The Bormann Brotherhood Read online

  This must sound, at this stage, a generalization, an oversimplification. Nothing about Bormann will prove to be simple in the end. Each piece in the puzzle, regardless of how it is expanded, explained, rationalized, provokes new questions, deeper profundities. This is the way Bormann cast his shadow during my years of travel with British naval intelligence, as a writer and a foreign correspondent, and as a producer of television documentaries. These activities gave me the opportunity to look and listen and ask questions in distant parts of the world, in Communist as well as Western societies. Others would have done as I did given such opportunities to search and to find. There was never any special merit in this. I had the opportunities. I do not know just when opportunity turned into obligation. This is not, then, a book I chose to write; it had to be written.

  I have tried to separate fact from comment. I have sometimes found my journey to be among liars and cheats, where “facts” could be bought by the gross. But there were also documents and authorities whose testimony could be trusted. There were documents available by 1972 to prove just how successfully the Bormann “plan for the future” infiltrated our lives. In London there were files that should have stayed secret under a thirty-year rule. These were opened by the British Foreign Office so that historians could catch some of the sweep of the Nazi period of open oppression. In the Public Record Office in London it was possible for scholars to look at the 1939-1945 war in its entirety. (The situation was different in Washington, where I was told intelligence material had never been declassified and was not likely to be.)

  The declassification of British documents made it possible for many men of authority to speak. I was surprised by the number of Americans and Europeans who had honored their promises to British security to keep their knowledge of Nazi operations secret. Some were willing and eager to talk now, because they believed that even honest documents can “lie.”

  One Englishwoman was the only survivor of six girls parachuted into Nazi-occupied France. The other five girls were tortured to death. The survivor traced their stories through interviews. She discovered that the girls, all former classmates of hers, were sacrificed deliberately in order to maintain the credibility of other Allied agents, of greater consequence to London. She found that the official documents in the case told a more palatable story. They disassociated the British government from a coldly calculated plan. The girls had been provided with information that it was intended the Nazis would extract from them on the rack. Perhaps the stakes were so high, the consequences so grave, the necessity so clear that this horror had to be employed to counter the known viciousness of the enemy. Does the designer of this scheme, a blurred footnote in the history of British espionage, sleep with nightmares?

  Another girl, a German, helped put together pieces of the puzzle. She was a child when Bormann disappeared. She grew up with a sense of horror about her own people. She searched for documents, and concluded that society had perfected a method of piling fact upon fact to produce distortion. She went after other escaped war criminals. She convinced me, without herself once expressing the thought, that a woman’s intuition could be more dependable when it comes to separating truth from falsehood. Her name was Beata Klarsfeld, and each time I crossed her trail, she lightened my gloom.

  But the gloom was inevitable. The story was complicated by a personal desire to get away from it. Why should we be forced to rake through this bloody garbage? None of it made sense. Most of it made Western civilization look like a deepening nightmare. And there was so much of it. The persecution of the weak and the helpless was preserved in permanent records. Yet there is too much to grasp; from this overflowing fountain of misery, how can one continue to drink and remain sane?

  The files on the German SS filled six freight cars for the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. Five million pages of typewritten records were produced by the prosecution hearings against twelve major war criminals alone. In twelve subsequent American trials at Nuremberg, another 24,000 pages were made public and a further quarter-million pages were left unpublished. The story they told should have shocked us out of a complacent belief in our Western civilization. They told of the great nation called Germany which had contributed so much for so long to culture and scientific progress and how it brought back slavery on an unprecedented scale; planned the mass murder of entire populations of children, old people, the sick and infirm, Jews, Gypsies, and Slavs; plundered Europe from one end to the other with careful calculation; and trained in schools, with chalk and blackboard, the men and women whose specialty in the middle of the twentieth century was to be the brisk disposal of millions of human lives.

  There were documents in plenty and yet somehow they must have overwhelmed us. The documents set forth, beyond all possible contradiction, the behavior of the German people once they became members of their own totalitarian state.

