The Bormann Brotherhood

by William Stevenson

  Men like Berger were just as easily fooled by anti-Communist talk as they themselves fooled others. Berger was one of many convicted war criminals who got early clemency; in his case, twenty-five years were cut down to three. The Gehlen Org had played host to the best Russian spies in the business because they paraded their Gestapo and SS backgrounds, and talked convincingly of their hatred for the Bolsheviks.

  What were the advantages to anyone who manipulated the Brotherhood behind the scenes?

  • Propaganda: Most of the old Nazis were not politically adjusted to the postwar need for subtlety. Their behavior was an embarrassment to Germans who wanted to let memories die. The Brotherhood encouraged them to overplay their hands and provided grist for Communist propaganda mills. The former Waffen SS, for instance, reorganized itself as the Mutual Aid Committee (HIAG) in the front line against Bolshevism. When Stalin proposed the reunification of Germany in 1952, he took the Western Powers by surprise. They were arming their Germany in a policy of strength. To have Hitler’s old associates mobilized against Russia was distressing and confusing for young Germans indoctrinated by the West immediately after the war to believe remilitarization was bad. They were told on the one hand that Hitler’s regime had been evil and discovered on the other hand that Hitler’s crusade against Communism continued in a new guise.

  • Espionage: The Brotherhood provided a network into solidly anti-Communist countries and into West Germany. The lists of former thugs, police bosses, and other guilty men under Hitler were invaluable to the Communists for purposes of blackmail. Death-camp officers received certificates “proving” they were innocently working elsewhere as a protection against arrest by the Allies. Blackmail victims included the ex-SS men who infiltrated the Gehlen Org. Heinz Felfe, Hans Clemens, and Erwin Tiebel, who for ten years sold the Soviets everything about federal intelligence, had been promised amnesty for their crimes by the KGB. There was also the overlap between former Nazis and SS men working both sides of the street. (“Professionals” who worked in the German secret services during the war were forbidden by the military governments to work for Allied intelligence. At the same time, they were being secretly recruited as spies by all sides. An attempt by Dr. Otto John to create a central register, to prevent the postwar crop of spies from simply selling information to all interested parties was quickly frustrated.)

  Some members of the Brotherhood would collaborate with the Soviets while exploiting the capitalist system and taking American money. There are many recorded examples of Germans who did this. The matter is not really in dispute. The military caste kept its own “brotherhood” links across the great divide between East and West Germany. Other ex-Nazis could be manipulated without their knowledge. Always, there was the prospect of a reunified Germany: desired for political reasons by many in Bonn, and for economic as well as political reasons in the East. Germans who looked beyond the Cold War foresaw a time when large financial interests in Latin America, and strong blood ties with German communities, would become part of a new drive toward a different kind of German imperialism. This was not necessarily, by the 1970’s, a prospect that would distress the Soviets. In the early days of the Revolution, there had been a fruitful partnership between Bolshevik Russia and the German military caste and its industrial and aristocratic partners. That partnership foundered when the Soviet Union lost control of the situation. Nearly three decades of Communist government in East Germany after the war, however, had provided the Russians with a pretty fair knowledge of the direction in which young Germans were likely to go.

  The earlier experiment in partnership began when Trotsky was still active in Russia. His friend was the chief of German military intelligence after World War I, Colonel Walter Nicolai. They agreed that the Soviet Union should make the arms forbidden Germany under the Treaty of Versailles. German officers, in exchange, placed their expertise at the disposal of the Red Armies. Germany had neither tanks, heavy guns, an air force, nor a navy. Its tiny army was limited by the Versailles agreements to 100,000 men. The Soviet Union lacked officers. After Trotsky vanished from the scene, Nicolai kept up his contacts through the Soviet secret service. Nicolai created a business corporation that cheated the treaty limitations and arranged for the production of German poison gas in Siberia, Junker bombers near the Urals, submarines and battleships at Leningrad. Until 1930, a third of the annual budget of the German government plus 120 million “stabilized marks” went into the secret cartel. The “Black” German Army trained a 20,000-man tank corps in the middle regions of the Volga. Before leaving for Russia, each soldier had his name erased from army lists. Prototypes of German planes and tanks, developed in German workshops, went in sections to the Soviet factories through the free port of Stettin. In this way the men and weapons that later reduced cities like Stalingrad to rubble were produced on Russian training grounds and in Russian factories.

