The Bormann Brotherhood

by William Stevenson

  Tito’s Partisans, having formed their own government, faced problems with the groups that had collaborated in the Nazi anti-Bolshevik crusade. It was claimed, and there is certainly ample evidence to confirm this, both in captured German newsreels and in Yugoslav government documents, that many of the recruits were Catholics, whose arms and Nazi-style uniforms were blessed by local priests. Some collaborators escaped into Italy, and the Yugoslavs drew up their own lists of wanted war criminals. (They have been plagued ever since by exile groups committing acts of terror against their diplomats and other officials abroad.) Among the Yugoslav documents were letters from Eichmann written, many of them, from his office in Vienna, in the former Rothschild palace. He was then pursuing the orders for the mass slaughter, and wrote to the German diplomatic representative in Croatia (treated by Hitler as a separate state, although part of Yugoslavia) confirming that the German authorities would pay thirty Reichsmarks per Jew delivered to the Zagreb railroad station. Eichmann had a large budget to build all the machinery of extermination, from the collection of live bodies to their final disposal.

  Tito, with his extensive underground contacts among Communists who were not necessarily devoted to Stalin, had been informed that Eichmann had returned, on Bormann’s instructions, to the eastern end of the Alpine Fortress and that a convoy of trucks had been seen climbing up to the mountain area of Bla Alm. This was an area well known to Tito, who, as a young Communist on the run, had escaped through the Austrian Alps. His own agents reported several curious developments. Eichmann had been seen supervising the unloading of twenty or more large boxes at a farm. The trucks bore the insigne of a German military unit based in Prague. The boxes were thought to contain melted-down gold taken from victims of the death camps in Czechoslovakia. All the boxes had been taken away later, nobody knew where.

  For the Tito government, the most important result of these inquiries was the identification of the leaders of an escape organization set up during the rule of Ante Pavelić, whose Croatin puppet state was established in 1941 under fascist patronage. Here, Bishop Hudal’s code of militant Catholicism and racial purity had been bundled together under an anti-Bolshevik flag and a three-fingered salute symbolizing the gun, the knife, and the cross. The Pavelić group was in close touch with Die Spinne, the “travel agency” run by the Brotherhood. It was established that Eichmann had been helped by the agency in Rome, issued a Vatican refugee passport with the name “Ricardo Klement,” and sent to Buenos Aires. Eichmann, as the world now knows, was captured there by Israeli agents in 1960 and sent back to Israel for trial. There he told interrogators that Martin Bormann was alive. The Israeli prosecutor, Gideon Hausner, reported that Eichmann received a note on which appeared only the words: “Courage! Courage!” The prosecutor said that handwriting experts were satisfied the note was written by Bormann.

  The view was held in Belgrade as recently as 1972 that a chain of monasteries, under Hudal’s protection, was used by escaping Nazi Croats, and that this was at Bormann’s disposal. Because of Yugoslavia’s peculiar situation, being a part of neither the Soviet nor the Western block, and being therefore excluded from certain forms of international police co-operation (although much is done unofficially), Yugoslav police developed their own international organization. They are particularly well informed on the use of forged passports (Tito himself traveled before the Nazi invasion of his country on a fake Canadian passport). Their Minister of the Interior holds the view that Hudal took care of Bormann in Rome until he was sent by sea to Argentina.

  Why did the Russians wait so long to disclose their own theory? They were inhibited for a time by Stalin’s brooding suspicion of plots against himself by the Western Allies and Germany, and it was only after Ms death that the Soviet Union officially confirmed the discovery of Hitler’s corpse. Curiously enough, their fraternal satellite East Germany has never officially endorsed Bezymenski’s report.

  The Yugoslavs had been in turmoil since the end of the war, but particularly since the break with Moscow in 1948. Discussing this with Tito’s Cabinet Minister, squashed in a corner of a lively Belgrade night club, I was dismayed again by the evidence of excessive reactions on all sides once the Cold War began. “It made things easier for war criminals,” he said. “The Allies against Nazi Germany were suddenly enemies. Russia was determined to secure its hold over East Germany and ourselves. The Americans and Britain wanted to set up their own kinds of political society in their own zones of influence. Manhunts were simply ridiculous against the background of nuclear forces building up across Europe.”

