The Bormann Brotherhood

by William Stevenson

  Amnesty International, of New York and London, is an overworked but resourceful documentation center which has assembled material on fascist-type police methods in Latin America. For many reasons, not the least being the danger in which informants stand if identified by police agencies in their own countries, Amnesty does not publicly identify sources. It does keep a most careful watch over the credibility of those who seek help through its intervention. The organization is voluntary and relies upon the sense of obligation shared by leading legal authorities in those countries where the phrase “secret police” is still offensive. Much of the background to reports of Nazi war-criminal organizations has been assembled by Amnesty researchers, working sometimes in conditions of danger.

  The Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian councils, at Canning House, Belgrave Square, London, have the largest library in Europe specializing in Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin-American affairs, and work in close liaison with government institutions in the United Kingdom and abroad.

  The Central State Archives of the USSR contain relevent documents under Sovietskiye Organy Gosudarstviennoy Bezopasnost (Soviet Organ of State Security) and transcripts of trials before military tribunals of the USSR Supreme Court and the Supreme Court of the German Democratic Republic.

  Officials of the Supreme Court of the (East) German Democratic Republic made available transcripts of trials: and the editors of Neue Justiz in Leipzig helped in tracing Nazi documents recently assembled from places of hiding in East Germany.

  Documents surrendered to the American security forces in 1945 by General Gehlen were microfilmed, and copies are stored in the National Archives in Washington, D.C.

  The collection of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich includes summaries said to come from the original diaries of Admiral Canaris; the location of the originals is as yet unknown to the general public.

  The Institute of Jewish Affairs of London works in association with the World Jewish Congress to advance education in the field of human relationships, and its excellent team of researchers produces background papers on the causes of racial and religious stress.

  Military archives at Freiburg, in Breisgau (Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv), of the Federal Republic of Germany contain originals of records from Hitler’s supreme headquarters (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht).

  No serious work on the postwar history of Nazi war criminals can ignore the detailed case histories assembled by Simon Wiesenthal, of the Vienna Documentation Center.

  Visnews, the international film-news service of London, provided access to newsreels of the Hitler period in which Martin Bormann makes his rare appearances.

  The Wiener Library of London rendered invaluable service. There is no work of importance on the political science of the totalitarian era that is complete without reference to this unique center. Founded in Amsterdam in 1933 by Dr. Alfred Wiener, a refugee from Nazi persecution, the library was transferred to London in the long hot summer of 1939, a few weeks before Britain declared war on Hitler’s Germany; and it became virtually part of the British Ministry of Information, from which a large quantity of intelligence and secret operations derived their inspiration. The library contains among many thousands of documents some 5,000 files relating to the “final solution” as recorded in the papers of the German Foreign Office, the chancellery of the Nazi party, and local Gestapo offices.

  Other prime sources of information were the Archives of Radio Free Europe, in Munich; Partisan warfare papers in the Yugoslav State Secretariat for National Defense; Ernst Kaltenbrunner’s reports to Bormann for Hitler on the July 1944 plot; The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, Stanford University, Palo Alto, California; “Kontraobaveshtayna Slushba” (“Counterespionage Service”) in Volume 4 of Voyna Encyclopedia, published in Belgrade; National Research Council archives of the Canadian government in Ottawa; National Film Archives, Ottawa; U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence reviews from 1946: National Archives and Record Service of the U.S. General Services Administration, Washington, D.C.; Royal Canadian Mounted Police security-service archives, which include the report of the Royal Commission on the Canadian spy case involving Igor Gouzenko and the use of forged passports.

  The military museums of several nations yielded film and documents which helped bring into focus Bormann’s friends and enemies. These museums include that of the Yugoslav People’s Army in Belgrade, the Norwegian Museum of Resistance to the Nazi Occupiers in Oslo, Canadian Army Headquarters in Ottawa, and the Imperial War Museum in London, which contains perhaps the only surviving copies of film shot on Hitler’s movie camera by Bormann. Interfoto MTI of Budapest was able to turn up photographs of Bormann with Himmler taken shortly before the chief of secret-police groups was sent to command the Rhine and Vistula armies. There is an unmistakable gleam of joy in Bormann’s eye as he says farewell to his last enemy.

