The Bormann Brotherhood

by William Stevenson

  The Russians did know the plans of Bormann and other leading Nazis to move large quantities of party files and papers by submarine to safety in Latin America. The so-called “Bormann Papers” were regarded by the Soviets as potentially dangerous. They could provide the textual foundations for a future rebirth of the National Socialist movement, and this represented a grave threat in a way little understood in the West. The war between Germany and Russia had been a clash of ideologies. The Russians did not regard the end of the war as an end to the ideological struggle, and for them the missing Bormann Papers, like the missing submarines, presented a mystery that would have to be solved.

  Bormann cast his shadow on me again after Commander Ian Fleming was released from British naval intelligence at the end of 1945. Fleming’s wartime attention had been concentrated on another prominent Nazi: Otto Skorzeny, thought to be part of the Brotherhood. Another flier joined us one day for lunch. Fleming was busy at that time with the foreign-news service known as Mercury. The pilot, Terence Horsley, was then editor of a newspaper associated with the Mercury project. He had piloted the wood-and-string biplanes the British used throughout World War II to hunt German submarines. These Swordfish had a top speed in a dive of ninety miles an hour, but Horsley enjoyed pottering around in them because he was a keen birdwatcher. “If you point ’em into the wind, you can hover by the cliffs and spot the nests.”

  Fleming cut him short. “What happened to that report on escaping U-boats?”

  Horsley’s eyes swiveled over to me.

  “He’s taken the oath,” Fleming said impatiently. It was my first indication that he knew about the spy planes and the secrecy oaths we were placed under.

  “It’s not complete,” said Horsley. “Some U-boat commanders struck out on their own. Others went under orders to South America. Then there was Plan Regenbogen….”

  I felt out of my depth in this discussion. Then I heard Horsley saying: “Fisher bought it. Crashed in the sea off Newfoundland.”

  “He was your boss, wasn’t he?” Fleming asked me.

  I nodded, mute.

  “Chip off the old block,” said Horsley. “Must’ve been his grandfather … that’s right. Old Admiral Fisher. Reckoned we were one of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel.”

  “That’s what Bormann used to say,” I murmured.

  They turned their gray wise faces toward me. They must have been in their mid-thirties, but they looked ancient and fierce. What did I know about Martin Bormann?

  I repeated the words to my naval unit of the younger Fisher, who had just crashed.

  “Did you join the manhunt?” asked Fleming.

  “Just watched for U-boats. There was talk of Bormann escaping by air, too. I read up on him but we never got a look at the full report which followed.”

  Fleming slipped a cigarette into an ivory holder. “The men who know about that are in New York. One’s General Donovan of OSS. The other is your namesake, Billy Stephenson….”

  I should have paid more attention. I was distracted by Fleming’s story of how his brother, Peter, had written a novel in which Hitler’s deputy was supposed to fly to Britain. It had appeared before the Deputy Führer made that mad dash to Scotland. Peter claimed he had no prior knowledge. But he was a wartime agent with Special Operations Executive, and I began to wonder if someone, somehow, had put the idea into the head of Hitler’s henchman. It seems curious, all these years later, to discover that the flight of Rudolf Hess did in fact play a vital part in Bormann’s career.

  CHAPTER 10

  Two hundred thousand copies of a public notice were posted throughout Germany on October 22, 1945, part of which read: “Martin Bormann is charged with having committed crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity, all as particularly set forth in an indictment…. If Martin Bormann appears, he is entitled to be heard…”

  This proclamation provided for Bormann to be tried in his absence, and it was the work of the International Military Tribunal, made up of the United States, France, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union. The Deputy Chief Prosecutor, Sir David Maxwell-Fyffe, made this statement to the President of the Tribunal: “There is still the clear possibility that he is alive.”

  Bormann was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. But the Tribunal added that his sentence could be altered or reduced if he wished to reopen the case and bring forward any facts in mitigation. Thus the door has been left open for him.

