The Bormann Brotherhood

by William Stevenson

  They learned one lesson, however. If they were certifiably “denazified” in law courts where pressure could be brought to bear, they might re-enter public life. By 1972, when it was difficult to rouse the public conscience in some parts of Germany and Austria, sentences for wartime acts were cut short, and men belatedly brought to trial were winning acquittals. A former Nazi architect who designed and built the Auschwitz gas chambers and cremation furnaces, Walter Dejaca, was freed by an Austrian jury. The New York Times was moved to protest, on March 14: “There can hardly be question of Dejaca’s complicity…. The court was shown blueprints for the gas chambers, for the furnaces and for electric elevators to transport corpses to the ovens, all bearing the architect’s signature. While no penalty can atone for the horror of Auschwitz, it is a desecration of the dead to allow its perpetrators to go scot free even a generation later. Crimes of this enormity serve to undermine the very foundations of human society. How can they so soon be forgotten—or forgiven?”

  One reason why editorial writers in New York felt outraged while West Germany for the most part accepted with equanimity these echoes of horror was the difference in public attitudes. When American policies lead to military adventures that offend the public conscience, there is a powerful outcry from one quarter or another. The critics of American policy abroad have always drawn their raw material from American sources.

  Big business in West Germany took back into positions of wealth and prestige men whose wartime records qualified them to join the Brotherhood’s operations overseas. Their peculiar advantage was that they had been tried and sentenced for war crimes, and then released; and thus they were certifiably acceptable in decent society again.

  The mechanism at Auschwitz for disposing efficiently of human beings was managed and improved to a great extent by I. G. Farben. This was the world’s largest chemical combine during Hitler’s regime. The name of I. G. Farbenindustrie AG was behind a global network of some 500 differently titled companies in more than ninety countries. The combine represented a form of international power that was resistant to catastrophe in Germany and therefore attractive to Bormann and those planning to survive the coming defeat. While the company still managed the machinery of mass extermination, it also prepared for a world without Hitler. This was demonstrated most vividly at the so-called “Auschwitz trial” in Frankfurt during 1964. Freight and cattle trains were packed with Jews and directed to the death camps, where “shower rooms” exterminated the victims and crematories sent up columns of fatty dark smoke and spread the stench of burned bodies. An American military court in Nuremberg sentenced thirteen executives of I. G. Farben to jail on charges of murder and looting. That was in 1948. Twelve years later, many were back with the company, its subsidiaries, or other chemical firms. For instance, Fritz ter Meer, who was found personally responsible for poison-gas production and experiments on concentration-camp victims at Auschwitz, returned to respectability as Chairman of Bayer Leverkusen, an I. G. Farben successor firm. The manager of the I. G. Farben slave-labor factory at Auschwitz, Otto Ambros (also Chairman of Hitler’s chemical-warfare committee) came out of jail to become director of two I. G. Farben associates: Scholven Chemie AG and Feldmuehle Papier AG. It was Otto Ambros who wrote an ingratiating little note on April 12, 1941 to Fritz ter Meer: “At a banquet given us by the management of the Auschwitz Concentration Camp we decided on all further measures affecting the really wonderful concentration camp organization for the benefit of [I. G. Farben’s] Buna Plant.”

  The large chemical monopoly was not the only offender; and this seemed to be the main source of irritation to its officials. To make them feel better, presumably, some were given awards by the postwar federal government for their services after leaving jail. Heinrich Bütefisch, who had been production chief at the slave-labor factory, and an SS colonel, was sentenced to six years by a U.S. military court, was released when Bonn was in charge of its own affairs, became Deputy Chairman of the Board of Directors of Ruhrchemie AG, and received from West German President Lübke in 1964 the Federal Grand Cross for outstanding services.

  The Farben combine had obtained permission to build a synthetic fuel oil and rubber factory in Upper Silesia in the neighborhood where slave labor could be obtained. Eager to please, Bormann’s old chum from terrorist days, Rudolf Höss, hurried along. He had been six years running concentration camps and thought he could oblige.

  He was a pious Catholic in his youth. A little simple, people said, but clearly destined for the priesthood. By the fall of 1941 he had decided not to be present at the selection of the sick for the lethal syringe, a weekly parade.

  He decided to reserve the gas chambers for the Jews. It was, to his way of thinking, a kindness. He got the figures up to 10,000 a day on one occasion, and the chemical industry then gladly increased its supplies of cyanide gas. Höss had not been in good repute with them before this. Farben directors complained that he provided only 1,300 slave workers out of the 2,700 needed on one rush job.

  A photograph and a personality profile of Höss shows that he was destined to take the rap. He had the dilated eyes and the drooping face of a man who found life difficult to understand. Before he was hanged, two years after the war, at the very place where he had juggled with the chemical industry’s labor demands, he told a Reuters correspondent that it was very unfair, because he had never killed nearly the number of people that the judges said he did.

