Schellenberg recorded that he thought Müller was drunk and talking too much, and yet was also fishing for some response from Schellenberg. They were alone. They had been talking all night. The war was approaching its end. Müller said: “Everything we do is half-attempted and half-done. Himmler is only strong when Hitler is behind him. Bormann is a man who knows what he wants….”
Schellenberg was surprised. He had thought Müller regarded Bormann purely as a criminal. He said: “Comrade Mueller, let’s all start saying ‘Heil Stalin!’—and our little father Mueller will become head of the Russian secret police.”
Gestapo Müller was a dour man. He gave the spy chief a long hard look. “And when that happens,” he said, “you’ll be for the long drop—you and your bourgeois friends.”
If Müller was, as Schellenberg later decided, at least to his own satisfaction, the source of high-level leaks to Moscow, then the possibility is raised that the Brotherhood was made an instrument of long-range plans for a resurgent and reunited Germany under Soviet tutelage. The possibility of the German military caste drifting back to its old ties with Russia had always been recognized. Gestapo Müller, with the freedom to pry into every corner of the Third Reich, would have known where potential recruits might be found. He seems, at this distance, much the likelier candidate as the silent observer for Stalin. We know that the Kremlin’s information was sometimes lopsided: a private conversation between the Führer and a top general, for instance, was reported on Moscow radio a few hours later with fair accuracy as a propaganda device. Sometimes there were woeful misinterpretations, as if the unseen watcher lacked some wider statesmanlike ability to assess events. The flight of Hess, for example, was grossly distorted, as Stalin made clear in his conversations with Beaverbrook; and this distortion would not have been Bormann’s work, because he knew all the circumstances leading to that escapade.
Russian inside knowledge of Nazi affairs became more apparent when the tensions relaxed again. The Premier of Poland, Josef Cyrankiewicz, following the hanging of Bormann’s friend Rudolf Höss, talked knowledgeably to me of the Bormann clique and its plans to preserve Nazi philosophy.
When, unable to escape these shadows, I followed up this Polish lead, it was through the Red Orchestra’s director, Leopold Trepper, who had used a doctored Canadian passport. It was issued to Michael Dzumaga, of Winnipeg, and was taken from a dead Canadian volunteer in Spain. The passport was altered, as usual, and in it appeared Trepper’s cover name, Adam Miklas, and his photograph.
A record of the false passport had shown up in old Gestapo files. After the war, foreign documents were referred back to the country of origin. The Canadian security authorities had been asked if they knew this citizen, Miklas, who joined the Nazis. Investigators were puzzled when they found that the doctored passport and other papers that belonged to Trepper had been stored in the private safe of Müller.
Heinrich Müller, “the thick-headed Bavarian,” was at one time head of the anti-Communist section of Göring’s early Nazi secret police. He had the reputation of being a fanatical anti-Communist, but on closer scrutiny this proved to be a ruse to continue his professional career as a Munich police detective in the Third Reich. He had won Bormann’s good will by disposing of the scandal surrounding Hitler’s murdered niece; and his career then rocketed.
Müller progressed along with Bormann, their fates closely interwoven. He had the opportunity and authority, as nobody else had, to look over Bormann’s shoulder. Even Hitler, by reason of his position as Führer, lacked the freedom to display an interest in every small detail of all that went on within the Third Reich.
Müller disappeared at the same time as Bormann. Someone went to a lot of trouble to borrow bones taken from three men and place them in the Berlin military cemetery, where the grave was marked with his name and brief history.
A knowledgeable source, Marshal Tito, in his unpublished diaries, has taken the view that Müller was the Russian informer whose presence was always suspected but never proved. Tito was a militant young man caught up in the great trade-union movements that swirled through Germany in those days. His later career as Partisan leader has tended to obscure the years he spent as a Russian agent; one so successful that, almost alone among foreign Communist leaders recalled to Moscow during Stalin’s great purge, he escaped death there.
