Abwehr

Under Canaris

According to Canaris’s entry in the Neue Deutsche Biographie (H. Krausnick, 1957), he became head of the Abwehr department on 1 January 1935, after his predecessor, Captain Patzig, had come into open conflict with the Nazi Party (NSDAP). From March 1938 the office was called the Amt Ausland/Abwehr of the OKW.¹

In February 1944, after one of his agents in Turkey had gone over to the British, Canaris was removed from his post and the Abwehr was taken over by the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA).¹

Canaris was arrested three days after the assassination attempt of 20 July 1944; on 9 April 1945, after a summary trial before an SS court, he was hanged at Flossenbürg concentration camp.¹

Organisation

According to the Bundesarchiv’s description of record group RW 5, its origins go back to 1920, when a counterintelligence group with two sections – counterespionage and counter-sabotage – was set up in the Army Statistical Department of the Troop Office (Truppenamt). In 1935 it was the Abwehr department (Abwehrabteilung) of the Reichswehr (later War) Ministry, then an office within the OKW, called Amt Ausland/Abwehr from October 1939.²

The office consisted of a central department, the Ausland group and three departments: Abwehr I (intelligence abroad), Abwehr II (sabotage and subversion) and Abwehr III (counterintelligence, including within the Wehrmacht). Field posts (Abwehrstellen) operated in the military districts, with foreign mail censorship posts assigned to them.²

Following Hitler’s order of 12 February 1944 and the assassination attempt of 20 July 1944, the Abwehr’s departments were placed under the Chief of the Security Police and SD; only the Ausland department and military counterintelligence passed to the Wehrmacht Operations Staff.²

Canaris and the opposition

According to the NDB entry, after the Fritsch affair (1938) Canaris allowed the Abwehr to become a “technical centre of the opposition” to Hitler; he supported Beck’s and Halder’s coup plans with information and shielded his subordinates, including Hans Oster. From 1941 his opposition activity waned, and he took no significant part in preparing the 20 July plot.¹

In 1939 he tried by several routes, including through Mussolini, to dissuade Hitler from a war that he regarded as “the end of Germany”.¹

The Abwehr and Poland

According to the abstract of Artur Jendrzejewski’s article in Rocznik Gdański (Gdańsk Yearbook, 2022), the Abwehr outpost in the Free City of Danzig (1920–1939) recruited Germans, Polish officers and officials, and deserters from the Polish army, among others, mainly for financial motives. Polish counterintelligence unmasked many of these spies, who were arrested and convicted.³

Drawing on Polish and German records, Tomasz Chinciński (Institute of National Remembrance, IPN) described German subversion in Poland from March to August 1939, including the sabotage network that the Breslau (Wrocław) Abwehr set up in late July 1939 in Silesia, Greater Poland and Lesser Poland.⁴

The activities of the Breslau Abwehr outpost in Polish Upper Silesia in August and September 1939 are discussed in an article by Grzegorz Bębnik in a volume published by the Internal Security Agency (ABW) in 2020.⁵

Records

The records of the Amt Ausland/Abwehr are held by the Bundesarchiv in record group RW 5 (1921–1945, 746 units, 19.3 linear metres). The records of the Abwehr I group have been lost; surviving documents of the field posts (record group RW 49) partly make up for them.²