Other personalities filled the scene, but Bormann’s genius lay in his perception of what really mattered in a bureaucracy. Hermann Göring could occupy himself with air-force matters; Goebbels and Ribbentrop and Schacht and Speer and a host of specialists could plunge into great adventures (which is how they saw the testing of the Nazi war machine in the Spanish Civil War and the annexation of Austria, the planning of the final Arch of Triumph and the logistics of reducing the Slavs to slaves). Bormann knew he must remain at the center of the spiraling interests of Hitler’s henchmen. He showed contempt for the symbols of power, which diverted his competitors.
Himmler must have guessed what was happening. But there was little time to consider these things. Much later, he said in some bewilderment to Walter Schellenberg, the spy chief, who had become his personal adviser: “Again and again, I have to come to terms with Bormann although it’s my duty really to get him out. The Führer has become so accustomed to Bormann, it’s very difficult to lessen his influence.”
The number-two man was always thought to be Field Marshal Hermann Göring. He testified at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, however, that after Deputy Führer Hess went, Bormann exerted the real influence: “The most decisive influence during the war … disastrously so, was that of Herr Bormann.”
Göring was asked: “Do you think the Führer is dead?”
He replied: “Absolutely. No doubt about it.”
“What about Bormann?”
“I hope he is frying in hell!” replied Göring.
His widow was just as vigorous in her denunciation twenty-six years later. Emmy Göring, at her modest home, No. 16 on the eminently respectable Buerclein-strasse in Munich, quoted the Field Marshal on the eve of his suicide: “Bormann destroyed each one of us in turn. He got Heydrich assassinated and he maneuvered Himmler into an impossibly ridiculous situation. With the Führer dying, he got rid of Goebbels and had me arrested as a traitor. He got the Deputy Führer to fly to England because Hess was the only real obstacle.”
The flight was made on the night of May 10, 1941. Hess was in his late forties. He was born in Egypt, in 1894, and his early boyhood was spent on the banks of the Nile. He was a brooding figure, whose thoughts about purity of race became part of Mein Kampf, much of which he wrote at Hitler’s dictation when they were both in prison. When he planned his flight, Germany was gorged with victories in Europe and was preparing for the invasion of Russia, which Hitler said would “make the world stand still.” A man with, theoretically, heavy party responsibilities, Hess knew the details of the impending attack on Russia, which was at that time the most ambitious military adventure in history. Yet he was able to practice flying a fighter plane for hours on end, over a prolonged period.
Obviously, his strange behavior could not pass without comment. His flight and the preparations for it should certainly have been known, in considerable detail, to Göring. The chief of the air force maintained always that Hess had received outside help for the hazardous journey. Hess told others that he wanted to keep his hand in as a pilot. But who told Hess to make the flight? He was a man who listened to the disembodied voices conjured up by his imagination, and for years he had studied Egyptian astrologers. At the same time, he was intensely practical. He had to arrange for the conversion of a Messerschmitt 110, a fighter that did not have the normal range he required. He had to provide the combat plane with an extra fuel tank for each wing tip and a third under the fuselage. He had to fly by his own navigation, without normal radio aids, without navigation lights, through savage skies filled with night fighters, for this was at the height of the Battle of Britain. Before this journey even began, he had to make long and careful preparations, which included thirty practice flights and the secret acquisition of maps and equipment.
About the only feature in this whole escapade that had not been meticulously planned was the role of the young Duke of Hamilton, Hess’s goal. It had been supposed by Hess that he could communicate directly with the King of England through the Duke, and negotiate a peace treaty that would release the Nazi war machine to concentrate on the Soviet Union. The Duke was hardly the man to play ball. He was flying a single-seat Hurricane converted for night fighting, and his job was to shoot down German aircraft attempting to fulfill Göring’s prediction that the Luftwaffe would wipe Britain from the map within another month. The Duke’s companions were suffering the highest casualty rate of any fighting service. And their particular assignment was the protection of Scotland, where Hess expected to be welcomed at the Duke’s hearthside.