  Because several of the researchers on this project must remain anonymous for their own protection, others agreed with me that it would be unfair to name some and not all. This is an inadequate way of thanking all of them. Motivated by a strong sense of justice, they checked and double-checked my work. Any mistakes are my own. One who need not remain anonymous, although his old comrades in arms will remember him as INTREPID, is Sir William Stephenson, who made this journey through a terrible chapter in history possible.

  FOREWORD TO THE SKYHORSE EDITION

  By Dick Russell

  This was among the first books published by the prolific Canadian author William Stevenson, who died in 2013 at the age of eighty-nine. A World War II pilot for the British, Stevenson afterward became a foreign correspondent in Toronto with a wide range of intelligence sources—and published two bestsellers in the 1970s (A Man Called Intrepid and 90 Minutes at Entebbe). Of all his work, The Bormann Brotherhood (1973) remains his most intriguing, and the most relevant to today’s world.

  As Germany fell to the Allies, did Hitler’s righthand man escape from the legendary bunker—perhaps in a U-boat or across the Danish border—soon taking refuge in South America with full knowledge (and likely assistance) of US spymasters? Had Bormann’s plans for a Fourth Reich then come to secret fruition as he oversaw a vast trove of post-war Nazi wealth while residing for years in Argentina and eventually dying in Paraguay?

  These are among the major questions Stevenson addresses in a wide-ranging, fluidly-written scholarly investigation set against the backdrop of the Cold War, in which several other of Hitler’s chief lieutenants—including Reinhard Gehlen and Otto Skorzeny—played prominent roles in the subsequent American fight against the Soviet Union.

  Bormann reputedly took with him from Hitler’s bunker a thousand-plus pages of a manuscript titled “Notes for the Future.” As the fellow who kept the accounts for the Führer, and was himself the wealthiest man in Nazi Germany, he’d earlier managed to smuggle out millions in forged banknotes and gold toward financing groups in the Middle East and Latin America. And Stevenson, while tracking sources through a number of countries, leaves little doubt that Bormann’s future included liaisons with not only the CIA but the Vatican.

  The year before Stevenson’s book came out, a skeleton matching Bormann’s features had allegedly been dug up in Berlin. For years German prosecutors held onto the remains until finally, in 1998, scientists compared the DNA from a piece of the skull with a tissue sample donated by an eighty-three-year-old relative of Bormann’s. Maintaining that these were identical, German authorities declared a “case closed.”

  Not mentioned was evidence from Doppelgängers, a book published in 1995 by forensics expert Hugh Thomas, which describes the skull having been encased in a red clay type of earth not found in Germany but common to a locale in Paraguay—where Stevenson and others believe Bormann died, probably sometime in the early 1970s.

  Subsequent books have backed up Stevenson’s landmark research. In 1974, military historian Ladislas Farago published Aftermath: Martin Bormann and the Fourth Reich. His team of four distinguished international attorne
ys, after poring through previously-classified Argentinian documents, reached a unanimous conclusion that Bormann had escaped Europe with the help of the Allies.

  A similar determination came in counterintelligence expert Paul Manning’s 1981 book, Martin Bormann: Nazi in Exile. One banker quoted, regarding the 750 corporations established by Bormann in neutral countries, described his organization as “the world’s most important accumulation of money power under one control in history.”

  All this and more is detailed in The Bormann Brotherhood: foreign companies making a fortune on clandestine arms sales, the group courting political leaders in Cairo and Indonesia while working to foment American enmity against the USSR, protection received from Pope Pius XII, and Cold War intrigues surrounding double agent Kim Philby. While tracing the roots of the story to World War II, Stevenson personally interviewed Hitler’s onetime banker Hjalmar Schacht, Nazi General and later head of West German Intelligence Reinhard Gehlen, and counterspy Otto John.

