The Bormann Brotherhood

by William Stevenson

  Dignity was given to such stories by the high-ranking German officers Gehlen, as a matter of diplomatic policy, made a practice of hiring. My subjective observation is that these decorative figures were selected for the impression they made on the military amateurs of the West; I use the word “amateurs” in the complimentary sense. I was not alone in this impression by any means. It resulted from a healthy distrust of a certain kind of military pomp and circumstance. These distinguished soldiers dropped casual remarks at formal social occasions, reinforcing the view that Bormann had betrayed the Third Reich. Such a figure was Lieutenant General Friedrich Wilhelm von Mellethin, ex-Chief of Staff to the Fourth Panzer Army. Later he left for South Africa, where he became a director of Trek Airways, which undertook special charter operations for police agencies supervising the blacks. He was a friend of Otto Skorzeny, that adviser on racial problems, who commuted regularly from Madrid. Skorzeny at this time contributed his share to the spreading tales of Bormann the Russian spy.

  Gehlen was faced with a small problem of his own credibility. He had produced for the CIA an earlier study of the Bormann case in which he concluded that Bormann was killed in Berlin. Since he was now claiming that Bormann was alive and well in Russia, he had to kill his earlier speculation. This he did. The park where Bormann was thought to have been buried in West Berlin was dug up during the night of July 20, 1965, and of course nothing was found.

  This may seem an elaborate operation. General Gehlen was an elaborate man. He had been described as “ruthless in his determination to re-create the German Reich” by Major Hermann Baun. At one time Baun was regarded as the best Russian expert within German military intelligence. Baun was got rid of, dying so miserably that much hostility was created against Gehlen even among those who shared his nationalist ambitions. One reason for Baun’s elimination was that in 1946 he had co-operated a little too closely with the British secret service for his own good. He had described the plans made during the war for escape. And his report linked Gehlen with such prominent figures as Skorzeny.

  Otto Skorzeny first appeared at the side of General Gehlen late in 1944, when he was commissioned to set up resistance groups in the Soviet rear. Later, the two men worked on the grisly Werewolf concept and Hitler’s imaginary Alpine Fortress.

  There, in retirement, Gehlen told me in 1972 what he had said about the Russian report on Bormann. His retort was typical of a man I must confess I did not like. There was no way to confirm his statement that Bormann had been a Russian spy and escaped back into Russia. The story had the virtue of explaining away the humiliating defeat of the Germans; and of throwing suspicion on the motives of anyone who claimed Bormann had escaped more or less as the Russians had said.

  “Beata Klarsfeld plays the Communist game,” Gehlen told me. “Is it true she married a Jew?”

  His secretary, Annelore (Alo) Krüger, inclined her head with the nodding motion of an old gray nag.

  “Doubtless that explains it.” He tugged an ear. “Bormann was a Communist for different reasons. He worked for Moscow from the beginning. He made Hitler invade that part of Czechoslovakia which started all the fuss. He did it on Stalin’s orders, you see. Stalin wanted us to go to war with England and America. Bormann did it all. We would have been united together otherwise, all firm against the Bolsheviks.

  “Bormann alive in a South American jungle? Newspaper rubbish. My V-men would know if he went that way.”

  General Gehlen, code-named “Gray Fox” in the kindergarten of bureaucratic intelligence, was also called (one could wish it were just as much a childish joke) the “Spy of the Century.” Now, with me, he approached the details of Bormann cautiously.

  “Admiral Canaris compared notes with me and we found we came to the same conclusion independently. But I must be careful. I am no longer in the secret service,” said Gray Fox gravely. “I am, however, still a general in the German Army, and a man has certain obligations, loyalties, duties….” Since Canaris had become a symbol of the “good” German, Gehlen quoted extensively from conversations with him, implying his own virtue.

  The Cold War had led the United States to hire him. Time had called him “a tight-lipped Prussian” fascinated by obsolete codes and invisible inks. Others labeled him the CIA’s Nazi, throwing open the doors of his spy net to unemployed Gestapo men.