  He was echoing, unconsciously (and, I am sure, to his potential embarrassment), an observation made by a senior CIA officer of long experience and balanced judgment. Bormann had been tried and convicted in his absence by the International Military Tribunal, whose charter was never dissolved. The responsibility for finding Bormann was that of the charter’s signatories. By 1950, they were close to a war among themselves, and Bormann became unimportant.

  Unimportant, that is, except to those who shared his past. To quote the former British chief of “black radio” propaganda against Nazi Germany, Sefton Delmer: “It was the so-called reformed Nazis, the boys who became our allies against Communism the moment the fighting ended, who set a match to the Cold War. It was their salvation.”

  People are always talking about the “hidden treasures of Lake Toplitz,” usually these days in cynical terms, for the phrase has come to represent what my friend in Jacob’s Well Mews described as the “lure of the treasure hunt,” the folly of chasing phantoms. Thrillers have been written about the search for Nazi loot.

  And loot it was. Europe was stripped of everything valuable. When the technical details are swept from the board, and we see the Nazi period as something more than beautifully machined guns and tanks and planes, we are left with a handful of squalid men obsessed with greed. Art treasures, gold, and incriminating documents were their currency; terror, their weapon; a vulgar pretense of political philosophy, their protection against appeals to their humanity. None of these leaders behaved bravely when the end came. They crept into their holes, concealed their possessions, and hoped for the best.

  The Yugoslavs had a great deal of experience in the concealment of documents in conditions where courage was always required. Their guerrillas defied Hitler as did nobody else in Europe, and they were subjected to massive attacks. With Tito from the beginning of Allied interest in his resistance movement was a middle-aged farmer from Welland, Ontario, a veteran of World War I: Major Billy Jones. This unconventional soldier, with a typical Canadian disregard for stuffed shirts, volunteered to parachute into the mountains of Yugoslavia long before Tito was taken seriously in London.

  Jones’s adventures have never been recorded, but he kept diaries, and so did his companions, including Tito. They all felt the need to preserve an accurate account of the long ordeal, in which one out of every nine men, women, and children was killed; in which, in a single German reprisal, a Serbian village was ordered to give up 8,000 persons to be shot (the number came to less even when every adult was hauled out, and so three hundred schoolchildren were marched in from outside to make up the required total).

  Jones himself was shot through the head, but survived, with the bullet lodged near his brain. He had become skillful at wrapping documents in waterproof materials and hiding them—usually in lakes, under rocky shelves just below the waterline. So he did not scoff at the Lake Toplitz tales. Nor did Tito.

  After the war, Jones returned to the mountains he had walked over in Tito’s own Long March. With Yugoslav officials, he made several exploratory trips to the scenes of guerrilla fighting. Using maps, he went to each of the locations where he was once forced to hide important documents. These included lists of names that, in Nazi hands, could have brought tragedy to many families; copies of his messages radioed to London; and verbal instructions from Tito. He had kept precise notes, in code, of where the material was hidden. Yet he was never able to recove
r the documents that had been stowed away in lakes and streams and underground caves.

  Tito awarded him the highest of Yugoslav military honors when Jones made his last journey back, and then ordered him to go straight into the hospital, so that surgeons could remove the bullet working its way toward his brain. Jones replied that he had to bring in the fall harvest at his Ontario farm. He died when the bullet, as Tito had predicted, entered a critical area of the skull.

  Shortly after, in 1971, Tito went to Canada and consoled Jones’s widow. He made the observation that men all through history have felt a need to preserve a record of their deeds. The worse the deeds, the more important it seemed for their perpetrators to keep for future generations a documented and doctored version. The honest versions, recording true courage, got lost, whereas the works of Hitler survived. Then he added in a quick aside: “But we haven’t heard the last of them yet.”

