The Bormann Brotherhood

by William Stevenson

  Mohnke was held in a Russian camp at Strausberg, and Allied intelligence knew that he was rattling his tongue off. His statements were quoted, without any Russian confirmation of his capture, whenever inquiries were made by the Canadians. His accomplice in the massacre of Canadian troops, Kurt (“Panzer”) Meyer, had been tried and found guilty of butchery, but was released after the heat of public feeling had cooled. When yet another request was made for information leading to the capture of Mohnke, the Russians merely replied that they were noting the appointment of “Panzermeyer” to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces in Europe. “These forces, as is well known, are directed against the democratic republics…. Imperialist warmongers have permitted Nazis to return to their former military and civic positions….” It proved a little difficult to respond to these Russian growls with convincing smiles of innocence. Colleagues of Meyer, jealous of the highly paid jobs being dished out to such proven battle commanders as Meyer (who had been the youngest divisional commander in Nazi German forces), were proclaiming their own eligibility. SS General Gottlob Berger and SS General Paul Hausser, far from being grateful for being free within a few years of the war-crimes trials, were urging NATO to consider the claims of the SS, who “trained the first army in the struggle against Bolshevism.”

  Then, in 1965, the Russians produced an astonishing version of what had happened to Martin Bormann.

  * Pintsch was beaten, starved, and his fingers broken, one by one. He was released in 1955 to return to Germany.

  CHAPTER 16

  Martin Bormann had not been killed in Berlin, in the Soviet intelligence version. He tried to reach a fugitive escape U-boat near Flensburg, went underground with Brotherhood help, and made his way finally to where his eldest son, Adolf Martin, was being prepared for the priesthood by Bishop Hudal at the Teutonic College in Rome.

  Propaganda? If it was, then Tito had forgotten his feud with Moscow enough to confirm it. The Yugoslav authorities supported the Russian story and added details of their own. Bishop Hudal was the leader of the pro-Nazi Croats in Yugoslavia, and his escape organization was well known to Tito’s guerrillas. Furthermore, the Nazi mass murderer Franz Stangl had fought Tito near the end of the war when his presence in Berlin became an embarrassment and his enemies decided he qualified for zum Verheitzen (incineration). Stangl was sent to Yugoslavia because Tito’s men never took German prisoners. But Stangl escaped from one minor skirmish and kept going. The Yugoslavs had followed his trail to South America, and their Ministry of the Interior had dossiers swollen with reports on the Brotherhood.

  I found this out when I went to Belgrade, where I was given every help in searching for wartime film for a documentary I was making on Tito. The film was buried all over the place. Old film, some of it combustible, was stored in battered cans. Some newsreels had been shot by combat cameramen sent by Allied intelligence, and also by Germans. When I said there was film enough to document the whole war, a former Partisan leader said: “You should see the documents and diaries we’ve got buried away. Some we can’t even find. They were hidden for safekeeping when we were escaping from the Nazi death squads.”

  The Russian version of Bormann’s escape was based upon extensive research by a Soviet intelligence major, Lev Bezymenski, who gave the first full public report on the Russian autopsy conducted on Adolf Hitler’s body, in Documents from Soviet Archives. He had interrogated Mohnke, who was so eager to co-operate that he provided the smallest details about old and close colleagues like Otto Skorzeny, his companion in Hitler’s personal bodyguard. The Soviet Major had also interviewed everyone who knew Bormann and was available to a Russian intelligence man. He was, of course, cut off from direct contact with witnesses outside the Communist countries. It was a nuisance, no doubt, but in comparing his account with the material unearthed by Western Allied investigators, the disadvantage becomes a positive help. The lines of inquiry were perforce independently pursued. They were separated by the Cold War. Yet many of the details and conclusions overlap. Furthermore, investigations within the Communist bloc were divided by the quarrel between Stalin and Tito. The Yugoslavs had their own problems with escaping Nazis, and their reports therefore provide a third source of possible confirmation.

  According to the Russian version, Bormann escaped from Berlin, having prepared for the future with the gold coins buried at Berchtesgaden, with hard currency purchased with forged banknotes, and with art treasures that could be sold safely. He had men like Otto Skorzeny in the Alpine Fortress, and the bombing of the Führer’s retreat there in many ways was to make things easier for him. The German commander of Luftflotte 6, Air Force General Robert Ritter von Greim, had driven up from his headquarters in Munich to find a place a shambles the week before Bormann’s escape, and had so reported to him.

