The German opposition question in British World War II strategy: interpreting Hugh Trevor-Roper’s wartime intelligence reporting

ABSTRACT

What explains the British decision not to lend significant support to the internal German opposition to Hitler during World War II? Some historians have labelled the absence of aid to the German resistance as an intelligence failure. P.R.J. Winter and others instead accuse the British government of policy failure by highlighting the excellent efforts of Britain’s wartime radio intelligence team, led by Hugh Trevor-Roper. But by closely reading the key piece of evidence in this case for intelligence success, the ‘Canaris and Himmler’ report, and by placing that assessment in the broader context of Trevor-Roper’s intelligence reporting through the end of the war, we argue that Trevor-Roper’s team did not lay the analytical groundwork for a shift in British strategy. Trevor-Roper neither appreciated nor conveyed to British policymakers the existence and strength of the German opposition, and he denigrated the opposition’s central hub, the Abwehr. This can be classed as a significant intelligence failure. Nevertheless, we also suggest that the intelligence versus policy failure framing of the German opposition question is something of a false dichotomy, as Whitehall’s intelligence and policy communities operated under a shared set of assumptions and reinforced each other’s beliefs about the appropriateness of British strategy.

KEYWORDS:

• Hugh Trevor-Roper
• radio intelligence service
• Abwehr
• World War II
• German opposition
• Wilhelm Canaris

Introduction

What explains the British decision not to lend significant support to the internal German opposition to Hitler during World War II? The spectacular bomb plot of July 1944, like earlier efforts to sideline Hitler, was carried forward by members of the German resistance with little assistance from the British government. Why did the British government not make more serious efforts to work with the German opposition to overthrow Hitler and bring the war to an earlier finish?¹

In 2018, the British politician Paddy Ashdown suggested that the war could have been shortened, with many lives saved and Soviet influence in East Europe curtailed, if the British and American governments had not dismissed the German opposition’s advances proffering an early peace.² But in general, the German opposition question is rarely voiced, with P.R.J. Winter describing in 2006 ‘the relatively poor state of the historiography surrounding the role of Whitehall, or more specifically its intelligence community, in the run-up to the failed [July 1944] putsch and its aftermath.’³

Winter’s invocation of the intelligence community suggests that before analysing British policy on the German opposition, a prior question must first be asked: was the British government aware of the existence and strength of the German opposition? If it was, then legitimate questions might be asked about the failure of the British government to exercise its judgment and imagination to find ways to work with the German opposition in their mutual aim of overthrowing Hitler. If it was not, the implications for British policy are less severe, but the implications for British intelligence become more pronounced. For the British intelligence community to go through the war without appreciating the existence and strength of the German opposition, or not conveying such an appreciation to British policymakers, would surely be classed as a serious intelligence failure.

Speaking with a surviving member of the German opposition in 1949, the wartime British prime minister Winston Churchill implied an intelligence failure, suggesting that ‘during the war he had been misled by his assistants about the considerable strength and size of the German anti-Hitler resistance.’⁴ Some scholars have similarly labelled this an intelligence failure, including David Reynolds, who writes that ‘the bomb plot represented an embarrassing failure by British intelligence, which consistently denied that there was a viable German opposition.’⁵ Winter has disputed the intelligence failure framing, however, insisting that Churchill did receive intelligence and other reporting on the German opposition, meaning he was not misled by his subordinates, and that the deliberate British policy of maintaining ‘absolute silence’ towards the German resistance fostered a lack of imaginative political judgment regarding the possibilities of working with Hitler’s internal opponents – in short, that this was a policy failure rather than an intelligence failure.

Winter draws on several sources to build his case that the British intelligence community knew about the German opposition before July 1944, including reports from MI14 (the War Office’s German intelligence section), the bugging of captured German officers, SIS reports, and (possibly) intelligence shared by the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS).⁶ Perhaps the key piece of evidence Winter draws on, however, is an assessment produced by a section of the British intelligence community focused on radio intelligence. This team, led by Hugh Trevor-Roper, argued in a report on ‘Canaris and Himmler’ that cracks were beginning to show between two key German intelligence agencies, the Abwehr (the principal German agency for military and foreign intelligence, as well as the protection of German industrial production) and the Sicherheitsdienst (SD, the Nazi Party’s intelligence arm, generally focused on questions of domestic security, including in occupied countries).⁷ The ‘Canaris and Himmler’ report produced by Trevor-Roper’s team was first drafted in November 1942 and finally published in June 1943. Winter (among others) finds proof in the ‘Canaris and Himmler’ report that British intelligence alerted the British government to fissures appearing in the German state and thus to the opportunity to work with anti-Hitler elements of the German intelligence and military services.

This article reassesses the question of British intelligence failure regarding the German opposition by examining the work of Hugh Trevor-Roper and his colleagues. After introducing Trevor-Roper and his intelligence career, the article looks closely at the ‘Canaris and Himmler’ report and the series of intelligence reports of which it was a part. We suggest that Winter both misreads the ‘Canaris and Himmler’ report and fails to place it in the context of Trevor-Roper’s long-running assessment of the Abwehr as an incompetent and corrupt agency-one that could never serve as a reliable partner for the British government. While we dispute Winter’s assessment of Trevor-Roper’s work, however, we take his broader point about a significant policy failure more seriously. We conclude by suggesting that to focus on the question of intelligence or policy failure overlooks the basic assumptions that Whitehall’s intelligence and policy communities shared regarding British strategy towards the German opposition.

These shared assumptions rested on both historical contingencies and political imperatives. One of the most notable turning points in the history of British intelligence in World War II was the Venlo incident.⁸ In November 1939, the SD, posing as members of the German opposition, captured two British intelligence operatives working undercover in the Netherlands. This led both to the destruction of Britain’s human intelligence network in Europe, necessitating instead a reliance on signals intelligence, and to heightened British wariness of outreach efforts on the part of the German resistance. Even where that wariness was overcome and contacts did occur, however, the immutable logic of political necessity meant those contacts never amounted to much.⁹ In the wake of appeasement’s failure, the domestic political calculus in Britain worked against serious negotiations with any German group, even anti-Nazi groups. The international political calculus was even more determining, with the Grand Alliance’s commitment to total German defeat – encapsulated in the policy of ‘unconditional surrender’ – and the relative weakness of Britain’s position within the alliance foreclosing any serious effort to treat with the German opposition.

Trevor-Roper’s wartime assessment of the Abwehr worked with, not against, the grain of these intelligence and political contexts. Claims by Winter and others, including most notably by Trevor-Roper himself, that the ‘Canaris and Himmler’ report provided an opening for Britain to partner with the German opposition are wrong. Trevor-Roper’s intelligence work only ever reinforced the assumptions that lay behind the ‘absolute silence’ policy and the British refusal to provide serious assistance to the German resistance.

Trevor-Roper’s wartime role

A well-worn path connected Oxford University to the British intelligence services during World War II. The Oxford historian Hugh Trevor-Roper made that same journey, although by a somewhat more circuitous route, in his own words moving ‘Sideways into SIS’.¹⁰ His intelligence role was secured by Walter Gill, a colleague at Merton College where Trevor-Roper was a Junior Research Fellow in 1939. Trevor-Roper became Gill’s deputy in the discrimination section of the Radio Security Service (RSS), formally part of MI8, the signals intelligence department of the War Office. Originally intended to locate radio signals transmitted by German spies operating in Britain, RSS soon expanded its search area to include signals transmitted from Germany to potential agents based in Britain.¹¹ After the codebreakers at Bletchley Park initially showed little interest in decrypting some of this early traffic, Gill and Trevor-Roper turned to the task themselves, aided by the MI5-controlled double-agent ‘Snow’. Trevor-Roper cracked one relatively simple hand cipher one evening, discovering that the radio transmissions originated with the Abwehr.¹²

This breakthrough made it possible to crack more ciphers protecting Abwehr communications between AST Hamburg and vessels in the English Channel and North Sea, as well as some communications from NEST Madrid and NEST Wiesbaden.¹³ On 20 March 1940, concerned about RSS encroachment on its turf, Bletchley Park started its own wider deciphering of German radio traffic under Oliver Strachey, successfully cracking further Abwehr ciphers by December 1940. Such intelligence material increased over time once Enigma could be deciphered, reinforcing the dominant role of Bletchley Park in the field of cryptanalysis.¹⁴ RSS continued to expand the scope of its collection efforts, with Gill and Trevor-Roper directing the interceptors towards the most promising sources.