  A difficulty at the trial was that the role of the Führer’s Secretary could not be documented. All his personal records, his thousands of pages of notes on Hitler, and the party papers for which, he was responsible had disappeared. The prosecution’s case was put on January 16, 1946 in these words: “Every schoolboy knows that Hitler was an evil man. The point we respectfully emphasize is that, without chieftains like Bormann, Hitler would never have been able to seize and consolidate total power…. Bormann was in truth an evil archangel to the Lucifer of Hitler.”

  The real Lucifer was, of course, Bormann himself. In those days it was hard to perceive his role when the documentary evidence was missing. Furthermore, the political climate had changed drastically. The Devil was once again back in Moscow, and Bolshevism was the anti-Christ.

  An astounding readiness to wipe from memory the previous five years of horror was symbolized by the conversion of Bormann’s wife and children to Catholicism. It took place quietly and promptly as soon as the war ended. Gerda had written only a year earlier to her husband that she hoped the children would remember how Christianity and Jewry got a foothold in Germany. She had always matched Martin’s violent outbursts of hatred for the churches. Now, in the summer of 1945, she placed Adolf Martin Bormann and his brothers in the hands of priests who became known later as members of the Vatican Line, an escape route for wanted Nazis. The eldest son dropped the name Adolf which he had been given in honor of Hitler.

  Gerda was ill, and shortly after died from cancer. Her decision helps to make comprehensible what must seem otherwise quite incredible. The mood in Germany favored Nazis who went underground. Allied attempts to denazify officialdom were regarded even then by many Western observers to be quite futile, but it was a period when fear of Communism had replaced the Nazi bogies. Bormann, as the guardian of Nazi philosophy, preserver of the flame, really had little to fear from his own people. They stuck to the safe rationalization that they had behaved like loyal citizens who naturally obeyed the laws of their country.

  The threat of war between the Western Allies and Russia had been promoted for years by the Nazis. Their vision of ultimate conflict with “barbaric Bolshevism” produced the first reference to an Iron Curtain.

  It was uttered by Hitler’s former Finance Minister, Count Schwerin von Krosigk, on May 2, 1945, when he was trying desperately to win Allied recognition for the government of Admiral Doenitz. Schwerin von Krosigk was an unctuous figure who had never forgotten Hess’s saying before his departure that the two Germanic nations, Britain and Germany, were fighting each other to the enormous satisfaction of the Bolsheviks. The Count, a former Rhodes Scholar who seems to have learned nothing about the English during his time at Oxford, calculated that Hess had made some impression on his British hosts. “The Iron Curtain moves closer,” he declared in a broadcast. “People caught in the mighty hands of the Bolsheviks are being destroyed.”

  The term was picked up from the German broadcast. Churchill used it when he cabled President Harry Truman on May 12: “An Iron Curtain is drawn upon their front. We do not know what is going on behind.” A year later, he dropped it into a speech in the United States. It demonstrates the infectious nature of the fears deliberately released by Hitler’s followers in order to win Western sympathy.

  Thousands of Hitler’s obedient servants, keenly aware of the Allied “unconditional surrender” posture, heeding the Moscow Declaration to pursue war criminals to the ends of the earth, moved fearfully through the ruins of German cities. Some knew where to go. Others had lit
tle more than the names of “safe” households. It dawned on the fugitives even before midsummer of 1945 that the Western Allies really had no stomach for revenge, though some popular Allied sentiment favored drumhead courts-martial for a few top Nazis, a proposal voiced by Secretary of State Cordell Hull and supported by Churchill and Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau; they wanted the worst Nazi criminals taken out one morning and shot.

  Lesser criminals, when discovered, often met with indifference. “I sometimes wonder if we should have had some more impressive arrangements for ending the war,” wrote Eisenhower’s chief of intelligence, Sir Kenneth Strong. “The Germans terminated their campaign in the west in 1940 with much ceremony and a formal signing of armistice terms in the identical railway coach used by Marshal Foch in 1918 when he received the German capitulation. But the feeling of us all at the time was to get the job over as quickly as possible and end the slaughter. There was still a war to be fought in the Far East after the Nazis had been finished with.”

  A crusade against Communism was what Martin Bormann counted upon. Though he had little time for Schwerin von Krosigk, who was still an active Catholic, he respected what he thought were the Count’s contacts at the Vatican and in the Anglo-Saxon world.