  Yes, there were documents all right. Hans Frank kept thirty-eight volumes of his diary while he was Governor General of Poland and using that position to kill and loot wherever he went. He recorded everything. His house was crammed with art treasures, from landscapes by Rembrandt to gilded chalices. His German troops were authorized to kill any non-German who showed hostility. Frank kept detailed notes of events that were regarded by his fellow proconsuls as routine: children scattered the ashes of the cremated on the death-camp roads to make them less slippery; Greek boys were freighted to Silesia for experimental castration; girls were sewn together to make Siamese twins; slave workers had their testicles exposed to X rays, which burned and mutilated them; prisoners of war, soldiers and civilians, captured in the “barbarian” territories of Russia and East Europe were shipped by numbers to labor camps where SS doctors performed experiments under what they called “controlled” conditions.

  The whole effect was surrealistic. The documents sent ten men to the gallows on October 15, 1945. The relatively modest series of executions horrified many civilized observers. It came as a purge for Western society. Hitler was dead. Ten of his henchmen had been executed. Now, surely, the night had passed.

  Two men condemned by the International Military Tribunal were Göring and Bormann. Field Marshal Hermann Göring crushed and swallowed a phial of potassium cyanide two hours before he was due to hang. Bormann not only cheated the gallows; he also contrived to miss his own trial. He was the only defendant whose case was heard in absentia and who was sentenced in absentia. In retrospect, this was entirely in keeping with the mystery that surrounds the man. Nazism never died on the gallows. Bormann and his companions never intended to see their life’s work destroyed.

  The German Brotherhood (Die deutsche Gemeinschaft) was explained to me first by one of the Latin-American intelligence agents managed by Sir William Stephenson, Winston Churchill’s personal representative in charge of secret operations during World War II. In putting together the pieces of the Bormann puzzle, I received enormous help and encouragement from “Little Bill,” as he was called, and his American associates. His great comrade in wartime was General William J. Donovan, chief of the Office of Strategic Services. Stephenson said, when I went to him with my last bits of the puzzle in 1972: “Nothing deceives like a document.”

  His man in Latin America repeated the warning. “The spirit of Nazism binds groups of men who keep no membership lists, who seldom refer to each other by their real names, and who manipulate and operate like the old German Brotherhood which gave Bormann a stranglehold on Hitler. There’s no documentation for those sort of people.”

  There is, instead, this man Bormann, who covertly governed the Third Reich. For more than twenty years, this stocky peasant with the pug nose and the obsequious habits of a butler brought together into his misleadingly soft and plump hands the strings that manipulated the Führer. Long after Hitler was dead, historians continued to misinterpret his role and his character. This is the measure of the man. He never cared for the visible trappings of power. He wanted the reality of it. He moved in Hitler’s court, a shrewd and unobtru
sive figure who was looked down upon by the thin-lipped generals with their bogus tradition of aristocracy. Foolish men like Joachim von Ribbentrop, hungry for titles and honors, disregarded him. Intellectual snobs like Albert Speer continued into the 1970’s to speak of Bormann as a crude and vulgar peasant. Crazed ideologists like Alfred Rosenberg, apostle for a Nazi religion, said he was illiterate.

  Nazi strategists had plotted for many years to set the West against Russia. They continued with that plan after the war ended. Members of the Bormann Brotherhood became hired agents of Western intelligence. How that came about is one of the pieces in the puzzle. Each piece seems outrageous enough. The cumulative effect becomes as difficult to grasp as the Third Reich itself. The Nazi experiment to produce a master race in Germany had failed, and so the Germans had proved themselves unworthy. The experiment must be resumed elsewhere. Farsighted Nazis had prepared for this, but they were also concerned about the legalities.

  At the time of the Nuremberg trials, a great new sense of moral purpose had started to sweep the Western part of the world. The Cold War required some temporary expediencies, however. We told ourselves that the means justified the ends. The Soviets told themselves the same comforting story. And both sides plunged into a wild competition to buy Nazis with professional experience in war and military science. So, little by little, we drifted into that very climate of opinion upon which Bormann and his brothers counted. They began to come out into the open, so quietly that few of us noticed.

