– C –
CANARIS, WILHELM (1887–1945). An enigmatic anti-Nazi admiral
who headed the Abwehr, Wilhelm Canaris was born in Aplerbeck
(North Rhine-Westphalia) on 1 January 1887, the son of a Ruhr
engineer descended from a northern Italian family. After entering
the imperial navy in 1905 and attending the Kiel Naval College, he
served as an officer at the outbreak of World War I. During the battle
of the Falkland Islands in December 1914, his cruiser, the Dresden,
was scuttled, but Canaris eluded capture by the British. Placed in a
Chilean internment camp afterward, he escaped. Using a false pass-
port with the name “Reed Rosas,” he passed through enemy controls
and was back in Germany by October 1915. His assignments then
included setting up a network of informers in Spain to report on
enemy shipping movements and assuming a U-boat command in the
Mediterranean.
Although Canaris participated in the abortive Kapp Putsch in 1920,
his reputation as a career naval officer remained untarnished. It was
also clear that he had an aversion to routine bureaucratic paperwork
and a decided preference for more difficult and dangerous assign-
ments. In order to circumvent the restrictions placed by the Versailles
Treaty on naval rearmament, Canaris was sent again to Spain in
1925, where he helped negotiate a secret agreement that allowed for
the design, construction, and testing of submarines, torpedoes, and
fire direction equipment. With the Nazi accession to power in 1933,
Canaris had little difficulty cooperating with the new regime, finding
it far preferable to its predecessors and seeing no viable alternative
for the time being.
The key moment in his career occurred with his appointment as
head of the Abwehr on 1 January 1935. Yet there loomed a critical
jurisdictional rivalry in light of the emergence of the Sicherheitsdienst
led by Reinhard Heydrich, who had earlier served under Canaris.
Socially initimate neighbors in Berlin, they soon concluded the “Ten
Commandments” agreement, giving the Abwehr sole responsibil-
ity for military intelligence. Increasingly, however, Canaris viewed
the Nazi regime with deep antipathy, telling his predecessor, Conrad
Patzig, in 1937 that it was composed solely of “criminals who will bring
Germany down.” Under his protection, prominent anti-Nazis such as
62 • CANARIS, WILHELM