  Now, the re-creation of Red bogeymen seemed to be away to a good start. The Count, in his broadcast, predicted that the proposed conference at San Francisco would never establish a world constitution “if Red incendiaries take part.” He predicted that a Bolshevik Europe would be the first step to a Sovietized world. By the time he was obliged to announce unconditional surrender, the German defeat sounded less shameful. The German military leaders, exploiting Allied ignorance about an arrangement whereby German members of the armed forces were not allowed to join the Nazi party, declared they had been fighting against Communism and not for Nazism. Singlehanded, they had tackled the Bolshevik hordes. It seemed almost heroic. “Be led by the light of the three stars, the true pledge of the real German character,” cried Schwerin von Krosigk. “Unity and Justice and Liberty!”

  Some of the stuffing was knocked out of this posture. The British refused to let German commanders evacuate their troops from the path of the advancing Russians. Argentina declared war on the Axis Powers just as the conflict was ending. Pope Pius XII suddenly recovered his voice and condemned the Nazis. On the very last day of fighting, he took another prudent step forward and said that fascism was a bad system in the wrong hands.

  Three weeks after the capitulation of German forces in Norway, however, Nazi commanders there continued to behave as if their military courts were preparing for another war, in which they would be fighting with the Allies against Russia. At German naval defense headquarters in Oslo, a judge court-martialed a young sailor for telling his commander: “I’m a free man now, you Nazi dog.”

  The judge who sentenced this imprudent youth was Hans Filbinger. He later became a prominent figure in West German political life. When I saw him again in 1972 he was much more confident about defending Nazi courts-martial, which after the war still sentenced men to death for desertion. Filbinger’s judgment on the sailor was actually dated June 19, 1945 on the official copy. It would have been interesting to hear yet another justification for Nazi punitive measures so long after the surrender, but this was not the purpose of my inquiry. More to the point was the fact that if conditions favored Nazi drumhead trials, then conditions must also have provided a friendly climate for escaping war criminals, even several weeks after Bormann vanished.

  Filbinger was in Oslo when Schaeffer, of the U-977, put ashore a small group of men and then left for Argentina. Did Filbinger recall, I asked, why this vessel had put in to Norwegian waters first? No, he did not. Did he know that war criminals had escaped to Norway? Well, it was possible. After all, he said helpfully, there was the case of Degrelle.

  Thus, in an infuriatingly casual way, I learned how a close associate of Skorzeny and the Brotherhood got away to the sanctuary of Franco’s Spain.

  Colonel Léon Degrelle, the Belgian fascist who commanded the SS Army Corps/West, had left Himmler near the Danish border and followed one of the escape routes into Norway. There he sought help from Vidkun Quisling, the Norwegian whose name became a synonym for traitor. The thirty-eight-year-old disciple of Hitler found that Quisling was equally anxious to escape retribution, and just as frustrated. Degrelle then went to Josef Terboven, the Reich Commissar of Norway, who later shot himself. Terboven said he had asked Sweden to provide the Belgian with asylum. The answer was No. “I tried to get you a submarine which was leaving—” Terboven waved vaguely out to sea. “Japan, perhaps, or is that too far? Perhaps I’m thinking of the other place. Argentina. But it seems impossible to get out of harbor. There are too many Allied warships in the vicinity.” He suggested Degrelle try to hitch a ride in the private aircraft of the former War Production chief, Albert Speer. The plane was in Oslo, apparently to take Speer to safety if he could make his way from the Flensburg escape hatch. The crew were anxious to leave, fearing Norwegian resistance troops might spot the plane. Its range was somewhat less than the distance to Spain. Did Degrelle want to take the chance?

  He grabbed it. The plane left at midnight, slipped across Allied occupied territory, and ran out of fuel at San Sebastian. It made a forced landing on the beach. Degrelle got in touch at once with Madrid, where he was welcome and where he remained.

  Filbinger offered no explanation for the presence of Speer’s plane in Norway, or any instructions given the crew to airlift important German escapees to freedom. In fact, captured U.S. Flying Fortresses were operating alongside German Condors with a Luftwaffe squadron in special “guerrilla support roles” which gave the commanders a license to do pretty much as they pleased.

