The Bormann Brotherhood

by William Stevenson

  Incredible though this seems, Dering was not alone by any means in arguing that he was the victim of defamation. One of the German doctors mentioned in the Dering action was Josef Mengele, an SS captain who volunteered to work in Auschwitz, particularly on Jewish twins. Mengele’s wealthy family had more than recovered its fortunes by 1964 as manufacturers in West Germany and in Argentina, where they acquired a fifty-percent interest in Fadro Farm KG, SA. The family was just as anxious as other wanted Nazis to get a clear verdict in an English court of law which would allow others to come out of hiding. The Auschwitz trial in West Germany was at long last getting under way, and Josef Mengele was the chief defendant. He wanted to make an appearance, but only if the Dering case demonstrated that people no longer cared.

  Another doctor mentioned in the case, Horst Schumann, had experimented on male and female prisoners at Auschwitz, had managed to gain acceptance after the war in his own country, and then, having received a tip that he might be dragged before a denazification court, fled to Africa, where he remained, resisting attempts to have him extradited.* Dr. Werner Blankenburg was Hitler’s administrative chief of the “euthanasia” program and figured prominently in the libel action. He had escaped.

  The shadows were everywhere. Dr. Schumann in German Air Force uniform peering at the pseudo-scientific operations on terrified young girls brought from Greece to have ovaries excised without anesthetic; Krystyna Dering, who was still asking questions about her missing husband, the doctor, in a restaurant in Poland when the libel action was first announced; the prison inmates mentioned in the register of surgical operations in one block at Auschwitz who had survived: all of them phantoms conjured up by the sonorous legal argument that “Dr. Dering did without medical, physiological or other legitimate reason” and “when to his knowledge some of the girls had on their backs or abdomens, or both, irradiation burns such as were likely to render any wound inflicted on them difficult or impossible to heal” record and perform “operations by injections causing such great pain that the girls had to be held down.”

  The shadows were more disturbing because I had been to Auschwitz; and I remembered the young Communist official with me who said: “This is why Poland regards Russia as a friend and ally. The Russians do not forgive as easily.”

  Because Auschwitz is in Poland, I asked a member of the Polish Foreign Office who had studied law in England if they had theories on why Dering had taken this singularly ill-advised action. He replied that the government security services of Poland were not in the habit of disclosing information outside the “democratic republics,” implying that unrepentant capitalists like me were incapable of making fair judgments. Nonetheless, Poland was deeply interested in the case, because, apart from the obviously horrendous disclosures, Dering was a Roman Catholic and a large percentage of the Polish people were Catholics.

  Intellectuals in Poland saw an opportunity to smuggle past the more stiff-necked Communist functionaries an important commentary upon society in general. The Dering trial demonstrated how Catholics collaborated with the Nazis and this was, of course, an acceptable reminder for Communists. But the trial also spelled out the dangers of blind faith in a single superauthority, whether one called it the Communist party, Hitler, or God. The Polish newspapers reported the case in some detail, including a brief exchange between the English judge and the defendant over the question of taking an oath to tell the truth. It underlined, for citizens in a land where the party was supreme, the healthy skepticism of those who live in a society that questions and challenges every statement said to be infallible because it is based upon some absolute authority.

  The Judge: Are you satisfied that you have taken the oath in a manner binding on you?

  Dr Dering: Yes.

  The Judge: On what testament?

  Dr Dering: It does not matter. I am a Christian and a Roman Catholic.

  The judge at this point observed austerely that perhaps “you had better be sworn properly—Take the Douai [Bible] version.”

  When the case had run its course, a Polish legal observer from Warsaw called on me before flying home. Had it occurred to anyone, he asked, that Dering versus Uris & Others might be an oblique way of testing public opinion? The West German Minister of Justice, Ewald Bucher, had stated that no further war-crimes prosecutions would be initiated in the courts after May 8, 1965. The law provided for a statute of limitations which laid down that no prosecution for murder could be started more than twenty years after the offense. The date of Nazi Germany’s capitulation was taken as the starting point for the twenty-year period.