It has been said that Hess was mad. There is no proof of this in conversations and letters of the time. None seem any more lunatic than what passed for social intercourse in Hitler’s circle. Later, Hess behaved less rationally, as might be expected of a man doomed to spend the rest of his life in solitary confinement.
Today, Hess is the sole occupant of cavernous Spandau Prison in Berlin, where he is watched by armed troops supplied in rotation by the Four Powers, entirely at Moscow’s insistence. It was Stalin’s recurrent nightmare that the Nazis might form a secret alliance with Western capitalism against the Soviets; and the flight of Hess was regarded by the Russians as having a far deeper significance than being merely a political maneuver by Bormann to place himself in power.
The maneuver was carried out with so little attention paid to the change in Bormann’s position that its significance was unnoticed by most of the Nazi chieftains themselves. It was signaled in terms of utmost discretion in a directive from Hitler:
“The former post of Deputy to the Führer will henceforth bear the title of Party Minister. It is directly subordinate to me. It will be directed as heretofore by Party Comrade Martin Bormann.”
The text was drafted by Bormann. The terms did not alert those enemies who might have stopped his progress if they had recognized that the peasant who seemed concerned only with serving his master was in reality manipulating him.
With Hess gone, his name struck from the party record by Bormann, the focus of power was clear. Hitler’s Deputy had made his office a center of party activity. As his successor, Bormann made it the party chancellery. And it was the party, his minions were reminded, that ordered the state. At the age of forty-one, Bormann had official power that gave him personal direction of the Nazi party, an instrument he had forged and used to bring Hitler to power. The Führer was busy playing the Supreme War Lord and admitted later that he lost sight of party affairs. The dramatic launching of Hess into the blue was a personal triumph for Bormann, who could now appoint or dismiss every party official, advance or ruin careers in any organ of government or in the political and military ranks, and who now answered only to Hitler.
His glee at the removal of his rival loomed larger in his mind than the enlargement of the war. This was evident in his letters and notes of the period. To one of his next victims, Himmler, he wrote: “Hess wanted to shine because he suffered from an inferiority complex. In the opinion of the Führer these are in fact the real causes. Only now has it become known that R H has been treated again and again for impotence even at the time his son was produced. Before himself, before his wife and before the party and the people, R H believed that by this undertaking he could prove his virility.”
This technique of quoting the Führer to support his own positions would continue until Hitler’s own usefulness had ended. It was many more years before the method was identified. Nazi business was conducted in secrecy, of course, and after the war there was simply too much documentation. Bormann’s small slips of paper sank to the bottom of the pile. Thus the view prevailed that Bormann depended upon the Führer and lost his own sense of identity when Hitler died. Everything he did, as pieced together from those harmless slips of paper and fitted into the larger pattern of Nazi affairs, proves the very opposite. Bormann used others until they became a nuisance or a threat. He used Rudolf Hess for “finger exercises,” exploiting the same kind of delusions that enveloped Hitler. The Messiah co
mplex of Hitler was clear in his identification with Saint Matthew as a voice crying in a wilderness; and himself as Saint John the Baptist carving a path for those to come. There were similar sicknesses in the mind of Rudolf Hess. These would have become evident during the years when Bormann worked with him.
Bormann’s skill in turning the weaknesses of others to good account is evident in the way Hess was led into his strange flight. The preparations and the aftermath show the ruthlessness, the crafty manipulation of others, the capacity to become part of another personality which would make it possible for Bormann to embrace the dogma of another faith without necessarily believing it. He needed to be rid of Hess. He played on the man’s credulity with regard to the British. More than anything, he exploited the man’s bizarre faith in soothsaying, old prophesies, and visionary revelations.
His instrument was a crackpot genius, Karl Haushofer, who was Professor of Geopolitics at Munich University when Rudolf Hess enrolled in 1920 as a student. Haushofer believed in premonitions and the influence of the soil upon a nation’s character. The Germans were the destined master race thwarted by the Jews. Germany would control Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals. Astrology would bring Germany and Japan together. Much of this crept into Mein Kampf.
