Hitler's Spy Chief by Richard Bassett

was certainly not above blackmail, especially with regard to its Irish agents during the Second World War. Nevertheless, on the whole, honey rather than vinegar was Canaris’ watchword.
    For similar reasons, although he had an entire section devoted to sabotage, (Section II), he was also sceptical of its value, not least on account of the danger to innocent civilians. Such groups were difficult to control and often provoked reprisals against the civilian population. Gradually, one by one, the Abwehr officers learnt that they had a strong and wily protector of their interests in the slightiy dishevelled admiral and that, as one of the Abwehr officers pointed out a few weeks later, There is rather more to him than meets the eye on first impression’. 19
    Canaris, needless to say, made his mark with the Führer. Between December 1934, just prior to his taking over the Abwehr, and March 1935, Canaris had no less than seventeen private meetings with Hitler. Likeevery chief of clandestine intelligence he enjoyed the right of access to the head of state at any time. But in Canaris’ case this privilege appears to have been unusually generously interpreted. No record exists of their first meeting but we can be sure that the qualities Canaris had manifested throughout his career stood him in good stead.
    These were, first and foremost, a cosmopolitan oudook on life. Canaris was perhaps the only politically reliable (i.e. anti-Communist) figure close to Hitler who knew something of the outside world. Much has been written about Hitler’s admiration for Ribbentrop, 20 the whisky salesman who had traded with the Scots and was therefore, somewhat rashly, invested by Hitler with a broad knowledge of the British empire. If Ribbentrop could appear a man of the world to Hitler, it would not have been difficult for Canaris, with his knowledge of the clandestine armaments and banking worlds, to appear the very incarnation of geo-political wisdom.
    Secondly, Canaris was a good listener, a sine qua non of any meaningful relationship with Hitler. Canaris knew well how to listen and charm Hitler, playing to his foibles and character weaknesses. Canaris had a soft spot for the Austrians: a legacy, perhaps, of his love of Europe south of the Alps. While Hitler would come to represent all that he loathed about klein bourgeois Austria, Canaris knew enough about the central European temperament to know how to ‘play him’. That meant pandering to Hitler’s prejudices, including anti-Semitism.
    Following research by Willi Grosse, 21 there is a probability that in one of these conversations, Canaris even mentioned the crass and repellent idea of identifying Jews in Germany by their enforced wearing of the Star of David. It was, of course, long before the death camps had been constructed, but while several biographers have sought to defend Canaris, claiming that he was acting in accordance with geographical rather than racial considerations, this conversation, if it indeed took place, must count as one of the blackest marks against Canaris’ record. At this stage, with the first flush of success in reorganising the Abwehr, it is sadly all tooplausible that Canaris might have wanted to ingratiate himself with the Führer by suggesting a ‘solution’ to the Jewish problem inside Germany. As mentioned earlier, Canaris was, in part, as a result of his views on Communism, far from philo-Semitic, yet as has been seen from his time in Spain during the First World War and his subsequent action in saving many Jews by drafting them into the Abwehr, he cannot be branded a typical anti-Semite either. He had worked successfully with Jewish bankers such as Ullmann, and would time and again rescue Jews from the certainty of being sent to the concentration camps by drafting them as agents abroad. Indeed, the conversation in which the question of the wearing of the Star of David arose may well have been provoked by the fact that