In May 1941, RSS was transferred from MI8 to the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or MI6). While most of RSS was housed in SIS’s Section VIII (the radio communications section), the Radio Analysis Bureau (RAB), of which Trevor-Roper was both head and (for a time) its sole intelligence officer, came under the control of Section V (counter-espionage).¹⁵ Towards the end of 1942, RAB became fully integrated into Section V of SIS. In May 1943, now named the Radio Intelligence Service (RIS), it reported directly to the chief of SIS, Sir Stewart Menzies.¹⁶

Throughout its various movements on the organisational chart of World War II British intelligence, Trevor-Roper’s unit engaged in several tasks. It provided analysis of the raw intelligence reports produced at Bletchley Park.¹⁷ It helped direct RSS’s collection efforts. Trevor-Roper and other individuals on his team also assisted in planning British deception operations.¹⁸ Towards the end of the war, Trevor-Roper moved to an inter-agency ‘War Room’ in the Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF). As head of the War Room’s research department, Trevor-Roper continued to produce analysis but with a broader range of sources, including captured documents and prisoner-of-war interrogations.

At the end of the European conflict, Trevor-Roper summarised his assessments in a big-picture overview of the Abwehr and Amt VI of the Reich Main Security Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt, or RSHA).¹⁹ Trevor-Roper later described this report, ‘The German Intelligence Service and the War,’ as ‘my testament, or relazione, on terminating my war service.’²⁰ E.D.R. Harrison labels it Trevor-Roper’s ‘valedictory paper.’²¹ Trevor-Roper’s final – and most famous – assignment was to determine what happened to Hitler, leading to his most celebrated book, The Last Days of Hitler, first published in March 1947. After completing his ‘testament,’ followed by his report on what happened in Hitler’s bunker, Trevor-Roper returned to an academic post at Christ Church, Oxford.

‘Canaris and Himmler’

Winter takes care to piece together the process by which Churchill was (probably) made aware of the ‘Canaris and Himmler’ report.²² But he provides no close reading of the report itself or a contextual analysis of the series of intelligence notes in which it appeared.²³ As a result, the significance he attaches to the ‘Canaris and Himmler’ report, and to Trevor-Roper’s attitude to the German opposition more generally, is misplaced.

Winter is correct to state that this particular RIS report ‘identified a growing rift between the Abwehr and the Nazi Party’ – ‘a power struggle in Germany between the Abwehr and the Sicherheitsdienst (SD).’²⁴ But he then leaps to a conclusion that does not follow from the facts of the ‘Canaris and Himmler’ report. ‘The report’s underlying thesis,’ asserts Winter, ‘derived from the proposition that the war in Europe could be brought to a premature end if only the British War Cabinet endeavoured to offer Hitler’s generals an incentive to launch a coup.’²⁵ Winter faults the wider Whitehall community for not grasping this underlying thesis, pointing to Guy Liddell, keeper of the MI5 diary, as an example. Liddell ‘surprisingly failed to take note of [the “Canaris and Himmler” report’s] wider implications,’ writes Winter, ‘namely that there was a growing rift between Canaris and Himmler, and that as a result, a golden opportunity now presented itself to exploit growing internecine warfare within Germany.’²⁶ Winter is not alone here. Trevor-Roper’s biographer, Adam Sisman, also suggests that the report ‘implied that there was an opportunity for the Allies to exploit this widening rift.’²⁷ The problem, however, is that the ‘underlying thesis’ or the ‘wider implications’ that Winter and Sisman ascribe to the ‘Canaris and Himmler’ report are not apparent. It is unsurprising, therefore, that Liddell and others would fail to take note of something that was not there, either explicitly or implicitly, in the first place.

The ‘Canaris and Himmler’ report is simply not the ‘piece of political dynamite’ Winter wants it to be.²⁸ It was certainly not a ‘piece of intelligence analysis that flew in the face of government policy regarding Nazi Germany, and more specifically the German opposition movement.’²⁹ The report itself contains no suggestion that the divide in the German intelligence apparatus was promising grounds for a British wedge strategy, or even for some more limited foreign interference to support the Abwehr leadership’s resistance efforts. It simply describes the SD’s intrusion into fields of intelligence previously the preserve of the Abwehr (notably counter-espionage and sabotage) and the Abwehr’s response – to focus more intently on providing operational intelligence to Germany’s military commanders.³⁰

The report’s rather anodyne conclusions state (i) that the SD is ‘now engaged in subversive activities on an increasing scale, including those para-military operations which are a typical Abwehr interest,’ (ii) that ‘it is Canaris’ policy to concentrate Abwehr resources on supplying immediate operational information for Commanders in the field,’ and (iii) that ‘the SD’s political intelligence service is constantly encroaching on the work of the Auswärtiges Amt [Foreign Office].’³¹ Even the report’s mild conclusions were not universally accepted within the British intelligence community, with Bletchley Park’s L. R. Palmer rejecting RIS’s assessment of significant changes to Abwehr duties and arguing instead that ‘our traffic shows little, if any, change in the functions of the various Abwehr departments.’³²

In short, the report describes bureaucratic turf wars but does not identify any organisation or individuals as part of the German opposition to Hitler. The words ‘resistance,’ ‘opposition,’ ‘loyalty,’ and ‘conspiracy’ never appear in the report; it contains no reference to Nazi suspicions of Canaris’s disloyalty, and nothing about the efforts of Canaris and other members of the German opposition to reach out to the British government. It most certainly did not imply that Britain and its allies could or should exploit the differences between the Abwehr and SD.³³

Trevor-Roper’s assessment of the Abwehr

The broader context of the ‘Canaris and Himmler’ report – the consistent line of assessment that runs through the whole series of RIS intelligence notes, culminating in Trevor-Roper’s ‘testament’ of 1945 — is even more damning of the idea that Trevor-Roper and his team were implying an opportunity existed for the British government to support the German opposition in its anti-Hitler activities.

Far from implicitly advocating a British wedge strategy, several RIS reports issued after the ‘Canaris and Himmler’ report actually claim a decent working relationship between the Abwehr and the SD. ‘Co-operation between SD and Abwehr seems to be good’ in South America, Trevor-Roper’s unit reported in August 1943, noting that while the two organisations were trying to operate more independently of each other, this was ‘for the sake of security’ rather than out of enmity.³⁴ ‘There has been very little recent evidence of friction between the Abwehr and the SD,’ RIS reported the following month. ‘On the contrary we have had several examples of successful co-operation.’ The SD’s ‘expanding the range of its activities … has not yet evoked any serious resistance or obvious hostility in the Abwehr.’³⁵ In October, in the context of relations between the Abwehr, SD, and other branches of the German government operating in Yugoslavia, RIS detected ‘little evidence of ill-will between them.’³⁶ In November 1943, nearly six months after the ‘Canaris and Himmler’ report identified emerging Abwehr-SD competition in the field of sabotage, the RIS painted a very nuanced picture of the two organisations’ relationship in the broader field of irregular warfare. ‘Our material does not allow us to decide with certainty whether the SD is, in relation to the Abwehr, an interloper in this field,’ noted RIS, further assessing that whether competition or co-operation defined SD-Abwehr relations varied according to theatre ‘depending on the initiative and opportunity of individual officers.’³⁷

