The Bormann Brotherhood

by William Stevenson

  Their leaders were planning escape long before the end. Bormann called for another 6,000 boys aged fifteen years to be mobilized in February 1945 while the Grand Master of the Order of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, was secretly meeting Count Folke Bernadotte, of Sweden, in the attempt to save his own skin. Werner Naumann, the Nazi Secretary of State for Propaganda, made a speech in Munich praising a twelve-year-old “soldier” for his loyalty, while Naumann himself was actually in Munich to arrange to go underground.

  General Karl Wolff, head of German police and SS units in Italy, and others with bargaining power there were making deals with the Allied secret service in Switzerland for the capitulation of the German Army in Italy. “Wolff is a rabid SS follower of Himmler,” wrote Field Marshal Viscount Alanbrooke in his diary. “It just does not seem plausible.” But it was. Wolff sold out in return for assurance from Allen Dulles that he would not be tried for war crimes.

  “All German males in a house displaying the white flag will be shot!” was a decree issued while Himmler was trying to curry favor with the Allies by an offer to liberate death-camp prisoners. Bormann, while stuffing valuable official Third Reich papers into sealed bags, proclaimed: “Carry on the good fight, or die. Only scoundrels will leave their posts….”

  There was a variety of escape organizations. Those for SS members were organized with the help of German intelligence abroad; and SS leaders could travel pretty much as they pleased, being answerable to nobody. They could ship money and valuables by Lufthansa, the German airline, or by way of neutral cities like Madrid; and they had their own claims upon the cargo and passenger space in U-boats and shipping in general. The leader of India’s anti-British conspirators, S. Chandra Bose, had been brought to Germany by U-boat for talks with Hitler in 1943, at the request of Schellenberg, acting in concert with Himmler. Japanese Rear Admiral Iso Kojima traveled to Germany by U-boat in 1944 and returned with passengers selected by SS Major General Wilhelm Mohnke and a quantity of gold bullion.

  The SS were the chief target, or so they suspected, of Allied revenge. They were also the natural channel for passing along to future generations the Nazi mystique. Bormann had kept a record of Hitler’s secret speech to the officers’ class of 1939, in which the Führer spoke of a development extending over another hundred years, at the end of which, by careful breeding, an elite would exist to rule the world. “Those who see in National Socialism nothing more than a political movement know scarcely anything of it,” he said on another occasion. “It is more even than a religion: it is the will to create man anew.”

  Because the inner workings of this secret society were hidden from the public eye, the SS had a reputation for the mysterious, the sinister, and the incomprehensible, which gave freedom to provide for its own survival.

  Bormann was perfectly in tune with the double-mindedness of the SS empire. Fine phrases concealed the behavior of gangsters. Citizens were bullied into actions that were below the dignity or beyond the courage of an SS man. There were 45,000 Gestapo watchdogs to see that orders were obeyed in the streets; 65,000 agents who looked for enemies within the state; 2,800,000 regular police led by senior SS commanders. There were 40,000 guards to terrorize inmates of twenty major concentration camps and 160 slave-labor camps. The Armed, or Waffen, SS had 950,000 in uniform at one time. Another 100,000 SS security-service informers made sure that every German displayed in word and deed (thoughts were more elusive) unquestioning loyalty. To prevent any secrets leaking to the public, no SS man could go to an ordinary court of law.

  But Bormann had his own power to counterbalance Himmler’s empire. He had created this immense and secret power within the party since he took control of the central administrative machinery and the treasury. The barons and liegemen of the Third Reich were his party functionaries. They formed a pyramid, with several hundred thousand block leaders at the base and the forty-one Gauleiter at the top. The Führer’s mystical powers flowed down to them through Bormann, and nobody else. These party functionaries would continue to follow his directions: they were cogs in the administrative machine, and he had always kept them well oiled.

  Moreover, he had already browbeaten those senior military figures who might be helpful, and others, such as Göring, he could override. Foreign intelligence networks were at his disposal, for he need only get the Führer’s approval to make arrangements that would benefit himself.

