The Abwehr was the intelligence agency of Nazi Germany from June 1938 to June 1944, originating as counter-intelligence cells in 1920. The Germans formed the Abwehr in 1920 as an espionage group, and each Abwehr station was based on army districts, in neutral countries, and in occupied lands. Vice-Admiral Wilhelm Canaris headed the Abwehr during World War II, and Canaris was alienated by the passage of the Commissar Order of 8 September 1941, which enabled the Wehrmacht armed forces to execute captured Soviet commissars and soldiers. Canaris would wind up working with the United Kingdom against the Nazis, and he hired Jews in order to smuggle them into Switzerland, while he also forbade the transition of the Abwehr into a "murder organization". He was executed for treason in 1945, at which point the Abwehr ceased to exist. While the agency had been created with the goal of winning the war for Nazism, it wound up sabotaging Hitler's war effort.