Hitler's Secret War: The Nazi Espionage Campaign Against the Allies

By Charles Whiting

In the shadows was another war… An unputdownable account of the Nazi spy operation and how it ultimately failed

During the Second World War there was, behind the scenes, a bitter conflict was stamped ‘Top Secret’. It was a war of infiltration and misdirection, espionage and assassination. And the Nazis were determined not to let anyone best them.

Revealing the full extent of Nazi’s secret intelligence networks, bestselling author Charles Whiting takes the reader into organisations like the Abwehr, Germany’s renowned military intelligence bureau, and features interviews with key figures like such key figures as Giskes, who fooled the Americans at the Battle of the Bulge, and Ritter, who stole the highly classified US Norden bombsights. There are accounts of hubris, heroism and cowardice; stunning triumphs and excruciating defeats, all out of the public eye and revealed only decades later.

Over a period of thirty years, Whiting met and interviewed a huge number of Nazi and Allied survivors involved in what came to be known as ‘The War in the Shadows’. The result is an extraordinary and gripping story combining great cunning with staggering incompetence.

Perfect for readers of Ben Macintyre and Max Hastings, Hitler’s Secret War outdoes the best spy novel and demonstrates yet again that fiction cannot rival history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 23, 2021
• ISBN: 9781800325081

Charles Whiting

A man who joined the army at 16 by lying about his age, Charles Whiting became a well-known author and military historian through his academic prowess. His first novel, written while still an undergraduate, was published in 1954 and by 1958 had been followed by three wartime thrillers. Between 1960 and 2007 Charles went on to write over 350 titles, including 70 non-fiction titles covering varied topics from the Nazi intelligence service to British Regiments during World War II. He passed away in 2007.

Book preview

This was a secret war whose battles were lost or won unknown to the public… No such battle has ever been waged by mortal man.

Winston Churchill

Author’s Note

I met my first spy when I was seventeen. He stood out in that echoing Belgian barrackroom, heavy with the stink of the ‘piss-buckets’, amid a couple of hundred men waiting to be sent to the front as reinforcements. Most of us were green teenagers, though the word had hardly been invented in those days. A few were veterans, twenty-one- and twenty-two-year-olds who had been wounded in the fighting in Normandy and were returning for their ‘second bash’, as the phrase had it.

The spy was different. He was an old man, perhaps all of thirty. He was strong-looking and surly and he’d obviously been an officer until quite recently. You could see the lighter marks where his pips had once been. Otherwise his battledress blouse was devoid of all unit insignia or medal ribbons, save for one thing left from his, to us, unknown past. They were upturned white-and-blue wings on his chest, complete with a parachute. I’d never seen the device before, but I recognised it for what it was. It indicated that he had jumped behind enemy lines three times.

He kept himself to himself. He smoked a pipe much of the time, clenched tightly between his teeth, as if somehow by this means he was forcibly restraining himself from talking. Why and about what I could only guess. Once, however, before the ‘big flap’ when we all disappeared to our various dates with destiny, he got drunk.

Perhaps it was pay day. Perhaps he’d taken up with one of the women who haunted the cafes-cum-brothels around that Belgian cavalry barracks and had conned her into buying him drinks. Tough they were, but soft-hearted in a way, if your face and attitude were right. At all events, he staggered in, helped to fill the giant piss bucket near the door – it took three men to lift it – and took up an aggressive stance at the sagging wooden bunk, still adorned with the eagle stamp of the Wehrmacht who had occupied this same barracks a couple of months earlier, leaving behind their bedbugs as souvenirs.

There he shot off his mouth: ‘Why us – fer Chrissake?’ I wasn’t particularly sensitive in those days, but I guessed that he wasn’t really addressing us, but his former masters and an unjust world that had dumped him here, from whence he would probably go to his death sooner or later.

