A SHATTERING CHRONICLE!
Based upon independent investigation, numerous exclusive interviews and recently declassified documents revealing in their implications.
THE BORMANN BROTHERHOOD
William Stevenson, holder of the Canadian National Press Award, has covered every major conflict since Korea. He is the author of seven books, writer of television documentaries and possibly the world’s most traveled journalist. It was in the course of these travels that he encountered the elusive pieces of the Nazi puzzle—now brilliantly and convincingly joined in this timely and important book.
Copyright © 1973 by William Stevenson
First Skyhorse edition © 2019
Originally published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1973.
Published by Bantam Books in 1974.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
Cover design by Rain Saukas
Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-2916-2
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-2919-3
Printed in the United States o f America
For
INTREPID
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND
A NOTE ON SOURCES
FOREWORD TO THE SKYHORSE EDITION
BY DICK RUSSELL
PART ONE
THE PUZZLE
PART TWO
THE PIECES
PART THREE
THE CONDEMNED
INDEX
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND A NOTE ON SOURCES
Martin Bormann did all he could to prevent information about himself from reaching his enemies. War criminals sank into a similar anonymity. Their postwar movements were followed by Allied joint intelligence teams, and their findings, particularly in the case of Bormann, became a primary source of information. Some of this material is available in the National Archives, Washington, D.C., and is classified as “privileged.” Similar material was declassified by the British in 1972 and can be traced through the Public Record Office. However, the hunt for Bormann and his Nazi brothers continued into the period still covered by countries’ various official secrecy acts. A report involving espionage and secret-police operations is bedeviled by difficulties of this sort. Some sources cannot be plainly identified; some informants risk the vengeance of Nazi self-protection gangs.
I have mentioned in the text those authorities who can be identified; I am, of course, most grateful for their help. Listed here are some of the individuals to whom I am also indebted. I have added the names of those libraries from which came most of my background information and many of my leads. The mention of film libraries as well may seem a trifle eccentric. In the case of an elusive personality like Bormann, I found a new method in use among investigative agencies utilizing old newsreels. These conveyed in an uncanny fashion the man’s true dimensions. I would like to thank the film archivists who helped catch Bormann flitting through old and scratched film. He was examined frame by frame until we became familiar with small gestures and other mannerisms which he would have difficulty changing.
It is the practice in any historical survey of this kind to support certain assertions with detailed references to the writer’s authorities. I have quoted from documents which at the time they were written were secret and confidential. Time changed their grading. To avoid embarrassment, however, I have not referred to documents that are not yet open to public inspection in the United States and Britain, although I have seen parallel documents in European archives, where their authenticity is beyond doubt.
In the case of individual accounts, Thucydides said it all when he commented upon the difficulty of chronicling the Peloponnesian War. The stories of battle commanders did not tally with the facts. General impressions were misleading. Eyewitnesses had to be double-checked because “many suffered either from partiality for one side or the other or else from imperfect memories.” So far as I have been able, I have taken into account here the imperfections and fallibilities of human memory. Most direct quotations come from transcripts of tape recordings or from shorthand notes.
The full verbatim account of the Nuremberg trials provided much information on Bormann and those who escaped through his foresight. Rather than refer to the many sources now available, which would tend to bewilder anyone pursuing this investigation further, I suggest consulting the twenty-three volumes of reports on the trials published by Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. It also confuses the issue to refer to the numbered Nuremberg trials documents, because not all were put in evidence; and of those put in evidence, not all were accepted by the court; but a tendency exists to regard any such documents as established evidence.
The long bibliographies that were a feature of books on the Nazi period tend nowadays to overlap to such an extent that it seemed more practical to refer to recent publications covering most of the existing literature. The opening of British Foreign Office files covering the war years and the relaxation of secrecy restrictions on certain Allied intelligence operations have also made clear inconsistencies and contradictions in earlier reports. This has been particularly true of Bormann himself, whose monstrous influence has become apparent only in more recent times.
The help given to me varied, naturally, because some individuals and libraries had more material to offer than others. Lord Russell of Liverpool, who was legal adviser to the British Commander in Chief in occupied Germany in the early postwar years, does deserve special mention because he was for a long time a voice crying in the wilderness. His experiences during the war-crimes trials led him to write The Scourge of the Swastika, and by the end of the 1960’s he was disturbed enough to obtain the full text of the neo-Nazi National Democratic party manifesto and to gather the records of Nazi war criminals who, by one device or another, had cheated justice.
The late chief of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, General William J. Donovan, left personal notes, which some of his friends and former agents have been kind enough to let me see, believing that he would have wanted this. The wartime chiefs of American and British secret agencies contributed personal accounts that had a bearing on the preparations for escape undertaken by thousands of leading Nazi figures in the midst of Germany’s military campaigns.