In early 1944, RIS did begin more forthrightly to describe a generally negative relationship between the Abwehr and the SD. With reports of the SD now encroaching into the field of operational military intelligence – the Abwehr’s bread-and-butter work – there was evidence of ‘the Abwehr resent[ing] the intrusion of rash and slipshod amateurs.’ But even at this late stage, this negative relationship was attributed not to any particular anti-Nazi sentiment or resistance activity within the Abwehr but to ‘the friction and distrust which is to be expected between competitive organisations.’³⁸ Indeed, it is striking that not a single RIS note from the first in the series (the ‘Canaris and Himmler’ note, published in June 1943) through to July 1944, the moment of the bomb plot, made any suggestion that the Abwehr was seriously engaged in coup plotting or other significant resistance activities, such as working to prevent Nazi Germany from achieving battlefield success. Trevor-Roper never acknowledged the Abwehr leadership as a key part of the German opposition until after the bomb plot of July 1944.³⁹

As the Nazi state disbanded the Abwehr and integrated its constituent parts into the RSHA between February (when Canaris was relieved of his post) and May 1944, Trevor-Roper’s team did recognise some limited opportunities to undermine the German war effort. But these opportunities were premised not on competition between the old Abwehr and SD, but on the integration of the two organisations. ‘The Abwehr … will become more effective and influential,’ RIS assessed in June of that year, suggesting that ‘our opportunities of undermining the organisation will be rather less, but the rewards of success much greater. The RSHA is the hard centre of resistance and authority in the Nazi state, and the Abwehr now leads into the centre.’⁴⁰

When the ‘Canaris and Himmler’ report is read in the broader context of RIS reporting from mid-1943 to mid-1944, it is clear that Trevor-Roper and his team never envisioned the differences and divisions between the Abwehr and SD serving as fertile ground for a shift in British strategy. They simply never assessed the Abwehr (or at least a group of key players within the Abwehr) as being an important part of the German opposition worthy of British support. Instead, Trevor-Roper and his RIS team developed several core lines of assessment on the functioning of the Abwehr that, once arrived at, proved remarkably resilient in the face of countervailing information. Complemented with earlier RIS reports, ‘The German Intelligence Service and the War’ provides a good summation of these core assessment lines. For Trevor-Roper, the Abwehr was a poor intelligence performer – an organisation whose ‘failures were regular and conspicuous.’⁴¹ He assessed the Abwehr as inefficient, even incompetent, on two related levels: organisational and individual.

Trevor-Roper’s assessment of Abwehr processes

At the organisational level, Trevor-Roper faulted the Abwehr for not performing its core intelligence function of correctly assessing Allied strategic intentions. For Trevor-Roper, the signal failures in the Abwehr’s record of error were the Allied invasions of North Africa in November 1942 and Sicily in July 1943 (operations Torch and Husky). The Abwehr failed to provide adequate warning of either invasion. If the Abwehr’s failure to anticipate Operation Torch was a clear marker on the path to its demise,⁴² Trevor-Roper thought its failure to warn of Operation Husky was its defining moment. He gave a withering description of the Abwehr’s Husky performance:

In the Spring of 1943, the Abwehr sought feverishly to guess the next Allied move aright, and in the months immediately preceding Husky (July 1943) the insistence from headquarters on the necessity of accuracy assumed an almost hysterical tone. In response to this need, literally hundreds of reports were sent in, and prophecies… were made of impending landings on almost every part of the European coastline from the north of Norway to the Dardanelles. By their mere number and variety, these reports overwhelmed any element of accuracy which any single one of them might contain; and in fact that element was negligible. Many sources guessed, what was likely anyway, that the blow would fall in Sicily; but these were a minority among the frantic prognostications which pointed to the South of France, Italy, Dalmatia, Albania, Greece, Crete and Rhodes.

‘There is no doubt,’ concluded Trevor-Roper, ‘that the period of Husky, when the need of an efficient intelligence service was most imperative, was the period when the G.I.S. [German Intelligence Service] was shown up at its worst.’⁴³ The Abwehr ‘seems to have had difficulty in distinguishing, among the spate of reports that it has received, between the good and the bad, the genuine and the tendencious [sic].’⁴⁴

It was not just that the Abwehr was bad at the task of intelligence analysis, but also that it simply did not do enough intelligence analysis. Indeed, according to Trevor-Roper, the principal organisational weakness of the Abwehr was its lack of centralised, all-source evaluation.⁴⁵ Instead, raw intelligence reports were sent straight to operational commanders. ‘One effect of this short-circuiting practice is that operational intelligence gets to operational commands very expeditiously,’ concluded an RIS note. ‘Another effect is that it gets to them unsifted, unchecked, uncollated and without reliability-appraisals.’ The outcome was that military commanders were ‘fed with an undigested mass of reports varying from good quality local reconnaissance reports to low-grade strategic prophecies emanating from unexamined sources.’⁴⁶

The Abwehr’s Abteilung (Abt) I (intelligence bureau) ‘was consistently unsuccessful,’ declared Trevor-Roper, due in significant measure to ‘a complete lack of centralisation at headquarters,’ and in particular ‘no centralised evaluation.’⁴⁷ In the Torch and Husky cases, rather than provide centrally evaluated intelligence to operational commanders and political leaders, the Abwehr ‘drowned the OKW with mis-information, sometimes invented [by its agents], and often deliberately supplied by the Allies.’⁴⁸ The Abwehr ‘sent its reports on to service departments for evaluation; but these service departments lacked the means of discriminating between Abwehr reports.’⁴⁹ In the immediate aftermath of Husky, Trevor-Roper’s team concluded that ‘from being a shapeless organisation controlled from, and routing through, Berlin, the Abwehr is becoming a number of decentralised groups each controlled more and more by the local service commanders.’⁵⁰

The lack of centralised control over intelligence assessment was similarly evident in the direction and exploitation of communications intelligence. ‘Cryptography [sic] was in fact never centralised in Germany, and this lack of centralisation is of cardinal importance for the understanding of the history of the G.I.S.,’ wrote Trevor-Roper in his testament. Such a decentralised ‘system led, not only to the stagnation of intelligence in private pools, but also … to technical inefficiency.’⁵¹

On the above points regarding the organisational weaknesses of the Abwehr, there is good reason to think Trevor-Roper was often mistaken. Trevor-Roper never considered the possibility that the Abwehr purposefully ignored plausible warning reports or created noise around Torch and Husky, among other Allied operations, to confuse the Nazi leadership and support the Allied war effort in preventing Hitler’s victory. Hans Bernd Gisevius, a Zurich-based Abwehr officer and co-conspirator against Hitler during the war, suggested that this was precisely what resistance members in the Abwehr did: ‘Now and then, among the heaped-up pebbles of daily reports from agents a gold nugget gleamed, but there were always busy hands ready to bury the nugget at once in the useless pile of “reliable” news from “informed sources.”’⁵² In addition to obfuscating incoming intelligence, Abwehr officers also likely provided important information on German military operations to the Allies, including through the Lucy spy ring based in Switzerland. These operations would have required some sophisticated intelligence tradecraft. Our immediate point, however, is less to correct any of Trevor-Roper’s potential errors than to highlight his view of the Abwehr as organisationally inept and to then make the obvious conclusion – that he never thought of the Abwehr as a viable partner in the war against Hitler.