He had been in the SOE or the SAS: the initials meant nothing to me in those days. He’d worked with the Dutch underground. Finally he’d been parachuted behind the lines to the Dutch, taking with him a small fortune in gold coins for the Resistance. But he hadn’t delivered. Like others of his kind I was to meet later, he felt he was beyond the normal laws of military discipline and accountability. Perhaps he felt he deserved a reward for the dangers he had incurred. Anyway he’d gone on the run, holed up in some big city, right under the Moppens’ noses (he’d used the slang Dutch word for the Germans) and spent the money on wine, women and song before the authorities caught up with him. They always do.

When the ‘big flap’ came a couple of weeks later he disappeared. Naturally I never saw him again, but over the next half-century or so to come, whenever I met others of his kind, it seemed to me that that vaguely remembered spy was somehow typical of them all.

Spies, at least the ones I’ve met, always seemed to believe that they were in control of the situation, when, manifestly, they were not. It led to a sense of grievance that their admittedly dangerous activities were never properly rewarded. Fred Winterbotham, the guardian of the Ultra Secret, complained: ‘Not even a good gong.’ Even as an 80-year-old, who was soon to become more famous than ever he had been as a spy, Group-Captain Winterbotham was bitter and resentful.

Spies appear always to think that their acts of espionage resulted in earth-shaking changes. ‘When I was told to defect by the CIA contact, I smuggled out 400 key documents, welded into the chassis of my Skoda,’ Major Frolik, of the Czech Secret Service, proclaimed proudly. ‘That opened Washington’s eyes!’ Two or three years later nobody cared. Major Frolik had served his purpose.

Colonel Giskes and Major Ritter, Germany’s wartime spy-masters who directed espionage operations against Britain and America, were cast in the same mould. Thirty years on, when this author had dealings with them, they were still boasting about how they had hoodwinked the Allies and how they had had spies, perhaps even assassins, in close proximity to Churchill and Roosevelt. Little did they understand that they had already been relegated to the status of minor footnotes in the history of the Second World War. The real threats to the security of those leaders during the war were still alive, kicking and unmasked, thanks to the machinations of the KGB.

With a finger on the trigger of his ‘special’ and a beautiful, nearly naked, blonde on his other arm, Ian Fleming’s creation, James Bond, looks like these real spies might have imagined themselves in that sleazy underworld of betrayal and counter-betrayal.¹ In fact, they were nothing like that, never were since they first made their appearance in Chinese accounts five centuries before the birth of Christ. As Montesquieu remarked in the 18th century: ‘Spying might perhaps be tolerable if it were done by men of honour.’

But the real spies weren’t ‘men of honour’. Neither were they ‘gentlemen’ in the older English sense of the word. The real James Bond, if he ever lived outside of the novels of John Buchan, is dead.

But what of the man who controlled the destinies of those Second World War spies, Admiral Wilhelm Franz Canaris, who led the campaign against Britain and America and whose agents ranged the world from Afghanistan to Arkansas? ‘Father Christmas’ his enemies called him. ‘High C’² was another mocking name given to him by some of his more malicious agents, such as Giskes. But for most of those who knew him when he had 3,000 full-time agents, and thrice that number of part-time ones, under his control Admiral Canaris remained an enigma. As William Shirer, who knew him, remarked in his book The Third Reich: ‘He was so shadowy a figure that no two writers agree as to what kind of man he was, or believed in, if anything much.’

‘He always tried to maintain his distance,’ Colonel Ritter, the virtual US citizen who returned to his homeland to spy against his new country, told the author, ‘when he came to visit our branch in Hamburg. When he invited us all to dinner after his inspection, the Admiral was always close, unlike those Germans who tell you their life story within five minutes of meeting them, we never got anything out of him!’

American writer Ladislas Farago met Canaris, or so he said, in 1935. As he wrote in his Game of Foxes: ‘I could not believe that this rumpled, tongue-tied, absent-minded little man was the new chief of the Abwehr … I had anticipated eager curiosity that sparkled in the eyes… [Instead] he impressed me as an honest dullard.’