  Bormann himself became an inconvenient symbol. He was a reminder of the past, whereas the West had accepted the small compromises: the fact, for instance, that by 1970 there were 176 German generals in a revived West German Army, and that every single one of them had served under Hitler as a senior officer. By the 1970’s it was possible to buy the memoirs of the “Hangman of Lyons,” who had taken refuge in Latin America. He was a member of the Brotherhood and he felt safe enough to tell the world that he did nothing more than his duty as a Gestapo chief when he sent orphaned children to the gas chambers.

  A chronological account would fail to give cohesion and understanding to so complex a narrative. So I have felt free to rove in time and place. My purpose is to move back and forth and to fill in as many elements of fact and motivations as can provide a balanced view of an unbalanced world, a panorama of mania that defies the imagination of a reasonable individual. And I have tried to put the pieces together as best I can, but without pretense that I would solve the puzzle.

  Before I set forth the pieces, there is one more thing to be said. Martin Bormann kept careful note of everything, and when he left the burning corpse of Hitler, he took with him more than a thousand typed pages, headed “Notes of fundamental interest for the future: To be preserved with the greatest care.” This is the real dimension of the puzzle. This is the measure of its meaning.

  PART TWO

  THE PIECES

  CHAPTER 3

  There was never an exact description of Martin Bormann.

  The most detailed was given me by the late Walter Schellenberg, former chief of the Nazi foreign intelligence service: “Scar on left cheek, thin strands of hair, balding, between five feet three inches tall and five feet seven inches.”

  The discrepancy of four inches seemed extravagant. Schellenberg shrugged. “Everything about him was inexact. Some say there are thumbprints in police records from when he was jailed for murder, but I say the records are in Communist hands. Some say there are SS tattoo marks giving his blood group under one arm. I say he never went through that procedure because he was given purely an honorary SS membership and rank by Himmler, who wanted to curry favor.”

  This exchange took place in Switzerland just after Hitler’s former spy chief had conferred in Spain with Hitler’s former SS commando chief, Otto (“Scarface”) Skorzeny. It was the year 1951, at Pallanza, on the shores of Lake Maggiore. There was nothing about Schellenberg to provoke any feelings one way or another. He had contributed to the British study of Bormann at a peculiar stage in his career; and now he was eager to prove that he had never served Hitler, only Germany. He offered more of his personal impressions of Bormann; and these, too, were much the same as the information filtered through Anglo-German contacts in the Iberian peninsula during the war.

  “I studied Bormann’s technique with Hitler and realized he controlled the Führer. He did this by making himself indispensable. This was long before the war, mark you, and I remember thinking I would refuse to make myself a slave to any man just to control him. But in those days I didn’t understand where Bormann was going….

  “You see, Bormann had a cast-iron memory and the constitution of an ox. He looked like an ox. He was stocky, with round and powerful shoulders and a short bullish neck. His head was pushed forward and cocked to one side all the time. He seemed like one of those women wrestlers in Berlin, moving sideways in the mud, waiting to trick an opponent. Shifty eyes, always ready to cut you down. Very nimble for such a heavy man. Short, fat fingers like a certain kind of sausage you see hanging in bunches. The fingers were covered with black hair along the back. Women liked him, you know, because he had so much hair.

  “He remembered everything. He knew exactly what to say, and when to say it, but only in regard to Hitler. He was like a devoted and intelligent wife, removing from the Führer any responsibility for small daily worries. There was something funny in this relationship though, as if he also provided the Führer with a sense of physical strength. Hitler, you know, looked awful in bathing suits. Bormann was like a pig in a potato field, and in Germany this is not such a bad way to look. In my diaries, I wrote how Himmler made such a contrast—a stork in a lily pond.”