Some German sources might prefer not to be acknowledged. I gained useful insight into the mentality of Hitler’s military commanders from a book published in 1941 by a general staff officer of the First Panzer Division, called Tanks Between Warsaw and the Atlantic. The author, twenty-five years later, became Supreme Commander of all NATO forces in Europe. He was General Count von Kielmansegg. The memoirs of other German personalities have been consulted, but with reservations. And it is important to note that East Germany’s own use of former military commanders under Hitler is still a closed book. I have restricted myself to an account of events that, in the main, occurred in areas open to public scrutiny. One can
only hope that in time it will be possible to give a fuller report on how the Soviet Union also made its private arrangements with men guilty of crimes against humanity.
In thanking the individuals listed alphabetically below, I hope it will not be thought they were responsible for conclusions other than those directly quoted, nor that they have broken the long silence imposed by the various secrecy acts.
Professor Niels Bohr: He provided me with introductions to the Academy of Sciences of the Ukraine, USSR. Professor Bohr died, in 1962, dedicated to the belief that secrecy with regard to the escape of Nazi war criminals was an impediment to mankind’s progress. He had worked under Nazi rule in Copenhagen until August 1943, when, aware of Germany’s growing interest in his development of atomic energy, he escaped.
Colonel André Dewavrin: He parachuted twice into Nazi-occupied France on missions for the British secret service. He became expert in unconventional warfare and a source of up-to-date information on the movements of Nazi war criminals.
Alexander Foote: This Englishman, recruited into Soviet intelligence service, worked in Switzerland in association with the legendary “Lucy,” the Russian espionage expert with a direct line to the German high command. Foote kept a record of Nazi preparations in Switzerland for postwar financing of escape agencies, and before he died he delivered the details to British intelligence.
Welles Hangen: The National Broadcasting Company’s Far East bureau chief, who disappeared and was one of many American correspondents listed as missing in the wars of Indochina, was the New York Times correspondent in Moscow when we together tackled the Soviet bureaucracy on the question of Martin Bormann’s alleged service as a Russian agent.
Iser Harel: He is the former chief of Israel intelligence, the Shin Beth, or National Security Office, which controls Sheruth Modiin, the military intelligence department.
Richard Hughes: The doyen of Western correspondents in Asia, Far East expert for the Times of London and the Economist, he provided me with some little-known facts about the Soviet spy Richard Sorge. It was through his initiative while he was in Moscow that the British spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean were produced for the first time to confirm that they had indeed returned to their Soviet masters. Hughes is a veteran in investigative reporting, combining experience in police methods with a considerable knowledge of Nazi and Soviet affairs. His many years of active and concentrated interest in the travels of Nazi war criminals provided guidelines for this book.
Hermann Langbein: Secretary of the International Concentration Camp Committee, which documents and tries to secure the punishment of Nazi war criminals, he asked me in 1972 to publicize some of the grosser examples of prominent Germans in public life today whose trials have been delayed by various excuses; “Possibly one can still change the practice of German Law Courts which at the moment permit a defendant to simply choose a busy barrister who then keeps asking for postponements of these trials….”
Paul Leverkühn: The German military intelligence director of Mideast operations, he provided some details of how Nazi Mideast spy rings became ODESSA escape routes. He had been a close admirer of Admiral Canaris, his chief, less for that man’s reluctance to go to war with the West than for his bitter anti-Communist feelings. He defended German supreme headquarters senior commanders at their trials, including Field Marshal Fritz von Manstein, and in this role developed an undying hostility to Dr. Otto John, who exposed Manstein’s dishonesty.
General Leandro Sanchez Salazar: Formerly chief of the Mexican secret service, he guided me through many of the problems of dealing with police forces in Latin America.
Milton Shulman: Now of the London Evening Standard, he was a Toronto Star correspondent who, as a qualified barrister, interrogated senior German Army commanders on behalf of British military intelligence in the war’s aftermath. He had made himself expert on the German Army as a major in Canadian military intelligence.
Jacques Soustelle: French Governor-General in Algeria under De Gaulle, he worked for the Free French in Latin America against Nazi operations there during the war.
Südwestfunk, of Hans-Bredowstrasse, Baden-Baden, West Germany: A documentary by this company, broadcast in July 1972, drew public attention to the case of Dr. Josef Thümmler, the Gestapo chief of Katowice and President of the infamous Auschwitz Summary Court. The West German prosecutors declared themselves unable to assemble the material from Poland that would make a case. The producer of the documentary, Henning Roehl, then went to Poland and obtained the material documenting the alleged atrocities. Thümmler was pensioned off by his employers: Zeiss-Werken.
