The Bormann Brotherhood

by William Stevenson

  AU submarine movements were under the control of Günther Hessler, a son-in-law of Admiral Doenitz, and this was regarded as significant. One of the first acts required of Doenitz when he was captured was the transmission of a radio message: “In accordance with the unconditional surrender of all German forces, all German ships will refrain from any act of war. The crews are forbidden to scuttle their ships or otherwise render them unserviceable. Infringements are direct violations of the Grand Admiral’s order and will have severe repercussions on the German nation.” The meaning was clear: take no chances of Allied retribution. There was no great optimism in Allied naval circles that there would be an honest reckoning. The U-boat was a symbol of deceit and treachery. And it was later noted that in his last message, Doenitz had never specifically forbidden escape.

  The Germans had their intelligence “cliques” in the Mideast and in Latin America, but it was the latter region that caused the greatest anxiety. The Bormann Life stated: “Catholicism is the faith of 200 million Latin Americans. An authoritarian form of government is the tradition. [But] large German communities have become quiescent as the fortunes of war turned against the Fatherland. These same factors of religion and totalitarian habits, however, will create a climate of acceptance for Nazis. We cannot pretend to have done more [during anti-Axis intelligence operations] than disrupt secret communications and in general make it difficult for Hitler to make use of the resources he had available here. The Nazi design in the western hemisphere* has been frustrated. The Nazi-type mind will persist….

  “Should Martin Bormann and leading German personalities succeed in concealing themselves, it is more than likely that they will antagonize their host-countries. It may be necessary, having regard to the foreseeable difficulties in extradition, to keep Bormann under constant surveillance…. A situation could arise where escaping leaders may be induced to waste their energies and exhaust their resolve in the machismo of the region.”

  The realists who had to study possible future developments were taking the hard view that if Bormann did escape through an Allied net which was bound to be poorly drawn around Europe in chaos, then he might be more useful in the end as a stalking horse.

  * President Roosevelt said in October 1941 that a map obtained from Nazi sources “confirmed the Nazi design in South America against the United States.” It showed a net of communications that would link centers in a nazified South America. Colombia was the centerpiece of New Spain, which would be General Franco’s reward for passively supporting Hitler. “This proposed reorganization of South America,” said Roosevelt, “includes our great lifeline, the Panama Canal.”

  CHAPTER 25

  As a figure who disturbs humanity’s conscience, Bormann had his effect among the Soviets, too. In all the reviews of his life, apart from that one semiofficial report by Lev Bezymenski, scant attention has been paid to the Soviet and East German side of the story. The basic facts originated in the West during a period when Russian historians were not co-operative. The new material of more recent years tends to be overlooked. The leakage of Allied analytical reports, for instance, was never a possibility when the Bormann puzzle exercised a number of brilliant minds. Yet it is clear now that Stalin was informed of the “soft” attitude toward some escaping Nazis by Kim Philby, the Russian spy at the top who was promoted in 1945 to head the new British Secret Intelligence Service section for operations against the Soviet Union. Nothing seems incredible after that. Philby had been in charge of the Iberian desk of the wartime SIS. Dr. Otto John, a trusting German bearing messages from the plotters against Hitler, was frustrated when his reports through British agents in Lisbon and Madrid produced no action. John never understood until the mid-1960’s that his dangerous missions were to no avail because the hidden chief in London was stuffing his reports where they would never be seen. Philby shared with the Soviets a deep distrust of any communication between the Germans and the British. He had no intention of permitting a secret alliance, even with German rebels against Hitler.

  So there were missing links in the Bormann story until Philby broke cover and told the world that he had been all along a Soviet agent. Philby’s particular contribution to the puzzle is that his British secret-service job required him to study the problem of postwar Nazis. He was one of the senior men permitted to read the major proso profile on Bormann, in which the possibility was raised that the Nazi leader might escape. Philby’s new job, opening an intelligence offensive against Russia because of the Cold War, was even more ironical. It meant that he knew all the details of the hiring of General Gehlen and his crew of German specialists on Communist affairs.

  There is another important piece in the puzzle to which earlier students would have given little heed. Gestapo Müller, whose grave was clearly marked and honored year after year in West Berlin, was never buried there at all. He was the most wanted war criminal after Bormann. We know now that it is more than probable he was in Russian hands within a few hours of leaving Bormann. Many of the facts and much of the circumstantial evidence pointing to Gestapo Müller as the highly placed informer for the Russians inside the Third Reich have revealed themselves in recent times.

  These additional pieces, if accepted, alter the shape of the final picture. The Philby piece must be accepted. There is no further dispute about his loyalty to Stalin from long before the war. Müller is not a case history that has been examined before, yet it is fair to assume that what the chief of the Gestapo knew about the inner secrets of Hitler’s court was also known to Stalin. This explains some oddities of Russian behavior, and it also suggests that Stalin had some reasons for his insistence that his wartime allies were not entirely frank about the fate of wanted men.