  The power of large or monopolistic companies must be considered in relation to the growing confidence felt by such men as Dr. Josef Mengele, who selected his human guinea pigs from thousands on their way to the Auschwitz gas chambers. Mengele in 1972 was traveling from his new home in south America by air to Spain whenever the Brotherhood there felt it was safe for him to do so, sometimes using the name “Dr. Nadich.” His family’s large business with Latin America made him feel he was wasting time and depriving the booming West German economy of his talents.

  This animal-like unawareness of the savage nature of his own behavior was demonstrated at the time of the Auschwitz trial, when his extradition was sought from Paraguay, still the most thoroughly totalitarian state in the world. The President-dictator, General Stroessner, the German brewer’s son, roared his refusal. Mengele still went ahead with plans to revisit the family home.

  The atmosphere in these German company towns does make such arrogance at least comprehensible. I had seen how the Mengele family dominated “their” Bavarian town, so that Dr. Josef could visit with impunity; and in a classic court action I had seen how a similar company with a load of guilt escaped justice because of local influence. A study of the proceedings in this case was published in 1972 by two Swedish researchers, based on a 972-page indictment compiled by the Public Prosecutor which charged a pharmaceutical firm in the small town of Alsdorf with commercial greed, indifference to suffering, criminal negligence leading to death and malformation of babies, and willfully offering for sale a medicament likely to cause harmful effects—to wit, thalidomide.

  The drug, which was eventually to sell in other parts of the world, was the product of Chemie-Grünenthal. It caused untold tragedy, especially in malformation of unborn babies who were by 1972 a fearful burden. They had matured into young people with flipper hands instead of arms and other indescribable handicaps. The hearings, instead of taking place in the regional center, at Aachen, were moved instead to the company town. It is a small place, where the workers are spoken of as “the labor force,” recruited from the young, who move with bovine submissiveness from school to the drug company’s employ. The big legal guns lumbered in, crushing the local prosecutor’s obviously inexperienced staff. Expert witnesses for the prosecution were vilified and the company’s high-priced lawyers dragged out the proceedings in a way that seemed possible only because they were fighting on local territory. The end result was the use of a loophole in the federal government’s constitution to suspend the trial. Then the company, knowing the parents of the crippled children could not a
fford more legal proceedings, offered to pay a modest settlement if each recipient of this largesse promised not to bring a civil action. The London Sunday Telegraph, viewing the trial as a comment on West Germany in the aftermath of Nazi atrocities, called it “a frightening glimpse of the unbelievably callous origins” of tragedy.

  I discussed the case with Beata Klarsfeld. She felt most Germans were easily impressed by the law. This was why the courts were infiltrated by Nazi-minded lawyers, masters of tactics similar to the thalidomide proceedings, making it possible for exiled Nazis to return home or come out of hiding. The fact that they were growing older mattered less than the need to restore them into good favor, give them a legal right to take public-service jobs again, and thus permit the absorption back into the national consciousness of ideas previously identified with Nazism and officially “wrong.” She felt, as a German, that her people would always take a submissive attitude to legal-sounding propositions. This was why Bormann waited to get documents from Hitler that established his primacy in the party. His legal mind was that of a medieval despot who makes the court witness the actual birth of the son and heir to an empire. The documents were his essential witnesses.

  * Schumann was finally cornered in Ghana after his redeemer, President Kwame Nkrumah (known officially, indeed, as the “Redeemer”), was deposed.

  CHAPTER 23

  In March 1972 I flew from New York to the capital city of Colombia on Avianca’s Saturday night flight to Bogota. An old man had been dragged out of a remote jungle settlement. He was the right nationality, age, and general build to fit the profile of Martin Bormann. This interested me less than the deliverance at regular intervals into police hands of men who were said to be Bormann. He seemed to be doomed to materialize in different guises for the rest of time. He was like the gods and the devils invented by human beings since the dawn of recorded history: invented by societies quite independent of one another, so that one suspected that we created these haunting spirits for the good of our souls.

  Those who reinvented Bormann, or truly believed that they had seen him, were not, as far as I could tell, driven by the usual motives of greed for notoriety or revenge. They thought they had seen him.

  This proved to be the case with Johann Ehrmann, the spelling of whose name was to change in the next few days, along with other details, until I had the feeling that I had tried to capture a wisp of fog between my hands. I checked into the hotel very late. The usual nightly drizzle of high mountain rain made the wide streets glisten. Here and there below my window, small figures were squatting in ponchos like cones of incense as cigarette smoke dribbled from invisible lips. Towering over all was a giant illuminated cross. The taxi driver had said it marked the place of My Lord of Monserrate. Tomorrow there would be a pilgrimage of cripples to kiss the altar.

  The phone rang. Hernando Orozco, of Reuters, like all good agency men, ignored the night hours in his personal life although a clock in his head told him what time it was anywhere in the world. Right now, in London, the readers of the Sunday papers were drinking their prelunch beer over reports that Bormann had been found in the Colombian jungle. “Perhaps it is true,” said Orozco. “All I did was report what the general of security police told me.”