Trevor-Roper’s assessment of the Abwehr leadership

In Trevor-Roper’s intelligence assessments, the Abwehr’s poor performance was due not just to organisational issues but also to character failings of key Abwehr personnel. Indeed, the two were related. Trevor-Roper thought the decentralised and lackadaisical practices of the Abwehr were in significant measure the fault of its chief, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. Abt I’s lack of success ‘was in very large measure due to the character of Canaris himself,’ wrote Trevor-Roper, continuing that ‘Canaris was firstly, a bad judge of men and secondly, himself a professional intrigant rather than an organiser.’⁵³ He elaborated later in the same report:

The personal faults of Canaris. These were an incapacity for organisation and an inability to choose good men. The Abwehr was filled, in its higher ranks, with personal friends and dependents of Canaris, and they were (in general) idle and corrupt.… The Abwehr was a personal bureau. The General Staff referred to it cynically as ‘Canaris Familie GmbH’. The only remedy or mitigation of such a situation would have been firm discipline; but Canaris had no conception of organisation. The Abwehr was thus a loose and irresponsible collection of worthless characters whom Canaris refused to dismiss. Instead of organisation, Canaris relied on personal astuteness.⁵⁴

In the ‘family racket’ that was Trevor-Roper’s Abwehr, Canaris’s weakness for personal favourites meant he overlooked even ‘palpable corruption.’⁵⁵ The peak of the Abwehr’s ‘personal corruption’ was, for Trevor-Roper, the case of Hans Oster, whose involvement in Unternehmen Sieben (Operation Seven) led to his dismissal as head of the Abwehr’s Central Division (administration). Trevor-Roper ascribed Oster’s motivation in this case to greed: ‘in the winter of 1942–43, General Oster, the head of the administration department of the Abwehr, was found to have used his official position to enable seven rich Jewish families to escape to Switzerland, nominally as agents but actually as an excuse to transfer the sum of 100,000 U.S. dollars from Abwehr funds to his personal account in Switzerland.’⁵⁶

Proof that Abwehr agents were actually controlled by the British (and thus double-agents) was ‘safely suppressed by interested parties’ – with the interest in question generally identified by Trevor-Roper as money (‘financial corruption’) or covering up failure.⁵⁷ ‘The use of unchecked agents corrupts their controlling officers, who come to share with their agents an interest in obstructing the full evaluation of results.’ At least some German intelligence officers ‘were intelligent enough to see the necessity of central evaluation,’ but they were also ‘corrupt enough to see the necessity of preventing it.’ And so ‘the G.I.S. gradually became a conspiracy to conceal the success of Allied deception’ – not a well-intentioned political conspiracy, but a corrupt conspiracy motivated by mere self-preservation.⁵⁸

In his wartime reports, Trevor-Roper occasionally acknowledged that something more than organisational incompetence and personal corruption might explain the Abwehr’s record of failure – that political motivations and manoeuvrings might also be in play. But in none of his assessments did he countenance the idea that the Abwehr, or even crucial Abwehr officers, might be working seriously against the Nazi regime until very late (too late) in the war. Where Trevor-Roper did identify higher motives, such as ‘political disaffection,’ these were not framed in terms of genuine resistance. For Trevor-Roper, the General Staff of the Army’s High Command (Oberkommando des Heeres, or OKH), with which he linked the Abwehr, really only ‘affected to despise’ the Nazis, and provided little opposition to Hitler until they lost influence and the prospects for victory significantly dimmed.⁵⁹ Trevor-Roper’s wartime reports characterised the stakes of internal German politics not as points of principle but as merely the grubby competition for influence and position. ‘For although in theory the structure of the administration was “pyramidal” and centralised, in fact, the apex of the pyramid, or the centre of the circle, was not a unitary structure at all but a vortex of competing personal ambitions,’ argued Trevor-Roper. This image of what he labelled court politics was the critical context in which Trevor-Roper understood German intelligence in general – ‘Thus all German politicians of consequence sought to set up their own information bureaus’ – and the Abwehr in particular. ‘The Abwehr was almost universally regarded, not as an administrative department of the OKW,’ wrote Trevor-Roper, ‘but as the personal bureau of Admiral Canaris.’⁶⁰

As with his assessment of the Abwehr as an organisation, there is good reason to doubt the accuracy of Trevor-Roper’s assessments of the Abwehr leadership and the extent of its corruption. Winfried Meyer’s account of Unternehmen Sieben suggests Trevor-Roper was mistaken on the details and motivation of this Abwehr operation,⁶¹ and a number of Canaris’s contemporaries describe his sometimes odd behaviour, working patterns, and preference for close confidantes as a deliberate veil to his support for the resistance.⁶² But again, the purpose of this article is not so much to refute Trevor-Roper’s intelligence reporting as to suggest that given the clear content of that reporting – including Trevor-Roper’s framing of Canaris, the Abwehr leadership, and Nazi Germany’s internal politics more generally – it is surely a mistake to read RIS assessments as appreciating the significance of the German opposition, let alone promoting the idea of British assistance to the German opposition. To the contrary, to the extent there was some appreciation within the British government of the Abwehr as a hub of the German resistance, the RIS notes with their description of the Abwehr as corrupt and inept would more likely have dissuaded anybody from considering the Abwehr as a prospective partner.

Trevor-Roper interpreted the divide between the Abwehr and SD not as a high-minded opposition bravely taking on the Nazis, but as a grubby contest for influence and self-preservation within Hitler’s court. He viewed the Abwehr and its leader Canaris not as committed resisters, but as generally loyal German officers engaged in bureaucratic turf wars with a rival agency. In such a situation, it is improbable that Trevor-Roper would have considered the Abwehr a reliable partner for any British outreach to the German opposition. Moreover, he viewed the Abwehr and its leadership as inefficient and corrupt – and on this score, it is almost impossible to imagine Trevor-Roper promoting a scenario in which the British government partnered with the Abwehr in an attempt to remove Hitler and bring the war to an early end. Trevor-Roper was no doubt very comfortable with the British policy of refusing to deal with the German opposition – at least as far as the Abwehr was concerned.

Getting Trevor-Roper’s assessment wrong

The exaggerated claims made by Winter and Sisman regarding Trevor-Roper’s reporting, and in particular the ‘Canaris and Himmler’ note, seem to be based not on a close reading or analysis of the actual intelligence reports in question, but on some comments made by Trevor-Roper long after the war had ended. Indeed, the ultimate source of the mistaken idea that Trevor-Roper and his team provided an analytical foundation for a shift in British strategy regarding the German opposition is neither Winter nor any other historian, but Trevor-Roper himself.

In 1968, Trevor-Roper suggested that he was aware of various Abwehr resistance activities during the war, particularly attempts to open communication with the Allies. Writing in his book, The Philby Affair, Trevor-Roper recalled the controversy over the ‘Canaris and Himmler’ assessment:

Late in 1942 my office had come to certain conclusions—which time proved to be correct—about the struggle between the Nazi Party and the German General Staff, as it was being fought out in the field of secret intelligence. The German Secret Service (the Abwehr) and its leader, Admiral Canaris, were suspected by the Party not only of inefficiency but also of disloyalty…. Admiral Canaris himself, at that time, was making repeated journeys to Spain and had indicated a willingness to treat with us: he would even welcome a meeting with his opposite number, ‘C’. These conclusions were duly formulated and the final document was submitted for security clearance to Philby. Philby absolutely forbade its circulation, insisting that it was ‘mere speculation’… . It was not to the Russian interest that the Western Allies should exploit the political division of Germany, or support the conservative enemies of Hitler, while the Red Army was still too far away to intervene.⁶³

Trevor-Roper’s recollection, however, matches neither the ‘Canaris and Himmler’ report, nor the general tenor of Trevor-Roper’s wartime reporting. While the ‘Canaris and Himmler’ report did indeed identify a division within the world of German intelligence, it made no reference to Nazi suspicions of Canaris’s disloyalty, said nothing about Canaris’s ‘willingness to treat’ with the British government, and most certainly did not imply that ‘the Western Allies should exploit the political division of Germany, or support the conservative enemies of Hitler.’⁶⁴

What explains this discrepancy between the ‘Canaris and Himmler’ report of 1943 and Trevor-Roper’s recollection of that report a quarter of a century later? It is possible that Trevor-Roper’s 1968 recollection embellished what he knew during the war – that his lack of a ‘need to know’ about specific sources of information prevented him from grasping the full scope of Abwehr activities during the war and that he is projecting information he learned after the war back onto 1942 and 1943. Given his work with the London Controlling Section for strategic deception, however, a role in which he would have needed a broad appreciation of enemy activities, it seems prudent to give his postwar comments on what he knew during the war the benefit of the doubt.

