The Bormann Brotherhood

by William Stevenson

  On the night of May 23, when Himmler was crunching on the cyanide capsule, the wife of Martin Bormann was being questioned in a remote area of the Austrian Tyrol bordering the Italian city of Bolzano, where she had been tracked down. Earlier she had taken another name and escaped to this spot with the children in a bus disguised as a large ambulance. A few miles away, Captain John C. L. Schwarzwalder, of the 307th, listened solemnly to the small German who said: “I am a general and chief of the intelligence department of the high command. I have information of the highest importance for your Supreme Commander….” To which the young American replied: “You were a general—you were, sir.” Reinhard Gehlen gave a stiff nod. He would be a general again if he could drive a bargain for fifty-two huge containers he had buried in an area around the small chalet where he had been hiding at Misery Meadow. Inside the containers were the details of his networks of secret agents still active behind Russian lines—bands of the White Russian Army of Liberation still operating with other armed groups of Ukrainian nationalists—and priceless dossiers of military, economic, industrial, and political intelligence on the Soviet Union itself.

  All SS files had been buried or burned. The Russians, by the time they began hunting, were prevented from seeing photostats of German Army and police files for the good reason that some of those names were on fresh lists of Western hirelings.

  Bormann’s favorite from the old days, Rudolf Höss, of Auschwitz, was also trapped in time. Of the SS leaders who failed to escape, the majority in Western hands were treated with leniency. Only about 50,000 were estimated to have had direct involvement in fearful crimes. Of the thirty senior SS and police commanders who were Himmler’s personal stooges in each military region, sixteen eventually went free. Out of twelve Gestapo and Kripo* bosses, eight survived. Out of six divisional heads in the Reich Central Security Office (RSHA), three survived. Out of eight commanders of liquidation missions in Russia, three survived. By the 1970’s, most of the major figures sentenced to long jail terms had been released. The biggest criminals had submerged into the millions of German soldiers and ex-prisoners swarming through the confusion of postwar Europe. Others waited to go, or were already on their way, to travel stations en route to Spain and Latin America.

  There were, of course, a thousand eyewitness tales from within a thousand yards of Lake Toplitz, where it was rumored ODESSA’s agents had concealed in the cold waters a sealed trunk crammed with incriminating documents that could be used to silence ex-Nazis who collaborated with foreigners. (A small example of what this “collaboration” meant in practice was given more than two decades after the war’s end at a German Embassy party in London when the outgoing Ambassador’s wife warned the staff never to forget they were among enemies.) Those hard-core SS men who were held in Allied camps became the despair of their “re-educators” because they recited democratic dogma without convincing their captors that they understood what a free society was all about. Allied lawyers who tried to segregate SS men in order to be fair, and who sought retribution for crimes that could be proved, were to find the task all but impossible. They were bedeviled by the presumption that the SS constituted a state within a state. During ten years of Allied war trials, the defendants who were not SS men perpetuated the myth. The idea took hold that Himmler’s SS was a kind of gigantic secret-police organization, and it became convenient to an older generation of Germans to cling to this faith. It was said that Heinrich Müller organized the political police of the Weimar Republic into the Gestapo after studying the Russian systems, ignoring the fact that the CHEKA, or GPU, or MVD, or whatever ghastly set of initials applied, were instruments of a revolution. There was never a revolution in Germany. The SS was there to prevent those very changes which the Nazi “revolution” was supposed to produce. The German industrial and financial monopolies were run by the same men as before. The civil service was unchanged. Hitler’s ministers strutted in the black uniform with the silver death’s-head insigne because there was a widely shared enjoyment of the SS mystique.

  Himmler was the Ignatius Loyola who, declared Hitler, created a Jesuit Order for him. Those who entered the SS, or gladly took honorary rank, were admitted to an all-powerful secret society. In the words of Albert Speer in an interview with me in 1972: “The SS cannot be understood and Bormann cannot be understood unless you recognize that ‘politics’ and ‘government’ meant to most Germans the rule of occult forces. The struggle between Himmler and Bormann was in part a fight to become chief of the lords of the nation, head of the secret society of carefully selected noblemen.”

