The Abwehr was the German military intelligence organization from 1866 to 1944. The organization predates the emergence of Germany itself, and was founded to gather intelligence information for the Prussian government during a war with neighboring Austria. After initial successes, the organization was expanded during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. Under the direction of Wilhelm Stieber, Abwehr located, infiltrated, and reported on French defensive positions and operations. The Prussians claimed victory, largely because of the success of Abwehr agents. In 1871, Prussia united with other independent German states to form the nation of Germany. The new country adopted much of the former Prussian government and military structure, including the Abwehr.

The intelligence agency was again tested at the outbreak of World War I in 1914. German agents worked to pinpoint the location and strength of the Allied forces, helping the German forces to invade and progress through northern France before stalemated trench warfare began. New military technology changed the nature of espionage. Agency director Walther Nicolai recognized the need for a modernized intelligence force and reorganized the department to include experts in wire tapping, munitions manufacturing, shipping, and encryption. The agency tapped enemy communications wires, intercepting and deciphering Allied dispatches with measured accomplishment. The Abwehr sent several agents to spy on the manufacture of poison gas in France, and tracked munitions production and shipping in Britain. The organization sent saboteurs to disrupt the shipment of arms from America to Allied forces in Europe. Several ships were sunk in transit after being identified by agents as smuggling arms. German agents, often acting on information collected by Abwehr, set fire to several American weapons factories and storage facilities. While the Abwehr was generally successful, the loss of the German codebook to British intelligence somewhat undermined the agency’s ultimate efficacy during the war.

After World War I, the Abwehr ceased operation under the terms of the Versailles Treaty. The intelligence service was re-established in 1921. When the Nazis gained control of Germany in the 1930s, some members of the intelligence agency began to spy on their own government. The Nazis created a separate intelligence organization, the Sicherheitsdienst, or Security Service, headed by Reinhard Heydrich. In 1935, the new Abwehr director, Wilhelm Canaris, and Heydrich reached an agreement about the roles of each agency, but both trained and maintained their own espionage forces. Canaris reorganized the Abwehr into three branches: espionage, counterespionage, and saboteurs. He appointed three distinguished Abwehr agents [1] to lead the branches, but only on condition that they were not members of the Nazi party. This aroused the suspicion of rival Security Service. The two agencies came into conflict on several occasions, and as Heydrich gained power, he persuaded the government to investigate members of the Abwehr for espionage and treason. Several members of the Abwehr were arrested in 1939. Though a handful of the agency’s highest ranking officials were active as double-agents or as members of the Resistance, the organization as a whole continued its espionage operations on behalf of the German government.

At the outbreak of World War II, Abwehr resumed operations similar to those carried out during World War I. The agency was in charge of tracking troops and munitions transports, tapping wires and intercepting radio messages, and infiltrating foreign intelligence and military units. Abwehr placed two operatives inside the British intelligence agency for two years, and developed a highly successful encryption device called the Enigma machine. Agents tracked and monitored various resistance movements in occupied Europe, and even sabotaged military and government strongholds behind Allied lines.

Canaris made the United States one of Abwehr’s primary targets even before America’s entry into the conflict. By 1942, German agents were operating from within all of America’s top armaments manufacturers. Abwehr scored perhaps its greatest victories in the area of industrial espionage, as agents managed to steal the blueprint for every major American airplane produced for the war effort.

One of the Abwehr’s responsibilities during World War II was the extraction of information from prisoners of war. While Abwehr agents remained largely in control of seeking strategic information from British, French, and American prisoners, the Nazi government issued a special directive to various branches of the military regarding Russian prisoners of war. The Commissar Order, as it became known, instructed the Army to handle Russian prisoners as harshly as they deemed necessary for the retrieval of military information. At one time, German concentration camps held more that 1.5 million Russian prisoners. Canaris himself raised several objections to this policy, largely on the grounds that it undermined the authority and efficacy of his agency and could cripple the German war effort.

In 1944, Heinrich Himmler, head of the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police, assumed control of Abwehr after an unsuccessful assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler and several other high ranking Nazi officials. Himmler suspected that the plot was the work of agents inside the government, most especially the Abwehr. The July Plot also exposed the work of those Abwehr agents who had intentionally leaked sensitive information to the Allies. Several agents, including Canaris, were charged with treason and executed. The Abwehr was then dissolved.

[1] A Plot within a Plot 1938

It was Ludwig Beck who decided that the army must act against Hitler if the risks the Führer was courting should lead to war.

Convinced that Hitler’s obsession with the reduction of Czechoslovakia had in fact made war inevitable, Beck resigned in August 1938. He had hoped that this act would trigger off a wave of protest in the army high command, but was utterly mistaken. Nevertheless, Beck had succeeded in engineering an embryonic conspiracy of army generals. Beck’s successor, Franz Halder, was also prepared ro act against Hitler in the last resort. So were the following: Erwin von Witzleben, Erich Hoepner and Erwin von Stulpnägel. But the plan they considered to arrest and try Hitler rather than go to war over Czechoslovakia came to nothing when Hitler won his greatest ever bloodless conquest at Munich. The conspirators did not have to act – and they had to blame this on Neville Chamberlain!

The excerpt from the Encyclopedia of the Third Reich by Louis L. Snyder (1976) states:

“Halder Plot. The first Resistence (q.v.) movement within the officers’ corps designed to remove Hitler from power. The leader was Gen. Franz Halder (q.v.), who on August 27, 1938, succeeded Gen. Ludwig Beck (q.v.) as chief of the General Staff of the Army. Soon after taking up his post, Halder made contact with several sympathizers: Maj. Gen. Hans Oster (q.v.), chief of staff of the Abwehr (q.v.), the counterintelligence unit; Hans Bernd Gisevius (q.v.), who worked for the Abwehr; and Dr. Hjalmar Schacht (q.v.), who had been removed from his office as president of the Reichbank. The group enlisted Maj. Gen. Erwin von Witzelen (q.v.), a senior officer in the Wehrmacht (q.v.), the armed forces.

The conspirators proposed to seize the government by a military Putsch in Berlin and to install a parliamentary regime, but the plot never went beyond the discussion stage. Halder had made an effort to enlist Gen. Walther von Brauchitsch (q.v.), commander in chief of the Wehrmacht, but he was unsuccessful in obtaining the support of that key figure.

The plan was dealt a severe blow when Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain (q.v.) made his flights to Germany to appease Hitler. When the Munich Agreement (q.v.) was signed on September 30, 1938, the Halder Plot was swept away.” (pages 135-136).”

While Halder and Beck had only planned to arrest Hitler in case of a war, some of the young officers assigned with the actual arrest (led by Abwehr agent and former Freikorps leader Major Heinz) wanted to go even further: they planned to provoke a shoot-out in the Reichskanzlei leading to Hitler’s death by a “stray bullet”. The assault party had already assembled in the nearby army museum when it was learned that Chamberlain and Daladier had given in. Because this big success made Hitler even greater in the eyes of the people, the conspirators didn’t dare to carry out the plot.

AND WOULDN’T WE ALL LIKE TO KNOW WHY?

In her old age Erika Waag Canaris, widow of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, wartime chief of German military intelligence (the Abwehr) and a prime mover in the conspiracy to assassinate Hitler in July 1944, was supported by an American pension apparently arranged by Allen Dulles, who was for many years head of the CIA.