Hans Piekenbrock, head of Abwehr I from 1939 to March 1943, was among SMERSH’s important prisoners captured in May 1945 not far from Prague. Promoted to Major General in April 1943, he commanded the 208th Infantry Division, which participated in the Kursk Battle in Russia, the biggest tank battle and the greatest German tank failure. In March 1944, Piekenbrock became Lieutenant General, and his division fought in Ukraine, Poland, Slovakia, and Silesia. While Piekenbrock was fighting, the Abwehr ceased to exist as an independent intelligence organization.
Abwehr’s Decline
The Abwehr’s decline occurred gradually in 1943–44. In mid-March 1943, Canaris, together with Piekenbrock, Erwin Lahousen (head of Abwehr II) and Franz von Bentivegni (head of Abwehr III) visited the headquarters of Field Marshal Günther von Kluge, commander of the German Army Group Center, located near Smolensk. General Henning von Tresckow, chief of Kluge’s General Staff, and his adjutant Fabian von Schlabrendorff, were also present at the meeting. All participants came to a mutual understanding that, as von Schlabrendorff put it, ‘Only Hitler’s death will put an end to this mad slaughter of people in the concentration camps and in the armies fighting this criminal war.’1 A few days later Schlabrendorff smuggled a time bomb, disguised as bottles of cognac, onto an aircraft that carried Hitler. The bomb failed to detonate because of the extreme cold in the aircraft’s cargo space. Schlabrendorff managed to retrieve the bomb. Later, on July 20, 1944 the Gestapo arrested Schlabrendorff and he was kept in a number of concentration camps. On May 5, 1945 the Fifth U.S. Army liberated Schlabrendorff along with a group of other prisoners of the Dachau concentration camp.
In the spring of 1943, Wilhelm Keitel, commander in chief of the High Command of the Armed Forces (OKW), irritated by the Abwehr’s inefficiency, ordered the replacement of heads of the Abwehr I-III.2 Soon Piekenbrock and Lahousen were sent to the Eastern Front and did not participate in the further plots to kill Hitler. From March 1943 onwards, Colonel Georg Hansen headed Abwehr I, while Colonel Wessel Freiherr von Freytag-Loringhoven headed Abwehr II. Both Hansen and Freytag-Loringhoven were also members of the anti-Hitler plot, and in July 1944 Freytag-Loringhoven even supplied Graf Claus von Stauffenberg with explosives for killing Hitler.
In February 1944, Hitler dismissed Canaris after the Gestapo arrested two high-ranking Abwehr officers on charges of treason, and Colonel Hansen replaced him.3 In June 1944, Abwehr I and II were merged together and became the Militarisches Amt (or Mil Amt) of Walter Schellenberg’s SD. Hansen headed Mil Amt until he was arrested as a member of the July 20, 1944 plot, and Schellenberg headed both the SD and Mil Amt until the end of the war. In the Mil Amt Erwin Stolze, who was previously responsible for diversions in Soviet territory, was charged with the training of terrorists sent to the rear of the Allied troops.4
On July 22, 1944, two days after von Stauffenberg’s unsuccessful attempt on Hitler’s life, the Gestapo arrested Hansen and, on the next day, Canaris.5 Freytag-Loringhoven committed suicide on July 26, before the Gestapo could get him. Soon, on September 8, Hansen was executed in Plötenzee Prison in Berlin.
In August 1944, the Gestapo investigators found Canaris’s diary in which he had written that since 1938 he headed a resistance group within the Abwehr. The diary was given to the above-mentioned Rattenhuber, head of Hitler’s guards, who handed it over to Ernst Kaltenbrunner, head of the RSHA. Hitler read it on April 6, 1945, and on his order, the next day a special SS tribunal sentenced Canaris to death.
