ADMIRAL CANARIS

A new biography of the man who “did as much to save Jews and other prisoners from Nazi death camps as Oskar Schindler.”

Prolific historian Johnson, author of The Last Weeks of Abraham Lincoln and Decided on the Battlefield, recounts how Wilhelm Canaris (1887-1945), Hitler’s chief of intelligence, grew to despise his boss and attempted to warn the Allies of his plans and, with some success, mislead him. Enlisting in the German navy in 1905, Canaris impressed superiors and became an intelligence officer at the onset of World War I. He served with distinction and remained in the shrunken navy after 1918. Fiercely nationalistic and conservative, he hated the Weimar Republic, cheered the Nazi takeover, and was appointed chief of the Abwehr, Germany’s military intelligence service, in 1935. Johnson fares no better than other scholars in explaining why Canaris turned against Hitler after a few years. Many Nazi officials disliked him, but Canaris was among the few who took action. Through smuggled papers and leaks, he regularly informed the Allies of Hitler’s plans. Sadly, they were generally dismissed as misinformation. Hitler grew to take a dim view of his discouraging intelligence. Perhaps Canaris’ greatest achievement was convincing Spanish dictator Franco to refuse Hitler permission to march Nazi troops through Spain to capture British Gibraltar. More than most biographers, Johnson recounts his subject’s rescue of hundreds of Jews by ordering their release from concentration camps, smuggling them out of the country, and even sending them abroad as Abwehr agents. It turns out that rescuing Jews was a minor industry among Nazi officials, especially if they were influential or had friends among them, but Canaris stands out. A suspicious Hitler dismissed him in 1944, and he was executed in the aftermath of the assassination attempt, although he was probably not involved.

A solid portrait of the iconic Nazi.