Wilhelm Canaris

Wilhelm Canaris was a German naval officer who became chief of the Abwehr, the armed forces intelligence service, in 1935. A veteran of the Imperial German Navy and the First World War, he occupied an unusual position inside the Nazi state: he directed military intelligence while maintaining contacts with officers and officials who increasingly opposed Hitler’s policies.

During the late 1930s the Abwehr became one of the institutional settings in which military resistance developed. Canaris’s deputy Hans Oster was a central organiser of the September 1938 conspiracy. Canaris was later removed from office, arrested after the July 1944 plot exposed wider resistance connections, and executed at Flossenbürg on 9 April 1945.

Michael Ridpath’s Traitor’s Gate uses Wilhelm Canaris and the Abwehr as part of the real political landscape behind the September 1938 conspiracy against Hitler. As Conrad de Lancey is drawn between German opponents of the regime and British officials during the Sudeten crisis, Canaris represents the ambiguous intelligence world in which service to the German state could coexist with contacts among men considering Hitler’s removal.