  A graphic description of this mentality was given to me one quiet summer’s day in a London club by the former chief of intelligence liaison among British secret services, Colonel Charles H. Ellis, who drafted the plans for an American intelligence agency after the war, Ellis still kept, even in his seventies, the impish sense of humor that distinguishes good intelligence agents. (As he himself has said: “They’re no good if they think they should make a career in intelligence, to begin with.”) He was recalling the atmosphere in Hitler’s Berlin when he was working there. He came home one night and sensed a subtle change in the manner of his landlady. “My husband,” she declared with a new hauteur, “is a block master.” Her man could hold his head up now, for he had been admitted to the outer circle of the secret circles around the Führer. He had entered into the “popular togetherness” of Volksgemeinschaft. As he told this anecdote, Ellis slipped into German. He was an inoffensive little Australian, mild and benign of manner, unfailingly courteous to waiters, with no time for pretension. Suddenly, as he gave this imitation of his German landlady, his back stiffened, his blue eyes flashed, and the guttural German accents rolled out across the somnolent club lounge. It was not a conscious imitation. He was simply quoting from the original. The effect around us was electric. Heads snapped back. One of the hovering waiters scuttled over to see what disaster had fallen. I caught a glimpse of what Volksgemeinschaft really meant.

  There was, in a prewar British edition of Mein Kampf, a definition of Volksgemeinschaft that sought to stifle any alarmed criticism. The word meant “folk community” and applied to the whole body of the people, without distinction or class. “Volk” was a primary word that suggested the basic national mood after the defeat of 1918, the downfall of the monarchy and the destruction of the aristocracy. It was “the unifying coefficient which would embrace the whole German people.”

  The Brotherhood has the same mystical (and conveniently vague) meaning. “Brotherhood” was a word used in the hushed way ODESSA was discussed in the 1960’s, like another phrase whose meaning could be adjusted to suit the audience: Third Reich.

  Out of Argentina, in 1961, came the first solid piece of evidence that continuing wild rumors were not entirely unfounded. The man in charge of the “Jewish problem” for the Gestapo, Adolf Eichmann, was taken by Israeli agents and made to stand trial in Jerusalem. There, the former Argentine Ambassador to Israel stated that Bormann had escaped to Argentina and then migrated elsewhere in Latin America. Five years later, Eichmann’s son Klaus wrote an open letter calling upon Bormann “to come forward for that part of the guilt for which you are responsible and for which my father stood in your place during the trial in Israel.” Klaus was no longer living in Argentina, but his brother Horst Adolf Eichmann was. Horst Adolf had reported to the Attorney General in Frankfurt (who, for various reasons, was most involved in the Bormann case) that he had talked frequently with Bormann. Now, suddenly, he said he’d been wrong: Bormann had died in Berlin. When he was pressed to explain this contradiction, he replied: “When you live in Latin America, where there are still influential Nazi circles, you take into account that these Nazi circles will one day strike….”

  * Leopold Trepper, Resident Director of the Rote Kapelle, the Red Orchestra, the Russian espionage apparatus in Nazi Europe. Admiral Canaris called any spy ring uncovered in Germany an “orchestra.” Secret radio transmitters were “pianos.” The organizers were �
��conductors.” Espionage circuits then were given an additional name, usually from their locality.

  * Kriminalpolizei, or Criminal Police, which with the Gestapo (the Secret State Police), and the Security Service (SD) were part of the RSHA.

  CHAPTER 9

  The first piece of this puzzle to come my way was a brief conversation in the summer of 1945. It had to do with the disappearance of Martin Bormann, a figure unknown to my small naval unit, preparing to transfer operations to Asia. We had just been converted from the seagoing version of the Spitfire to the gadget-packed Hellcats on loan from the U.S. Navy. A large number of U-boats were thought to have broken loose, and Stalin had all but accused the Western Allies of concealing the escape of Nazi leaders. The Russians seemed to know more about German underwater traffic than we did.