  Bormann knew, from what happened at Stalingrad, that heavy bombing actually creates defensive barriers; that an army trying to advance behind its own bombers is delayed and even stopped. He knew that the galleries that honeycombed the mountains around Hitler’s alpine home would be more difficult to reach than ever; that the two-hundred-foot-long Gallery 16, for instance, with its printing presses and machinery for turning out forged banknotes, could well defy discovery.

  He had sent Gerda and the children deeper into the mountains (as everyone else has agreed). But Frau Bormann, using the name Bergmann, took with her some other children. The bus painted with a red cross in which she traveled thus assumed a more convincing appearance. One of the children, unfortunately for her, was by no means an orphan. The father had reported to the U.S. Army’s Counter-intelligence Corps in Munich that his child had been kidnapped from Berchtesgaden by Bormann’s wife, and he suspected that he knew where to find her. (Again, this is confirmed, by the CIC authorities, who assigned Alexander Raskin, a Belgian Jew who had been a slave worker, to try to locate Bormann’s wife. Raskin traveled by mule through the remoter areas and could testify that if the Nazis had mounted a guerrilla war there, it would have been difficult to catch them.)

  The Russians believed Bormann visited his wife briefly before Raskin could find her. More than a month earlier, on April 2, 1945, Bormann had proposed to Hitler that the latest notes of the Führer’s monologues, all of course recorded by Bormann or his team of stenographers, should be transferred to Bad Gastein, in the Austrian part of the Alpine Fortress. On April 16, when the assault on Berlin began with 20,000 Red Army guns bombarding a bridgehead to the east, a senior Nazi official left with Bormann’s notes covering the period February 4 to April 2. His instructions were also to have the Nazi gold reserves moved from Bad Gastein to a salt mine on the German side of the frontier. (This former Nazi official later vanished into the Gehlen Org, where his account, recorded for the Western Allies, has been accepted as true.) It seemed to the Russians that Bormann was so familiar with the routes from Berlin south to the mountains that he was easily able to reach Gerda. She was already at this time gravely ill, and died a few months later. The Bormanns knew that “Frau Bergmann” and the “kindergarten” she had established must come under observation. This did happen, and from the end of May 1945 until her death in March 1946 she was watched constantly by CIC agents on the off-chance that Bormann might return. She told one American who questioned her that Martin had cabled her an all-is-lost message. From what is known of her devotion to the Nazi cause, preserved in volumes of letters until the end, the Russian view that she was putting Bormann’s pursuers off the scent is not hard to accept. Her conversion to Roman Catholicism after her own diatribes against Christianity may be explained on many grounds; a charitable view is that she was anxious about the children, knowing her own death was near, and capitulated to the priests.

  Bishop Hudal seems to have found Bormann’s wife and children with unusual speed. He had been enthusiastically quoted by the Nazi press in the 1930’s, and he had conveyed from the Vatican to Hitler the kind of assurances that permitted the Führer to take actions he might have hesitated to launch if the
re was a danger of united Catholic opposition. On this matter, the Yugoslavs and the Poles have made interesting observations: in both instances, the postwar Communist regimes have bitter recollections of collaboration between their local Catholic communities and the Nazi occupiers.

  The Russian explanation is that Hudal was indebted to Bormann from the earliest days of Hitler’s chancellorship. This was reciprocated, for it was Bormann who had gotten Catholic burial for Hitler’s murdered niece Geli. The conventional Catholic funeral had been part of his job to stop public gossip, but he was under considerable obligation in consequence. There is no new evidence that Bormann was using his contacts, especially Hudal, as a channel to the Vatican, apart from statemerits by the SS military commander in Italy, General Karl Wolff, after his release from a war-crimes prison. On the other hand, many Catholic critics of Bormann’s behavior were given brutal treatment. Father Bernhard Stempfle, for instance, who knew many details of Geli’s death, was shot three times through the heart and his spine smashed for good measure, during the blood purge after the Führer took power. The priest left behind papers that escaped the Gestapo. These voiced Father Stempfle’s view that no bargains could be struck with the Devil.