Bickham Sweet-Escott: Some of the frustrations of piecing together a puzzle of this nature were conveyed by Mr. Sweet-Escott, of Special Operations, who wrote in his book Baker Street Irregular that there were no real secrets, “least of all from the people who work in the huge wedding-cake skyscrapers which house the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs.” He cut through a great deal of the bureaucratic red tape with the observation that professional historians in their own parts of Europe had managed to re-create an account of events in spite of the inaccessibility of the official records kept by Anglo-American governments, “without whom there would have been no resistance to the Nazis.” An earlier book he wrote on British secret operations was based upon what published material then existed. The typescript was sent to the British War Office for clearance under the Official Secrets Act in late 1954. Half a year later, he was informed that the strongest objections were taken to the book and he would be liable for prosecution under the law if he went ahead and published. Eventually, after many arguments, and with the help of friends in high places, he was able to bring out a somewhat censored version. Such are the vagaries of military security.
Kurt Tank: One of Hitler’s weaponry experts, he first drew my attention to escape routes when I found him in India. Tank was an aircraft designer who worked in Cairo on the Egyptian-built He 300 fighter under the direction of “Herr Doktor Mahmoud.” Tank became controller of production in Bangalore, India, of the first Indian jet fighter, the Hindustan HF 24. It was in Bangalore that I talked with him about escape routes he had followed, first to Argentina.
Sir Robert Thompson: Chief of the British Advisory Mission in Vietnam and formerly director of counter-terrorist work in Malaya and Borneo, he provided expertise on escape and evasion techniques.
James Wei: Special adviser to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, formerly of Yenching University, and a keen historian, he kept records of Hitler’s military commanders who during the war made inquiries about future work and later came to Taiwan on arms missions. A man of many talents and great intellectual resources, he was director-general of the Republic of China information services and took an amateur interest that would put professional detectives to shame. His knowledge of Latin America and the movements of war criminals, through his country’s embassies and missions in that area, proved profound and accurate.
Vice-Admiral A. G. N. Wyatt: Hydrographer of the British Royal Navy, he charted U-boat movements at war’s end.
Marshal Georgi Zhukov: Russian suspicions about escaping Nazis were described by this Soviet military leader, who in World War II was in over-all command of Soviet forces in Germany when Stalin refused to stop investigating the possibility that even Hitler got away. He had studied in Berlin during Soviet-German military collaboration, 1923-33. He was kind enough to discuss the mystery surrounding the Berlin escapees and later, from Stalingrad, sent further notes, which were intended for his memoirs.
Archives were more accessible by 1973. Those given here are an indication of the immense amount of material available. Unfortunately, many documents only confirm the confusion among Nazi officials whose day-by-day accounts often contradict each other. Evidence given at trials has to be read with due regard for the defendants’ anxiety to please their captors. Military trials held by Yugoslav, Czech, Polish, Norwegian, Russian, and other tribunals nevertheless cast a fresh light on events because in some c
ases the verbatim reports have only now become available. The Russian documents were not printed except in brief excerpts, and so their contents have been obtained at second hand. The German trials of war criminals have been preserved in court copies of the charges and the summing-up speeches.
The phrase “Third Reich” is used here in the sense of Germany’s hopes and ambitions of that time for a Thousand-Year Reich. The National Socialist regime came to be called the “Greater German Empire” after the proclamation of the Third Reich in 1933. This confusion of terms sometimes misleads the student. Librarians usually file material under “Third Reich” in chronological order from 1933 to 1945, and the subsequent fate of believers in a thousand-year empire has to be pursued through cross references. A source of postwar information is, of course, the Central Office for the Elucidation of National Socialist Crimes at Ludwigsburg, West Germany.
The Ludwigsburg Office is to bring its activities to a close in 1980. Now, so long after the end of the war, as the Chief Prosecutor for that office has said, the chances of satisfactorily clearing up cases are steadily deteriorating. A comprehensive report on the prosecution and punishment of war criminals and of persons who have committed crimes against humanity was requested by the United Nations General Assembly in its resolution 2583 (XXIV) of December 15, 1969. This was answered in a statement by the Federal Republic of Germany on July 9, 1970, which showed that the West German authorities had sentenced twelve convicted war criminals to death and 6,215 to varying terms of imprisonment, which under German law can be shortened considerably on grounds of good behavior. The reader is referred to the Bonn statement, which sets forth the total figures and an explanation of the difficulty in pursuing investigations and securing convictions.
Two indispensable sources, the first of which is found in a few specialist libraries, were the ten volumes on Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression published by the U.S. Government Printing Office in 1946, and Mein Kampf. The U.S. Nazi party, in its monthly White Power and in the National Renaissance Bulletin, regularly advertises Mein Kampf as “the bible of National-Socialism.”
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