deadly schemes against the Allies. Operation Pastorius was an Abwehr plan to recruit Germans who had lived in the United States, smuggle them back into the United States by U-boat, and have them commit acts of sabotage, blowing things up. The plan didn’t work. The agents that the Abwehr attempted to smuggle into the United States were caught and put on trial.
At the same time, Canaris had his hands in a radically different kind of plot. He was directly involved in actions to help Jews leave Germany in 1942 and 1943. In the summer of 1942, Canaris helped cover up a plan by two other Abwehr officers to rescue 14 Jews from Berlin. The Gestapo was told that these Jews were necessary for a secret mission to Latin America.
In reality, the Abwehr worked with Swiss officials to allow these Jews to be given entry to Switzerland and saved from certain deportation and death. Canaris, a high-ranking Nazi surrounded by vicious anti-Semites, had done the unthinkable. You’ve got the head of Nazi military intelligence actively saving Jews from being deported to their deaths. Now, we’ve got to put this into the reckoning when we come to assess Canaris because he’s going against one of the major tenets of Nazi policy, which is to exterminate Jews.
Why was Canaris helping Jews, the prime target of Nazi hate? I’m sure the Poland atrocities were a major factor, but there may have been another. Prominent figures from the Third Reich know that Canaris’s daughter was disabled. That’s terrifying.
I’m in Berlin on a mission to find out where Nazi spy master Wilhelm Canaris ranks in Hitler’s hierarchy of evil. I’ve just learned that in 1942 he began helping Jews escape from the Third Reich. I want to know why. So I’ve joined Haiko Sour in Berlin’s Zehlendorf neighborhood to get his view on this extraordinary turn of events.
So this is the neighborhood that Canaris was living in when he was head of the Abwehr. Yes. And which one is his house? This one.
All right, let’s go and have a closer look. Yes. Among his neighbors here were the Jews he helped escape to Switzerland. Also nearby was the home of feared SS intelligence chief Reinhard Heydrich.
Heydrich was an old colleague of Canaris and notorious even among his fellow Nazis for being ruthless. Hitler himself once called Heydrich the man with the iron heart. Canaris and Heydrich were not friends, but they had to meet socially, and the wives had to meet socially too. And it was very difficult for Canaris to deal with Heydrich.
Canaris’s daughter told me that her mother, so Canaris’s wife, had to come to Mrs. Heydrich and they drink tea together, and they know that Canaris’s daughter was disabled. Heydrich’s wife said, “We had to kill all disabled persons. ” My god, that must have been absolutely terrifying for Canaris and his wife to know that one of the most evil men in the Nazi regime is aware of the fact that they have a child that is disabled.
And in the Nazis’ eyes, and especially in the eyes of Reinhard Heydrich and it sounds his wife as well, that she should have been killed. Yes, that’s terrifying. Canaris was well aware of what the Nazi regime’s policies were toward the disabled, and that injected a moral dimension into Canaris’s growing suspicion about the regime. That’s an impressive looking church.
Not far from the family home is another pillar of Canaris’s life. So this is where Canaris went to church? Yes. Was he a very religious man?
Yes, his faith was very important. So did Canaris’s faith play a role in his decision to go from supporting the Nazis to opposing them? Yes, of course. Canaris did not make any decision before he thinks, and religion is one part of that process.
Faith, family, and the slaughter in Poland prompted Canaris to change his ways. But even as he did, rumors of his subversive activities spread, and in early 1944, SS Chief Heinrich Himmler convinced Hitler to dissolve the Abwehr. Canaris was no longer a spy. A few months later, a group of Nazi officers famously tried to assassinate Hitler with a bomb, but failed.
Canaris was implicated in the plot. He actually couldn’t have participated in the attempted assassination. But this attempted assassination was a good excuse for Hitler to get rid of somebody who he’d come to see as a thorn in his side. So Canaris was arrested.
Wilhelm Canaris was found guilty of treason and executed at Flossenbürg concentration camp on April 9th, 1945. Seems to me that he was very brave to do what he did, trying to resist and also save lives. Do you see him as a heroic figure? In my opinion, no officer from the Third Reich can be called a hero.
What is the difference between Oskar Schindler and Canaris? Schindler risked his life. Canaris not really. He had a powerful position within the Nazi state.
So, Canaris risked not his life, but he used the power he had from his position. It’s a convincing argument, but before I make my final judgment of Canaris, I want to find out what life was like for everyday resistors living under Nazi rule. I’ve come to the University of Munich. During the Third Reich, it was home to a student resistance group known as the White Rose.
The White Rose opposed Nazism and attempted to resist, mostly through intellectual means, mainly distributing pamphlets. They didn’t engage in armed resistance, but they did try to spread ideas that were opposed to the regime. This is a stunning university. Yes, it’s 150 years old, and you must know Hildegard Kronova is a former politician and an authority on citizen resistance during the Nazi regime.
The siblings Hans and Sophie Scholl put their pamphlets beside the doors here, and then they went up to the second floor. The leaflets were thrown down. So they threw leaflets down from up there, and they would have landed on the floor of the atrium here. Yes.