  Whatever Bormann’s bargain, he is said to have visited his wife’s hide-out undetected, and to have then made his way north to Flensburg. There he was to meet his old friend Erich Koch. (Koch was captured by the British, handed over to Poland, and held in Russian interrogation centers for eight years before being sentenced to hang. Like Mohnke and other intimates of Bormann, he seems to have been squeezed dry of every tidbit of information. He does not appear to have been hanged by the Communists, who yet demand ruthless treatment of war criminals in Western jails. More probably, he was being used for whatever knowledge he had, in the same way as his old comrades were singing for their supper in the West.)

  Koch had always been a fanatical Gauleiter, one of Bormann’s barons; he made himself overlord of East Prussia with a total disregard for the military and police machinery there, which he treated with contempt. He had already proved, at least to his own satisfaction, that bullying tactics paid in his bestial treatment of the Ukrainians. When the vengeful Russians moved on East Prussia, and Koch boarded the icebreaker Ostpreussen, he made his staff prevent refugees from following him. As Gauleiter, he had forbidden any evacuation and took public delight in the news of an earlier refugee ship, the Wilhelm Gustloff, which had preceded the icebreaker by several weeks into the Baltic, where it struck a mine. More than 8,000 passengers had perished, history’s greatest sea disaster, and one that caught scant attention in those days of horror except, characteristically, from Gauleiter Koch. He thought only Nazis deserved to get away in this evolutionary period when, again, only the strong should survive.

  Koch was to have linked up with other escapees in the naval-base areas around Flensburg and Hamburg. U-boats were thought to be victualing for the long journey to South America. But something went wrong. Koch ended up in a refugee camp in the always-accommodating province of Schleswig-Holstein and remained there undetected until May 1946, when he became a day laborer in a British Zone village. There he was recognized and eventually returned to Poland, early in 1950.

  The Russians, adding Koch to their small stockpile of Nazi insiders, were cagey. An early warning of their secretive approach to the Bormann mystery had been given on June 9, 1945, more than five weeks after they discovered the inefficiently burned corpses of Hitler and Goebbels. Georgi Zhukov, speaking for the Russian military command in Berlin, said: “We have not identified the body of Hitler…. He could have flown away from Berlin at the very last moment.”

  Even when investigations had reached a stage where the Russians felt able to put forward an informed guess, the first version came out in the curious form of a book published first in Moscow and then in East Berlin in 1965. The book was credited to the Soviet intelligence major who had devoted so much time to piecing together the evidence: Bezymenski. The German title was Auf den Spuren von Martin Bormann. Since nothing is published and distributed in a Communist state without official approval, and since a matter as sensitive as this one had been attended by unusual secretiveness, the production of the report in this edited version was clearly calculated. It claimed that Bormann realized that Grand Admiral Doenitz’s remaining U-boats were manned by Allied prize crews and, financed by some of the gold delivered by his financial adviser, Helmut von Hummel, went into hiding.

  He was said to have crossed the border into Denmark near Flensburg in March 1946, a date coinciding with that given by Ronald Gray, who maintains that he helped Bormann enter Danish territory, although not really with the intention of letting him escape. Bormann stayed in Denmark with the help of the ODESSA network until the Nuremberg trials were over. He then traveled back to the Inn Valley, where frontiers meet. He could move into Switzerland, Austria, or Italy; and near to hand were the galleries tunneled beneath Hitler’s Berchtesgaden estates, where some of the Nazi gold reserves were still concealed.

  Bormann decided to place himself under the protection of a Franciscan monastery in Genoa. He put out cautious feelers through the broadly based Kameradenwerk (another name for the Brotherhood), and some time late in 1947 met Bishop Alois Hudal. The Bishop suggested two possible avenues of escape: to Spain, where Otto Skorzeny was settled with other members of the Brotherhood, or, following Eichmann, to Argentina. The latter route offered attractive possibilities; there were funds already at work in various business enterprises run by Brotherhood groups in South America. This was the Russian speculation.