Tito’s belief is supported nowadays by Western intelligence experts who studied the period. The view is that Gestapo Müller was recruited when the German Communist party was approaching its peak membership of a quarter-million in 1928. It had twenty-seven newspapers, 4,000 known cells, and an unknown number of underground agents.
Müller was dispatched to the Soviet Union to study the police system there. It seems significant that he was always accused of trying to model the Gestapo on the Soviet secret police, in whose hands he was during the period he spent (with the Nazi party’s own approval) in Moscow. When he came back, Germany was the arena for the largest spy network in the world, according to Tito, who was then working as a Comintern agent in a German factory. He recalls that the workers were told they were not being disloyal in giving technical information to the Soviet Union because this would help in the struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Later, Müller led a drive against Communists from his post on the Communism desk of Section VI at Munich police headquarters. But this purge coincided with the great power struggle inside Moscow, and hundreds of leading agents were being recalled to the Soviet Union only to face execution squads. Müller thus gave a convincing demonstration of anti-Communist diligence to the Nazis by knocking off those Communists who would have been liquidated anyway. He became the tireless foe of Communists. His reports covered every detail from small cells to the organizational structure of Moscow’s police agencies. Heydrich was so impressed that he put Müller in charge of the destruction of courier posts, fake passport rings, and other paraphernalia. From the Russian point of view, it would be worth sacrificing a few thousand doubtful comrades to build up the credibility of a very senior agent.
A similar performance was given in Britain by Kim Philby, who joined the Anglo-German Fellowship to prove his anti-Communism to his bosses, and went on to become the most highly placed Soviet agent in Britain. Both Müller, the rabid Gestapo man, and Philby, the supposedly dedicated anti-Communist, could thus maneuver themselves into positions where they took charge of secret operations that enabled them to dispose of incriminating evidence against top-level Soviet agents. The purge of the 1930’s heiped Müller strengthen his good name with the Nazi leadership, in the same manner that Philby was proving his worthiness to a section of the British ruling class which, pre-Munich, was on good terms with German industrialists and not actively hostile to the National Socialist philosophy. Philby went to the Spanish Civil War on the side of the fascists and was decorated by Franco with the Cross of the Order of Military Merit.
The Philby story was exploited by the Russians once it was known to the world at large. The story of Müller was not given to the psychological-warfare experts in Moscow. The Red Army Fourth Bureau, like any other police or intelligence agency, gives away nothing unless forced to do so, either by outside exposure of the facts or because it hopes to get something back in return. This was evident when the Warsaw government refused to let Leopold Trepper leave Poland. He was notorious as the “Soviet master spy” in Hitler’s Germany. It seemed to explain how Stalin knew so much of events inside the Nazi court. Yet in fact Trepper’s Red Orchestra was already destroyed by the time the war with Russia was under way. If Trepper had rendered such great services to Communism, why was he held virtually prisoner even by 1973? He was old, very sick, and by normal standards his dedication and service should have entitled him to be granted his last great wish: to go to Israel, where he could die among his own people.
“He could still talk too much,” I was told. “He was caught in 1942 and his spy ring was destroyed by the winter of that year.” The informant was a form
er French resistance man now with the DST counterespionage section in Paris. “Trepper was made a Soviet hero because it was a means to distract attention from the mystery of where Stalin did get his information. But Stalin was still getting that information after the Red Orchestra had been totally cleeaned up.”
Müller’s secret role would help explain the strange business of former Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess. The Russians insisted, even in 1973, that he alone should be kept in the fortress prison of Spandau, one man and 599 empty cells; one man guarded in rotation by the Russians, the French, the Americans, and the British. In this island of eight acres in Berlin, surrounded by machine-gun posts and electrified fences, this solitary man, now age seventy-eight and very ill, this victim of Bormann’s rapacity, was kept prisoner on the insistence of the Russians and in the face of humanitarian appeals from other governments. Winston Churchill, not noted for his generosity toward Nazis, had long ago written: “I am glad not to be responsible for the way in which Hess has been and is being treated. Whatever may be the moral guilt of a German who stood near to Hitler, Hess atoned for this by his completely devoted and fanatic deed of benevolence.”
