Hitler's Spy Chief by Richard Bassett Read Free Book Online Page B

days’.
    For Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, however, time was running out. For Pabst, as for most of the officer class, these two were the human expression of all they detested in Communism. Luxemburg’s shrill and harsh voice, which it was said had even caused members of the Soviet Politburo to wince, was, as one officer described it, a ‘perpetual insult to civilised Germans.’ 6 The two were subversive, foreign (Luxemburg was a Jewish Pole), rootless and fanatic. Pabst was determined to liquidate them as soon as possible. A guard was detailed to escort them to the Moabit prison and shoot them on the way when ‘they tried to escape’. There are several versions of what happened next. An official statement declared ‘Karl Liebknecht was shot while trying to escape and Rosa Luxemburg was killed by an unknown person while being taken to prison.’
    In fact, Liebknecht, already suffering from wounds inflicted by the crowd near the Hotel Eden, was shot by his escort, Horst Pflugk-Hartung after the car stopped for ‘a repair’. Luxemburg was shot earlier, near thehotel, but Vogel, the soldier commanding her car, lost his nerve and dumped the body in the Landwehrkanal, where it was not found until May. With these macabre and brutal moves in the cold January night air, Pabst’s and Zaharoff’s aims had been realised.
    Canaris, meanwhile, was ordered to Bavaria to compile a report on civil defence movements that were being organized there. At least three writers on Canaris (Abshagen, Buchheit, Brissaud) put this trip to Bavaria before the murders of Luxemburg and Liebknecht. Canaris himself always denied any complicity in the crime but, at that stage in his life, it is hard to imagine he would have felt regret at the death of the two. His relationship with Noske would have depended on a ruthless approach to them. Noske, later questioned on the murders by his anxious comrades, replied: ‘You are like old women. War is War! You were not even there.’
    Moreover, Canaris – thanks to his time in Spain – had become a willing if junior partner in the international arms ring that Liebknecht had denounced. His brother Carl, now with the armaments firm of Thyssen, would later become director of Krauss-Maffei, the manufacturer of German tanks to this day. Canaris could scarcely have operated so effectively in Spain without it, and this ring, as Zaharoff’s career so vividly illustrated, operated on the basis of more complex loyalties.
    It is beyond any doubt that Canaris knew the two were murdered, not least because the officer who ordered his journey to Bavaria was his old friend and comrade, Pflugk-Hartung, the main protagonist of the events of the night of 15 January. It is hard not to see Canaris’ trip to Bavaria as an attempt to distance him from the murders, though as will be seen they would cast a long shadow over his future career. Canaris’ exact involvement may never be fully explained, but he was an accomplice and his right wing anti-Communist credentials were vividly forged by his connection, however shadowy, with this event.
    For the next few months, however, his life was one of careful and constructive alliances. As liaison officer with the Guards-Cavalry, as asignificant voice at the Admiralty, above all as the confidant of Noske, he enjoyed insights that gradually made him a key observer of that most important fault-line in post-war Germany, the interface between politics and the military. At the same time, he managed to find time to track down his love of three years earlier, Erika Waag, in Pforzheim, and within two days the couple were engaged. With all the passion that romance against the backdrop of political unrest can engender, this must have been an absorbing time, but Canaris’ sense of his own mission, then as later, never allowed him to be ruled by matters of the heart.
    His mission in Bavaria completed, he returned to Berlin to find