Erwin von Lahousen

Lahousen and Canaris took well to each other, as both shared anti-Nazi feelings. Lahousen became a member of a circle of hand-picked officers opposed to Hitler who ran the intelligence agency. Canaris appointed him chief of Abwehr section II, which dealt primarily with the Brandenburgers and sabotage.^[2][3]

Lahousen handled the successful sabotage aspects of the

In 1943, Lahousen was sent to the Eastern Front and thus escaped the final days of the Abwehr, which, along with Canaris, had fallen into disfavour.^[2] Lahousen later claimed that he was the one who supplied the bomb used on the Smolensk plot (Operation Spark, 13 March 1943). The assassination attempt carried out by Fabian von Schlabrendorff failed.

After the failure of the assassination attempt and putsch (20 July plot), Claus von Stauffenberg and thousands of other accused plotters, including Canaris, were executed. Due to his service at the front, Lahousen escaped notice. On 19 July 1944 Lahousen was heavily wounded by an artillery hit.

Nuremberg trial

After the end of the war, Lahousen voluntarily testified against Hermann Göring and 21 other defendants at the Nuremberg war crimes trials in 1945–1946. Lahousen was the first witness for the prosecution, his prominence due to being the sole survivor of the 'Abwehr resistance'.^[2] Among other things, he gave evidence about the murder of hundreds of thousands of Soviet prisoners of war and the Einsatzgruppen death squads, who murdered more than a million Jews in the conquered areas of the Soviet Union, Poland and Ukraine.

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