  The breakdown in communication between the Soviets and the Western Allies required folly in both partners. The distrust led to the pursuit of narrow selfish aims. Today the West cannot be sure if some branches of Brotherhood and related agencies were made to function, knowingly or not, on behalf of the Soviets; any more than they can be sure if the reverse is true. It can be fairly argued, for instance, that the Nazis in Cairo helped Russia by creating, or at least increasing, dissensions in the Mideast. This, indeed, was the view of individual American, British, and French diplomats and political leaders, who were sufficiently appalled in some cases to resign during the first Suez crisis.

  The public suffers from secrecy, as always. Looking back, it is hard to justify the treatment of postwar Nazi affairs as top secret. Secret from whom? The governments and religious agencies involved in humanitarian work in the wreckage of Europe, if they needed protection from some unpalatable facts, could have weathered the storm. As it was, we cut ourselves off from what little the Russians were willing to tell us and a good deal of information that other Communist forces in Europe then had. We seemed to think we had a monopoly of the really significant information.

  There are certain facts beyond dispute about what Stalin knew at the end of the war, not all of them taken into consideration in earlier speculation about Bormann’s fate. He knew that serious Allied attention was given to the desirability of letting some Nazi figures run loose. His troops had found those “incredibly important party documents” that Bormann ordered Scar-face Skorzeny to rescue from a forest. Skorzeny told the Western Allies that he arrived too late and that the files, together with high-ranking German officers captured in Berlin, informed the Red Army General Staff’s Fourth Bureau—the most successful of Soviet intelligence agencies—about plans for escape into the West. Stalin was fully informed on secret negotiations between leading Nazis and the Allies before the war ended. He knew that the Vatican regarded his empire as by far a greater threat than the German Reich. He had German intelligence papers listing 20,000 “safe houses” in Switzerland alone where Nazi collaborators could catch their breath and plan the transfer of funds for a possible Fourth Reich. And it is known now, after the 1963 Felfe scandal, that from the very beginning of the Gehlen Org’s spying activities against the Soviets, m
ost information fed by Gehlen to the West during the Cold War was already known by Moscow to be reaching us.

  So the secrecy of those days, difficult to recall now until we remember the tragic aftermath of the Un-American Activities Committee and the witch hunt of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s boys, served nobody more than the Axis ideologues and those Nazi survivors who had always dreamed of war between “civilization,” led by Germany, and the Bolsheviks.

  American commanders in the field, on the other hand, had a strong sense of the need to get on good terms with their Communist allies. General Walter Bedell Smith told Eisenhower’s intelligence chief, Sir Kenneth Strong, that the U.S. regarded Russia as the country of the future. “I was a little surprised,” Strong confessed in his memoirs, “but he was only repeating what many Americans were thinking at the time.” This impulse was quickly discouraged by the Russians themselves.

  Of course the Russians bore a great responsibility for the multiplication of suspicions on both sides. Their record in prewar Germany was an ugly one, and worth looking at more closely because it prepared the way for Bormann’s role as an unconscious source of information for the Russians. There might have been some foundation for a postwar alliance with Russia, all the same, if a breakdown in trust had not started all over again with the sudden and still-controversial suicide of Himmler. No record was ever published of the last-minute babbling of a man whose name was synonymous with the planned mass murder of whole populations in order to improve the human breed. This struck the Russians as odd at the time, this sudden burial in an unmarked grave of a man who knew so much. It coincided, in time and place, with the discovery that the Western Allies were buying the Nazi expert on Russian affairs, General Gehlen.

  All through the war, the only terms offered to Germany were “unconditional surrender.” The purpose of inflicting an unmistakable defeat was to show Germans the dimensions of their crimes, to demonstrate the outrage of civilized society, to emphasize that any nation guilty of such barbaric behavior must expect to be punished. President Roosevelt had spoken for all the Allies when he said that only in this way could Germans be stopped from reviving the old stab-in-the-back theory which made them feel betrayed by World War I and its aftermath, and justified in embarking upon the Nazi path to the second war. Yet already it must have seemed to the Russians that this stubborn refusal to make deals with Nazis had changed. Here was Himmler, one minute in British hands and ready to talk his head off, and the next minute apparently dead, with nothing confided about his disclosures of Nazi escape plans. He must have known those plans, the Russians would have reasoned; they themselves had a good idea of the continuing help given to fascist groups by those institutions with an almost paranoid hatred of Communism. Allowing for the confusion at the end of the war in Europe, the best that can be said is that the most disastrous event of all, the disappearance of Bormann, came at a bewildering time for everyone. Yet he was the legally appointed leader of the Nazi movement, entrusted with all the works of the prophet.

  Stalin understood the significance of Bormann’s position as leader of a party that required no territorial definition. The title was like that of a Communist party theoretician. There was no compulsion to put assassins on Bormann’s trail, as Stalin had done with Trotsky. What the Russians could do, and had demonstrated their skill at doing in Trotsky’s case, was put a tail on Bormann and other fugitives. Meanwhile, there must have been some sense of outrage when Stalin’s agents read Philby’s summary of the Bormann proso profile, which examined his chances of escape. There was no sinister design behind it. Stalin in isolation would not have seen it that way. The projection of Bormann’s possible actions was only one of many documents of that time; but the Soviets had a traditional fear of, and therefore a selective eye for, conspiracy.

