Read Online Fighting to Lose by John Bryden - Free Book Online

into the millions. Ordinary Germans saw little of the actual violence, but what they did see the next day was swaths of sidewalk and roadway flashing and sparkling in the sun, below gaping store fronts where once there had been glass. Perhaps some felt shivers of premonition; broken glass everywhere would be a common sight when Germany’s cities were mass-bombed just a handful of years further on.
    Canaris apparently tried to help mitigate the violence of Kristallnacht , for afterward he received the private thanks of Jewish community leaders. From then on, throughout the war, he secretly helped what Jews he could.14
    In the meantime, Canaris’s best tactic against the Nazi regime was to build up as effective a secret service as he could. He took his cues from Nicolai’s books and reorganized the Abwehr so that one of its main tasks was to build up as complete a picture as possible of the economic and social fabric of potential enemy states, collecting the information covertly and from open sources. He staffed the Abwehr’s offices with mature and worldly veterans of the First World War who had gone into business and had acquired skills in management and administration. He also tapped into the intelligence-gathering potential of business and commercial enterprises with operations abroad, and systematically recruited informants from among the sailors and officers manning German merchant vessels calling at foreign ports.
    Indeed, Abwehr files captured toward the end of the war show that a huge pre-war effort had been made to collect economic, social, and industrial information, especially on the United States. Colonel Nicolai had observed that Germany had been badly surprised by the tremendous war-making capacity of the Americans when they entered the war in 1917, and it resulted in crucial setbacks on the battlefield. Although the Nazi leadership hoped that the Americans would not be drawn into a second European conflict, Canaris ensured that Germany would be well-informed if they were. Reports by Abwehr spies in the United States ran into the thousands by late 1941.15
    Canaris read Nicolai’s books cover to cover. He responded to his complaint that collecting intelligence at the fighting front had been ineffective by creating the Aufklarungkommandos, special mobile units of military intelligence personnel that were to follow immediately behind the advancing troops and search for documents left behind when enemy positions were overrun. He met Nicolai’s suggestion that full advantage be taken of advances in aircraft and wireless development by doing clandestine aerial surveys of England’s south coast and Germany’s border areas with France and the Low Countries, developing portable wireless transmitters, and generally modernizing the paraphernalia of espionage.16 Hitler supported all these measures; Canaris needed spare no expense.
    By 1939, the Abwehr was the most advanced and effective secret intelligence service in the world.

    In contrast to the British, where the various secret services were fragmented into separate organizations, each answering to the appropriate civilian or military department, the Abwehr dealt with most of the major security and intelligence tasks. It answered solely to the army high command — Oberkommando des Heeres or OKH — before the war, and then, after it started, to Hitler’s headquarters, the armed forces high command — Oberkommando der Wehrmacht or OKW. It consisted of three main departments: Abteilung I: Espionage; Abteilung II: Sabotage; and Abteilung III: Counter-espionage.
    Smaller departments had specialized responsibilities — Abteilung Wirtschaft focused on economic intelligence, for example. These names were almost always abbreviated by the Germans themselves as Abt I, Abt II, Abt III, Abt Wi — or, if the reference was to the headquarters department in Berlin, Abwehr I, Abwehr II, Abwehr III, and so on.
    The Abw/Ausland (Foreign Affairs) department collected open