So he remained a mystery not only to his most intimate colleagues but also to the huge Nazi police apparat led by sharp young men out to get him. As hatchet-faced Dr Kaltenbrunner, the last head of the Nazi police organisation, wrote after the Nazis arrested him in late 1944: ‘[Canaris] managed to throw sand in all their eyes – Heydrich, Himmler, Keitel, Ribbentrop, even the Fuhrer.’

Heydrich, the sharpest of them all, who had known Canaris the longest of those out to bring him down – he’d been a naval cadet under Canaris back in the late twenties – told his wife Lina that Canaris needed careful watching because he was ‘a cunning old fox’.³

The motives of Canaris are very hard to fathom. How are we to explain that, although he worked for years to undermine the Weimar Republic (1919–33) because it was ‘not German or nationalist enough’, he immediately set about doing the same to the Third Reich, led by the greatest German nationalist of them all? What can we say of a man who harboured a major anti-Hitler plotter in his office (Major-General Oster, his Chief-of-Staff) and even helped the Resistance to place their first bomb in Hitler’s plane? When he first heard of the July 1944 attempt on Hitler’s life Canaris cried, ‘Dead? Good God! Who did it? The Russians?’

So many questions, so few answers.

Dreamer and realist, patriot and traitor, genius at deception and hopeless fool, cunning conspirator and genuine self-sacrificing friend, family man and predatory homosexual – all these were part of Canaris’ complicated make-up. How different he was from the simple souls who spied and sometimes died for him.

Compared to Canaris, those other two great spymasters involved in that dirty war in the shadows between 1939 and 1945 seem innocents abroad. Allen Dulles, the American, convinced that he was changing the world in the name of the United States of America, was an amateurish bungler who, unwittingly it seems, was directed by Canaris’ Abwehr and Stalin’s KGB. Even the chief assistant of Dulles’s boss, General Donovan, was a Soviet spy.⁴

‘C’ for his part, head of the SIS, an intelligence service that didn’t exist as far as the British Government was concerned, but was praised and admired by no less a person than Adolf Hitler, was also the victim of a Russian spy⁵ and hampered by the fact that he represented a dying empire.

In the end it appeared that Dulles and ‘C’ had won the war in the shadows. But now, half a century later, it is clear that Canaris cast a longer shadow. That Swiss connection, which he protected and which ensured that Germany had the financial means to continue the war long after it had been predicted that the country would be hopelessly bankrupt by 1940, occupies German Chancellors and American Presidents to this very day. Forgotten in name, Canaris is still with us in that continuing war in the shadows right into the new millennium.

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Ian Fleming was in Naval Intelligence during the Second World War, deskbound virtually all the time, but it was during this period in ‘Room 39’ that he conceived his ideas for the globe-ranging super British gentleman-spy, defending what was left of the Empire and bedding exotic beauties everywhere in the course of proudly being a member of ‘Her Majesty’s Secret Service’.↩︎

Pun on the first letter of Canaris’ name and a well-known German vitamin drink, containing vitamin C.↩︎

Frau Heydrich to the author.↩︎

Duncan Lee.↩︎

Kim Philby, the greatest British traitor of the 20th century, a double agent who might well have become ‘C’ himself if he had not been found out in time.↩︎

Book One

The Battle Begins

I can’t tell you what sort [of job] it would be. All I can say is that if you join us you mustn’t be afraid of forgery and you mustn’t be afraid of murder.

Secret Intelligence Service recruiting officer to Colonel Sweet-Escott, London, 1940

The Making of a Spymaster 1917–37

The Secret Service is a service of gentlemen.

Admiral Canaris (1939)

Now the ‘Bunker’ was quiet again. But Danish Colonel Lunding couldn’t sleep. He tossed and turned on his hard, narrow prison brink. Overhead the harsh cell light glared down on him from the concrete ceiling.

This wakefulness was nothing new for the former head of Denmark’s Military Intelligence. For ten months now he had been imprisoned in Flossenburg Concentration Camp not far from Nazi Germany’s border with what had once been Czechoslovakia. Here in Cell 21 of the Bunker, which housed the special prisoners of a dozen different nationalities, he had rarely spent a good night. Even when his emaciated body screamed out for sleep, his agile mind continued to work. His daily task of darning old German Army socks and sweaters, heavy with the odours of their dead former owners, certainly did not act as a soporific.

