Month: August 2019

Admiral Canaris, his wife, and two daughters had lived at Waldsangerpfad 17, also in Zehlendorf and southwest of the center of Berlin. (UPDATE: A little more research reveals that the address of the house when the Canarises lived there was Betazeile 17.)

By the time my parents lived in the house — beginning November 1945, six months after the end of the war — no one from the Canaris family lived there. Based on mounting evidence that he had been working against Hitler, Wilhelm Canaris had been dismissed and the Abwehr disestablished in early 1944. After Canaris’s personal diary, containing additional evidence of his opposition, was presented to Hitler, Canaris was arrested, convicted by an SS summary court, and sentenced to death. He was executed on 9 April 1945.

While my parents lived in the house, my mother became pregnant with me. This is a picture of my mother, in spring 1946, sitting on a cot out on the second-floor rear deck of the house. She told me later that she was suffering from morning sickness at the time. Sure looks it.

 On 14 June 2019, Julia and I joined members of the extended Canaris family on a visit to the Canaris home. The neighborhood is quite nice, featuring generally large homes, expansive yards, and cobbled roads. (I’m not sure I’d enjoy driving on the cobbled surfaces, but they lend a certain style and do tend to slow drivers down.)

(Julia and Sam had previously visited the house in December 2017, when they went to Paris and Berlin for their honeymoon. She had tracked it down using WWII-era photos as reference.)

Isabel had made arrangements beforehand, of course, with the current occupants of the house, who were very gracious in inviting us onto the grounds. We spent 15-20 minutes in the back yard, which contained wonderful plants and landscaping. I believe the current owners learned about the home’s history only a short time before the visit (it was 72+ years ago) and of its importance to me personally only during our visit.

Here’s a brief (1:16) video from the visit.

Part IV: Wannsee

 

We were met at Tegel Airport at about 10:30 am June 13 by Isabel Traenckner-Probst and her daughter, Eva. As we emerged from customs, we saw two tall women waving balloons and heard them yell our names.

Isabel drove us to the hotel she had so kindly arranged for us, but our rooms were not ready and would not be for several hours. Recognizing we had taken a redeye, Isabel, again kindly, made her home available to us for naps. Isabel and her family, also including husband, Reiner, and son, Lars, live in one of what the locals call “American homes,” apartments originally built to house American service members and their families.

(Isabel is a great-great-grandniece of Wilhelm Canaris, German admiral and head of the Abwehr, Germany’s military intelligence agency, and she was our principal contact with the extended family. [More about the Admiral later.] My parents had lived in the Canaris house 1945-46, returned to the U.S. with two of his personal photo albums, and we were in Berlin to mark the return of those albums and other material to the Canaris family.)

After we grabbed a few hours sleep, Isabel drove us to the Hotel Haus Leopold, a favorite of her and her family, located in an upscale neighborhood of Berlin, Zehlendorf. 

We came to realize that Zehlendorf was the area where my parents were married in November 1945, and where they lived after that. Most American forces lived and worked in this section of Berlin during the occupation and for many years thereafter.

That evening, we met other members of the Canaris family at a reception held at Chalet Suisse, located in a forest setting, Grunevald, in Zehlendorf. Below are scenes from Chalet Suisse.

I was surprised to learn that there were several members of the family meeting each other for the first time. Then again, as I learned more, it was not so surprising. The Canarises, while well-established in the first half of the 20th century and before, had been very much disrupted by the war and different elements of the family dispersed near its end and afterward to other parts of Europe and beyond. Many had traveled far for this night and they had a lot of catching up to do.

Isabel was also trying to develop a family tree and had brought her intial draft, sketched out on attached sheets of paper perhaps 5 ft X 12 ft in size. Family members added to the names listed there. At one point, Isabel apologized to Julia and me for everyone speaking in German. I said, “No need to speak English.” And a young woman, who was writing on the family tree, looked over at me and, with a smile, said “But we all could.”

At dinner, I sat alongside my first personal contact with the Canaris family, Patricia Highfill, another great-great-grandniece. (Her picture appeared in the Christmas letter post, as I had delivered the albums and other material to her in the fall at her home in Palm Desert, Calif. She then brought them to her family’s home in Switzerland and they were conveyed to Berlin.) She urged me to try a meal with one of her favorites, rösti. I would describe rösti as high-end “hash browns.” When Julia told Eva our version of “rösti” was a popular breakfast side in the U.S., she was surprised.

I also met at dinner Michael Günther, a TV documentary producer, who is heading up production of a documentary on Admiral Canaris. Julia and I would become friends with Michael and his wife, Cornelia (Connie). More on them later, too.

Back to the hotel around 11, we rested for a big day ahead.

Part III: Visiting the Canaris home