A more plausible reason, then, for Trevor-Roper’s failure to mention the Abwehr’s opposition work in his wartime reporting is the possible existence of security restrictions and the compartmentalisation of different streams of intelligence. Trevor-Roper was tasked with analysing radio communications (wireless/telegraphy), a source he saw as far superior to human intelligence.⁶⁵ But this source was unlikely to reveal much of the Abwehr’s opposition activities, which were understandably not conducted via those channels. As Winter notes, the very source Whitehall’s intelligence community had come to rely upon for many of its insights into German intentions by late 1943 (signals intelligence, SIGINT, or more specifically, Ultra) would not be able to detect the growing conspiracy against the Führer owing to the simple fact that the conspirators did not contact or communicate with one another via Enigma or any other form of radio communication in the months leading up to their attempted putsch.⁶⁶ So while in the course of his varied wartime work, Trevor-Roper may have become aware of information on the Abwehr derived from non-radio sources, he might not have been at liberty to use those sources in his reporting. If this was the case, he presumably believed that such restrictions no longer held by the time he made his 1968 comments.

But even if the non-radio intelligence reports on German opposition activities were not explicitly mentioned in his wartime reporting, surely Trevor-Roper’s assessments would have implicitly reflected their content if he had considered them credible. It is not uncommon for intelligence analysts to exclude high-grade or compartmentalised intelligence from reports they wish to circulate to a (relatively) broad audience, while nonetheless ensuring those reports are informed by, and certainly not contradicted by, the excluded intelligence. Trevor-Roper did not do anything like this. Nothing in his intelligence reporting acknowledged the Abwehr as a vital part of the German opposition and opened up some space for a policy discussion on whether ‘the Western Allies should exploit the political division of Germany, or support the conservative enemies of Hitler.’

There are not many options left to explain the discrepancy between Trevor-Roper’s wartime reporting and his 1968 statement. One remaining possibility is that while he believed that British policy should be amended to allow for the exploration of a possible partnership with the German opposition, specifically the Abwehr, he dared not put this on paper during the war. Knowing full well that his political masters had instituted a policy of ‘absolute silence’ regarding the German opposition, Trevor-Roper may have bent his beliefs to that policy and self-censored his intelligence reporting. Winter suggests this was the case with other parts of the British intelligence apparatus.⁶⁷ Perhaps it was also the case with Trevor-Roper. Perhaps he, too, succumbed to the ‘bureaucratic disease’ of ‘Group Think.’⁶⁸ But providing ‘intelligence to please’ or conforming his thinking to the conventional wisdom would have been out of character for the famously independent-minded Trevor-Roper. Given his reputation for speaking his mind and as a bureaucratic brawler, it seems highly unlikely that Trevor-Roper adjusted his intelligence reporting to please his intelligence or political superiors.

The most plausible interpretation of Trevor-Roper’s wartime assessments, not coincidentally also the most straightforward interpretation, is that he actually believed what he wrote at the time. Security considerations may have prevented the inclusion of all information to which he was privy, but they should not have excluded assessments that aligned with that information – and this he did not do. Any fracturing of the German government was explained as court politics – the jostling for power and influence – rather than genuine opposition to Hitler. For Trevor-Roper, there were no real divisions to exploit in Germany. Whatever Trevor-Roper’s level of awareness of Canaris’s opposition activities, he was dismissive of the Abwehr and – assessing it as corrupt, incompetent, and generally loyal to the German government – was unlikely to consider it a suitable partner for British efforts to undermine Hitler.

The fact that the ‘Canaris and Himmler’ report made no reference to Nazi suspicions of Canaris’s disloyalty, said nothing about Canaris’s ‘willingness to treat’ with the British government, and most certainly did not imply that ‘the Western Allies should exploit the political division of Germany, or support the conservative enemies of Hitler’ is hardly surprising because during the war Trevor-Roper did not put store in any of those things. Indeed, it would have been very surprising had the report articulated such points, since none of the following RIS reports contain even a remote suggestion that he believed any of them. Trevor-Roper was convinced that Canaris and other Abwehr personnel were by-and-large loyal German intelligence officers; he would surely have dismissed any outreach by Canaris as the gambit of a corrupt man seeking self-preservation; and he would almost certainly never have suggested the British government join forces with the Abwehr, an organisation he viewed as corrupt and inefficient.

Trevor-Roper’s 1968 recollection of the ‘Canaris and Himmler’ report was mistaken, and the acceptance and elaboration of that mistake by Winter and Sisman should be corrected. Suggesting that Trevor-Roper implicitly prompted the British government to work with the Abwehr to overthrow Hitler is not only a misreading of the ‘Canaris and Himmler’ assessment, but also decontextualises the ‘Canaris and Himmler’ paper from the rest of Trevor-Roper’s intelligence reporting. That Trevor-Roper failed to appreciate the Abwehr’s role in the German opposition is an intelligence failure, and to suggest otherwise is simply wishful thinking.

Conclusion: the intelligence and political contexts of Trevor-Roper’s reporting

Despite several opportunities between 1938 and 1945, the British government did not make any sustained effort to work with the German opposition to Hitler to prevent or curtail the war.⁶⁹ Winter identifies this fact (particularly as it pertains to the bomb plot of July 1944) as a policy failure rather than an intelligence failure. His key piece of evidence is the first RIS report, ‘Canaris and Himmler’. But as we have detailed above, the report is not the ‘political dynamite’ Winter suggests it to be. On the contrary, the implication that an emerging fissure between the SD and the Abwehr promisingly set the stage for British assistance to the German resistance is absent not only from the June 1943 report but also from the series of follow-up RIS reports and Trevor-Roper’s own 1945 valedictory report, ‘The German Intelligence Service and the War’. In these reports, the Abwehr is portrayed not as the centre of the German opposition but as inefficient, incompetent, and corrupt on both organisational and individual levels – hardly a suitable partner for the British government.

There are certainly questions around the extent and effectiveness of the Abwehr’s resistance work, but our point is that Trevor-Roper and his team asked none of those questions prior to the dramatic attempt on Hitler’s life in July 1944. They were unwilling to contemplate the idea that the Abwehr (or key members of the Abwehr) were working against Hitler in any direct or significant way. This should be classed as an intelligence failure.

In disputing Winter’s claim that this was not an intelligence failure, however, we do not wish to dismiss Winter’s corollary argument that this was a failure of policy. Indeed, we tend to see the intelligence failure versus policy failure framing as something of a false dichotomy that overlooks the basic assumptions regarding British strategy towards the German opposition shared by Whitehall’s intelligence and policy communities.

The British government’s policy of ‘absolute silence’ towards the German opposition was informed by the Venlo incident, which also set an important context for the intelligence war. In November 1939, the SD captured two British intelligence operatives working undercover in the Netherlands. The British, expecting a meeting with a German general supposedly seeking to overthrow Hitler and sign a peace agreement with Britain and France, were instead surprised by the SD. The Venlo incident exposed the risk of reaching out to supposed members of the German opposition. It also allowed the German government to root out much of Britain’s espionage network in Europe, thus forcing the British government to rely on signals intelligence rather than human intelligence.⁷⁰ This concentration on signals intelligence set the stage for the secret war, ultimately leading to Ultra’s success, and was approvingly noted by Trevor-Roper, who saw it as ‘a far more trustworthy source of information’.⁷¹ Nevertheless, the ‘absolute silence’ policy that later took hold in the British government was driven less by risk aversion or lack of human intelligence capability than by domestic politics and foreign diplomacy.