  SS Lieutenant General Schellenberg was a dapper little Nazi technocrat who was cut out of Bormann’s plans for survival because of his own secret contacts with Western intelligence and his attempts, while fighting was at its height, to bargain in neutral Sweden for his own life. He was absorbed into a British secret-service net and spent five postwar years in what had been a lunatic asylum outside London. This asylum provided the perfect cover for the long-term interrogation of such men.

  Schellenberg had made a permanent enemy of Gehlen when the latter was head of the Wehrmacht’s Fremde Heere Ost (Foreign Armies East) intelligence service, which specialized in Soviet affairs. Gehlen had played on Western fears of Communism, and overnight became the chief of his own organization, which spied for American intelligence. These were all posts Schellenberg thought he was better suited to fill; and in his jealous rage he disclosed what purported to be a conspiracy to make use of the Gehlen Org as a channel of escape for war criminals. Many of Gehlen’s agents, subsidized by Western intelligence funds, proved to be notorious Gestapo and SS killers. This piece of the puzzle is examined later.

  What Schellenberg gave me was a glimpse of the shape and personality of Martin Bormann when he was operating at his peak. The outline can be filled in with some of the detail of Bormann’s early years. A psychoanalytical report by Allied intelligence focused on his loss of his father at the age of four, and his sense after that of being unwanted within the family. He had been born on June 17, 1900, in the small Lower Saxony town of Halberstadt. His father was a trumpeter in a military band. The widow remarried, a banker, and the boy was conscripted as a cannoneer near the end of World War I. He never saw action.

  He joined the Society Against Presumptuousness of the Jewry after eight months’ military service and an even briefer postwar search for work. He found what he later called an estate-management job, having attached himself to a family of local landowners. There is no record of why the twenty-year-old youth became fired by anti-Semitism. A number of writers of the time were preaching a secular neo-Teutonic Aryanism. A Cistercian monk, Lanz von Liebenfals, as far back as 1900 had used the swastika as a symbol of his Order of the New Templars. The monk produced books and pamphlets which are said to have influenced Hitler, too: certainly, they met, and Liebenfals later took credit for some of Hit
ler’s proposals for a “final solution to the Jewish problem.”

  Bormann had a strong affinity to the peasantry, and this seems to have drawn him to the monk’s vision of a master race springing out of the good earth. “The race can only flourish on the land,” wrote Liebenfals. The Germans of pure Aryan blood would purify and strengthen themselves through direct contact with the soil. The Jews polluted the pure Aryan blood because they were alienated from this blood-and-iron influence. Therefore the Jews must be destroyed. He set forth the manner of liquidating the Jewish people in details so revolting that intellectuals could never take him seriously. Bormann did, and his actions later surpassed anything the monk conceived in flights of hate-ridden fantasy. What was manifest at the start of this century as a mad monk’s muddled and malevolent fiction became within thirty or forty years fearful reality. Other theorists were writing a pseudo-scientific version of mankind’s evolution—men like Richard Wagner, whom Hitler idolized. Bormann grew up in a society saturated in mysticism masquerading as a new order, a properly scientific view based upon Darwin’s revolutionary ideas of how man evolved from ape.

  The prospect of Germans proving to be a master race was attractive in those years of defeat. It became an obsession with Bormann, and, like any religion, it provided him with an excuse to pursue purely selfish ends. His love of money, his greed for power, were commented upon by Gerhard Rossbach in an interview many years later. Rossbach had led a Freikorps, a group of armed volunteers supported by the German Army, which had been restricted in the number of regular soldiers it could keep on the books by the Versailles Treaty. Bormann became treasurer of the group after it underwent several changes of name to evade the law. The mission of the Freikorps was to weed out weaklings said to have caused German sufferings. The groups were also used to fight Bolshevik forces on the eastern frontier. But the young German republican government also saw them as a threat to its own existence. They were declared illegal in 1920, but were more active than ever by 1923, when the French executed Leo Schlageter, a Freikorps soldier, for industrial sabotage. The incident took place in the industrial heart of Germany, which was under French and Belgian occupation. The German economy was falling apart. The execution brought to a climax all the feelings of resentment and frustrated nationalism.