The Bormann Brotherhood

by William Stevenson

  The latter was established when Russian doctors performed an autopsy and failed to discover the left testicle, in either the scrotum, the spermatic cord inside the inguinal canal, or in the small pelvis. The lack of one testicle was not regarded as a serious or uncommon disorder, but it could become a problem in combination with other infantile disorders.

  The research teams could not, obviously, have known they were defining a physical malformation which Hitler had kept secret. What they described were the manifestations, based upon many interviews with refugees, including his nephew William Patrick Hitler and others who had known him well. His first major political victim, Ernst Röhm, had said at about the time of the murder of Hitler’s niece that “his sex life is looking at the big round bottoms of peasant girls as they bend over in the fields.” The analysts had said that Hitler seemed preoccupied with eyes and breasts and buttocks as substitutes; and went on to describe castration fantasies without, of course, knowing how close they were to the truth.

  Note was taken of Hitler’s dependence upon approval by older women, his need to draw strength from massed audiences, whose seduction he compared with that of a woman, his nightmares, his self-punishing behavior in private and his vengeful outbursts in public.

  He satisfied his sexual needs in a manner that left him open to blackmail. Bormann cleaned up the dirt.

  Bormann made sure Hitler kept to schedules, which the Führer hated. Bormann concealed from others the Führer’s frequent, manic depressions. Nothing was exposed of the feminine nature hidden inside the great orator who boasted: “The audience is just like a woman. Someone who does not understand the intrinsically feminine character of the masses will never be an effective speaker. A woman expects from a man … clearness, decision, power, and action.”

  Hitler’s role was one Bormann could never have played and did not wish to play. He knew the other Führer, who woke up in the middle of night screaming. The Reich Minister for Church Affairs, Hans Kerrl, compared the Führer to the Holy Ghost: “There has arisen a new authority as to what Christianity and Christ really are—Adolf Hitler. He is the true Holy Ghost.” The founder of a new social order for the whole world loved long and impressive titles. He conveniently forgot promises and screamed with rage when thwarted. He seemed to stiffen into masculinity with the stream of his own words, hypnotizing himself into the conviction that he really was the Father.

  Only Bormann saw the small man with flabby muscles, short and spindly legs, and a chest so hollow that his uniforms were padded in front. His teeth were brown and rotten, and when he was not strutting between the ranks of cheering disciples, he had a dainty ladylike walk in which one shoulder twitched and the opposite leg snapped up.

  What would the puppetmaster do when the marionette broke? The scholarly soothsayers in early 1945 guessed correctly that Martin Bormann had been mentally prepared a long time for this moment. He performed his last task for the Führer-doll when he called for gasoline to burn the remains. It was one of the rare times when he miscalculated. The sandy soil outside the bunker soaked up the fuel. The broken doll did not burn long. Bormann shrugged and walked away.

  It was never supposed that Bormann would waste time hanging around his family unless he suffered a nervous breakdown. Then, possibly, he would need the soothing hand of the woman he called, on occasion, “Mommy.” Then, too, he might seek refuge in the very Christianity he had scorned and scourged; for in that relationship, love and hate were closely interwoven. The broken doll of Hitler might need to be replaced by an abstract god. This would no more divert Bormann from his pursuit of power, political or material, than his dependence upon women, and especially Gerda, directed him away from his goals. He was and would remain a single-minded man.

  “Why would his wife do a back somersault into the Pope’s lap?” I asked Campbell Stuart after the conversion of Mrs. Bormann became known. Stuart had gone on a political mission to the Pope many years earlier, when Catholic Canadian troops were needed during World War I. “For that matter, why would the Vatican take her?”

  He shook his head. “Don’t blame the Vatican for everything. You don’t curse the president of Pan Am if a ticket clerk sends you to the wrong destination.”

  “None of the Bormann children ever discussed their mother?”