  The Polish lawyer made some acid comments about the survival of useful Nazis in Communist East Germany, and it is better if he remains anonymous. He became involved much later in the case of a Polish Jew who directed a Communist spy ring inside Nazi Germany, celebrated after the war as a hero in Poland, but then denied freedom to go to Israel in 1972. By then, of course, the passage of Jews from Communist states to Israel had become a major issue with the Soviet Union, and the Poles fell into line. The lawyer was to prove helpful later in the reconstruction of Brotherhood operations, or, in his words: “The works of the Kameradenwerk.” He provided details of the death sentence passed on another Auschwitz doctor by a Communist East German court some time after the Heyde fiasco, as if to counterbalance his comments about his own side’s tolerance of Nazis when it suited them. This was the case of Dr. Horst Fischer, found guilty of helping to murder 70,000 prisoners in Auschwitz. He practiced as a country doctor in East Germany. His trial took place after the date suggested by the West German Justice Minister as ending the twenty-year statute of limitations.

  The proposal to drop war-crimes prosecutions in West Germany would mean that Adolf Hitler could reappear quite safely. In the Führer’s case, the public would take care of the matter. But what about lesser figures? They might have felt safe if the libel action brought by Dr. Dering had ended in a resounding victory. The fact that Dering’s unseen friends actually believed he would be vindicated was disconcerting proof of their insensitivity. The fact that Dering was not vindicated was an indication of the horror felt by the ordinary citizens of a free country when confronted with crimes that seemed to have been buried with Hitler. Anglo-Saxon law recognizes this capacity on the part of the people to remember and be shocked by crimes against humanity. This law, observed in the United States and Britain, is based on the principle tempus non occurrit regi (the passage of time has no influence on the prosecution of the crime). In the United States, as in England, there is no statute of limitations for murder.

  The People’s Chamber of the (East) German Democratic Republic appealed to all nations to stop the West German government from declaring a moratorium on war crimes, claiming that the “inner-German law” was subordinate to international law. It pointed out that it had suspended the statute of limitations with regard to war crimes, whereas “in West Germany, Nazi criminals have either not been punished at all or given totally inadequate sentences. Some of them even occupy today responsible positions in the state and the economy.”

  The West German Justice Minister who had started the whole controversy, Ewald Bucher, was a former Hitler Youth member and a registered member of the Nazi party. Political observers in Bonn felt that Bucher was under pressure from his own rightist Free Democratic party.

  Prosecutions at this time were pending against 13,000 suspects. There were no prosecutions pending against prominent West Germans, but these might yet find themselves identified and charged with wartime criminal offenses. There were thirty-six senior police officials in the province of Schleswig-Holstein, for instance, who were said by the Social Democrats to have been involved in Nazi murders.

  Out of a total of 274 senior police officials in this province, which was notoriously the favored hide-out for war criminals unwilling or unable to go abroad, an unknown number lived under false names. The Schleswig-Holstein parliament, yielding to demands from a section of the press, appointed a special commissi
on to investigate Nazi infiltration of the police force. The commission, like similar courts of inquiry, never seemed to get to the end of its investigations because of “legal impediments.”

  Three out of four letters from the general public sent to the Bundestag in Bonn favored letting the statute of limitations lapse, in the manner recommended by the Justice Minister. Finally it was decided by parliament to extend the statute until September 21, 1969—the twentieth anniversary of the day West Germany began to manage its own affairs. By 1972, the law had been extended again. The year 1980 was loudly touted as the date when the Central Office for the Elucidation of National Socialist Crimes would end its activities, since the chances of satisfactorily clearing up cases was steadily deteriorating.