  The problem in recovering the wartime diaries was that an underwater ledge is the hardest thing in the world to locate years later merely on the basis of coded notes. Jones had described to me the difficulties, and his belief that in the mountains of the Alpine Fortress there must still be large quantities of materials. His Yugoslav aide, a Partisan who is now a senior member of Tito’s government, added that their own agents had reported the curious circumstance that on May 2, 1945 an armed German unit visited a salt mine near the Berchtesgaden fortress. Deep in one of the galleries were art objects from the Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum and the Osterreichische Galerie. Some 184 paintings were selected, many of them impossible to evaluate, along with boxes of sculpture and fifty large containers for tapestries. The haul was carried away in trucks toward Switzerland.

  Many of these treasures were recovered by American Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives teams. But Tito’s man observed casually that a great deal more was never found. The treasure beyond price, he suggested, was the thick file of names linking the Brotherhood, Die Spinne, ODESSA, and other agencies, whose strength lay in the fact that membership lists were not circulated.

  Were such lists known in Belgrade? The answer was yes. One of the largest neo-Nazi colonies of Yugoslavs was still led by Ante Pavelić, who at war’s end had been forced to run. His trail had been followed by Tito’s men to the Tyrolean town where Gerda Bormann had been received into the Catholic church before her death and where former Nazis have since built homes remote from the world. Pavelić had been picked up by ODESSA couriers, taken to Spain, and given a new identity and papers for Latin America. His Brotherhood contact was SS Colonel Walter Rauff, who designed and built mass gassing chambers for Auschwitz. Travel was arranged by La Araña, the Spanish name for Die Spinne. Pavelić had since withdrawn into an armed camp in Paraguay shared with German settlers in the restricted military zone northeast of Asuncion. There he worked with Dr. Josef Mengele, the death-camp experimenter, and Rauff, who commuted between Spain and the neo-Nazi movement of his own invention: Das Reich.

  How effective was Das Reich? I asked. There was an impression that these secret organizations were for men on the run, and divorced now from ideological pretense.

  Tito’s man shrugged. “We know it works for the Croat terrorists. They’ve assassinated our people, including one of our Ambassadors just this year. They have military training camps, in Latin America and now in Australia. But they have trouble traveling abroad. This is why they need to test the legality of their position, and public opinion. You will see. Mengele will try to justify his work in the death camps. Altmann-Barbie, the Gestapo man in France, is testing the wind with his memoirs. If they can come out of hiding, then Das Reich ceases to be a drab underground.”

  He paused. “Personally, I think the Franz Stangl case is being watched for this reason.”

  Franz Stangl was one of the SS killers sent to fight Yugoslav guerrillas. When caught, he was put into the American camp near Salzburg, Camp Marcus W. Orr, from which so many escaped. Like Otto Skorzeny, he walked away one day with the knowledge, passed along by fellow SS prisoners, that ODESSA would look after him. His route was through the former German secret-service net in the Mideast, and he lived in Syria until fear of reprisal drove him out. In Damascus he ran an import-export agency, a mark of the spy trade.

  He was transported to Brazil, where he worked in the Sao Paulo Volkswagen factory. Then the “bomb” dropped in midsummer 1967. The governments of the Netherlands and Israel demanded his extradition in accordance with the international convention against genocide, which Brazil, unlike some Latin-American countries, had signed. It was another three years before he was brought to trial.

  Stangl had been commander at Treblinka, near Warsaw, where 700,000 prisoners were sent, of which fewer than a hundred are known to be alive now. When he was posted to Yugoslavia, the Partisans got copies of his SS record. His Cross of Merit was awarded for “Secret Reichs Matter” involving “psychological discomfort.” He had delivered to Berlin in the space of less than one year: 2,800,000 U.S. dollars, 400,000 pounds sterling, 12 million Soviet rubles, 145,000 kilograms of gold wedding rings 4,000 karats of diamonds valued at more than two carats each, 25 freight cars of women’s hair for industry, about 1,000 freight cars of used clothing, and so on.