The willingness to reach out to supposed German opposition elements in late 1939 and 1940 was associated, rightly or wrongly, with Neville Chamberlain’s discredited appeasement policy. As Klemens von Klemperer notes of this period in British policy and politics, ‘one by one all distinctions between Germans and Nazis faded.’⁷² To ask the British public to make heavy sacrifices for a war while at the same time negotiating with the enemy was increasingly untenable. Churchill formally articulated the policy of ‘absolute silence’ in a minute to Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden in January 1941. But even more than domestic politics, the United Kingdom’s need to defer to its Allies truly drove the ‘absolute silence’ policy later in the war. The United States was committed to a policy of ‘unconditional surrender’. This all but ruled out dealing with the German opposition,⁷³ which generally wanted to negotiate an end to war on the Western front but not surrender to the Soviet Union on the Eastern front. The Soviet Union was allergic to any prospect of a separate peace on the Western front.⁷⁴ As the junior partner of the three Allies, Britain had little freedom of movement to chart its own course with the German resistance.

As a relatively minor cog in the machine of British World War II intelligence, Trevor-Roper’s reporting was never likely to change British high policy. In any case, he did not produce analysis that might have prompted such a change in policy. His reporting aligned very comfortably with the ‘absolute silence’ policy, and may even have exacerbated it, in part because he shared the assumptions behind it. An anti-appeaser with no love for German culture or language, Trevor-Roper entered government service at a time when the British intelligence community saw its German counterpart as a formidable and skilled opponent.⁷⁵ Trevor-Roper’s enthusiasm for proving this orthodoxy wrong was no doubt fuelled by his desire for decisive victory – over Germany, over his immediate enemies in the German intelligence community, and not least over an SIS old guard that he despised.⁷⁶ But his revisionist urge may also have clouded his ability to see anything other than Abwehr incompetence and inefficiency, and dismissing the possibility that the Abwehr contained genuine resisters only further enhanced the logic behind the ‘absolute silence’ policy. In operating under a shared set of assumptions, Whitehall’s policy and intelligence communities (or at least Trevor-Roper’s part of the British intelligence community) tended to reinforce each other’s beliefs about the appropriateness of British strategy rather than challenge and stress-test those beliefs.

After the war, Trevor-Roper achieved prominence as a historian and public intellectual, commenting on a range of topics that included both wartime German politics and British intelligence. But his postwar writings should not distract us from the task of closely examining his actual record of intelligence reporting during the war. Indeed, we should be alive to the possibility that Trevor-Roper’s postwar commentary may have subtly worked (whether intentionally or not) to divert attention from his actual wartime record or to give post facto justification to questionable parts of that record, thus distorting the historiography of British intelligence in World War II. Despite later claims, a careful examination of Trevor-Roper’s wartime record suggests that he did not promote, even implicitly, the idea that the British government should support the German opposition, including members of the Abwehr, in its efforts to overthrow Hitler.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Renate Atkins

Renate Atkins is a PhD candidate in the Department of Security Studies and Criminology at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. Her research considers the role of the Abwehr (Germany’s principal foreign intelligence service) during World War II and British assessments of the Abwehr’s work.

Brian Cuddy

Brian Cuddy is a historian of US foreign relations and international politics, and Lecturer in Security Studies at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He is the editor (with Fredrik Logevall) of The Vietnam War in the Pacific World (University of North Carolina Press, 2022) and (with Victor Kattan) of Making Endless War: The Vietnam and Arab-Israeli Conflicts in the History of International Law (University of Michigan Press, 2023).

Notes

¹ The German opposition or resistance was a loosely connected web of various groups, each with different visions of Germany’s future but all united in their desire to end Hitler’s rule. These groups included socialists and union members, church members, private lawyers, former politicians, and state officials (especially in parts of the German Foreign Office), but the core of the opposition was located in the German military.

² Paddy Ashdown, Nein: Standing up to Hitler 1935–1944 (London: William Collins, 2018): 296–302.

³ P.R.J. Winter, “British Intelligence and the July Bomb Plot of 1944: A Reappraisal,” War in History 13, no. 4 (2006): 469.

⁴ Fabian von Schlabrendorff cited in Winter, “British Intelligence and the July Bomb Plot of 1944,” 475.

⁵ Cited in Winter, “British Intelligence and the July Bomb Plot of July 1944,” 476.

⁶ Winter, “British Intelligence and the Bomb Plot of July 1944,” 478–482; P.R.J. Winter, “Churchill, British Intelligence, and the German Opposition Question,” War in History 14, no. 1 (2007): 109–112. In disputing Winter’s reading of Trevor-Roper’s wartime reporting, this article makes no comment on his reading of these other sources.

⁷ Within the German intelligence system, the division of responsibilities between the military’s Abwehr and the Nazi party’s SD/Gestapo was agreed upon in a 1936 document known informally as the Ten Commandments (Zehn Gebote): ‘Grundsätze für die Zusammenarbeit zwischen der Geheimen Staatspolizei und den Abwehrstellen der Wehrmacht,’ Anl. zu Abw 4218/12.36 III z g, 23 December 1936, RW 5/194, Bundesarchiv (hereafter BArch), Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany. The Ten Commandments were later modified during the war: ‘Grundsätze für die Zusammenarbeit zwischen der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD und den Abwehrdienststellen der Wehrmacht,’ Anlage 1 zu IV E 936 g.Rs., 1 March 1942, RW 5/763, BArch, Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany.

⁸ See, for example, John H. Waller, The Unseen War in Europe: Espionage and Conspiracy in the Second World War (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 1996); 104–117; S. Payne Best, The Venlo Incident (London: Frontline Books, 2009).

⁹ See, for example, the documents in the folder labelled Peace Proposals, FO 1093/228, National Archives, United Kingdom. Contact with German groups was ongoing during the war but was kept in extreme secrecy. An example is ‘C’ [Menzies] to Sir A. Cadogan, Letter, C.I/8, 22 November 1943, http://www.secretintelligencefiles.com/Content/swwf.fo1093/0261/002. A note on this letter reads, ‘“C” wants this secret and not given further distribution’.

¹⁰ Hugh Trevor-Roper, “Sideways into SIS,” in Hayden B. Peake and Samuel Halpern, eds., In the Name of Intelligence: Essays in Honor of Walter Pforzheimer (Washington, DC: NIBC Press, 1994), 251–57. Reprinted in Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Secret World: Behind the Curtain of British Intelligence in World War II and the Cold War, ed. Edward Harrison (London: I. B. Tauris, 2014), 35–48. Page references are to the 2014 edition.

¹¹ E.D.R. Harrison, “British Radio Security and Intelligence, 1939–43,” English Historical Review 124, no. 506 (February 2009): 58.

¹² Sisman, Hugh Trevor-Roper, 81; Harrison, “British Radio Security and Intelligence, 1939–43,” 58–59, 59n13.

¹³ An AST (Abwehrstelle) was an Abwehr station. Each military district and occupied territory had Abwehr stations. These ASTs performed all Abwehr duties in a highly decentralised manner. Norbert Mueller et al., Das Amt Ausland/Abwehr im Oberkommando der Wehrmacht: Materialien aus dem Bundesarchiv, Heft 16 (Koblenz: Bundesarchiv, 2007), 51. A NEST (Abwehrnebenstelle) was an Abwehr substation. On the order of ASTs, NESTs and outposts see Franz Eccard von Bentivegni, ‘Zusammenstellung des Amtes Ausland/Abwehr über die in den besetzten Gebieten eingerichteten Abwehrstellen, Abwehrnebenstellen und Aussenstellen sowie die Aufgaben der bei diesen Stellen eingesetzten Abwehr III – Offiziere,’ 10 February 1941, RW 4/300, BArch, Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany.

¹⁴ Winfried Meyer, Klatt, Hitler’s Jüdischer Meisteragent gegen Stalin: Überlebenskunst im Holocaust und Geheimdienstkrieg (Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2015): 412–417.

¹⁵ Trevor-Roper nonetheless insisted on remaining on location with the RSS in Arkley so as to better provide intelligence direction, rather than move to the SIS base in St Albans. His dual reporting lines provided Trevor-Roper with some measure of autonomy in his work. Sisman, Hugh Trevor-Roper, 89.

¹⁶ Sisman, Hugh Trevor-Roper, 115.

