The Bormann Brotherhood

by William Stevenson

  Manstein insisted that he learned of the genocide of the Jews and other “subhumans” only after the war. John claimed this was an agreement made by all German generals he had questioned in the screening camps: that none should admit knowledge of atrocities.

  Manstein, on the witness stand, repeated that he knew nothing of the mass murders. The Eleventh Army War Diary was opened to a passage which was read out in court: “A new Commander-in-Chief arrives…. He is an autocrat and somewhat difficult. However one can speak frankly to him.” Then several lines had been, as John put it, “pasted out.” The page was held up to the light, and John translated the censored passage: “The new Commander-in-Chief does not wish officers to be present at the shooting of Jews.” Manstein signed the War Diary each day, and his credibility was thus lost. Just how bad this was for Manstein’s self-esteem is demonstrated by the distortion in his book, Lost Victories. He says the pasted slip merely obscured the earlier sentences: “He is an autocrat … one can speak frankly to him.”

  There was no doubt in my mind, listening to Dr. John in 1972, that he was doomed from the moment he was appointed chief of the new West German security office. Old Nazis and pro-Nazis and the men of the Gehlen Org must all have regarded him with distaste. He was the man who had exposed Manstein, the great hero of Gehlen’s youth, as a consummate liar. That alone offended the military caste and its ideals of a brotherhood that closed ranks against outsiders and concealed its sins.

  Otto John used his period in office to lecture his own people, and in this way he lost a good deal of public confidence, too. He declared that a dangerous basis had been established for transforming the new federal republic into an authoritarian state on nineteenth-century lines. The Korean crisis and the fear of Communism had made possible the rearming of Germany. Men who had been Nazis in public service, including professional soldiers, could now apply for re-employment. Chancellor Adenauer was given the prerogative to lay down policy directives. To John, this looked alarmingly like a return to the past. Here was an old-style state administration based on the same old officialdom, with a federal chancellor who must be obeyed by ministers who were not his equal, and old-style generals back in the saddle with undemocratic powers over civilian life. Bringing back the Nazi-period civil servants was made acceptable to Germans with an automatic respect for craftsmen. Rearmament was made palatable by an American-financed newspaper, Deutsche Soldatenzeitung, which explained to young readers the need for a military program, and at one stage denounced Otto John as the man who had worn British Army uniform and called himself “Oscar Jurgens.” (In fact, John did wear a British war correspondent’s uniform on one occasion, to get fast permission to travel in a restricted zone.)

  He found himself obliged to hire former police officers who, despite Nazi backgrounds, boasted they were the Indispensables, as indeed they were, since nobody else had their training. These were the only men John had available to investigate the Werewolves, SS men, and other old comrades. Obviously they were never going to take action against their own kind. When he cracked down on militant groups, he found former Nazis working as V-men for U.S. Army G-2 intelligence “fronts.”

  He realized these sudden changes were the political products of a tense world, but his dreams were shattered. He had planned an Albert Schweitzer Youth League to promote a democratic outlook and help youngsters develop a resistance to totalitarian influences of any kind. What he found instead were new youth groups of the extreme left and right, a polarization caused by the Cold War. But it satisfied what John feared were the instinctive responses to any kind of harsh authority.

  Chancellor Adenauer was now receiving a stream of notes from Gehlen, delivered through intermediaries, denouncing John as a British stooge, an alcoholic, and a homosexual. Adenauer was hostile to this man chosen by the British, as much as he was hostile to the British, who had fired him as Burgomaster of Cologne for his arrogance.

  Otto John was officially confirmed as President of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution after a year in which Adenauer resisted the pressures of Germans who respected John’s judgment. But the score was evened up when Adenauer also approved the appointment of a deputy to John who was one of the Gehlen Org appointees: Colonel Albert Radke, the wartime chief of security in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia.