  “They’ve always refused. Martin Bormann, Jr., once said he would protect his father, or so he was quoted. He became a Catholic missionary. A reporter found him in the Congo and asked if he would hide his father and young Martin said: Yes, because in spite of everything, he was his father. There was no law that said he must deliver his own father to the hangman.”

  “That must have been the mother’s attitude.”

  “Funny you should say ‘mother.’ Bormann—the Bormann—had a mommy complex. It was something he concealed because the Nazi style was blustering masculinity. He wrapped his ‘weakness’ in brutality.”

  The Brotherhood, with true Nazi spirit, had no place for women in its ranks. From time to time, reports had come out of Latin America from women who claimed to have had affairs with Bormann.

  One woman who had really known Bormann was the widow of Hermann Göring. Before I flew to the Munich area to speak with her in the summer of 1972, I saw that part of the proso profile on Bormann which focused on his life with Gerda and the place of women in Nazi Germany. An accompanying note quoted the priest of the Jesuit Order which ordained Martin Bormann, Jr., in August 1958: “This is new confirmation that even among the godless evolved by totalitarianism, there is a way back.”

  Frau Göring shed no light on philosophical matters. She regarded Bormann as the evil genius behind Hitler and the man who destroyed her husband. “Bormann interfered from the very start,” she said. “My husband never thought of starting a war with Britain. He would have gone to the coronation of King George VI, but it was really Bormann who stopped it!”

  The coronation was in 1936, but Frau Göring gave a vivid account of how Göring, the most powerful figure next to Hitler so far as the public had been concerned, was even then unable to talk privately with Hitler. “Bormann was always present and wrote down every word.”

  The Nazis never permitted women to play an open political role. In the year Göring missed the coronation, there was a woman speaker at the Reich Party Day of Honor in Nuremberg. She was a stocky blonde of uncertain age named Scholtz-Klink, who told the vast assembly that all German women should stand shoulder to shoulder with the Führer in order to fight the evil of Bolshevism. Hitler replied that woman’s role was to raise the family and bear children; men protected the whole of society. There was tremendous applause. Frau Scholtz-Klink promised in the name of all German women to try to lighten the Führer’s burden.

  Frau Göring, a former opera singer, with some knowledge of stage management, had observed the orgasmic nature of Hitler’s relationship with the crowd. “When it came to Nazi party nights, Bormann produced the whole show for Hitler, and nobody out front knew this was so. I had the feeling, watching the Führer perform, that he was just like any poor little showgirl, entirely in the hands of the promoter.”

  The widow of Hermann Göring unwittingly confirmed in 1972 what was speculated upon in the mid-1940’s. Bormann used women to gain control over his rivals. He held complete sway over the prude Heinrich Himmler, who could sign away the lives of thousands with an absent-minded stroke of his pen, but who was tortured by his conscience. He had a mistress tucked away in the Alpine Fortress. He had already married a Protestant girl, to the dismay of his Catholic Bavarian parents. Then his personal secretary became his mistress and bore him a son and a daughter. He acknowledged paternity late in 1944, and put himself deep into Bormann’s debt by borrowing the equivalent of $20,000 from party funds—a large enough amount, and, for the publicly virtuous Himmler, a nightmare obligation.

  Like so many of Bormann’s victims, Himmler was too late in taking the measure of the common and vulgar fellow who danced attendance on the Führer. He was easily manipulated by
Bormann because the pretentious little secret-police killer was suspended like a pendulum between prude and persecutor. He was indecisive behind those cold eyes. An order snapped out to dispose of God knows how many lives did not indicate strength of purpose, but fear of self-revelation. Bormann knew this. He knew he could always dominate a man, who, while standing trial at the age of nineteen for killing the prostitute for whom he had also pimped, wrote: “I shall always love God and remain faithful to the Catholic church.” Later, he forced SS men to leave the church and recommended the public execution of the Pope. This same Himmler could encourage his childhood friend Karl Gebhardt to pursue human-guinea-pig experiments at the same time that he put himself totally into Bormann’s conspiratorial hands in his effort to conceal an extramarital relationship which would set a bad example to the public.