  Yet the secret power residing in the SS was necessary to Bormann’s personal plans. After Hitler’s defeat at Stalingrad foreshadowed the end of Nazi Germany, his most eager allies were the SS formations. They knew already that the Allies considered the SS to be a criminal organization. Himmler, isolated in his own world of self-delusion, thought he could negotiate with the Allies for his safety, using methods that seemed normal after a lifetime within the SS structure. He would barter, use blackmail, appeal to emotions, evoke the specter of Bolshevism. He would buy his freedom with the lives of condemned Jews, perhaps; or establish a working relationship with General Dwight Eisenhower, whom he seems to have regarded as purely a Junker-type general (even the name had, to his ear, an East Prussian timbre). Others, from Kaltenbrunner down, had heard the warnings of what would be done at war’s end to punish them. The Moscow Declaration signed by Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin vowed to pursue the guilty “to the furthest corners of the earth.”

  Bormann’s most willing helpers, and the most ingenious, were clearly to be found in the SS, which included 200,000 foreigners. These were the SS men who could provide temporary refuge in their own homes in Austria, Belgium, and, most useful of all (because of proximity to neutral Sweden), Denmark. Most SS men were terrified of exposure. They had no need to wait for the Allied judgment at Nuremberg: “The SS was used for purposes which were criminal, involving the persecution and extermination of the Jews, brutalities and killings in the concentration camps … slave-labor programs and the maltreatment and murder of prisoners of war.” The SS had liquidated 2,500,000 Poles, 520,000 gypsies, 473,000 Russian prisoners, 4 to 5 million Jews. Another 100,000 “incurables” had been gassed under the “euthanasia” program. Thus more than a million men formed an “army of outlaws,” and their racial fanaticism was not likely to be changed overnight. The most devout among them, from Bormann’s viewpoint, were likely to be the most reliable.

  * Fleischhacker did not change his name after the war, as most of his colleagues did, and was lecturing on biology almost thirty years later in Frankfurt.

  CHAPTER 8

  “The youth of a people of eighty millions has bled to death on the battlefields of Europe while you enriched yourself, feasted, robbed estates, swindled and oppressed the people. Our young officers have taken the field with a faith and idealism unique in the history of the world. By the hundred thousands they have gone to their death. But for what? For the German Fatherland, for our greatness and future? No. They died for you, for your life of luxury and your thirst for power.”

  General Wilhelm Burgdorf sprawled across a bench in front of the most powerful man in Nazi Germany: Martin Bormann. The time was 4:30 A.M. on April 28, 1945. The place: a bunker under the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. Both men had been drinking all night Between them and the world outside were sixteen feet of concrete topped by six feet of solid earth. When bombs exploded, the bunker quivered as the shock waves were transmitted through the sandy subsoil of the city.

  Nobody had dared talk to Bormann in such terms. Not even Adolf Hitler, asleep in another of the bunker’s eighteen tomblike rooms.

  “My dear fellow,” said Bormann after a pause, “you don’t have to be personal about it.”

  This odd exchange was recorded later, in a book, by a young military aide, Captain Gerhard Boldt. He was astonished. Bormann never drank when Hitler was around. And as for General Burgdorf, he had deserted the traditional officer caste to become the kind of rabid Nazi who normally fawned upon Bormann, the Führer’s alter ego.

  Two days later Hitler was dead and the way clear for Bormann to b
ecome legally the Führer of a Fourth Reich. The proper documents had been drawn up. He had reached the climax of a long climb through the central core of power. While others, no less ambitious, fought for positions of eminence, Bormann stayed with the hard and unobtrusive tasks at the heart of the whole machine: the party. He had what he needed most: responsibility as Party Minister for the future of Nazism. He had volumes of notes on which to build the faith; but more to the point, he had the duly witnessed statement of the last German Emperor that he was the successor to the throne. He could afford to smile at a drunken general.