  John must have had few illusions left. He knew already how ruthlessly the Gehlen Org had disposed of Hermann Baun, the first head of the Gehlen Org’s Acquisition Service. An honest intelligence man, Baun was outraged by Gehlen’s obsession with sniffing out Reds, and he said so: “He wants to play Gestapo for the Americans.” Baun was diverted into lesser work. One day, driving to an Org out-station to deliver money, he crashed. The money in his briefcase was said by his enemies to have been part of an embezzlement plan. He was called upon to resign because of “obscure aspects” to the case. Baun, who seems to have been a man of honor, broke down under Gehlen’s accusations of fraud and “went morally to pieces like a whipped dog.” He had thought Gehlen was his friend. He died a couple of years later, still an outcast.

  A “protest by the generals” was delivered by Gehlen’s friends asking that John be removed because he had interrogated German generals under what they regarded as degrading circumstances.

  Then, on the tenth anniversary of the abortive attempt on Hitler’s life, distinguished Germans gathered in West Berlin to honor the memory of the men executed by the Gestapo, and Dr. John vanished across the Communist border.

  He had been invited to the gathering, and later had coffee with a surgeon he had known during the war. He remembered nothing more, he said later, until he woke up in East Berlin. The surgeon, Dr. Wolfgang Wohlgemuth, resided in East Berlin and was accused of lacing John’s drink with dope.

  Otto John was sentenced to four years’ solitary confinement for treasonable activities when he finally got back to the West. One of the chief witnesses for the prosecution was tried for perjury sixteen years later.

  Listening to John, I remembered the smug and self-righteous Gehlen and the strange affair of the cyanide-gun killings; and those incredible statements made in East Berlin by a former Gehlen Org agent who said he was ordered to perform the killings and make the Communists seem responsible. I remembered, too, that day at Pullach when the staff at last stripped away the cover title of South German Industries, along with their drab workaday titles and flowered again as colonels or major generals or “higher government counsellors” in the new federal intelligence agency. American dollars still sustained them, but they saluted the black-red-and-gold of the federal republic. And somewhere safely locked away in Russia was Gehlen’s enemy, Dr. Otto John. And I remembered Gehlen talking of “vitriolic propaganda against Hitler’s Germany” pumped out by John.

  An acquaintance from East Germany who is quite openly an apologist for the Communist regime there said: “Otto John came over because he was desperately fed up with what was happening in the West. But then he fell apart and became a boring drunk….”

  John shrugged when I asked if the world had simply become too much for him. “It’s pretty hard to be a German. On the Communist side, the regimentation is severe. In the West, well-meaning friends keep giving support to the Germans who shout loudest and longest against the wicked Reds. If you try to follow your conscience, you make an enemy of everyone.”

  Yes, he agreed, there had been a period when the authorities were eager to see justice done, but only because they wanted to convince the Allied occupation authorities that it was safe to give the Germans control of their own affairs again. Now, the old mentality was reviving in which clever lawyers found loopholes by which war criminals could slip back into public life. It was not a case of new Nazis, nor neo-Nazis launching new movements, so much as a return to the lack of civic-mindedness and the absence of individuals willing to be stubborn about something in which they believed. It was a case of going back to the generation that fathered the Nazis, which was much riskier. Hitler you could identify as an
evil figure; but the old authoritarian system simply encouraged an acceptance of a military caste, and there was no symbolic figure to arouse public alarm.

  He was a lawyer, and he did not like the way the laws were being twisted to serve other ends than those of justice. Mass murderers of the Nazi era could now hope to escape scot-free. The men who masterminded the postwar survival of leading war criminals had achieved most of their objectives.

  “All that prevents a new Greater Germany is the dividing line drawn by the Russians,” he said with a bleak smile.