  Himmler was obsessed with romantic visions of a Wagnerian era filled with Germanic heroes and glorious women who were, above all things, pure. This vision, in Hitler’s case, led easily enough to the Nordic German master race, with a sexual code that ruled out extramarital relations. Hence Bormann’s grip on the weak Himmler, who spoke in high moral tones (“healthy clean-living,” he recommended to his future sister-in-law, adding severely: “You will have to be ridden on a tight rein”). His wife, Margaretta, always egged him on, and may well have been the real source of his malice. What they had in common was their sexuality, and after the war, in 1952, she confessed that she had known about his commission to liquidate the Jews and had encouraged him. Heydrich, the subordinate to Himmler, was driven by a shrewish wife who carried her feud against Frau Himmler into the postwar period. “All there was to her,” she said, “was size-fifty bloomers.”

  Bormann managed their affairs to his benefit, and managed his own affairs with such discretion that few discussed them. He managed Hitler for subtler reasons to do with his own masculinity and the Führer’s inability to get sexual relief except in public situations which were emotionally charged. There was a repeated note of homosexuality in Hitler’s exaggerated regard for self-sacrificing comrades. Bormann deliberately fed his appetite for erect blond youths exuding male sweat and nobility of soul.

  “Every child brought into the world is a battle women win for our existence,” cried Hitler, himself above procreation. His teacher in 1919, Dietrich Eckart, had prophesied that the future savior of Germany would be a bachelor. “And then we shall bring in the women.”

  Bormann put it more crudely. The women were not going to get impregnated by the Holy Ghost after the war “but only by those German men still left.” The state must see to it that “the decent strong-minded, physically healthy men reproduce themselves increasingly.” He would permit pure Germanic women to produce children outside marriage, in order to make up for losses in battle. Superman was to be created by selective breeding.

  Gerda Bormann’s enthusiasm to share baby production with her husband’s mistress persisted to the end, evidence of her fidelity to “national biological measures,” which she and Bormann had largely foisted upon Germany. She was not likely to betray Bormann if he should visit her postwar mountain retreat. She would accept a permanent separation for the sake of the cause, and an overnight and expedient conversion to Catholicism to secure a guarantee of safe-conduct for Martin.

  Bormann had no time for religion except as a drug. He was managing director of a large corporation which prospered by feeding the masses a regular dose of Hitler. Others could rhapsodize, like Alfred Rosenberg, whose seven-hundred-page Myth of the Twentieth Century was twaddle and rubbish. In this respect, Bormann saw through the intellectual pretensions of those who treated him with contempt. He betrayed none of his contempt if the courtier still enjoyed Hitler’s favor. “He is unbelievably energetic and tireless,” said Rosenberg before he discovered what a buffoon he was in Bormann’s eyes. “He makes notes of everything, dictates, keeps voluminous records in a vulgarized form and is always with the Führer.”

  Of course. Bormann had worked his way up from messenger boy. Germany was an enormous corporation disguised as a bureaucracy.

  The Allied study team that produced the first Borman Life in April 1945 came to the conclusion that Martin Bormann would escape from the ruins of that corporation.

  The highly secret study recognized that the man had tailored himself into the monstrous bureaucracy of Germany. He limited his vision deliberately, although he was capable of moving to extremes of intellectual activity. He did not push an idea to its limit, leaving that to Hitler. He cultivated a coarse and vulgar manner to disarm opponents and to satisfy Hitler’s need for a brutish companion. He gave an impression of blinkering himself so that he trod a narrow line and was prevented from showing a curiosity about those matters which did not immediately cross his path.

  There was no disposition to see him frozen into immobility by the defeat of Germany. Keeping in mind that this report was completed before events in the early hours of May 2, it was remarkable in predicting that Bormann would not leave until he had absolute and written authority that he was Hitler’s successor. He understood the political intrigues of the court. He was compared, as he has been many times since, to Stalin under Lenin. Stalin, too, maintained the pose of a plodding bureaucrat while the intellectuals around Lenin ignored the lout and destroyed each other. Bormann looked a peasant, and when the time came for escape, it was back to being a peasant that he would go. This ability to merge into a rural landscape would stand him in good stead.