  I found him a mild-mannered old man busy with evangelical church affairs and fighting the Catholics of Bavaria. Outside the iron gates surrounding the two villas he shared with his son’s family was a notice listing the daily services at the local Lutheran church. It was later, when I checked again the incredible list of unrepentant Nazis in his employ, that he came into focus. He cooed as gently as any dove, as sweetly as Professor Johann von Leers, who had moved with such mysterious ease out of American war-crimes camps to Argentina and then to Cairo.

  Gray Fox had given me detailed instructions on how to find his home on the Bavarian lake at Starnberg. Each time I phoned from overseas, the instructions were the same. Fly to Munich. Take the electric train to Starnberg. Pick up a taxi outside the station. He sounded affable, anxious to please, and solicitous about my health.

  I landed at Munich on July 25, 1972 and broke all the rules. A taxi took me straight from the airport, southward twenty miles through a region thickly populated by strange leftovers from Hitler’s war, to Berg, Waldstrasse 27/29. As a result, I was dropped on his doorstep without warning. The large expensive Mercedes slid away, back to the airport, the driver a little curious about my bags sitting on the sidewalk. There was no way through the fence around the two villas standing on land that sloped down to the lake. A sign warned me against the dog. Another offered me the choice of two bells: Gehlen Senior or Gehlen Junior. I tried them both. Nothing happened. I walked up the road and down again. Large, discreet villas. Neat as pins. Lots of trees. Very woodsy. This must be the place Walter Schellenberg had talked about. On some foreign intelligence job thirty years ago, he had driven here in a fast car to see Wilhelm Frick, who had placed the Jews outside the law and so turned them over to the Gestapo.

  And this was where Frick had lived drawing up his administrative charts, regulations, decrees, and laws so that nothing overlapped and loopholes were plugged. He had drafted the laws that gave a legalistic gloss to the “final solution,” precisely setting forth the legal framework that permitted Germany to be purified of racial contagions. He had not broken the law, he said before being hanged. His conscience was clear. The law was the law….

  I remembered Schellenberg’s detailed account of that drive to this leafy Bavarian estate. Over there, in the mountains, was Hitler’s Berchtesgaden. All this region had been part of the Alpine Fortress and that great plan to cover the escape of Bormann’s friends.

  A pair of German Army helicopters sprang out of the trees and clattered across the lake. A man in a white linen jacket and a broad-brimmed white straw hat fiddled with the lock on the double gates, and courteously drew back.

  The face seemed familiar. A face, I realized later, astonishingly like that of Hitler. The feeling grew when I talked with him later. A small man with curious pointed ears, slow-moving blue eyes, a neat little mustache. He shook my hand and walked me down the drive, past the larger villa, toward the lake and his own modest quarters. He had just been for a swim. Would I leave my bags in the small hallway? Sorry about the darkness of this room. The blinds were down, against the sun.

  He pottered around the windows, slowly winding the metal blinds. A modest room, with the kitchen off to one side, a small patio, and a passage leading to a bedroom. A framed etching of some London clubs in Pall Mall; a tall embroidered screen from China; a rather handsome sword from an Arab sheikh; and a battered writing table. The bungalow seemed to be built of lathe and plaster. Not the palace the CIA should have built.

  “All those stories about money”—Gray Fox caught my eye—“you see how humble we are. That bigger villa—my son and his family live there. This is enough for us.” He motioned me t
o sit down. There was an old-fashioned sofa, with a chair near each end and a table. “No, not there.” He moved me to the corner chair, and turned back to wind up another blind.

  It was now an hour since my sudden arrival. About the length of time it would have taken if I had followed his route.

  The front door banged open, and Miss Krüger came in. A grandfather clock struck the hour. A precise person, Miss Krüger. She sat down and pulled out a notebook. She had been with the General since 1942 and she had been protecting him ever since.

  “Bormann,” I began to say. They looked at me with quickened interest. “Bormann must have wielded great power.”

  “He was the power.” Gray Fox glanced at Miss Krüger.

  She got up, crossed the room, and sat on the sofa. I tried to return to a different chair.