  Though a majority of hunted men could vanish into the faceless crowds, the intimidating atmosphere cowed many Germans. Fear was abroad: some of it a hangover from years of police oppression and some of it a consequence of the last-ditch propaganda on the Werewolves.

  The long-range escape planes were part of the German Air Force’s special Werewolf detachment. They were supposed to be used to drop young Werewolves behind Allied lines. They also figured in Martin Bormann’s escape plans. Enterprise Werewolf was another of his agencies. He was politically and administratively in control of the Volkssturm, a peculiar people’s army made up of very old and very young men and women armed with Czech rifles and Panzerfaust one-shot bazookas.

  The first of the Volkssturm units was inspected on October 21, 1944 by Himmler. “New resistance will spring up behind [Allied] backs,” he proclaimed. “Volunteers will strike like werewolves.” The name, which later created fear and uncertainty, was thus mentioned publicly for the first time.

  When Germany began to suffer invaders on its soil, trusted men were needed for the huge task of shifting documents and treasure to safety overseas. A crucial appointment, in Bormann’s private maneuvers, went to the flamboyant giant who first loomed into his presence in 1940 as a member of the first SS Division, Hitler’s bodyguard: Otto Skorzeny. He was put in charge of the Werewolf organization, which provided, along with his other unconventional operations, a cover for the movement of key men and party properties. General Reinhard Gehlen was charged with military direction of Enterprise Werewolf (a responsibility he denied having undertaken, in conversations with me in 1972).

  Gehlen and Skorzeny were to provide captured Allied uniforms for the resistance fighters. They were to organize and supply isolated groups, which would carry out orders best summarized in Himmler’s letter to the SS Police Chief West, General Karl Gutenberg: “Educate the population not to collaborate with the enemy, by execution of the death penalty behind the front.”

  Whatever Hitler’s addled brain thought this would achieve, the guilty men around him saw a perfect means of escape amidst confusion and fear. SS and Gestapo chiefs who were planning to go underground would have at their disposal Allied uniforms, transport, food, and arms. If need be, they could demand he
lp from their countrymen under Allied occupation. And they could expect to get it, because a campaign was under way to strike terror in the hearts of collaborators. Werewolves would punish acts of disloyalty to Hitler.

  The passionate devotion to the Führer among many youngsters was to be fully exploited. Young Werewolves would cover a withdrawal into a “national redoubt” around Hitler’s mountaintop home at Berchtesgaden. It was popularly known as the Alpine Fortress, and the U.S. Seventh Army reported it was to be defended by 200,000 veteran SS troops and Werewolves. It covered 20,000 square miles of Bavaria, Austria, and a small part of Italy. It was, of course, to become the hide-out for men escaping abroad.

  The atmosphere of bewilderment and terror helped the guilty to get away. This is well illustrated by the curious and frightening Werewolf murder of the Chief Burgomaster of the old imperial city of Aachen.

  Aachen was the first German city to be occupied by a foreign invader in a hundred years. Officials who helped the enemy had to be publicly punished. It was the symbolism, as always, that counted. Radio Werewolf hammered the theme “Rather dead than Red” (a phrase that lived long after). Bolshevism was the real enemy; the Nazis had always resisted the Bolsheviks; therefore any German who helped the enemies of Nazism was helping the Bolsheviks and was a traitor. A climate was being created that would favor the concealment of wanted men.

  On March 29, 1945 it was announced that the Chief Burgomaster of Aachen, Franz Oppenhoff, had been executed by order of the German people’s courts. He was killed by a girl from the Union of Hitler Maidens and a sixteen-year-old boy. They were part of a Werewolf unit parachuted from a captured Flying Fortress of Werewolf Squadron 252. The boy was known as a P-man, in honor of SS Lieutenant General Hans Pruetzmann, who had exported children from the Baltic states for “Germanization” and then terrorized Russian civilians from his post as SS Police Leader to the Southern Army Group at Kiev. Another of his claims to fame was that he was responsible for exterminating 200,000 Jews before the end of 1941.