  Yet Bormann was extremely sensitive to the weaknesses in others; quick to take advantage of indecisiveness; capable of displaying the right degree of unctuousness if that was what his quarry seemed to require, but equally able to play the bully. He screamed at generals, and fawned on Albert Speer, his most hated rival, so that the Minister for War Production mistook the nature of his enemy and called him “brutal and lacking the culture which might have put restraints upon him.”

  The Allied Supreme Command was warned that if Bormann should be caught, he was to be handled only by very senior officers and then with extreme care. His physical condition was rated as A-1: “He is 45 years old and appears to have the strength and stamina to go underground for a considerable period of time.”

  The preparations for escape were noted in this particular Bormann proso profile. Several sources were quoted. For example, the Madrid station for German military intelligence had 357 full-time agents on the payroll and a large permanent staff, together with provision to pay, on results, about 890 Spanish locals. In the crossfire of intelligence during this period, the British and Americans were separately picking up the same reports of disaffection. When they compared notes, they found that the center of trafficking in loot was Switzerland. Top SS men were trying to barter Jews for their own safety, and by the end of 1944 there were two accounts of the situation. One came from Schellenberg, who said he had arranged to “save the lives of 1,200 Jews every two weeks” by freighting them into Switzerland. The other version claimed that former Swiss President Jean-Marie Musy had been asked to name the terms on which 250 Nazi leaders could secure political asylum. It required no great insight to perceive where the truth lay.

  Was Switzerland where Bormann would go? Allied intelligence early in 1944 knew he had proposed two exits in private conversation with Gauleiter Koch and Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, who was by then inspector of death camps. The convertible by-products of the camps, jewelry and gold, were shipped back in otherwise empty freight cars, and there were details to be discussed about future disposal. Other commodities, like human hair and old clothes, were part of an industrial process in which Bormann was careful not to pry. He did not get along with the large self-confident barons of the Ruhr. His escape plans were confined to thugs who did not conceal their avarice behind toothy smiles or in the folds of double chins. The wealth accumulating from the camps had been dispersed through the Gestapo and Abwehr networks to safe places abroad. Bormann was expected to make a break for the northern redoubt first. Switzerland w
as the more obvious exit and therefore to be avoided.

  How he would escape depended on Hitler’s decision either to go to his alpine retreat or to stay in Berlin. The analysts thought he would stay. They knew enough already about the chaos in the wake of the Allied invasion armies to guess that Bormann would merge with the refugees while he made his way toward the Kiel submarine pens. He was the one leading Nazi who could vanish in a pigsty. His needs were really few. He had what Speer called “dogged perseverance.”

  In the flood of orders, memos, background briefs, and confidential documents that plagued Allied fighting men, a scholarly study on Bormann, almost totally unknown to most soldiers, was, not unnaturally, pushed aside. Academics in uniform tried desperately to rescue information from the ruins, knowing that within a few years humanity would be asking: “How could it happen?” The fighting men were tired and wanted the war over. The final part of the report, dealing with methods of escape, did not exactly rivet attention even within the tiny circle of recipients.

  It emphasized the hostility toward the Allies among certain Swedish military men, including some in charge of intelligence, a result of highhanded British action against the Swedish Navy. The Scandinavian region was pinpointed as a target for escapees, an alternative to the U-boats in the region of Hamburg and Kiel. There was anxiety about the new submarines being built at Danzig, but the Baltic was shallow and heavily mined. The new Walther-boat submarines were given a million-to-one chance of breaking out. One earlier type of U-boat, the U-77, was reported to have made the suicidal run. It reached Oslo, where other submarines had been moved, partly to escape aerial bombardment. But another reason for submarines moving to Nazi-occupied Norway was to pick up shipments of loot and high-ranking officers.