  “No,” coaxed Gray Fox. “Not there. Here.” He led me back to the corner, where, I could only suppose, the concealed microphone must function better.

  Miss Krüger opened the notebook. The General sat opposite me.

  “There is not much I am allowed to say about Bormann. The Bonn government asks me to wait.”

  “To wait …?”

  “Before selling the story.”

  I thought perhaps I had misheard him. “There is no arrangement … there’s no fee attached,” I said, and had a sudden memory of slipping one hundred dollars to another general, on compassionate leave from a war-crimes prison. The money, in that other case, had helped the General’s young wife and children, living in half a miner’s cottage. Gehlen, on the other hand, had asked for a quarter-million dollars from Lord Thomson’s chain of newspapers for his memoirs. The Canadian publisher declined, muttering some appropriate comments.

  “You see,” the General said pleasantly, “much was known of Bormann, but not all of it could be told before. The first positive clue was when one of my men saw a newsreel in a Communist theater which included a big sports event in Moscow. The cameraman cut back to the spectators now and again. My man caught a glimpse of someone he recognized as Martin Bormann. We secured the film and I am satisfied he was correct. But this is all I can say now.

  “In my memoirs I am more concerned with the fight against Communism. These days it is not popular to talk against Communists. My political friends think it wiser to remain silent.”

  It was clear that the old man was a menace to right-wing friends trying to stop Willy Brandt’s movement toward a rapprochement with East Germany. Our conversation took place on the eve of Chancellor Brandt’s campaign for re-election, which was run on the basis of this policy to reduce barriers between East and West. Gehlen regarded the whole Brandt policy as essentially a Communist plot, and if he had been allowed to sound off in those terms, doubtless his more subtle colleagues feared he would drive the younger voters in the opposite direction.

  He saw himself as the guardian of Germany’s traditional institutions. He felt responsible for rescuing the only Nazi German organization and maintaining continuity almost unbroken from becoming head of Hitler’s Foreign Armies East to chief of the Gehlen Org aimed at Russia. He quoted a politician of fifty years ago who had said: “Germany and Japan are the natural opponents of any Russian expansion. But the British Empire and the United States in the long run are the most threatened.”

  Now there, said Gray Fox, was true perception. If a man could see historical trends half a century ahead, how much more effectively this could be done with modern methods of analysis…. Absolute freedom of the press was dangerous…. There must be ways of screening officialdom from public scrutiny….

  My eyelids began to droop. Frick must have sounded like this.

  If the war had turned out differently, Reinhard Gehlen’s name would have been inscribed in the Thousand-Year Reich’s Hall of Fame. His words showed no change of heart. SS men were put at the disposal of the Egyptian government “to inject expertise into the Egyptian secret service.” He still betrayed indignation at the way the Btitish during the war “pumped out propaganda against us through the BBC.”

  Miss Krüger scribbled away, and sometimes tore out a sheet with small notes for me, such as: “Read Das Ende einer Legende a collection of proofs that Otto John was not kidnapped but went over to Russians of own free will—With two interviews with Soviet Colonel Karpow who confirms this statement.”

  The grandfather clock bonged. Tea was brought, and sponge cake. The Gray Fox droned on. Willy Brandt’s “Eastern policy” had been plotted secretly at a meeting in Rome between West German socialists and Italian Communists. (Gehlen, I found later, repeated this accusation in his memoirs with no other documentation than unnamed intelligence sources.) No wonder Gray Fox’s own political supporters wanted him to keep quiet. He could say unblinkingly that the secret service should be used to fight Willy Brandt, appeasement, Communism, in fact everything that did not accord with his right-wing friends. It never occurred to him that a new generation of Germans might be put off by his authoritarian views.

  If this sounds like an abuse of hospitality, I can only say that General Gehlen is a specimen worthy of study, in the way the previous resident in that place by the lake, Frick, considered some condemned prisoners warranted closer examination.

  When Frick was Reich Minister of the Interior and Gray Fox was shadowboxing the Bolsheviks, this order went out: “The war against the Bolsheviks offers an opportunity of overcoming the shortage of skulls for the Heredity Research Center. The Jewish-Bolshevik commissars, embodying as they do a revolting but characteristic example of sub-humanity, give us the opportunity…. After the Jew has been done to death, whereby the head must not be damaged, the officer should sever the head from the body and dispatch it in preserving fluid.”