  After the capture of Adolf Eichmann, the revitalized West German government, with its old hands back in positions of medium power and more, recognized that it should burnish its image abroad. The statute of limitations had come into effect so far as manslaughter and lesser offenses were concerned. But now, while giving a dazzling display of moral rectitude, the federal government got entangled in its own web. It had set up the so-called Ludwigsburg Office, whose chief was then himself investigated and found to have been sentenced to jail by a Soviet military court in 1949 for war crimes and crimes against humanity. He was fired. His successors dug up an embarrassingly large number of men and women who were candidates for trial. Hundreds of SS killers were identified in the police forces, and slowly the newly discovered guilty crept through the courts. The majority, however, were small fry, not those who drafted orders or signed decrees.

  What happened was this. About the time John became President of the BfV security service, men like Gehlen and Adenauer were using the Korean war as a lever to get concessions from the Western Allies. An official of the U.S. High Commission in Bonn, Charles Thayer, described a typical incident in his book The Unquiet Germans. General Adolf Heusinger and General Hans Speidel visited the American diplomat secretly. They said that if prisoners awaiting the death sentence at Landsberg were hanged, Germany as an ally against Communism was an illusion. The Landsberg prisoners had been commanders of SS liquidation squads, and Thayer pointed out that any court would want such men hanged. What would happen if crime went unpunished? What assurance was there against a resurgence of barbaric German behavior? The generals retorted that Americans should assist the people toward repentance by tempering justice with mercy.

  It was these interventions that had bothered John. Condemned men were reprieved under this kind of pressure. Almost all Nazi war criminals still in Allied and West German jails were released.

  Most unsettling of all in these cynical bargains, an amnesty was declared for Germans who had assumed false identities after the war. It was then that John vanished in Berlin. The guilty began to feel safe. They saw, sitting on the right hand of Chancellor Adenauer (and gleefully assuming that John had gone for good) Hans Globke, who had drafted Hitler’s anti-Semitic laws.*

  The old German Penal Code said that cases of murder could not be prosecuted more than twenty years after. But the United Nations had resolved that “no statutory limitations shall apply to war crimes and crimes against humanity.” Bonn subsequently introduced legislation that seemed to be concerned only with reducing criminal responsibility in traffic accidents. This said that culprits not actuated by base motives were guilty only of lesser offenses. The legislation attracted no great interest until the Supreme Court began to apply it to wartime mass murders. SS men who simply did their duty were no longer guilty of murder, but of manslaughter. The drafting of this loophole clause in an innocent-looking piece of traffic regulation was the work of ministerial directors in the Justice Ministry—Josef Schafheutle, who drafted most of Hitler’s repressive legislation, and Walter Römer, who was Public Prosecutor in the Nazi special court at Munich, where he secured the death penalty for political offenders, which meant, in effect, those who opposed Hitler.

  The situation now was one where the big offenders felt immune. Some would write their memoirs to prove their integrity, and others would creep back from exile with cranky versions of National Socialist philosophy.

  Otto John was one of the many twilight-zone intellectuals who seemed doomed to roam the earth and point out injustice in such implacable terms that nobody wants them around. He came out of that vindictive West German term in jail, having been interned or imprisoned in three other countries, quite resigned and yet incapable of remaining quiet. The Russians, obviously, must have offered him inducements to stay. So, too, the East Germans.

  He went back to his old home in Cologne. No friends waited for him. He was neither pro-Communist nor pro-Nazi, and he did not seem to belong to any religious group. He was that most disturbing of men, an independent; and so they left him alone.

  He moved out of Germany when Count von Kielmansegg took command of twenty-three NATO divisions, including the British Army of the Rhine, in 1966. General Kielmansegg had been a General Staff officer in the operations department of the army high command on July 23, 1941 when he signed an order to the Sixth Panzer Division, Section Ic: “Partisans who may be captured should not be shot but hanged in full view near the village…. In the case of attacks on German soldiers or units, all villages within a radius of four kilometers shall be razed to the ground and the male inhabitants sentenced to death by hanging.”

  * Globke was kept by Adenauer as his key administrator until 1963, despite all the evidence of war crimes. Globke, for instance, had been Reich Commissioner for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor and organized the registration of those who were eventually liquidated.