Two days later he was hanged slowly with a piano-wire noose in the Flossenbürg concentration camp. The SS-executioners were in a hurry to finish off Canaris: American troops were not far away from the camp. Before he left his cell, Canaris tapped out a message to an imprisoned Danish officer Hans Lunding, who was in the neighboring celclass="underline" ‘I am dying for my country. I have a clear conscience… I did no more than my patriotic duty in trying to oppose the criminal madness of Hitler, who was leading Germany to its ruin. It was in vain, as I know now that my country will go under, as I knew already in 1942.’6
After Hansen and Canaris’s arrests more reorganization of the former Abwehr followed. Abwehr III was divided among the SD, the Gestapo, and the OKW.7 The latter part, known as the Truppenabwehr, included counterintelligence in the German troops, navy, and air force, as well as in the POW camps and the German Field Police (GFP). Part of the Brandenburg-800 division (within Abwehr II) joined Otto Skorzeny’s special commandos unit SS-Jagdverband attached to the SD. The other part was included in the tank corps Grossdeutschland.
On December 1, 1944, Walli I and III were transferred to Schellenberg’s Mil Amt and became its Branch F. Later, in April 1945, escaping the advancing Soviet troops, Walli I moved to Bavaria.
As for Bentivegni, he headed Abwehr III until March 1944, when he joined the army. In August 1944, Bentivegni was promoted to Major General, and in January 1945, to Lieutenant General. On May 15, 1945 SMERSH operatives captured Bentivegni, at the time commander of the 81st Infantry Division, among numerous prisoners taken in the Courland Pocket in Latvia.8 The Army Group Courland of about 181,000 men was the last German unit that fought on Soviet territory until their surrender on May 9, 1945.
Bruno Streckenbach, Heydrich’s former deputy in the RSHA and the Einsatzgruppen supervisor, was also captured in Courland. In September 1942, he was transferred from the RSHA to the Waffen SS, and from April 1944 onwards, Streckenbach commanded the 19th SS Waffen Grenadier Division, part of the Latvian Legion. Later promoted to Waffen-SS Lieutenant General, he was captured on May 22, 1945.9
On May 31, 1945 SMERSH operatives caught Erwin Stolze in Berlin in civilian clothes.10 In 1947, he testified: ‘At the beginning of April 1945… Walter Schellenberg issued an instruction that prescribed… in case the Red Army threatens to take over Berlin, to prepare false documents in advance, to destroy operational documents, to go into hiding and wait for new instructions. I followed this order.’11 In the underground, Stolze headed a network of 800 Nazi terrorists.
In February 1946, Soviet prosecutors presented testimonies of Piekenbrock, Bentivegni, and Stolze, written during interrogations in GUKR SMERSH, at the International Nuremberg Trial.12 Lahousen, a rare survivor of the Abwehr resistance, personally testified in the courtroom against the Nazi defendants.
Piekenbrock, Bentivegni, Stolze, and Streckenbach remained in Moscow MGB investigation prisons until February 1952, when the Military Tribunal of the Moscow Military District sentenced Stolze to death, and Bentivegni and Streckenbach, to twenty-five years in labor camps.13 On March 26, 1952 Stolze was executed.
However, the Military Collegium changed Bentivegni and Streckenbach’s punishment to imprisonment, and convicted Piekenbrock to the same term. After spending three years in Vladimir Prison, in October 1955 the three were released and returned to Germany.
The heads of the FHO (Foreign Armies East) and Walli met different ends. During the July 20, 1944 attempt on Hitler’s life, General Reinhard Gehlen was sick, and his deputy, Gerhard Wessel, managed to destroy Gehlen’s correspondence with the plotters in time.14 As a result, Gehlen luckily escaped the Gestapo’s attention, but during the last months of 1944 Hitler was outraged by the pessimistic reports of Gehlen.
At the time, Gehlen had already organized his own plot. In spring 1944, he developed a plan to save the FHO’s records for the West. By February 1945, Wessel and Hermann Baun (head of Walli I), Heinz Danko Herre and Horst Hiemenz (the former and the last head of the FHO’s Gruppe II), and Albert Schöller (deputy head of Gruppe II) participated in Gehlen’s efforts.15 In April 1945, Wessel succeeded Gehlen as FHO head, and the plotters safely hid the Walli I and FHO archives.