The Russians had agreed to release every other war criminal incarcerated in Spandau, but never Hess. The old man was allowed to see his family for half an hour at Christmas. The Russians insisted, over the objections of the other three powers responsible for Spandau, that Hess must not in any way have physical contact with his wife or son; that his family must be thoroughly searched; and that they must undertake to reveal nothing of what was said during the short conversation.
Hess might as well be dead. If the Soviet member of the tribunal that sentenced him, Major General I. T. Nikitchenko, had his way, the Deputy Führer would have been sentenced to death anyway. What did he know that the Russians feared? During his captivity in Britain he had talked of a secret treaty between Hitler and Stalin defining spheres of interest in the event of war. This was not the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939, but an agreement, signed at the same time, an infamous conspiracy between the Soviet Union and its class enemies, to plunder small nations.* The protocol preceded the invasion of Poland, which started World War II. The pretext for that invasion was an operation personally conducted by Gestapo Müller.
Müller was to drive “canned goods,” consisting of concentration-camp inmates, to the Polish border. The prisoners would be clothed in Polish uniforms and at the last moment given lethal injections. German troops would stage a frontier incident in which it would be made to seem that Poland’s soldiers had crossed into German territory. The “canned goods” would be presented as Polish troops shot on German soil. Foreign correspondents would be brought to the “battlefield” to see for themselves the bodies.
As head of the Gestapo, Müller was to convey the doomed prisoners from the camps to the border. Few Nazi leaders knew the details. The code words to start the operation were “Grandma dead.” Hitler settled on August 26, 1939 for the invasion of Poland as the result of the “unprovoked attack,” the proof of which would be the murdered prisoners.
Gestapo Müller was the only Nazi leader in a position, through his own empire of secret police, to warn Stalin of what was afoot. Martin Bormann was closeted with the Führer throughout this period. Müller, on the other hand, was extremely mobile because the plan required live Germans dressed in Polish uniform to make a mock attack from the Polish side of the frontier. There were 150 Polish uniforms to be found, troops to be briefed on what was represented as a military exercise, and the “canned goods” to be selected from concentration camps. In the event, the incident was postponed at zero hour, and Hitler finally pulled the trigger at dawn on September 1, 1939. POLISH INSURGENTS CROSS GERMAN FRONTIER was the Völkischer Beobachter headline. The war had begun.
Stalin had known, in advance, the pretext for invasion. Baron Ernst von Weizsäcker, a former foreign state secretary, testified at the trial of Hess that “the secret protocol [between Hitler and Stalin] explicitly or implicitly was to create a completely new order in Poland. When it came into operation, a line of demarcation was followed. In the Soviet sphere were included Finland, Estonia, Latvia, the eastern parts of Poland and certain parts of Roumania. Everything west of that line was left to Germany….”
That was undoubtedly why Hess remained in jail in 1973 despite Allied pleas for mercy. He, too, could say too much.
SS Lieutenant General Heinrich Müller has been described in Allied intelligence studies as a cold and secretive personality: “A man with an imposing head and sharp features, curiously disfigured by a thin gash of a mouth that had no lips.”
His name was not on the list the Russians recovered from the Führer’s bunker after the Battle of Berlin. Yet survivors have testified that he was there until Hitler’s suicide, reporting to the Führer each day from his office. When he vanished, he made a good job of it. All his files on the continuing investigation into Hitler’s family history from 1934 to 1943 were missing, too. If the Russians collected them, they never said so.
After the British secret service, working in 1963 through a cooperative German official, had “Müller’s” grave opened, and after pathologists agreed that none of the bones could have been those of Müller, certain matters were recalled that were overlooked before.
In the twilight of the Third Reich, discussions centered on making new overtures to the Western Allies in the hope of a last-minute front against Communism. Müller was vehement in opposing such proposals. Three survivors whose relationships with Müller were totally different have each described separately his attempts to stop negotiations with the West. These were Felix Kersten, the masseur; Count Schwerin von Krosigk, the Finance Minister, who became briefly the Foreign Minister in Admiral Doenitz’s rump government, and spy chief Walter Schellenberg. The latter suspected Müller was delaying matters until the Russians had overrun Berlin.
