Wilhelm Franz Canaris

Wilhelm Franz Canaris (1 January 1887 – 9 April 1945) was a German admiral, head of the Abwehr, the German military intelligence service, from 1935 to 1944 and a member of the German Resistance.

Colonel Wessel von Freytag-Loringhoven's son Niki, testifying in Munich in 1972 and in recent revelations, reports that Canaris was involved in the foiling of Hitler's plot to kidnap Pope Pius XII. Colonel Freytag-Loringhoven was a subordinate of Canaris, and his son, Niki von Freytag-Loringhoven, reported that within days of the arrest of Benito Mussolini as ordered by King Victor Emmanuel III, the Führer commanded the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (the Third Reich’s Security Headquarters) to retaliate against the Italians via the kidnapping or murder of Pius XII and King Victor Emmanuel.

The colonel’s son, Niki Freytag Loringhoven, now 72, recently came forward to reveal new details about the plan, reporting that on 29 and 30 July 1943 his father and Erwin von Lahousen, who were employed in the section of German intelligence dealing mainly with sabotage, attended a meeting in Venice where Canaris informed the Italian General, Cesare Amè, of the plot. General Amè relayed the news which allowed the plot to be foiled. The Italian paper, Avvenire, maintains that the younger Freytag von Loringhoven’s accounts comport with the Von Lahousen’s Nuremberg war crimes trials deposition.

The evidence that he was playing a double game grew, and at the insistence of Heinrich Himmler, who had suspected him for a long time, Hitler dismissed Canaris from the Abwehr in February 1944, replacing him with Walter Schellenberg and merging most of the Abwehr with the Sicherheitsdienst (SD). Some weeks later, Canaris was put under house arrest, preventing him from taking part directly in the 20 July Plot, 1944, to assassinate Hitler.

However, just after the Stalingrad disaster, Canaris had already planned a 'coup' against the entire Nazi regime in which many Nazi officials would be accused for known crimes, while Hitler would be arrested as an insane person based on his exposure to poison gas in World War I, then imprisoned for life. After the 20 July Plot, Canaris's long-time rival, SS leader Heinrich Himmler discovered that one of the officers involved in the plot, a friend of Canaris who had committed suicide, had kept the plot details in a metal box. The investigations also revealed that a number of other assassination plots (possibly another 10 or 15) had been activated but had failed and were covered up at the last minute. Most people who participated in these plots were people Canaris knew well. In the aftermath of the attempt on Hitler's life, the Gestapo found no direct evidence tying Canaris to the plot, but his close association to many of the conspirators that were arrested was enough to seal his fate.

Himmler kept Canaris alive for some time because he planned to use him secretly as a future contact with the British in order to come to an agreement to end the war with himself as the leader of Germany. Hitler also wanted to keep him alive in order to get the names of additional conspirators. When Himmler's plan failed to materialize, he received the approval of Hitler to send Canaris to an SS drumhead court-martial presided over by Otto Thorbeck with Walter Huppenkothen as prosecutor that sentenced him to death.

Together with his deputy General Hans Oster, military jurist General Karl Sack, theologian Rev. Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Ludwig Gehre, Canaris was humiliated before witnesses and then executed on 9 April 1945, in the Flossenbürg concentration camp, just weeks before the end of the war. He was led to the gallows barefoot and naked. Just before his execution he tapped out a message in Morse code, which was heard by another prisoner, claiming he acted for the good of Germany and denying he was a traitor. At the time of his execution, Canaris had been decorated with the Iron Cross First and Second Class, the Silver German Cross, the Cross of Honour and the Wehrmacht Twelve and Twenty-Five Year Long-Service Ribbons.

Erwin von Lahousen and Hans Bernd Gisevius, two of Canaris' main subordinates, survived the war and testified during the Nuremberg Trials about Canaris' courage in opposing Hitler. Lahousen recalled a conversation between Canaris and General Wilhelm Keitel in which Canaris warned Keitel that the German military would be held responsible for the atrocities in Poland. Keitel responded that they had been ordered by Hitler. Keitel, who also survived the war, was found guilty of war crimes at Nuremberg and hanged.

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