Incredibly, Haushofer had been an army general in World War I and the German military attaché in Tokyo. His mysticism, and his sometimes shrewd guesses, had won him the attention of credulous Germans, including Hitler. When the next war came along, he pressed on anyone who would listen his theory that conflict with Britain was wrong for a number of mystical reasons. His influence on Hitler was exercised through Hess; and Schellenberg later testified that it was generally recognized that Hess should be stopped from communicating this mixed bag of ideas. (Hitler, if exposed to the prophesies of such men, listened with superstitious attention to such a degree that the British finally lured away and hired his personal astrologer, Louis de Wohl,* who worked under Allied secret-service instructions in New York from 1941. His job was to harmonize the predictions he wrote in a syndicated column with world events, and to slip in from time to time predictions of Hitler’s inevitable disaster. Another soothsayer, in Cairo, was bribed to put Hitler’s planet, Neptune, in the House of Death. It was hoped to drive Hitler, over a period of time, to suicide.)
Bormann, instead of cutting Haushofer off, diverted his visits into long private chats with Hess. When Hitler continued to prepare for war against Russia, Bormann saw to it that Haushofer concentrated on Hess. The Professor, guided by the stars, wrote to the Duke of Hamilton, whom he supposed to have some special influence with the King. The Duke never replied to the letter, sent through neutral channels, or took it seriously. Meanwhile, the Professor confided to Hess that he had had three dreams on three separate nights in which he saw the Deputy Führer piloting a plane and later walking in a great castle with tartan tapestries on the wall.
It cannot have taken the Deputy Führer long to get the message. He went first to discuss the whole idea with Hitler in October of 1940; Bormann’s brother Albert escorted him to Hitler’s presence. There followed an odd conversation in which Hitler resisted the suggestion that he put off the offensive against Russia until peace had been secured with Britain, in accordance with the Professor’s premonitions. In the months that followed, Albert kept Martin informed of the growing disparity between Hitler’s inspirations and the secondhand predictions from Hess.
Ilse Hess, the Deputy Führer’s wife, had a four-year-old boy who was unusually like Martin Bormann, although nothing was ever said about the matter. Rudolf had a reputation for homosexuality, and Bormann nailed the coffin more firmly with his theories of how Hess demonstrated his masculinity, which was not normal, Ilse was puzzled by the way Bormann seemed to promote the Professor’s ideas in private while deploring them in public. She said later that Bormann was a scheming careerist who had wormed his way into her husband’s affections—an interesting thought. At all events, there was remarkably little effort made to prevent Hess from practicing flying and from making relatively long flights for those days, each lasting two hours or more.
Hess made his flight, and was astonished when he was clapped into a British prison. There he talked rationally, if obsessively, to Beaverbrook about the coming conquest of the world by Russia. Otherwise, Beaverbrook reported to Churchill, the man was absolutely sane: “He may have unsound ideas about himself but he is not mad.”
Churchill cabled Roosevelt that there were no signs of insanity in the Deputy Führer, who seemed in good health. He then speculated on the new role of Martin Bormann. It was agreed that there was an intelligence gap that needed filling here: nobody knew enough about Bormann to make any kind of assessment. He was a cipher. Further talks with Hess only confirmed a deepening suspicion that Bormann had calculatingly led him into his strange mission.
Whatever Mrs. Hess might have said later about Bormann, she let him spend a great deal of time with her son, Wolf. They developed a strong and intimate friendship, and after the war, when Bormann had disappeared, a watch was kept on young Wolf Hess by Allied intelligence, as was done with the Bormann family.
Bormann’s savage action, after the mess was cleared up with Hitler’s statement that his Deputy suffered from hallucinations, was typical. Hess’s young adjutant, Captain Karlheinz Pintsch, who lived near the Hess household outside Munich, at Pullach, was invited to lunch with the Führer. Pintsch went, carrying a letter Hess had asked to have delivered to Hitler. Lunch was the usual Spartan affair, and afterward Hitler glanced at Bormann, whose brother Albert was already standing by the door. With a quick nod, Martin rose and told Pintsch he was under arrest. Two bodyguards crashed through the door and took him away. He was sent to the Russian front, where he was captured and tortured. Years later, when he finally returned, he described these events and said it was clear in retrospect that Bormann had wanted to silence him quickly, since he might have known too much about Bormann’s part in a conspiracy fatal to Hess.