  The Bormann mystery has never gone away. Since 2010, new evidence has surfaced from both eyewitnesses and archives in Argentina that the CIA was keeping tabs on Bormann as late as 1967 and the FBI was sending agents to follow his money trail well into the 1980s. Not a public word was ever sounded by either agency.

  There is no small irony in the words Hitler once screamed to his photographer: “Whoever is against Bormann is against the state.”

  Did Martin Bormann end up an old man paddling a canoe along the silent banks of the Putamayo River? Perhaps. Or is his legacy something far larger and more sinister? Toward the end of his book, written forty-five years ago, William Stevenson offered what he called “a cautionary note to us and to our inheritors. The despicable forces loosed by the Third Reich are not expunged, although, like some virulent virus, they may have changed to other forms and be difficult to identify. They remain malignant and as potentially dangerous as before. If there is any value to the persistence of the Bormann puzzle, let it be to remind us of the darkest side of human nature that he and his brothers so monstrously exemplify.”

  PART ONE

  THE PUZZLE

  CHAPTER 1

  The man in London’s Festival Hall coffee shop said: “Nobody wants to believe I shot Bormann.”

  “Are you still certain it was he?”

  “Absolutely.”

  A waitress banged past with a tray of rattling mugs.

  “Things don’t change much, do they?” he said, glancing at the steaming urn. “Just like an army canteen.”

  He was a big man. I could imagine the lightweight Sten gun between those thick hands.

  “You mean you’re absolutely certain it was Martin Bormann?”

  “Do I look daft enough to say it was if it wasn’t?”

  “No.” I turned my head. The Thames glittered in the sunlight. Big red double-deck buses lumbered past London Bridge.

  “I mean, I’ve nothing to gain.”

  Nobody ever had. Thirty times some honest individual had come forward with enough evidence to warrant an investigation. Thirty different investigations leading nowhere.

  “You see,” he said, “the real truth is, they don’t want to find him.”

  “They?”

  “The lot back in power in West Germany. The letter I got from the State Attorney’s office was written by an ex-Nazi. Found his name in the Brown Book.”

  “More coffee, luv?” asked the waitress, in that aggrieved voice of the Cockney who thinks you’ve had more than your tuppence’s worth already.

  “Yes,” the large man said obstinately. “We do want more coffee.”

  “Orl right. Keep yer shirt on!” She disappeared, a teaspoon hanging on a string from her waist like a jailer’s key.

  It was eleven o’clock on the morning of June 19, 1972, and I was talking to Ronald Gray, former member of the British Army Intelligence Corps; trained gunman with the 33rd Armoured Brigade; mentioned in American dispatches for his counterintelligence work in Korea; Identity Card No. 001237, signed by U.S. General James Van Fleet; later served with Her Majesty’s Admiralty Criminal Investigation Department; now living at West Wickham in Kent and a regular traveler to Germany. I had done my homework.

  “What’s the Brown Book?”

  “A secret Russian book. Lists all the names of the Bonzen, the Nazi party bigwigs, Gestapo, SS, what war crimes they committed, and how they’re back in every key job in West Germany today.”

  “It’s not secret, this book. You can buy all four hundred pages in East Berlin.”

  “Oh.” He looked down at his clasped hands. “Well, it was secret when I saw it.”

  A stubborn man. Well dressed, without show. Conservative tie. Shoes polished with the dedication of a good soldier. When I came into the coffee shop, at the time he had designated, he was nowhere to be seen. I had never met him before and had no idea whom to look for. I slid into a booth by the windows and suddenly he was there. A fast man on his feet but slow and stubborn if he felt like it.

  It could have been just another story. Except that Gray told it differently, not knowing that his observations were a curious confirmation of reports he could not possibly have seen. He was certain he had shot Bormann. I guessed that he was intended to believe he had witnessed the death of Adolf Hitler’s puppetmaster. There had been a gun battle and then, in the light of a winter’s moon, he thought he had seen Bormann’s body weighted and dropped into Flensborg Fjord.