  “The greatest manhunt is under way from Norway to the Bavarian alps,” Winston Churchill assured Moscow. President Roosevelt had cabled Stalin a bitter protest against his unfounded suspicions about Allied negotiations with Nazi leaders even before the war ended.

  We were eight pilots trained for lone-wolf missions, and were waiting to join carriers in the Far East. There seemed little sense to scouring the water around Britain when the war there was over. We thought at the time the decision was just another example of naval bureaucracy at work.

  “How do you find this Bormann with high-altitude cameras?” one of us asked the chief pilot.

  “Tie a professor to the end of a cable and dangle him over the Atlantic.”

  “Bormann’s escaped in a U-boat?”

  “Maybe.”

  “What’s all this professor stuff?”

  “Take this and you’ll see. It’s a proso profile of Bormann.” The chief pilot, who was known as “the Fish,” being descended from Admiral Sir John Fisher, gave us folders. The material in the folders was impressive. We learned that a proso profile was a method of building up a portrait of someone who was dead or missing. It never occurred to me that bits of the portrait would drift into my hands for the next two decades and more.

  The first Bormann profile threw some light on why the Russians were restless and suspicious. The last will and testament of the Führer was among the important papers missing with Bormann. These were documents that might revive someday the whole Nazi mythology. Furthermore, a Russian commission stated there was irrefutable evidence that some Nazi leaders escaped from Berlin in a light plane for Hamburg, from where “mysterious persons” had departed by U-boat.

  Our search of the high seas led to one incident, at least, when a German submarine traveling on the surface in the Bay of Biscay was attacked by a Royal Navy torpedo-bomber. The U-boat commander had ignored signals to wait for surface craft and began to crash-dive. The vessel was in the vicinity of San Sebastian, where Albert Speer’s personal aircraft had crash-landed a little earlier with Léon Degrelle, a Nazi war criminal, aboard. Moreover, Nazi agents had been picked up from this Spanish port during the war. So the naval plane took no chances and sank the submarine. The whole affair was tactfully forgotten, because the Allies had no wish to cause Franco Spain any embarrassment, nor were they anxious to let it be known that they were aware of escape routes in Spain. This was a time when all sides were anxious to avoid further unpleasantness. It was also a time when the German submarine fleet could move with its customary cunning.

  There were 398 U-boats in commission. All were capable of spending more weeks at sea. Many were within reach of American havens. Others could move from their patrols between Norway and Scotland. Several did. For example, Captain Heinz Schaeffer, commanding the specially equipped U-977, moved underwater by day and surfaced at night. Skirting the British Isles, he made for Argentina.

  In the twilight of the war, this cat-and-mouse game had many strange twists. Schaeffer gave British waters a wide berth because U-boat intelligence reports had defined several new minefields just before the war ended. These were said to consist of deep mines designed to catch U-boats, which no longer had to surface to recharge batteries, thanks to the snorkel air-breathing device. The truth of the matter was that Britain had a shortage of such mines and the vessels to lay them. Naval intelligence in London therefore fed false information to a double agent known as “Tate.” He reported, piece by piece, these nonexistent minefields. Altogether, there was only a small area protected against U-boats. At war’s end, nobody bothered to mention that the whole thing was another hoax. As a result, U-977 took longer than it should (fourteen weeks) to make landfall along the Argentinian coast. Admiral Doenitz had ordered all his captains, in a message dated May 7, 1945, to “refrain from any act of war.” What was known, however, was that Doenitz, before the victorious Allies ordered him to broadcast the surrender, had told his submarine commanders “never to give up.”

  Several U-boat commanders chose to follow the never-give-up order. Doubtless Stalin, in his mood of suspicion, smelled Allied collusion. He was not then aware that the U-boats conducted a war by standards of their own.