  Colonel Nicolai simply drew on past entanglements. The German Army had traditional ties with Russia. Even before the Bolsheviks were in the Russian saddle, it was German troops who watched over the sealed train that carried Lenin and his comrades from Switzerland to take control of the Revolution. Stalin’s decision to give the Nazis secret support in 1929 when Hitler needed money was an attempt to keep up these good relations.

  It was, of course, all much too cozy. Stalin and Hitler had a common interest in dividing Poland but they were not compatible. The secret partnership led inevitably to the great Red Army purges of 1937, when thousands of Russian officers were executed on suspicion of treason and espionage for Germany.

  Hitler, on his side, had wanted to break the power of the German General Staff. He let the Russian bloodletting speak for itself. There had always been a pro-Russian faction within the German Army, in his opinion. The greatest anxiety after 1945 among German liberals was that the military caste would maintain its traditional sympathies. In East Germany, the career soldiers found jobs within the Communist regime and were integrated with Soviet forces. It raised another real possibility that there were successors to Colonel Nicolai whose sympathies were with Moscow, like Gestapo Müller. One of the forgotten footnotes to history which now takes on dramatic significance is that when Hitler wanted Nicolai interrogated for alleged pro-Soviet activities in 1943, it was Gestapo Müller who stopped the investigation on his own authority.

  * The secret pact was confirmed by Ribbentrop at Nuremberg under cross-examination by Hess’s defense counsel, Dr. Alfred Seidl. But the Soviet prosecutor, General Roman Rudenko, successfully objected to the production of a copy of the protocol.

  CHAPTER 26

  The vital pieces in the puzzle had been in the rag bag of my memory a long time. As happens so often, they turned up unexpectedly and lay there unrecognized. They had to do with the protection given by SS General Heinrich Müller’s Gestapo to another man now celebrated officially by the Soviet Union as Stalin’s greatest spy.

  First I must explain how a seemingly trivial series of conversations produced those odd bits of information, which possibly make everything else fit together. As a Canadian, I was able to fly to Hanoi during the early days of Communist occupation because this was part of Canadian membership on the international truce commission. I crossed swords in Hanoi with a brilliant member of the commission who represented Poland. She struck me, frankly, as a dragon. Then I met her on the long and tiresome flight between Hanoi, Peking, and Moscow, during which she turned out to be charming and extremely funny in her criticisms of Russian bureaucracy. How I came to make that flight is another story; how she came to be on it, I shall never know. Nevertheless, I was satisfied that it had no sinister implications, because the lady did most of the talking, and most of what she said would have raised the hair on the venerable heads of the Central Committee of the One True Party.

  She had worked in Mexico as the correspondent for the Polish state-run news agency, using that country as a base to cover the whole of Latin America, much of which was of course closed to a Communist, however charming
ly feminine. We talked about the man who assassinated Trotsky in Mexico, whom I had confronted in his cell. The dedication of the killer to his Communist gods struck me as fanatical to a terrifying degree. “It was positively medieval,” I said.

  We were trudging through the mud of a small airfield somewhere in Siberia while the plane refueled. She smiled and looked away. “Russia is medieval,” she said. “Stalin might be the last truly medieval tyrant. He commanded that kind of devotion because he was a replacement for God in the minds of people suddenly robbed of their religion. The killer’s background was Spanish and Catholic, but he had rejected his national loyalties and his inherited beliefs.”

  “Did you know him?”

  “Slightly. He was in that Mexican jail for a great many years. He never stopped being a fanatic. He was trained from childhood to carry out assignments of that nature for the Communist party and he transferred his loyalty to the party as if he was raised to become a missionary priest.”

  “Except missionaries save lives, surely?”

  “He saw the destruction of Stalin’s greatest enemy and philosophical rival as the saving of humanity.”

  “Trotsky was no great threat. Why concentrate all that effort on an old failure?”

  “Stalin concentrated on every possible competitor. Against a real enemy like Hitler he was cunning and implacable.”

  “But he couldn’t produce an assassin.”