  The town of Flensburg is in the northernmost tip of Germany. Escaping criminals find it fairly easy to cross from there into Denmark and then to proceed across the narrow strait between Copenhagen and Malmö, in southern Sweden. It is also in that most authoritarian of all states, Schleswig-Holstein, full of gloomy castles and dark memories. Flensburg was the last refuge of the last government of the Third Reich under the “weekend Führer,” Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz. It was the last name on the map before German armies, pouring in in panic from the Russians, fell into the fjord. It was the northern retreat for escaping Nazis; an alternative exit to the Alpine Fortress, which covered the mountains that sprawled over three frontiers to the south.

  In March 1946, when the picket fences of Germany were plastered with scraps of paper informing homeless citizens that this or that relative was in such a camp or such a hospital, Ronald Gray crossed the frontier near Flensburg on a regular British Army courier route. In his pocket he carried photographs of major Nazis wanted on charges of war crimes. The chief among these was Martin Bormann.

  Gray recalled that in those days nobody knew what had happened to Bormann. He was regarded as the evil genius. It was many years before he was recognized as a conspirator of even more grotesque size. He was hated by Hitler’s henchmen. He was also feared by them. He had been seen escaping from the Führer’s bunker in Berlin after the suicides of Hitler and of Bormann’s remaining enemy, Joseph Goebbels. Some thought Bormann had, all along, worked for Stalin. He had been the secret promoter, they said, of every move that guaranteed a Russian victory, so that, in the guise of rolling back the German armies, Stalin had seized half of Europe.

  Others among Gray’s colleagues said Bormann was in Washington quietly dictating an account of how a civilized nation had gone berserk.

  The Russians suspected that Bormann had always been working for the British. The British had a sinking feeling that they had depth-charged (accidentally, of course) a German submarine bearing Bormann to his Brotherhood abroad.

  Gray was not bothered in those days by misgivings of this kind. He knew that among Flensburg’s attractions was the presence of U-boats whose commanders subscribed to Plan Regenbogen (Rainbow), which called for scuttling their vessels rather than surrendering—a plan that would, however, cover the escape of some. He knew, too, that Bormann was aware of the illegal traffic between these coastal waters and Sweden during the war; the scientists vital to developing Germany’s atomic bomb had been among those who slipped out in that fashion while the Nazis still controlled Fortress Europe.
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  Gray was trailing his coat in the hope of drawing out any members of the escape organizations, which the Nazis, ironically, based upon Allied spy routes. Allied soldiers with multiple re-entry passes had been approached with offers of money to help escapees. Gray traveled three times a week past British military police, German border guards, and Danish customs men. His face was familiar—familiar enough that an agent for the SS and Gestapo “welfare organizations” might try to bribe him.

  At the end of Europe’s worst winter, Gray was approached by a young German girl, Ursula Schmidt. She had been asked to make contact with him, she said, by a group of refugees in a wooden barracks at Flensburg. For 30,000 Danish kroner, about $10,000, they wanted him to take someone across the border. Gray agreed. He told me that he borrowed the uniform of Captain Ronald Grundy to disguise the fugitive. On the night of the escape, he drove in a British Army truck to the Flensburg rendezvous and collected a thickset man muffled in castoff clothing.

  The man struggled into Grundy’s uniform jacket, pulled the peaked cap over his eyes, and told Gray to drive on. It was nearly midnight. The border guards recognized Gray and the truck and waved them through. Gray drove another three miles. His passenger ordered him to stop. He got out and stuck black tape in a star over the nearside headlight. At that moment, said Gray, he recognized Bormann. He was, he told me, frightened. And added, revealingly: “I saw this wasn’t going to be one of those thank-you-and-good-by jobs. I was supposed to be paid on delivery. I was going to be lucky to get away alive.”

  The passenger made Gray drive through the Danish village of Rinkenaes, and then ordered him to stop. His manner was curt now. To their left ran a railroad. On the right glimmered the waters of Flensborg Fjord. A flashlight winked in the light mist, reflecting on a thin layer of ice. Gray’s client got out onto the road, took off the British jacket and cap, and suddenly broke into a run.