  The Department of Administrative Services (DAS) secret police had arrested the old man at an Indian settlement on the river that forms part of the frontier between Colombia and Ecuador. The village was itself some days’ trek from the town of Pasto, which itself was a matter of weeks by road, in this weather, from the capital. By air, it was three hundred miles over high twisting valleys. There was still a space for me on the police plane leaving early for Pasto, where the old man would be questioned. The German Embassy had said it expected Bormann’s fingerprints by air from Frankfurt immediately. It had said this under the pressure of publicity created by a former henchmen of Che Guevara, a Cuban Communist who disagreed with Castro’s way of doing things. This man edited an influential magazine, which refused to fall into line with the rest of the Colombian press, and it was he who brought the affair to light. So the police and the Cabinet could not ignore the matter. However, said Orozco, the Pasto community was entirely German, and there was already a campaign to protect a poor old man grubbing it with the Indians. And the spokesman at the German Embassy had changed his story twice about the fingerprints. Also, the police were backing off. It seemed that the old man had rather conveniently removed the tips of two fingers and a thumb in a regrettable accident involving firearms. He fitted the scant description of Bormann: right age, and so on. But …

  It was the middle of the night, and I should have caught a couple of hours’ sleep, but Bogota is nearly 9,000 feet above sea level and that altitude always did keep me awake. I went downstairs and into the wet streets again. Soldiers in white helmets, with guns, stood in the doorways and smiled politely. The center of the city rose in formidable cliffs, lit only when the moon broke through drifting cloud. The Club Argentino beckoned. A friendly bar. Good music. I had forgotten how good that Latin-American rhythm was. Girls danced in a tiny pool of light. I found a corner and ordered a drink.

  Did I really want to go on with this? If I sat here long enough, I would shortly find it difficult to know if I was in Saigon or Cairo or Warsaw or Djakarta. If I sat here long enough, there would come the inevitable man with his inevitably intriguing story.

  “You will have a cigarette?”

  Here he was. Inevitable. Sleek. Slightly menacing.

  “You cannot sleep?”

  “No,” I said.

  He raised two fingers to the bar boy. “You were not sleeping on the plane.”

  “What plane?”

  “From New York.”

  I took his cigarette in resignation.

  “Hey, Joe!” he called to a bulky figure sitting beside the pool of light where the girls were still writhing.

  An American this time: large and rather crumpled. Joe Something. Big wide smile and big wide hands. Saw me on the plane. That’s how Gaston, here, knew. Smiles all round.

  “Is there anything we can do to help?”

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “You want to get down to Pasto, right?” Joe leaned forward. “I saw you reading the news.”

  More big smiles.

  “I think I’ve got transport, thanks.”

  “Funny place, Pasto. Eh, Gaston?”

  The other man nodded.

  “They had trouble with the guerrillas there again. This country’s all mountains and valleys. Guerrilla country.”

  “Cardinal Concha Cordoba could tell you much about that,” said Gaston. “He defrocked the priest—”

  “The guerrillas don’t stand much chance,” Joe interrupted. “They got some fine people down there at Pasto. Every Saturday is Bavarian night at the Gasthaus Eric. Brew their own beer. Solid German stock. They can handle these nuts who wouldn’t recognize one end of a gun from the other.”

  “You must know the place?”

  “Fly there all the time. Got my own plane. I could take you down if you needed the ride.” He gave me his card, which bore the name of an oil company. “Call me, anyway.”

  I promised I would and excused myself. The music was suddenly getting on my nerves.

  “Until tomorrow,” said Gaston.

  Gray light crept over the ring of mountains. The cross shone more brightly than before. Perhaps it caught the sun. I walked along the wide streets. Big showrooms with expensive cars and tall office blocks. The cars in the windows stood like floodlit monuments to the Mercedes company. And a mile away in any direction, the people lived in shacks.

  Funny, that mention of the priest. There was a defrocked priest named Camilo who took to the mountains to lead a revolution. On February 15, 1966 the Colombian authorities announced that Father Camilo Torres had been killed by government troops. There had been a movement for a time, spreading to Uruguay and Venezuela, called Camilismo—in memory of a Catholic martyr.

  The old ma
n drank a very good local beer called Club Colombia. He had been pulled into the town of Pasto on the pretense, said the local Colonel of police, that his ID card was out of date. It gave an opportunity to check his background.

  The Germans in Eric’s were friendly and bluff. “Why persecute a poor old Jew?” “That’s right; he came here to get away from persecution.” “You can see he’s simple in the head.” “Why pick on German exiles; haven’t we suffered enough?”

  The old man was born in Germany in 1899, one year before the registered birth date of Bormann. He had a piece of paper which said so. The crumpled certificate was issued to him in 1952. It bore the imprint of an American refugee organization. His name was really Johannes Hartmann, and he didn’t know how the confusion arose. He smiled uneasily at the suggestion that he was Jewish. No, he said finally. No, he was not a Jew.

  There was another bit of paper, tattered and greasy, issued by the frontier police in 1926 recording that he had crossed from Ecuador with the declared intention of becoming a resident foreigner. He had come from Germany in the 1920’s to make a new life. Germany was a place of anarchists and thugs. He grew a few root crops with his Indian family. He knew nothing about Nazis. He smiled apologetically. After all, he had been gone before they arrived, and he was not much for reading newspapers.