  Schaeffer had already accomplished a transfer of men near the Norwegian coast prior to making the long journey to Argentina. He was surprised, on his arrival, to find himself placed under arrest, though he was told that this was a technicality. Argentina had come into the war at the last moment, to mollify the victors. Because of this, Argentina’s profascist government could give safe haven to Nazi refugees. It did not work out this way for U-977’s commander, however. His movements had aroused the keen interest of American intelligence. He was flown to Washington and questioned hard about reports that he had carried high-ranking Nazis. This he denied.

  He was then flown to England, where he joined other U-boat prisoners in Hertfordshire. There they lived in an old mansion surrounded by parkland. If any were thought to have useful information locked inside their heads, they were given civilian clothes and taken on night-club jaunts by chummy British Navy officers, who took the line “We’re all brothers of the sea….”

  Commander Schaeffer was in time released. Nothing was ever made public of what he revealed.

  Otto Kretschmer, whose U-99 had been sunk, was entertained by Captain (later Admiral) George Creasy. The conversation was light but the drinking was heavy. Much later, a rueful Kretschmer said he was surprised by the detailed information the British appeared to have on all German submariners, including their personal histories. He was also slightly appalled by what he himself had contributed to that knowledge in the heady atmosphere of good comradeship.

  There has never been a public disclosure of how many U-boats did in fact reach Latin-American havens, often to be scuttled after their crews shifted the cargoes ashore. Otto Wermuth, for instance, was loitering in U-530 off Long Island when he got the order to surrender. He chose to follow Doenitz’s earlier instruction, and so he, too, sailed into Argentinian waters, two months after the war’s end. Officially listed as “Fate Unknown” are five Nazi submarines whose movements are veiled in obscurity: U-34, U-239, U-547, U-957, and U-1000. A far greater number were said to have been scuttled during the winter of 1946, and there is no record of just how many in fact went down, or how many discharged cargoes before going down. The total number scuttled, 217, is impressive.

  Submarines of great endurance were being used, toward the end of the war, to carry strategic materials and to drop agents along the American coast. The big snorkel-equipped U-boats traveled as far as Japan and back.

  The Doenitz concept of “wolf packs” was developed while the Admiral still directed the world’s largest underwater fleet through his communications center in the French harbor of Lorient, looking out upon the Bay of Biscay. When he was obliged to lay down his arms, he did not lay down orders stopping the traffic of these vessels. Though he was saved from trial by the tributes of American and British naval commanders, he nevertheless had conducted a type of submarine warfare that killed a great many innocent people. He had been expert at it for forty years. He disowned Plan Regenbogen, by which submarine commanders were to scuttle rather than
surrender, but cringing and cunning were the earmark of his trade.

  There is evidence today that the Soviet Union knew of plans to make use of cargo submarines to move “valuable documents” gathered by Bormann. It also had details of a new type on order. The military version had a range of 31,500 miles at ten knots. A mercantile version carried a cargo dead weight of 252 tons. There were to be thirty old U-boats modified into the new type, and these were registered with the German naval high command. There were seventy registered military versions. All would have been capable of moving large quantities of men and material across the South Atlantic. Officially, they were never built.

  The Russians had the registration numbers and became doubly suspicious when told by Allied naval intelligence that the vessels did not exist. One hundred large German submarines had vanished into thin air. Yet Stalin had been told by no less a statesman than Churchill that the Germans were pushing ahead with construction of even more advanced types of U-boat. Soviet distrust persisted for a long time after the war because it seemed inconceivable that the hundred vessels, all properly registered, had no more substance than the blueprints in the shipyards.

  Their disbelief is another indication that their highly placed spy at Nazi party headquarters was someone with an over-all view of confidential matters but without sufficient detailed knowledge to pursue inquiries into specific areas. He was good at passing over bulk material but lacked either the time or the expertise to evaluate all of it. The new long-range submarines did not get built because Allied bombing slowed down work in the yards. Thus no written order was given to stop construction, and no piece of paper found its way to Berlin to that effect. Admiral Doenitz was informed, at his naval headquarters, that bombing had disrupted the building program, and that was that.