Lunding lay awake night after night, listening to the stamp of the SS guards’ heavy boots in the courtyard below and the snores of the prisoners around him. All of them were special for one reason or another and all were fated to end on one of the six nooses waiting in that courtyard.

But on this particular night in April 1945 he was burdened by the knowledge of what must soon happen to the elderly German in the next cell. The thought wouldn’t let him sleep. Even though the German had been Lunding’s most formidable enemy before the Gestapo had arrested him, the Dane’s mind was full of concern for the man they called ‘Father Christmas’.

Just after two in the morning on that April night, four weeks before the end of the Second World War, SS Sergeants Wolf and Weihe dragged the German back to his cell. Lunding had been awakened from a fitful doze by the sound of their heavy boots clumping down the stone corridor and the rattle of the prisoner’s chains as they had flung him back into his cell, more dead than alive. Then they had marched away. As always, the two torturers were in step, as if they were on a parade ground. For a while there had been silence. There always was after an interrogation. While he waited, the Dane could imagine the elderly German sprawled, beaten and bloody, on his straw-filled bunk, counting the steps until his SS torturers were out of earshot. And by now he too knew how many steps there were. Like all the Prominenten in the Bunker, that number was seemingly engraved on his mind.

Lunding was right. Almost immediately after their steps had died away and all was silent again in the death house, there came the first hesitant taps on the cell wall. The Dane hurried to the door. He peered through the crack. No one in sight. He moved in his stocking feet to the wall and tapped out the acknowledgement with his chipped tin mug.

Then the message began. It gathered speed and it seemed to the Dane that the German was regaining his confidence. It was as if he was strengthened by the knowledge that someone in this Nazi hell-on-earth could share with him his last hopes and fears. ‘It was my last interrogation,’ Lunding recorded the message years later. ‘They beat me up again. I believe they have broken my nose.’

There was a pause. It was as if the German on the other side, his ear pressed to the rough concrete of the cell wall, expected some sort of comment. But the Dane remained silent. He could offer no relief. He knew Scharfuhrer Stawinsky. He always beat up his prisoners. It was part of the routine. If Canaris survived this time the SS would beat him up again later.

Canaris started to tap on the wall again. ‘Now I shall die for my Fatherland. I have a clear conscience. You’ll understand that, as an officer, I did my duty when I tried to oppose the criminal stupidity with which Hitler led Germany to its ruin.’

Lunding could have commented, but he refrained. The German was as good as dead anyway. Why reproach him? Finally he tapped out a few words of encouragement, but even as he did so he knew they were worthless. He had glimpsed Stawinsky’s face through the gap in the cell door when they had come to fetch Canaris. He knew what the spiral motion the SS man had made with his right forefinger to the other guard meant. The German was ‘going up the chimney’. First he’d be strangled, as Hitler had ordered should be the fate of all these high-ranking traitors. After that he’d be despatched to the ovens and the smoke of his funeral pyre would ascend through the chimney.

Canaris started tapping on the cell wall once more. Lunding pressed his face to it. Now the sound was fainter. Obviously the German was weakening. Thus, as recorded by Colonel Lunding, his last message came through. It read: ‘It was all in vain. I knew Germany was finished in 1942. All in vain.’

Admiral Wilhelm Canaris had just a few hours to live.

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Nearly three decades before, in the summer of 1917, Wilhelm Canaris, First Lieutenant in the Imperial German Navy, had completed three very adventurous years of war in the service of his Imperial Majesty Kaiser Wilhelm II. Surprisingly enough, none of them had been spent in the activity for which he had been trained since he had joined the Navy at the age of eighteen in 1905 as a member of the crew of an Imperial dreadnought. Instead his war had been spent fighting on the secret front of espionage. Virtually from the start of his long military career Canaris would do battle in that murky world of treachery and counter-treachery, the ‘War in the Shadows’.

