Wilhelm Canaris was dismissed as head of the Abwehr. Technically the Abwehr, the German military intelligence ministry, was abolished on the same day and its functions were taken over by the Ausland-SD, but this doesn't seem to have been really the case to some degree, and most sources show the Abwehr continuing on until the end of the Third Reich.
By Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1979-013-43 / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5419101
Canaris was opposed to the execution of Jews and registered complaints regarding it. He also passed information on to the Allies and was involved in efforts to overthrow Hitler. He was one of the most highly placed sources of intelligence for the Allies inside the Nazi regime. An Abwehr deputy, Hans Oster, was also a figure in the German resistance.
His role would ultimately cost him his life, as he'd be arrested and executed later in 1944. His wife, Erika, would relocate to Spain, where she would live until 1970. Halina Szymańska, a Switzerland based Polish spy working for the British, whom Canaris used to pass on information, and who was also Canaris' paramour, and who was a widow of a Polish officer, would move to the UK after the war, marry an exiled Polish officer, and lived until 1989.
Canaris has always been a very difficult personality to grasp. Some regard him as being very heroic, as he was in fact carrying out resistance efforts from the very heart of Nazi Germany. Others find him less so, wondering why he didn't go further given his central position. He had briefly supported the Nazis, given their anticommunism, but had parted from them very early. He had used his position to shield Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and he seems to have been motivated in his opposition to the Nazis partially by faith. Regarding that, he was a Lutheran in keeping with a conversion from Catholicism that his grandfather had made, but he had referred to himself as a "Catholic Mystic" and was fascinated with Spanish castles. Neither faith would condone carrying on an extramarital affair. He believed himself to be of Greek descent, but in fact he was of Italian descent.
The German III Panzerkorps took Vinograd and Lysianka in its effort to relieve the Korsun pocket.
F6F’s on the flight deck of USS Gambier Bay (CVE 73) en-route to the South Pacific, February 12, 1944.
Marines captured Gorissi on New Britain. Allied forces landed on Rooke Island in the Bismark Archipelago as well. In the Marshalls the US landed on the Arno Atoll.
The German ship Oria sank in a storm in the Mediterranean, taking over 4,000 Italian prisoners of war down with it.
The New Zealand Corps replaced the US 2nd Corps at Cassino.
Defenses at Anzio were reconfigured given recent German successes, but no major fighting occured on this day.
The British troopship Khedive Ismail was sunk by the I-27 in the Indian Ocean, taking 1,297 troops down with it. One of them was Kenneth Gandar-Dower, age 35, who was an English sportsman, explorer and author. He was on board as a war correspondent.
Wendell Willlkie announced his candidate for President, back in an era when the Presidential election cycle didn't begin insanely early. No Democratic candidate had yet been announced, although his name had been put forward for some primaries.
A lawyer by profession and the child of two lawyers, Willkie had been in the Democratic Party until 1939, and indeed Roosevelt had considered him, even after that, as a Vice Presidential candidate. By 1944 his health was rapidly declining, something accelerated by heavy drinking and smoking, and he would, in fact, not be alive by the November election.
Margaret Woodrow Wilson, age 57, the daughter of Woodrow Wilson, died on this day of uremia. She was living in India, where she had become a devotee of a Hindu sect.