  She stared across the field. “I think we’re ready for take-off.” She turned as quickly as she turned away from the subject.

  Much later, I raised it again. This time she made no attempt to dodge the implied question. “Stalin had a potential assassin right inside Hitler’s circle,” she said. “What would be the point in killing Hitler?”

  “He’d have saved a few million lives.”

  “And made Hitler a martyr. And revived the old German stab-in-the-back theory. If Hitler had been assassinated, believe me, the Nazis wouldn’t have had to go into hiding. No, what was needed was a watchdog who would report back to Stalin and make it possible to bring about the military defeat of Germany and the destruction of German master-race ideas.”

  “Who was this watchdog?”

  She shook her head. “Who knows.”

  In Warsaw, stopping over en route to New York, I had one more fling at the subject. Her husband also held a degree in international law. He had been involved in the trial of SS Colonel Josef Meisinger, the “Beast of Warsaw,” a Gestapo butcher of the arrogant kind, crude, vulgar, bovine—a bastard. “He was,” said the husband, “a great and long-standing friend of Gestapo Müller.”

  The lady who could be a dragon in North Vietnam was here the solicitous wife. She gave her husband an anxious glance.

  “It’s true,” he insisted. “He was Müller’s right-hand man from the start. I had to go through both their histories before Meisinger hanged. He was a detective on the same Munich crime squad. Imagine it! The secret police are all the same. They think they have a license to kill.”

  “But Gestapo Müller never did kill the man he should—”

  “Hitler? Why murder the Führer? You make him a martyr and the Germans sorry for themselves again. Müller was there to destroy others and keep an eye on Hitler. You will find Müller systematically got rid of some monsters but he was careful with Bormann and the Führer. The first was his source of information, though Bormann never knew it. Hitler was the symbol of evil, someone we could resist. It’s more difficult to resist an idea than it is to hate an individual. Gestapo Müller, if only the story could be told, was the hero—”

  At this point his wife, very sensibly from their point of view, cut him short.

  A fascinating new line of inquiry had been opened up by this conversation. Gestapo Müller now seemed to have covered the tracks of the most celebrated of Russian spies. This was Richard Sorge, a fully certified member of the Nazi party, who filed reports through the German News Agency from Tokyo.

  But Richard Sorge informed Stalin in advance of every projected Japanese move since 1937. He gave the date of Hitler’s invasion of Russia. He provided the vital information that Japan would not attack Russia’s Far Eastern bases when Stalin was weighing his defenses and wondering if he could risk keeping Siberian troops for the protection of Moscow.*

  Sorge’s cover as a German newsman became suspect in Berlin. In the winter of 1940, Schellenberg was still only Deputy Chief of the Security Service’s foreign intelligence section and he was checking the reliability of German embassies abroad. He sent Meisinger, the future Beast of Warsaw, to work on the case. Meisinger duly reported back that the Japanese agencies believed Sorge was a Russian spy.

  The report went to Gestapo Müller, who suppressed it. Then he persuaded Schellenberg, an eager listener, to forget the whole thing. It was absurd to suppose Sorge worked for anyone else. Besides, it would reflect badly on Schellenberg’s department if such stupid gossip got around. The last thing Scheilenberg needed, with one ambitious foot on the ladder of promotion, was to have an investigation that might demonstrate his own lack of good judgment.

  Unhappily for Sorge, he was betrayed by one of his own Japanese subagents. He was hanged by the Japanese almost three years later. After his exposure, Ribbentrop asked Müller for the files on the case. All he got was the standard Gestapo card index. Müller had destroyed the rest. Gestapo Müller had never deviated from his original anti-Nazi position. This was erased from the record by his excessively conscientious work on behalf of Martin Bormann at the time Hitler murdered his niece in 1931. The inference is clear. Müller had been instructed to make every use of his special relationship with Bormann in order to report to his real masters in Moscow.

  An official Soviet account of Sorge is curiously insistent that he was the greatest wartime spy—a posthumous award the Russians can afford, so long as others among their great agents are not exposed. More important and relevant here, the official history demonstrates the similarity in background of Sorge and Müller.