¹⁷ ‘From August 1941 the Radio Analysis Bureau began to issue “Vw” (Section V, wireless) reports on the Abwehr and its activities in theatres around the world, including the occasional “Who’s Who” of local enemy agents, known as “Purple Primers”. Over the next few years the RAB (and its successor, the RIS) would circulate more than eighty such reports, describing Abwehr activities in impressive detail.’ Sisman, Hugh Trevor-Roper, 94.

¹⁸ Sisman, Hugh Trevor-Roper, 117. Winter also notes that Trevor-Roper was ‘instrumental in providing the Twenty or “Double-Cross” Committee with inter alia the order of battle, call-signs, operations and personalities of the Abwehr and Sicherheitsdienst (SD),’ P.R.J. Winter, “A Higher Form of Intelligence: Hugh Trevor-Roper and Wartime British Secret Service,” Intelligence and National Security 22, no. 6 (2007): 849.

¹⁹ Hugh Trevor-Roper, “The German Intelligence Service and the War,” 1945, CAB 154/105, National Archives, United Kingdom.

²⁰ Cited in E.D.R. Harrison, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Trevor-Roper, The Secret World, 26. A relazione was the final report of an early modern Venetian ambassador’s service in a foreign state.

²¹ E.D.R. Harrison, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Trevor-Roper, The Secret World, 26. Compare Reinhard Doerries’s view of the report as the ‘somewhat general British review’ of a British intelligence officer during World War II. Reinhard R. Doerries, Hitler’s Last Chief of Foreign Intelligence: Allied Interrogations of Walter Schellenberg (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2007), 333n9.

²² Winter, “British Intelligence and the Bomb Plot of July 1944,” 476–477; Winter,“ A Higher Form of Intelligence,” 867–871.

²³ ‘Canaris and Himmler,’ RIS Note 1, 5 June 1943, HW 19/347, National Archives, United Kingdom; a somewhat incomplete set of the 35 RIS notes beginning with the ‘Canaris and Himmler’ note of 5 June 1943 and ending with a note on the Abwehr’s organisation in China dated 31 January 1945 is available at HW 19/347, National Archives, United Kingdom.

²⁴ Winter, “British Intelligence and the Bomb Plot of July 1944,” 474, 476.

²⁵ Winter, “British Intelligence and the Bomb Plot of July 1944,” 474.

²⁶ Winter, “British Intelligence and the Bomb Plot of July 1944,” 477–478.

²⁷ Sisman, Hugh Trevor-Roper, 113. Sisman also notes that the ‘report concluded that this struggle for secret intelligence was a symptom of a wider struggle for power between the Nazi Party and the German General Staff.’ Sisman, Hugh Trevor-Roper, 113. While this is a more reasonable implication to draw from the report, it is not specified in any of the three points that make up the report’s conclusion. “Canaris and Himmler,” 4.

²⁸ Winter, “British Intelligence and the Bomb Plot of July 1944,” 476. Winter’s further claim that the ‘Canaris and Himmler’ report is ‘one of the few successful examples of “predictive intelligence” from this period’ is also dubious, although on somewhat firmer ground than his claim about the report’s implications. Winter, ‘British Intelligence and the Bomb Plot of July 1944,’ 478n41.

²⁹ Winter, ‘A Higher Form of Intelligence,’ 867.

³⁰ On the reformulation of the Ten Commandments, including an explanation of changes it specified between Abwehr and SD duties, see H Mühleisen, “Das letzte Duell: Die Auseinandersetzungen zwischen Heydrich und Canaris wegen der Revision der “Zehn Gebote’,” Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen 9, no. 2–3 (1986): 395–458.

³¹ ”Canaris and Himmler,” 4.

³² L. R. Palmer (Hut 18) to Nigel de Grey, letter, 13 June 1943, HW 19/347, National Archives, United Kingdom. See also Harrison, ‘British Radio Security and Intelligence, 1939–43,’ 87–88.

³³ ”Canaris and Himmler,” It is important to note that the version of the report we are working from is the published version of June 1943. The original version of the report, likely drafted in November 1942 by Stuart Hampshire, may have been different. Trevor-Roper’s biographer, Adam Sisman, implies just this, noting that the report was eventually distributed in June 1943 ‘albeit in a bowdlerised form.’ Sisman, Hugh Trevor-Roper, 115. E.D.R. Harrison similarly writes that the paper was ‘watered … down’ before publication as RIS Note 1. Harrison, “British Radio Security and Intelligence, 1939–43,” 87. It is even more important to note, however, that neither Winter nor Sisman cite the original November 1942 report. Winter only cites the June 1943 report, and Sisman relies in turn on Winter and on Trevor-Roper’s 1968 recollection (described below), suggesting that neither Winter nor Sisman has seen the original November 1942 version and are basing their analysis on the June 1943 version. Winter, ‘British Intelligence and the Bomb Plot of July 1944,’ 474n26; Winter, “A Higher Form of Intelligence,” 879n106; Sisman, Hugh Trevor-Roper, 113–115 and 548nn51–54. We would welcome any information that might help us locate a copy of the November 1942 draft version of the ‘Canaris and Himmler’ report.

³⁴ ”The Sicherheitsdienst and Abwehr in South America,” RIS Note 10, 2 August 1943, HW 19/347, National Archives, United Kingdom, 2. For a later description of Abwehr-SD working relations in Argentina, see “The Sicherheitsdienst: Recent Developments II,” RIS Note 20, 31 October 1943, HW 19/347, National Archives, United Kingdom, 2–3.

³⁵ ”Himmler and the Sicherheitsdienst,” RIS Note 16, 27 September 1943, HW 19/347, National Archives, United Kingdom, 2.

³⁶ ”The Sicherheitsdienst: Recent Developments I,” RIS Note 18, 9 October 1943, HW 19/347, National Archives, United Kingdom, 2.

³⁷ ”Sicherheitsdienst (Amt VI) Operations,” RIS Note 22, 24 November 1943, HW 19/347, National Archives, United Kingdom, 1–3. On balance, and with ‘the little evidence which we have,’ Trevor-Roper’s team ultimately did assess the SD as a probable interloper in the Abwehr’s domain of irregular warfare. ‘Sicherheitsdienst (Amt VI) Operations,’ 1.

³⁸ ”The Sicherheitsdienst: Recent Developments III,” RIS Note 24, 6 February 1944, HW 19/347, National Archives, United Kingdom, 4. Note that in an apparent administrative error, two different notes were filed as RIS Note 24. See also RIS comments the following month on Abwehr-SD relations in South America: ‘The general interest of the Argentine story is that it provides definite evidence of the SD’s expansion at the expense of the Abwehr during the last two years,’ resulting in ‘a disaster for German diplomacy and possibly also for the OKW’s intelligence service.’ ‘The SD and Abwehr in South America II,’ RIS Note 26, 8 March 1944, HW 19/347, National Archives, United Kingdom, 3.

³⁹ For references to the involvement of Abwehr personnel in the bomb plot of July 1944, see ‘Schellenberg and Amt VI,’ RIS Note 33, 2 September 1944, HW 19/347, National Archives, United Kingdom, 1, 4; Trevor-Roper, ‘The German Intelligence Service and the War,’ 16.

⁴⁰ ‘Reichssicherheitshauptamt: Militärisches Amt,’ RIS Note 30, 15 June 1944, HW 19/347, National Archives, United Kingdom, 3. The word ‘resistance’ in this context is clearly not referring to resistance against Hitler, but to resistance against the Allied advance.

⁴¹ Trevor-Roper, “The German Intelligence Service and the War,” 3.

⁴² Trevor-Roper and his team noted that they first began to accumulate evidence of Abwehr incompetence in November 1942, that is, around the time of Operation Torch. ‘Abwehr Incompetence,’ RIS Note 11, 4 August 1943, p. 4, HW 19/347, National Archives, United Kingdom (‘the incompetence of the Abwehr, of which evidence has been accumulating over the past nine months’). RIS also suggested that evidence of the Abwehr losing bureaucratic ground to the Nazi intelligence agency, the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), started to appear in mid-1942, and became clearer by November 1942 with, for example, a ‘remarkable order’ from the Abwehr’s Oslo office essentially subordinating Abwehr counter-intelligence work in Norway to the SD. ‘Canaris and Himmler,’ 1–2.