  Bezymenski’s private report in Russian does provide a list of the many sources he consulted during a period of several years’ investigation. He writes self-deprecatingly and with humor. He disliked playing “Sherlock Holmes, that celebrated English detective,” but he notes that the great Holmes did pioneer methods for the assembly of circumstantial evidence leading to conclusions from which it was then possible to work back until the final proof was found. Besymenski has not, so far as I know, gone beyond making his point that the trail of Bormann after Italy led to the same destination as Eichmann’s.

  SS Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann had been a Nazi fifth columnist in Austria with Otto Skorzeny. After that, his road led to the death and destruction of millions. He went to Palestine to visit Jewish settlements in 1937, when Skorzeny’s father-in-law, Dr. Schacht, was charging blood money for each German migrant. He reported on these and other Jewish communities in terms which would be reflected in Bormann’s 1942 decree on the “Jewish problem.”

  Eichmann was in Prague when Hitler died. His name was not yet on the wanted list, and he knew from the gossip passed along the grapevine that American camps were the easiest on the nerves. He used these internment camps like guesthouses, moving steadily west and north until he reached the Danish border. There he made contact with Rudolf Höss.

  Höss was in touch with Bonnann, who, the Russians said, had visited briefly his old home at Halberstadt, now inside the East German border, and a couple of hours by car from Hamburg. The sudden appearance of Eichmann may not have been the most cheerful event for Höss, who found himself very shortly standing trial for his life in Warsaw. But Bormann’s influence was based upon fear, not necessarily of Bormann so much as of what he could do to expose people or cut off their sources of money. The Brotherhood existed on mutual aid and mutual apprehension. So it was suggested to Eichmann that he use the network’s resources and visit the southeast corner of the Alpine Fortress and collect certain valuable documents and treasures.

  Eichmann’s adventures, where they crisscross the paths of Bormann and the Auschwitz gang, were reconstructed in 1970 by an enormous Montenegrin member of Tito’s Cabinet, who swept into the Hotel Metropole in Belgrade one evening to talk to me of events not chronicled by the Russians. Tito had been involved in a direct and personal way with the story of Nazi war criminals, not only because he had seen atrocities committed against his own people, and not only bec
ause pro-Nazis had escaped from Yugoslavia to set up armed camps abroad. Tito’s closest friend during the time he spent in prison as a young Communist had been a Jewish political writer and philosopher, Moshe Pijade. What happened to Jews as a result of Nazi Germany’s policies, it seemed to Tito, had never been properly understood. He was further frustrated because, although Yugoslavia had suffered more than any other victim of Nazi atrocities (in terms of size), Tito had been treated as an outsider and his country as having nothing to say at the Nuremberg trials. Yugoslavia, caught in the Cold War, was regarded as a Russian satellite; and in view of the secret struggle between Tito and Stalin during the first four postwar years, this had been an unfair and a foolhardy judgment. So the Yugoslavs had kept their files to themselves.

  In October 1942, the Yugoslav Communist party had captured copies of Bormann’s decree “Preparatory Measures for the Solution of the Jewish Problem … Rumors about the Position of the Jews in the East.” Little Moshe Pijade, a tough and resilient intellectual, was shaken by it. He was, as he proudly declared, a Communist theoretician. Still, he could hardly help feeling Jewish at that moment. The decree stated: “In the course of the work on the final solution of the Jewish problem discussions about ‘very strict measures’ especially against the Jews in the Eastern territories have lately taken place….” The style was Bormann at his best and worst. The phrases wrapped terrible propositions in opaque language. “It is conceivable that not all ‘Blood Germans’ are capable of demonstrating sufficient understanding for the necessity of such measures, especially those who do not have the opportunity to visualize Bolshevist atrocities.”

  The italics were those of Tito’s Jewish comrade. Bormann went on to say, in the impenetrable double talk of the virtuous official, that Jews currently being deported would be “transported still farther to the East.” In Russia the transports were mobile gas trucks into which Jews were herded and killed with exhaust fumes while the vehicles were on the way to the burial pits. Extermination camps went into operation, and an enormous railroad system was organized for the transport of prisoners to the death chambers, where crystallized prussic acid was proving a more efficient killer. “It lies in the very nature of the matter,” Bormann had decreed, “that these problems, which in part are very difficult, can be solved only with ruthless severity in the interest of the final security of the people.” In such fine phrases lie hidden the terrible truths of life, as we continue to discover.