  CHAPTER 19

  The guilty men were not only respectable again but also back in uniform. Decent men, honestly confused and not maliciously motivated, were pushed to the wall. The Dr. Johns were punished and the clever ones went free. Hitler’s racist fantasies were back in circulation in foreign editions of Mein Kampf. His own propagandists were financed by responsible governments to broadcast the same racist poison as before. Israel got the full blast of Nazi vilification. Arab states received training from Nazi professionals. In Bolivia a Gestapo killer likened his massacre of French resistance fighters to the liquidation of Che Guevara’s guerrillas. Nobody seemed astonished. Nobody cared.

  The Nuremberg trials did not make a sudden end to all evil. The Thousand-Year Reich had been going at full throttle and was only twelve years down the line when it switched tracks. There was still a tremendous amount of energy to drive the preachers of racial superiority. There was also a great reserve of expertise on fascism in all its forms.

  An Allied army of all sorts of talents had been assembled by the end of the war. There were American and British writers, entertainers, fortunetellers, psychologists, safe-crackers, and other assorted brains. Those who reported to headquarters in New York included the famous mistress of a Nazi diplomat, champion heavyweight boxer Gene Tunney, European physicists, and graduates of spy schools established at a safe distance from prying Nazi eyes. Their orders were typed, their inoculations arranged, and their instructions given by young girls whose normal rendezvous for dates was “under Atlas” at Rockefeller Center on Fifth Avenue. Late in 1945 Noel Coward arrived to wind up his services for Allied intelligence. There, too, came the wartime Director of Propaganda in Enemy Countries, Campbell Stuart, and a young Royal Air Force fighter pilot whose children’s stories were read by Eleanor Roosevelt to her family during the dark days of war: Roald Dahl. Out of this odd mixture of creative imaginations had been extracted brilliant schemes for espionage, subversion, and deception—anything to bring an end to Nazi slaughter. Then suddenly the whole organization broke up and the volunteers dispersed. Berlin had fallen. The Nazi U-boat chief had announced Germany’s unconditional surrender.

  Not everyone felt that this was the end of the struggle. General William Donovan, for one, feared the survival of men who would transplant the Nazi philosophy. He had asked for British co-operation in trying to predict the further actions of the potential Führer of a Fourth Reich. Work had been done on this on both sides of the Atlantic. Every Nazi leader had a proso profile. Martin Bormann’s was updated, and into the dossier went a
n analysis of the party structure, the distribution abroad of secret funds, and thoughtful assessments of the effect upon his mind of Hitler’s death.

  “The Life Past & Future, Mind & Conduct of Nazi Party Reich Minister Martin Bormann” continued to accumulate stray bits of information over the years. The detective work appealed to Campbell Stuart, who had once gone on a special mission to the Pope and whose life was based upon grabbing the world by the throat, not in violence, but in a spirit of aggressive inquiry. He was a Montrealer who worked for better understanding between the United States and the United Kingdom. He had been Managing Director of the Times of London and he was just as much at home in Washington society as he was at the Palace of Versailles or Scotland Yard. Like so many others, he knew only too well the long wartime route between American intelligence, via Bermuda and the old Pan-American clippers, to Lisbon, thence to London’s Baker Street or Churchill’s bedroom for a consultation with the old man. The Bormann Life was under his general supervision, and when I asked him, what there was about it that fascinated him, he replied with one word: “Compassion.”

  “Compassion?”

  “For all victims of this kind of evil. It never stopped with the collapse of Germany. It’s with us now in one form or another. The Nazis grew out of racial prejudice. It really is just as simple as that. The whole drive of these people was in the direction of producing a superior race. We have to guard against this all the time, and Bormann is a useful reminder.”

  He tapped his long thin fingers on the side of his chair. “Bormann makes us examine our own consciences, if we’re willing. The Pope was not, I suspect, willing … Pope Pius XII. Did you know his predecessor commissioned an encyclical ‘The Unity of the Human Race’?”