  When Stangl’s job was done, Poland was officially regarded as Judenfrei, rid of Jews.

  Asked how he would answer the charges when he went on trial at Düsseldorf (justice being a little delayed, it was altogether twenty-seven years later), he said: “My conscience is clear. I was simply doing my duty.”

  An observer at the trial on behalf of the Brotherhood was SS Colonel Hans-Ulrich Rudel, who became another piece in the puzzle.

  CHAPTER 17

  Beata Klarsfeld was one of many who thought the Soviet intelligence report was designed to smoke out Brotherhood members in the Spanish arena, where the first round between Communism and fascism had gone to Franco; and in Latin America, where the struggle was just beginning. Interpol and the Treasury agents of the United States and Britain were well aware of secret and counterfeit funds invested in businesses that fronted for Nazi survival groups. Bormann’s party funds had amounted to $120 million and SS funds were the equivalent of another $60 million: considerable sums in the mid-1940’s, converted into hard currency, and shrewdly invested. The money, as always, had been under Bormann’s control.

  The West German secret service, formerly the Gehlen Org, reacted to the Russian report that Bormann had run away in a curious fashion. General Gehlen made known the view, first only within his own and Allied security services, that Bormann was in fact a Russian agent. The Soviet Fourth Bureau was blamed for calculated deceit, part of an over-all plan to nourish fear in East Europe of a Nazi revival.

  Two major scandals had engulfed Gehlen’s agency. The General was shown to have played politics by forming an alliance with the periodical Der Spiegel, and the German public, aware at last of Gestapo and SS influence inside the secret service, became uneasy. The trial of Heinz Felfe, hired by Gehlen for his impeccably anti-Communist background, showed that the whole security apparatus had been penetrated by Russian agents, taking advantage of their Nazi wartime records. There had been, in addition, cyanide spraygun killings of two Ukrainian leaders, which were at first blamed on Russian agents and then on Gehlen’s men.

  The extent to which Gehlen’s empire was rotting away by 1964 was measured by Chancellor Ludwig Erhard, nearing the end of his first year in office. He had evicted from the attics a special staff of liaison officers placed there by Gehlen. “I refuse to live under the same roof as these people,” he said after a prolonged campaign to get them out. Former disciples of the Order of the Death’s Head were reported by responsible West German publications to have moved into key jobs under Gehlen; and it was widely reported that the sure way of finding employment in the new federal secret service was to recite the theories about Slavs being subhuman and Bolshevism the curse of civilization.

  So when the Russians produced what was, for them, a restrained account of Borman
n’s probable adventures, only speculating upon what might have happened once he left for South America, General Gehlen’s supporters began to lay a smoke screen of rumors that Bormann was really a Russian spy. The scandals involving the Gehlen Org were denounced by the General as “hogwash from the fairy-tale empire of the press.” He had worked always in total secrecy, but after the transfer of his agency to the West German government, it became apparent that the public was the real victim of this secrecy. The Felfe trial demonstrated that Gehlen had kept nothing secret from the ideological enemy in Moscow.

  During the war, Gehlen collected military intelligence on East Europe and Russia as head of Foreign Armies East (FHO). The man who first made it possible for Gehlen to build up those Russian files, General Franz Haider, now said Bormann was the only man who could have been the Russian agent known to be leaking top-secret information until the very end of the war. (Haider had appointed Gehlen to FHO in April 1942.) The military historian Dr. Wilhelm von Schramm disclosed that a regular interception of messages between Berlin and Moscow had been traced to Bormann’s party chancellery. All the messages were signed PAKBO, which was the acronym for Parteikanzlei Bormann. A Berliner, Frau Gertrud von Heimerdinger, stated that she had been held in Russian custody when Bormann escaped and that shortly after she was taken to the Moabit Prison she saw “through an open doorway the Secretary to the Führer surrounded by armed Soviet soldiers.”