  Richard Sorge fought bravely in the Kaiser’s war and then floundered in the aftermath. Like Bormann and Müller and thousands of other young Germans, he found the chaos unbearable. And, like so many, he looked for extreme solutions. The choice between Communism and National Socialism for a thoughtful man was a choice between a system without heroes or the hero without a system. The Communist system promised order and loyalty to all men. Hitler demanded loyalty from all men and promised an organized system based upon totalitarian control.

  Talent scouts were abroad in Germany, looking for men to fill a variety of jobs. This is known from innumerable sources today. At that time, it was not obvious. Sorge happened to fit one profile; Müller would have fitted another. Sorge was coal mining in the Ruhr for a time, and he became a founding member of the Communist party in Hamburg. He was different material from Müller. He was sent to Moscow for training and then dispatched abroad as a Comintern agent. He transferred to the Red Army’s Fourth Bureau. The path he followed from this point onward was one that clearly ruled him out as an informer inside Hitler’s circle.

  Müller did not have obvious Communist connections. He had been active against the Nazis, it is true. But by 1930, when Sorge was tagged for operations aboard, what the talent spotters needed at home was a man who could work his way up through the central column of the Nazi party; a man who would have every excuse to gather material on the personalities of Hitler and his closest advisers. The Soviet Union already knew a great deal about the new military machine being forged in Germany, for it had played a large part in helping to produce it.

  Looking back now, it is not so curious that my chance encounter in Hanoi should have started this reconstruction of events. Richard Sorge, on his way to build up the Russian spy ring in Japan, paused in Shanghai to acclimatize. There, his old comrades of the Comintern had been active. Shortly after he left, the British police tore apart the headquarters of the Comintern’s Far East network, which was led by Hilaire Noulens, who carried the
inevitable faked Canadian passport. One of his men was Nguyen Ai Quac, who surfaced much later and became a household word throughout the world as Ho Chi Minh. The British policeman who broke up the network later trained American OSS agents at the spy school in Canada set up by William Stephenson.

  Both Bormann and Müller were out to destroy the one powerful man who might have changed the shape of postwar Europe. This was Admiral Canaris, who was in deep trouble by 1944. He had shifted suspicion from Bormann to Müller as the Russian informer. At the same time, he was resisting Bormann’s efforts to make his military intelligence system a creature of Nazi party intrigues.

  Admiral Wilhelm Franz Canaris had been a legend in both world wars. He was known as the “Grand Prince of Espionage,” the “Admiral of Darkness.” His intelligence net covered the globe. Bormann lusted after it. Its agents and collaborators in foreign police forces, its transport facilities, its communications, and its methods of distributing large funds in great secrecy, all these were vital to any future Brotherhood abroad. But it was necessary to break the hold that Canaris had upon it, and so the organization became the target of vicious rumors and gossip. It was said to be full of sexual perverts; Canaris was a masochist, a sadist, and an ambidextrous homosexual, too; his military intelligence system was full of traitors.

  These accusations were nourished for different reasons by Gestapo Müller. He probably at last recognized that Canaris, by a process of elimination, regarded him as the prime suspect. Flicke, the radioman who first detected signals from the party chancellery to Moscow, had started an investigation that could be stopped only by killing Canaris. The death warrant was signed in the chaos following the bomb plot against Hitler in 1944, although historians to this day argue about the Admiral’s part in it. The balance of opinion is against Canaris having played a direct role, but the plot gave Kaltenbrunner an excuse to question the Admiral, for Bormann. That interrogation was brutal beyond description; an account of it was given by British agent Peter Churchill, held in the same Gestapo jail. Churchill escaped, and held the view that by the time Canaris was taken by the goon squads he was doomed. Bormann wanted control over the world-wide facilities of German military intelligence. Müller wanted to get rid of the man who was uncomfortably close to discovering where all the leaks to Stalin were coming from. Early in April 1945, Admiral Canaris, at the age of fifty-eight, was stripped naked and hoisted so that his head could be maneuvered through a loop of wire hanging from a butcher’s hook on a pole in the prison yard. Movie cameras were set up, and the subsequent film was rushed to Hitler’s personal labs, where Bormann supervised its processing in time for the nightly film show. The executioners made sure the looped wire was caught under the Admiral’s chin and then they let him drop.