C

Canaris, Wilhelm (1887–1945) German Admiral who was Chief of the Abwehr, the military intelligence service of the High Command of the Armed Forces (OKW), Wilhelm Canaris was born in Aplerbeck on 1 January 1887. The son of a Westphalian industrialist, of Greek background, Canaris entered the Imperial navy in 1905 and during World War I commanded U-boats in the Mediterranean as well as carrying out espionage missions in Spain and Italy. After 1920, a naval staff officer in the Baltic fleet who eventually rose to command the battleship Schlesien, Canaris had, shortly after the war, helped to organize counter-revolutionary cadres and took part in the Kapp putsch. He appreciated Hitler's anti-Versailles programme and his own pathological fear of Russia and communism found expression in support for open reaction under Weimar. Nonetheless, the cultivated Canaris disliked the mob violence and brutality of Nazism and this equivocacy increased after his appointment as Chief of the Abwehr on 1 January 1935, a position he held until February 1944. As head of the Abwehr, Canaris proved himself an incompetent dilettante whose judgement was consistently unsound and whose political and military information about the enemy was minimal. A pessimistic recluse, whose nerve failed before each Nazi adventure only to turn into effusive admiration for Hitler once it succeeded, Canaris was constantly beset by Hamlet-like doubts about his role. His opposition to some of Hitler's policies and his contacts with Resistance circles did not prevent him from fulfilling his duties as head of counter-intelligence or even proposing such measures during the war as the identification of Jews by a yellow star.