  The lawyer directing this office, Erwin Schuele, had good reason to want the “witch-hunting” to stop. He was identified in 1965, after five years in the job of token Nazi-hunter, as being himself a member of the Nazi party from 1935 and a former Brown Shirt storm trooper from 1933. The Nazi court President in Stuttgart in 1943 recommended his appointment as a judge because of his “political reliability,” and the Nazi Minister of Justice in 1944 made him, with the approval of the Nazi party, a junior judge.

  The Polish lawyer who kept track of war criminals later had a few hundred feet of 16-mm. film sent to me which showed, it was claimed, Dr. Mengele near the border between Argentina and Paraguay. The film clip had been accepted by Communist authorities as a genuine portrayal of the Auschwitz Angel of Death. The results of an investigation into this piece of film were interesting. We ran the footage through a Movie-scope alongside authenticated photographs of Mengele, and there was no question that the man in the film resembled the Auschwitz doctor in every visible way. By then, there was plenty of evidence to show that Mengele moved freely in Paraguay and did live near the Argentine border. I began to receive more “documentation” on Nazi fugitives. This also came from the Polish lawyer. When I saw him again late in 1964 he said, with what I have no doubt was complete truthfulness on his part, that he believed a genuine re-education program had purged East Germany of fascist influences. But in October of that year, Nikita Khrushchev was stripped of power. Friendly contacts with Communist officials became more difficult. Suddenly one appreciated how greatly the old tensions had been relaxed, and how little one had used the opportunity to deal with honest patriots before the old suspicions rose up in the wake of Khrushchev’s downfall.

  Before we lost contact again, the lawyer sent me the names of a few criminals among the 6,000 SS men who had served as guards and technicians in the gas chambers, or as medical orderlies and registration clerks, all at Auschwitz. Only 900 out of that 6,000 were known by name. Of these, Poland had dealt with 300, and even in these cases they found it difficult to locate witnesses. “How,” he asked, “can Nazi war criminals ever be prosecuted, whether or not the statute of limitations is ended? There are just too many of them.”

  From East Berlin came a revised Brown Book on Nazi war criminals which claimed that 1,800 major offenders were back in key West German posts, or drew large pensions for their work in Hitler’s lifetime. It listed fifteen government ministers, one hundred generals and admirals of the revived German armed forces, 828 leading judges and judicial officials, 245 senior diplomats, and 297 police and security officials. There were details referring to men like Ludwig Hahn, Nazi party member No. 194,465, appointed Deputy Chief of the Gestapo in Hanover, promoted to SS Major and transferred to Gestapo / Berlin, and given the task, between 1941 and 1944, of running the Nazi security police in Warsaw, which in that period was the setting for one of history’s worst reigns of terror. Official Nazi party documents were cited whose authenticity seemed beyond doubt. Hahn was in command of the security forces which “resettled” some 500,000 Jews in gas chambers at Treblinka and liquidated the Warsaw ghetto.

  By this time I knew that the Polish lawyer’s interest in the fate of the Warsaw Jews was very personal. He had studied in England, had absorbed liberal intellectual ideas, but he could not forget that his own parents were Jews who had died in Auschwitz.

  To test the accuracy of his information, I looked more closely at the case of Ludwig Hahn. His profession was given as that of deputy director of a life insurance company based in Karlsruhe. The company was a cover for the West German intelligence service, and Hahn was a senior officer in that organization.

  Any further inquiries were met with blank stares. And since this was again idle curiosity on my part, there seemed no justification for spending time and money on the mystery of some obscure fifty-six-year-old German.

  Looking back, one sees why indifference of this kind must have driven the Poles to despair. To the East Germans, the refusal to believe their Brown Book must have seemed positively sinister; it had been dismissed as Communist propaganda by Bonn officials, who thus disposed of the matter. The West German government was still recovering from the shock of the Felfe trial in the Karlsruhe federal court, which demonstrated the real ineffectiveness of the Gehlen Org and intelligence operations inside the Communist countries. It had prompted Die Welt to conclude that, “owing to a catastrophic personnel policy,” the Gehlen Org had provided “a comfortable retreat for both major and minor Nazis.”