Somebody sympathetic to the regime saw the pamphlets they were distributing and reported them, and they were both executed because of the pamphlets they were distributing. During the prosecution, the siblings say they are only a few. All right. So they protected maybe a larger group of people by just focusing on themselves.
Yes. And that obviously destroyed the group. Yes. Yes.
I suppose it’s easy for us today to say, you know, why didn’t more people resist the Nazis? But as you very clearly pointed out, dictatorships are extremely hard to resist against. Yes, there are really seven persons who had to pay with their lives for the freedom word, and this is the memorial here. It’s really touching for us because there is no order that this memorial should always have white roses, as there are people who bring roses with them.
Really? So does that give you hope? Of course. Because this is a sign that the people appreciate the persons who had been murdered by the Nazis, and they admire them, and I think if a person admires other persons, this person will learn from this.
I still can’t believe they were just students trying to express free speech, and all they were doing was distributing pamphlets, and they lost their lives for it. It’s unbelievable. But it really shows how incredibly brave they were to resist the Nazis. Do Canaris’s acts of resistance compare at all to the selfless heroics of the White Rose?
It’s now time to find out where the Nazi spy master ranks in Hitler’s Most Wanted. He was complicit with the regime. He didn’t have to do the job he did. Did he do as much as a committed resistor in his position could do?
My journey has given me new insight into Wilhelm Canaris’s many plots to destabilize the world, setting the stage for the Second World War. It’s also revealed his remorse and attempts to make at least some amends. Now, it’s time for us to decide where he should sit in the hierarchy of Hitler’s Most Wanted. This story is definitely one with many twists.
And it’s quite hard for me to figure out where we should start with this, but I think we do need to start with the bad things that he did. Anthony, well, he was drawn to Hitler. He was drawn to somebody who he thought embodied strong leadership and even dictatorial leadership. The relationship among Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco in Spain is a key relationship, and Canaris was directly involved in supplying arms from Germany and Italy to fascists in Spain.
Guy, how important was intelligence gathering during the Second World War and the role that Canaris played overall as effectively Hitler’s spy master? I don’t think it’s as important as your kind of thriller writer would like. I think that it’s an exciting and fascinating part of war, but I don’t think that the actions of Canaris and other spy chiefs fundamentally altered the course of the war. I think we can go in hard on him because of the fact that he was complicit with the regime.
He didn’t have to do the job he did. No one was going to execute him if he didn’t do the job. One thing to consider is the fact that he is in fact a trained spy. He was very comfortable with lying and being able to put forth whatever face was necessary for the situation.
And yet he was in fact against some of the worst actions of the regime, aligned with the resistance to some extent. That’s right. He was completely repulsed by what was happening to Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland, by mass shootings and by the early stages of genocide. But how effective was his resistance against Hitler?
If you’re one of the Jews that he was able to save, you’d say very effective. And he found some creative ways to save Jews given the powers that were at his disposal. Did he take a lot of risk to save Jews? Did he act in ways that might have brought unwanted attention to himself?
Did he do as much as a committed resistor in his position could do? Probably not. Let’s face facts. Yad Vashem is not going to make him the Righteous Among the Nations for helping to save Jews during the war.
But certainly there is enough sense of whiteness in all these shades of gray with Canaris to not call him a hero as such, but certainly not to write him off as a complete villain. These shades of gray make Canaris an extraordinarily difficult personality to pin down. He was instrumental in starting a war that rained misery and death down upon millions. But it’s impossible to ignore his clandestine resistance campaign.
What I’d like to do now is come to some sort of conclusion where you think he should rank in the hierarchy of evil. What I’m most interested by is based on our conversation, does he even deserve to be in this pack of cards? Guy, what are your thoughts? Personally, I think no, he doesn’t.
Why? I happen to think that there are 52 worse Nazis in the Third Reich who are deserving of a place on this deck. So therefore, I’m not going to put him on this at all. I tend to agree with Guy, but there’s enough doubt in my mind to have me rank him particularly low on the deck.
At least I’m going to put him at 45. Anthony, I disagree with you, Guy. The success of the nationalists in Spain was a central goal of the Nazi state, and Canaris was integral to that success. The Franco regime outlasted the Nazi regime by decades.
Because of that, I think he does belong in this ranking, and I rank him number 52. This has definitely been the hardest one for me to assess. I understand that he was involved in resisting Hitler. I understand that as being maybe a redemptive quality about him.
However, he still was part of the Nazi regime. There are still things that he did that have to be taken into account. So, I disagree. I don’t think he should be left out of the pack of cards entirely.
I also disagree. I think 45 is a little high because I think there definitely are a number of Nazis that are ahead of him. So, I have to agree with Anthony here. I think he is number 52.
He’s therefore the two of clubs. Wilhelm Canaris became enthralled with Hitler and masterminded a deadly intelligence network that destabilized Europe. But during the war, he turned against the Nazis and actually helped Jews escape to safety.
For that, he ranks 52nd in Hitler’s Most Wanted.