  Burgdorf in his maudlin state had talked of some higher ideal. This same Burgdorf gave Rommel the poison with which he killed himself, on orders conveyed by Bormann after the July 1944 plot to kill Hitler. Idealism had a different meaning in Bormann’s lexicon. While Hitler fussed over the smallest detail of conquest and extermination, Bormann made himself the richest individual in the land, Göring notwithstanding. He did this for the sake of the movement, beginning in 1933 when Germans stormed the new ruling party with sycophantic schemes to make themselves and the new bosses rich. They came to sell the franchise for “Heil Hitler!” stickers, Christmas trees bent to resemble swastikas, or soap carved into busts of Hitler. They were always met by an unsmiling Bormann, with his fat palm turned up to receive this manna.

  Now he was saving for a new Reich. He had decided that the first empire must be consumed by fire to be rid of a leader now found unworthy. This, at any rate, was how he presented himself to Captain Boldt. The young veteran from the Russian front wrote later how Bormann said: “We who have stayed here and kept faith with our Führer, we shall when this fight is victoriously ended be invested with high rank in the state and shall have huge estates.”

  He had trucked out of Berlin a great quantity of papers recording the history of the dying Third Reich. He had also sent some loose change to Mrs. Bormann and the children, hiding in the Alpine Fortress: 2,200 gold coins worth at that time roughly the price of Monaco. The last documents had been squirreled away into his underground office, a cold gray tomb whose cement walls sweated at night.

  Someone shrewder than Boldt was watching these preparations. Gestapo Müller worked quietly in a street nearby. He had heard reports of Burgdorfs outburst, and within hours had left on a mission of his own.

  There were no great difficulties in moving about Berlin. The defenses consisted of two understrength Wehrmacht divisions and what was left of the SS volunteer division Nordland, to which was attached a French battalion whose men fought one action within a few blocks of the Reich Chancellery. There was a separate command under Mohnke, who was later hunted for a massacre of Canadian prisoners, and it was to Mohnke that Müller made his way. Neither of them was seen after the burning of Hitler’s corpse.

  Later, a check on Müller’s activities prior to his disappearance showed that he helped Bormann store documents and valuables, and held long talks with the mistress of the hulking Kaltenbrunner, who shared with Eichmann certain hopes for the future. The lady’s name was Countess Gisela von Westrop, and she had been gone from Berlin a long while by the time the facts were known. Some said she fled to Switzerland or the Alpine Fortress.

  It occurred to more than one observer in the preceding months that Bormann seemed to be shipping an unusual quantity of personal effects to his “Beloved Mommy,” at Berchtesgaden. But it was a time when even the weightiest dignitaries asked no questions, not wishing to know about the deals being made, for example, with the advancing Allied forces.

  Goebbels had a shrewd notion of treachery afoot. Hitler had married his mistress, Eva Braun, in a macabre ceremony before killing her and himself. Bormann had ordered the necessary gasoline, once more anticipating the Führer’s wishes. After the suicide, he had carried Eva outside to burn her corpse, and Goebbels was shocked. The dead girl was in the arms of a man she had always regarded with fear and loathing. Goebbels himself poisoned his six children and then, with his wife, Magda, waited for an SS orderly to shoot them both dead. “I do not intend,” he had said, “to run around the world like an eternal refugee.”

  Bormann did intend to travel. He donned the uniform of an SS major general, his honorary rank, and crammed some papers into a leather topcoat, including Hitler’s last will and testament, of which he was executor. This blamed “international Jewry” for everything.

  He left the Führer’s bunker on the night of May 1, 1945. By then, the Russians had learned of Hitler’s presence in Berlin. They lobbed shells into the Reich Chancellery grounds but they seemed to be in no hurry. There was opposition from the improvised army of sailors, Hitler Youths, and aged home guards, stiffened by SS troops. There was no resistance from the bombastic Burgdorf; that General was shot dead by an unknown hand.