In the aftermath, Mrs. Hess was evicted from her Berlin quarters on the third floor of Wilhelmstrasse 64. She was told to list all possessions that were in her husband’s name; and his house in Harthauserstrasse was confiscated. The blame for these actions was placed upon Bormann. Years later, police files showed that the orders were issued by Gestapo Müller.
When Beaverbrook reported to Stalin his impressions of the Hess peace mission, there was a long silence. The proposal that Nazi Germany should unite with Britain against Russia “really knocked him for six,” the press baron said later.
The Russians suspected that Bormann persuaded his nominal chief to make the flight; that Bormann was a British informer; that although the Hess mission failed, it put Bormann into direct contact with British intelligence; and that Bormann remained a British agent until the end of the war.
From that time onward, Gestapo Müller was never far from Bormann’s side. There was talk that Müller was “looking after Stalin’s interests,” a rather heavy-handed line of Germanic humor which referred to Müller’s police training in Russia. The gossip stopped with the abruptness of a strangled cough, and the Gestapo men responsible for these ill-advised “froth-blowing” jokes were victims of another piece of Nazi fun. They were sent to battle fronts from which it was unlikely they would return, under the Nazi term “zum Verheizen” the slang for “incineration.”
* Allied intelligence experts got into a tangle with just the police machinery. When Bormann escaped, there was a main office of Reich Security, under Heinrich Himmler, which covered security police, the Gestapo, the SD (Security Service) terrorist police, and subdivisions such as Adolf Eichmann’s Bureau IV A, 4b. There were more than one hundred Reich Security agencies, and Bormann knew them all, whereas it is doubtful if Hitler or anyone else was fully conversant with their activities.
* Major Waldemar Pabst died on May 7, 1970. The death notice in Die Welt described him as a Royal Prussian major, former Director of Rheinmetall-Borsig AG, and quoted from Reve
lations: “They may rest from their labors; and their works do follow them.” Pabst told the story of the murders only in 1962, when he wrote: “It was not easy for me to take the decision to have them done away with [but it was] absolutely tenable from the moral and theological viewpoint.”
* The Bormann-Vermerke was authorized by the Führer; its final form was to be corrected, approved, and preserved by the only reliable interpreter of Hitler’s thoughts, Martin Bormann.
* He was Hungarian and responded to the financial inducement conveyed through British agents. One of these, Ben Levy, a British playwright and Member of Parliament, had to climb the back stairs of a New York hotel to pay him each week in greenbacks.
CHAPTER 6
The stocky watchful figure moved onto the platform behind Hitler, then moved jerkily to join a cluster of jack-booted generals.
“Okay, run it in reverse.”
The girl in the London archives pressed a button, and the figures flickered on the screen again.
“Now roll both projectors.”
On another screen appeared an old man walking along a jungle path.
We watched the two films projected side by side: one grainy and scratched, the other in vivid color. One showed Bormann at a Nazi rally. The other showed a German farmer on the banks of a tributary to the Amazon. Both figures betrayed similarities of gesture. By running the film frame by frame, it was almost possible to synchronize the movements of a pudgy man aged forty-one and a leathery peasant aged seventy-two. Uncanny.
“You’re on to something”, said Norman Clark, foreign manager of the big London news-film agency Visnews. He had been my foreign editor on the liberal News Chronicle. Now we stood in the vaults where the agency stored millions of feet of rare wartime film. He left me as the film editor wrestled with another of the 35-mm. cans. It was going to take hours to hunt through this film rescued long after the war from hiding places in the Bavarian Alps.* Above us, roses bloomed in the back yards of semidetached houses.
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