  So, feeling defensive, no doubt, Bonn ridiculed the East German Brown Book.

  Eight years later, former SS Colonel Ludwig Halm went on trial for tolerating the murder of prisoners in Warsaw.

  His wife, sister of a top-ranking West German military figure, had good connections during the war. Harm’s brother-in-law, General Johannes Steinhoff, was now the chief administrative officer for the reconstituted Luftwaffe and thus part of the NATO military establishment. It seemed evident that Hahn had enjoyed a long period of protection; that the persistent complaints about his wartime role had been impossible to ignore; and that the trial, which began May 2, 1972 in Hamburg, was in keeping with a decision to make justice appear to be done. He was accused of the comparatively minor offenses of ordering the deportation of some Warsaw citizens and not interfering in the killing of Warsaw Pawiak Prison inmates.

  A West German weekly, Die Tat, commented: “We drew attention more than two years ago to documents showing that Hahn gave direct instructions for the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto…. The files of evidence amount to 133 volumes. Charges were finally filed last August after strong public criticism.”

  If the “minor” charges against Hahn failed to bring a conviction, investigation into all other cases in which he might be implicated would have to start all over again. This seemed to be the intention. The Hamburg courts (where Hahn now lived) had refused all applications made by the prosecuting authorities to have him taken into custody between December 1970 and August 1971, and when finally the police did search his villa, they found photostats of pretrial statements made to the prosecutor by witnesses in his case.

  Ludwig Hahn had known he was under investigation for many years. He must have been aware of Communist reports published ten years before he was finally brought to trial. There was no evidence produced in public that he followed his old comrades from the Auschwitz days to South America. Yet this would have been the prudent action to take.

  A Polish police report reached Interpol in Paris in 1972. It alleged that Hahn indeed had flown regularly to Argentina and Brazil with false papers prepared by the Gehlen Org. More curious still, if the same Polish sources were again right: Hahn visited Dr. Dering at his clinic in London in the spring of 1962. Shortly afterward, on June 22, 1962, Dering, a Member of the Order of the British Empire for his postwar services to the Colonial Medical Service, issued his writ against Uris for libel.

  Nobody in his right mind, protected by the Order of the British Empire, which was like a certificate of virtue, would have launched such an action. He was practicing medicine within the socialist National Health Service. Nobody in London had spoken against him. Nothing had been published in that city to bring him into disrepute, and it would have been an eccentric
reader who connected a passing reference to “Dehring” in a large novel with a live Dr. Dering. By taking this legal action, he put himself in the center of a spotlight which could have only catastrophic results. By the eighteenth day of the trial, every English-language newspaper had carried reports of the horrors of Auschwitz as recounted in the cool legal language of the court; and after judgment was given, almost every British newspaper and weekly journal carried special articles in which the moral issues received attention.

  Within a few months, work began on the extradition of Franz Stangl, charged with killing at least 400,000 Jews at another camp near Warsaw. He had taken refuge in Brazil, and was an old friend of Hans-Ulrich Rudel, a founder of the Kameradenwerk. When he was brought to trial at last, he told the court that he had escaped with the help of Bishop Hudal, who “knew exactly who I was.”

  What Stangl and the Brotherhood did not know was that the British Home Office decided in 1948 that there was not sufficient evidence to support a prima-facie case for the surrender of Dering as a war criminal to the Polish government. The Poles had been trying to get him ever since. Dering was on the United Nations list of war criminals on the complaints of the French, Czech, and Polish governments; and application had been made for his extradition from England. On that basis alone he was held in an English prison for nineteen months, survived the interrogations and investigations, and secured a job as a doctor in the Colonial Service. The presumption that he could clear his name, and thus secure for other war criminals a kind of ticket back into polite society, was founded upon the fact that English law had worked earlier in his favor. His ill-informed advisers had demonstrated again their total lack of moral, let alone common, sense.