  Hitler’s former adjutant, and brother of Martin Bormann, Albert, waited in a wooden cuckoo-clock chalet near the Führer’s bomb-scarred retreat eighty miles southeast of Munich, in the Alpine Fortress, where SS and fanatical young Werewolves were advertised as ready to wage guerrilla war. Nothing stirred. The story of a secret resistance in the mountains extending from Eagle’s Nest to the borders of Austria, Switzerland, and northern Italy was a propaganda operation that delayed Allied entry into Berlin, 320 miles to the north. If all went according to plan, Martin had won the extra time he needed to gather up documents that would revive their fortunes.

  Unknown even to Hitler’s most intimate friends, Martin Bormann already held legal possession to the Berchtesgaden estate. Registered in his name was a complex of eighty-nine buildings worth a considerable fortune. Furthermore, he was the properly registered owner of Hitler’s birthplace, the house of Hitler’s parents, and all the properties Hitler had given, so he thought, to Eva Braun and other favorites.

  The “gold-rush town” atmosphere Bormann had created around Berchtesgaden was obliterated by Allied bombing a week earlier. The wooden chalet where Hitler had retreated like a bogus peasant, with its cushions embroidered with swastikas by adoring ladies, was destroyed. So was the mansion on the mountaintop, likened to a stranded steamship by the same critics who resented Bormann’s construction projects all through the valley.

  Plodding toward what remained of Eagle’s Nest, his head full of plans to recover that glory, went Dr. Werner Naumann, the Nazi propagandist, who eight years later was accused of conspiring to restore the Nazi regime. His purpose was to get in contact with those who wanted to escape abroad: SS officers, Gauleiter, and bureaucrats sharing the spirit of brotherhood with Bormann. He was also bringing Albert Bormann the glad tidings that brother Martin was on his way.

  Ernst Kaltenbrunner was heading in the same direction, disguised as an International Red Cross doctor, if disguise was possible for a man nearly seven feet tall with a face slashed with scars. He knew of plans to use escape routes through the Alps, but he was not sure if his old friend Martin Bormann could help. He had a rendezvous with Adolf Eichmann, the bureaucrat who took the view that the subhuman breeds should be exterminated.

  His fellow Austrian Otto Skorzeny had already gone to earth in the region. Earlier, when Kaltenbrunner had been asked what to do about syphilitic prostitutes, he had said (with all the majesty of the law behind him as Heydrich’s successor): “Bury them.” It had been Skorzeny’s task to obey the order. Now he was burying SS documents instead.

  General Reinhard Gehlen, in this same part of Bavaria, was also burying documents. His were the German intelligence files on Russia, which he later sold to the Americans for more than mere money.

  Hitler’s ghost would have found the situation not altogether discouraging. The torch might yet be passed on. All his thoughts were preserved in the voluminous files kept by Martin Bormann. The last leader of the Hitler Youth might be the first of a new era: Artur Axmann had also escaped from Berlin and was heading toward the mountain retreat. So was Bormann’s personal assistant, SS Colonel Wilhelm Zander, carrying a trunkload of documents from the party chancellery, which he concealed at a lake forty mil
es south of Munich and somewhat short of the great assembly area around Berchtesgaden.

  At the other end of Germany, far to the north, near the biggest U-boat yards, test pilot Hanna Reitsch was reporting events to a bewildered Grand Admiral, Karl Doenitz, who had made neither head nor tail of the confusing cables sent him by Bormann. Her report made several things clear. Until the very end, Bormann was functioning in a conspiratorial role. He had delayed the dispatch of messages, he had distorted the meaning of Göring’s distress signals from the Alpine Fortress, and he had continued as if there was a future for a Nazi government in which he would remain supreme. He had destroyed his last two rivals, Himmler and Göring, in the eyes of the Führer even during the preparations for Hitler’s suicide. Hanna Reitsch had been ordered by Hitler to make sure “a traitor does not succeed me,” and by that he had meant Himmler. She had flown out of Berlin in a small Arado 96 training plane, with Russians firing from all sides.

  She ran into Himmler as she left Doenitz’s command post, and demanded point-blank to know if he had been in contact with the enemy offering proposals for peace without the Führer’s orders. Himmler agreed that he had. Hanna Reitsch said: “You betrayed your Führer and your people in the very darkest hour? High treason, Herr Reichsführer!”