Back in October 1914 he had been serving on the German cruiser Dresden. Under the command of Admiral Graf von Spee, the Dresden had been part of the German fleet that had sunk the British Pacific Fleet. For nearly three months thereafter the Germans had been masters of the South Pacific until the Royal Navy had caught up with them. Smarting from the disgrace, the Admiralty in London had hastily assembled a powerful fleet, which it had despatched to the Falkland Islands. The fleet’s orders had been simple in their brutality: Wipe out the Germans.

On 8 December 1914 the cruisers Inflexible and Invincible, under the command of the aptly named British Admiral Sturdee, had met the Germans. Trapped, Graf von Spee fought back bravely, but to no avail. Badly outnumbered, the German fleet was sent to the bottom. Only the Dresden escaped, due to her superior speed.

Four months later, however, the Dresden, too, met her end. Coaling in Chilean waters off Mas a Tierra on 9 March 1915, she was surprised by a salvo from the British cruiser Glasgow. The Dresden’s captain, Kapitanleutnant Luedecke, sent Canaris under a white flag to the Glasgow. Canaris’ assignment was to explain that the Dresden didn’t want to fight – after all, she was in neutral waters.

The Glasgow’s skipper wouldn’t buy it. He snapped back: ‘I have my orders to sink the Dresden wherever I find her. All the rest can be solved by British and Chilean diplomats.’ And that was the end of the one-sided conversation.

A little later Canaris reported back to his own skipper who knew he was in a fix. He couldn’t escape to sea. Even if he could, he hadn’t yet taken on board enough fuel. If he stayed where he was and tried to fight it out with the Glasgow he would suffer severe casualties. But he was determined not to let his ship fall into the hands of the enemy as an easy prize. He’d rather scuttle her. Thus, as the first salvoes from the Glasgow shattered the morning stillness, the Germans opened their seacocks and the seawater began to flood in.

The sinking of the Dresden was, with the exception of a few months as a U-boat skipper in 1918, the end of Canaris’ career as a fighting sailor. Although in the end he would reach the rank of Admiral, he would now start his new unorthodox career, which would earn him the contempt of his former naval comrades, that of an agent, spy and finally spymaster.

For a while Canaris endured the dull existence in the Chilean internment camp where the survivors of the sunken Dresden were held by the pro-British Chilean authorities, but not for long. He spoke excellent Spanish as a result of his previous tours of duty in Spanish-America and he felt he could escape from the camp and reach Germany if Luedecke would give him permission. In the end, after a lot of pleading, Luedecke gave way. He would be allowed to escape.

Eager to get back to the fighting, and in the hope of rapid promotion due to losses in Europe, Canaris wasted no time. Stealing a boat, he rowed himself to the mainland from the island where the internment camp was. By dawn he had stolen a horse and started on his long and dangerous journey through Chile to pro-German Argentina.

The journey took him several months. He hid by day and travelled by night. He skirted all towns. What supplies he needed he stole or bought from the Indians. Time and again he was struck down by malaria for which he possessed no quinine, or any other medicine for that matter. But his iron determination to get back in the war kept him going. In the end he crossed the Andes in a three-day-long snowstorm, reached the plain and celebrated Christmas 1915 at the hacienda of a rich and aristocratic German settler, Herr von Buelow.

The German, a patriot with dual nationality, wanted Canaris to rest up for a while. ‘Mensch, Canaris’ he said, ‘Sie sehen aus wie derlebendige Tod’ (You look like death warmed up). But Canaris, burned black by the sun, emaciated and still plagued by malaria, was impatient. In spite of his host’s protests, he bought false papers and booked passage on the neutral Dutch ship SS Frisia, bound for Rotterdam, the great Dutch port that he would help to conquer a quarter of a century later.

His cover story was complicated but clever. Under the identity of Reed Rosas, a combination of both a Spanish and English name, a Chilean with a British mother, he was on his way to Holland to claim a fortune left to him