  It may be bad form to recall these things while taking tea and sponge cake with a general who boasts that, as a secret-service chief, he knew all about practically everything; and then adds, without visible embarrassment, that naturally his work did not concern itself with the bestial manifestations of Nazi security work. But Gray Fox was the kind of man who would never ever understand the effect upon ordinary people of what he was saying or what he had done. Not openly.

  But somewhere a small worm of doubt must have wriggled into his conscience. He found it necessary to identify with the German resisters in a typically oblique way: “I took no part in the conspiracy against Hitler but it would be false to deny that I knew one was afoot.” He had the luck to be dismissed by Hitler three weeks before the war’s end, when the Führer went into one of his tantrums and cut down anyone who happened to get in his way. It gave Gray Fox a drop of virtue, which, in the words of Hugh Trevor-Roper, “he greatly increased and used to lubricate his next and most difficult act of survival—his transformation from Hitler’s and Himmler’s chief intelligence officer in the East into the Central European expert of the American CIA and afterwards the head of the secret service of the Federal Republic of Germany.”

  On September 21, 1971 three German officials called on Gray Fox. They were in charge of the Bormann case. General Gehlen had published a statement in the German edition of his memoirs claiming Martin Bormann spied for Russia and transmitted information on his own secret radio.

  Judge Horst von Glasenapp, the Frankfurt investigating judge, who still hoped to track Bormann down, took a sworn deposition from Gray Fox, in the presence of Chief Prosecutor Wilhelm Maetzner. In this statement, Gehlen said what he repeated to me: that Canaris had arrived at the same conclusion as he had with regard to Bormann. He believed Bormann had been recruited in the 1920’s, in that period when a polarization took place inside a wrecked Germany; “Discontented veterans went either to the extreme right or to the Bolsheviks.” Bormann’s method of rising within the Nazi hierarchy was based upon Stalin’s example. His dedication was abnormal; it had nothing to do with Germany’s national aspirations. Bormann manipulated Hitler in order to get results beneficial to Russia, and he destroyed all the men around the Führer in order to bring about the final collapse.


  Gehlen was again adopting the familiar crabwise approach. Canaris “described to me his grounds for suspicion or supposition … two reliable informers in the 1950’s convinced me that Martin Bormann was alive then and in the Soviet Union…. I am not able, even under oath, to divulge the identity of the two aforementioned informers since I am convinced that I am acting properly when I put the interests of security over the obligation to tell the full truth.”

  Let us put aside the temptation to speculate on the reliability of a man who says that security takes priority over truth. Put aside Lord Beaverbrook’s headline in his Daily Express: HITLER’S GENERAL: SPIES FOR DOLLARS, which appeared in 1952 with the comment that Gehlen set a match to fires of hatred against Russia. Resist the temptation to wonder what would have happened if this man had indeed won control over all anti-Communist operations against the Soviet Union; and be thankful that there were many wiser heads directing Allied policy.

  If Gehlen, whose entire military record is that of an armchair warrior, had played his games without any overriding control, the fat would have been in the fire. Russia had kept six million men, 50,000 tanks, and 20,000 aircraft in Europe. The United States, by contrast, began to reduce its forces as soon as the war ended, so that by 1947 they were down from twelve million to less than one and a half million. Gehlen was performing a dance of death, with provocative operations in Communist territory that involved the lives of men who little realized Gray Fox’s deficiencies.

  For the Russians were infiltrating the Gehlen Org. They put up for hire to Gehlen just the men he considered trustworthy: volunteer agents with the stamp of good Nazi stock on their rumps—ex-SS, ex-Gestapo, ex-Nazi intelligence; and Heinz Felfe, who became Gehlen’s intimate companion and chief of counterespionage. The collapse of the Gehlen Org into a heap of ridicule came with the exposure of Higher Government Counsellor Felfe as a Russian spy, along with other V-men.