  A brief chronology of events that span a period of Soviet interest in Bormann suggests some interesting possibilities.

  • 1942: A senior American diplomat, George F. Kennan, an expert on Russia, proposes that the Western Allies remove Nazi officials after the war but retain all the central authorities in order to unify Europe, a proposal that would revive all Stalin’s fears. (Kennan later wrote in his memoirs that the “Russians, determined to exploit the economic potential of Western Germany and Western Europe and fearful of being excluded from having a voice in these regions, would not hear of anything along these lines.”)

  • 1943: Nazi officials begin secret talks with Allied contacts about the possibility of overthrowing Hitler. This is wrongly interpreted as indicating to Stalin that within the Western Alliance there is readiness to consider treating with a new Germany against Russia.

  • 1945, April: President Roosevelt cables Stalin: “I cannot avoid a feeling of bitter resentment toward your informers, whoever they are, for such vile misrepresentations of my actions or those of my trusted subordinates.” This is the stinging reply to a message from Stalin complaining about negotiations in Switzerland between Allen Dulles, General Karl Wolff, and others. Roosevelt says there is no question of any agreement with the Germans: “Your information must have come from German sources.”

  • 1945, July 17: Stalin tells Secretary of State James Byrnes that he believes Hitler is alive in Argentina or Spain.

  • 1945, August 31: Russians broadcast a claim that Bormann is in Allied hands. Montgomery’s British headquarters replies: “We have not got him. That is definite, and it is not believed that the Americans have him.”

  • 1945, September: Russian commission of inquiry reports no trace of Hitler but insists there is irrefutable proof of a small plane flying in the direction of Hamburg on April 30, and departure of a submarine from Hamburg with “mysterious persons on board.”

  • 1947/48: Martin Bormann is reported to have arrived under another name in Argentina.

  • 1955: General Gehlen reports confidentially that his men have evidence Bormann escaped. He is told to keep silent. Meanwhile, others, like the Nazi propagandist Werner Naumann, have changed their stories about Bormann’s fate. Naumann now claims, having been with him on the fateful night, that Bormann was seen to rejoin his real masters, the Russians.

  • 1963: Kim Philby, once in line as overlord of all British secret-service operations, vanishes and turns up in Moscow.

  • 1964: A Russian intelligence major produces a report which is published, an unusual procedure, tracing Bormann’s movements until his departure for Argentina.

  • 1965: West German authorities dig up a park in West Berlin, hoping to prove Bormann is dead.

  • 1971: General Gehlen, no longer chief of West German intelligence, publishes his statement that Bormann was known to be alive in the 1950’s. However, he says Bormann was seen in Russia.

  General Gehlen was probably right for the wrong reasons; or wrong for the right reasons, depending on your point of view. There was plenty of evidence available to him in the mid-1950’s that Bormann had escaped; and later it became expedient to say that he went back to his spiritual home in Russia. When Gehlen made that statement, Kim Philby had returned to Moscow and, as is known, was advising the Soviet authorities on psychological warfare and the manipulation of the information media. Soon after Philby disclosed his real loyalty, the Russian account of Bormann’s escape was published. Then Dr. Otto John, who had been deeply involved in 1945 in the questioning of major German military and political leaders, suddenly bethought himself of the real reason for his being kidnapped while working as the British-appointed chief of West German security. It had everything to do with Philby and the possibility of past alliances between the West and German militarists; and the potential for a future alliance of that sort.

  This obsession with Germany’s power, past and future, cannot be overestimated where the Russians are concerned. They placed Philby in the center of Anglo-German friendship associations even before the Spanish Civil War because they suspected an identity of purpose between Western industrialists and the Ruhr barons. Their involvement in Germany went deeper and had strong
historical roots. Germany was once regarded as the future base of international Communist strength. Germany had produced Karl Marx. It is not a fantastic notion to suppose that if the British Establishment could be penetrated to its most secret heart by a Soviet agent with impeccable English credentials, this could be done in Germany. Indeed, it would be incredible to suppose that the Soviets were not successful in a country far less insular and clubbish, and far more vulnerable to political extremes of action.

  The most vivid account of Gestapo Müller’s qualifications as Stalin’s eyes and ears in the heart of the Third Reich came from Walter Schellenberg, who had to consult frequently with Müller. They had destroyed the Rote Kapelle, the Red Orchestra. (This Russian espionage group can be discounted so far as this particular aspect of Stalin’s operations is concerned. It was involved in the daily drudgery of espionage and was broken up in 1943, which rules out its director, Leopold Trepper, despite claims that he was a kind of genius spy.) Schellenberg noted in his published diaries that he was discussing the intellectual aspects of treason when Gestapo Müller began an astonishing and self-revealing diatribe against Nazi half-heartedness. “National-Socialism is nothing more than a sort of dung on this spiritual desert. In Russia there’s an uncompromising and unified spiritual and biological force. The communists’ global aim of spiritual and material world revolution offers a positive electrical charge to our western negativism.”