Near Müller’s office was that of Adolf Eichmann, Gestapo chief in charge of the “Jewish problem.” Müller was handing out certificates, which many SS men used later, attesting that they had worked for civilian firms in the past few years. He was annoyed when Eichmann waved his Steyr army pistol and said that was a good enough pass to freedom or death. “This document,” Müller is reported to have told Eichmann, “is more than a pass. It will tell us where you are.”
Was this Müller’s new task—to follow the fortunes of the Brotherhood? He was one of the gang and knew the various plans for escape. When General Hans Krebs, Hitler’s last Chief of Staff, tried to negotiate with General Vassili Chuikov, commander of the Eighth Guards Army, he was rebuffed and made his way back to the Führer’s bunker, whose Führer was now dead. He rejected the role of fugitive, condemned to roam the world like a hunted criminal, and snarled at Werner Naumann that “civilians are welcome to dive into Müller’s rathole.” Much later, reversing his original story that he did not know where Bormann went after escaping from the bunker, Naumann said he believed the “Fourth Führer” had sheltered in Müller’s cellar before setting off on the long road to safety.
The shelter used by Müller in the last days was not the Gestapo bunker but another one used by the secret-police chief in the complex around Bormann’s party chancellery. There is something more than mere symbolism in this constant proximity between Müller and Bormann. It provides an explanation for the consistent doubts and suspicions directed at Bormann by Admiral Canaris, while he was still chief of military intelligence. Canaris was a technologist. He was not so much pro-Western, as anti-Communist; and in his practical way, he looked at what a powerful Soviet empire could do militarily and the prospect appalled him. One of his underlings was a counterespionage radioman, Wilhelm Flicke, who monitored illicit transmissions between Berlin, Switzerland, and Moscow. After two years’ detective work, Flicke traced the source of radio transmissions to Moscow. It was the cluster of ministerial buildings in Berlin. He refined his findings and concluded that only Bormann’s had the necessary transmitters. The party chancellery, in f
act, had its own communication system linking Bormann’s Gauleiter and other officials loyal to him personally. Flicke’s death in 1957 is still a matter for conjecture in German police circles. At all events, he reported his suspicions in a dutiful manner, up through the chain of command to Canaris. The Admiral was recorded by his assistant, Paul Leverkühn, as saying soon afterward that he was extremely worried at the possibility of the Red Orchestra net having links inside Hitler’s headquarters, “possibly to Bormann.”
Others who concluded that Bormann was a “brown Bolshevik” may well have been confused in a similar way. They were making informed guesses, based on inexplicable events, of which Bormann seemed to be the center. It was understandable that they should overlook the chief of the secret police, whose job included that of ferreting out anti-Nazis and lukewarm supporters of Hitler. It was also dangerous to hint at doubts regarding Müller. His Gestapo had agents everywhere. Who would dare voice suspicion, let alone put his name to a piece of paper? Once the finger of suspicion pointed in the direction of the party chancellery, wishful thinking and fear of the secret police took over. Bormann was universally disliked, although he wielded great power. But in 1942, Canaris and others who felt uneasy about Bormann did not realize just how much more power he wielded than anyone else. They prudently put aside doubts about Müller’s loyalty. Was he not the most rabid of anti-Communists in the early 1930’s? Unhappily for Canaris, his comparatively loose talk against Bormann led to his execution before the war ended.
There were many prominent German figures after the war who joined the chorus of accusations against Bormann. Their backgrounds sometimes put their motives in question. There was SS Lieutenant General Gottlob Berger, who sought Allied patronage for his anti-Communist dedication. His was the office that issued the military handbooks describing Russians as subhuman. He told the Wilhelmstrasse trial (one of the war-crimes trials that followed the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg) that he felt Bormann “did the greatest harm of anybody,” and that Bormann would reappear at the proper time as the Soviet-backed commissar of a Communist Germany.
The Bormann Brotherhood Page 39