⁴³ Trevor-Roper, “The German Intelligence Service and the War,” 14.

⁴⁴ ”Abwehr Incompetence,” 1.

⁴⁵ Trevor-Roper also identified the Abwehr’s reliance on human intelligence (unreliable personal sources) rather than signals intelligence (impersonal reports) as a key problem. Trevor-Roper, “The German Intelligence Service and the War,” 10.

⁴⁶ ‘Abwehr Incompetence,’ 8.

⁴⁷ Trevor-Roper, “The German Intelligence Service and the War,” 2, 3, 4.

⁴⁸ Trevor-Roper, “The German Intelligence Service and the War,” 8.

⁴⁹ Trevor-Roper, “The German Intelligence Service and the War,” 10.

⁵⁰ ”Abwehr Incompetence,” 4.

⁵¹ Trevor-Roper, “The German Intelligence Service and the War,” 2.

⁵² Hans B. Gisevius, To the Bitter End: An Insider’s Account of the Plot to Kill Hitler, 1933–1944 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998), 442.

⁵³ Trevor-Roper, “The German Intelligence Service and the War,” 3.

⁵⁴ Trevor-Roper, “The German Intelligence Service and the War,” 10. GmbH (Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung) is the German equivalent of a limited liability company often associated with family businesses.

⁵⁵ Trevor-Roper, “The German Intelligence Service and the War,” 13.

⁵⁶ Trevor-Roper, “The German Intelligence Service and the War,” 14.

⁵⁷ Trevor-Roper, “The German Intelligence Service and the War,” 12, 8; “Abwehr Incompetence,” 2.

⁵⁸ Trevor-Roper, “The German Intelligence Service and the War,” 22.

⁵⁹ Trevor-Roper, “The German Intelligence Service and the War,” 8.

⁶⁰ Trevor-Roper, “The German Intelligence Service and the War,” 2. For reference to “Hitler’s court,” see Trevor-Roper, “The German Intelligence Service and the War,” 17.

⁶¹ Winfried Meyer, Unternehmen Sieben: Eine Rettungsaktion (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Anton Hain, 1993).

⁶² See, for example, Fabian von Schlabrendorff and Gero Von Gaevernitz, Offiziere gegen Hitler (Zürich: Europa Verlag, 1946); Ulrich von Hassel, The von Hassel Diaries 1938–1944 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1948); Helmuth Groscurth, Tagebücher eines Abwehroffiziers 1938–1940 (Stuttgart: Deusche Verlags-Anstalt, 1970). In addition to accounts by contemporaries of Canaris, a number of historians similarly describe the Abwehr as a central hub of German opposition to Hitler. See, for example, Harold C. Deutsch, The Conspiracy against Hitler in the Twilight War (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1968), 27; Klemens von Klemperer, German Resistance against Hitler: The Search for Allies Abroad, 1938–1945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 22. Even Trevor-Roper came to reluctantly admit this after the war, acknowledging in a 1947 article that ‘Canaris and Oster and their friends in the Intelligence Service’ formed the ‘consistent nucleus’ of the ‘old military group’ that composed the most credible component of the German opposition from 1937 to 1944. Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘The German Opposition 1937–1944,’ Polemic 8 (1947), 4.

⁶³ Trevor-Roper, The Philby Affair, 78–79. Trevor-Roper added that even if this interpretation of Philby’s action to suppress the report ‘is correct, the effective result may have been negligible. The British government was not, at that time, favourable to alleged German opponents of Hitler.’ Trevor-Roper, The Philby Affair, 79.

⁶⁴ But remember, of course, that the June 1943 version with which we are working was apparently somewhat different to the original November 1942 version.

⁶⁵ Trevor-Roper, “The German Intelligence Service and the War,” 10. See also an interview from 1981, in which Trevor-Roper suggested that it may have been for the best that SIS did not have an extant agent network in Europe during the war, as unreliable HUMINT may have interfered with good British intelligence work. Christopher M. Andrew, “The Profession of Intelligence, 1941–1951,” radio documentary, BBC Radio 4, 16 August 1981, CKEY2096759, the British Library, https://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do.

⁶⁶ Winter, “British Intelligence and the July Bomb Plot of 1944,” 471. See also Deutsch, The Conspiracy against Hitler in the Twilight War, 343–344.

⁶⁷ Winter, “British Intelligence and the July Bomb Plot of 1944,” 473.

⁶⁸ Winter, “British Intelligence and the July Bomb Plot of 1944,” 478.

⁶⁹ This article has focused on the period from mid-1943 to mid-1944, that is, the lead-up to the bomb plot of July 1944. After the establishment of RIS in mid-1943 with a direct reporting line to Stewart Menzies, Trevor-Roper and his team had firmly established their position within, and value to, the British intelligence community, hence our focus on this period. But it should be noted that the bomb plot of July 1944 was only one instance in which the British could potentially have assisted the German opposition with earlier occasions, especially in 1938, offering greater potential for success. Of course, Trevor-Roper had not even begun his government service at that time.

⁷⁰ To what extent the damage done to Britain’s espionage network in Europe dramatically reduced the British intelligence community’s understanding of German politics is debatable. The historian Simon Ball notes that the Venlo incident actually exposed the poor state of British human intelligence collection on German politics in the 1930s. Simon Ball, Secret History: Writing the Rise of Britain’s Intelligence Services (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020), 82–83.

⁷¹ Trevor-Roper, “Sideways into SIS,” 39.

⁷² Von Klemperer, German Resistance against Hitler, 218. Winter identifies British hatred of Prusso-German militarism as a key driver of ‘absolute silence,’ but von Klemperer suggests such hatred was not a necessary prerequisite of support for the policy. Winter, “British Intelligence and the July Bomb Plot of 1944,” 471n11; von Klemperer, German Resistance against Hitler, 218.

⁷³ With the exception of elements of the Office of Strategic Services, the US government was sceptical of the value to be gained from supporting the German opposition. According to a consolidated interrogation report produced late in the war, “the total defeat of Germany seems a far better guarantee for world security than might have been created by a peaceful entry of Allied armies into Germany in July or August 1944.” Major Frederick Sternberg, CAC Commanding, “Army Intelligence Consolidated Interrogation Report: Political and Social Background of the 20 July Incident,” 10 September 1945, in American Intelligence and the German Resistance to Hitler: A Documentary History, ed. Jürgen Heideking and Christof Mauch (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1998), Document 101, p. 415. As noted in an earlier memo, however, the Allies were prepared to use the German opposition ‘to assist the invasion effort … in any way coldly calculated to promote the success of the invasion, without any regard whatsoever for the German individuals involved.’ Whitney Shepardson, “Memorandum by the OSS Planning Group: Rejection of the Herman Plan,” 3 April 1944, in American Intelligence and the German Resistance to Hitler: A Documentary History, ed. Heideking and Mauch, Document 37c, p. 205. According to the historian Günther Gellerman, Churchill believed that the United States would not enter the war if there was any doubt surrounding Britain’s determination to continue fighting with all means available. Günther Gellermann, Geheime Wege zum Frieden mit England: Ausgewählte Initiativen zur Beendigung des Krieges 1940/42 (Bonn: Bernard & Graefe Verlag, 1995), 7.

⁷⁴ Winter, “British Intelligence and the July Bomb Plot of 1944,” 471n11; Sisman, Hugh Trevor-Roper, 113.

⁷⁵ Ball, Secret History, 67–98; Sisman, Hugh Trevor-Roper, 118.

⁷⁶ On Trevor-Roper’s views on his SIS colleagues, see Sisman, Hugh Trevor-Roper, 90–93, 103, 106–107.