The Bormann Brotherhood

by William Stevenson

  Two weeks later, German military intelligence itself died—officially. In a labyrinth of underground concrete-and-steel-lined tunnels, in the suburb of Wohldorf, outside Hamburg, the thud of Allied bombs had been muffled. Several thousand men and women had moved through these tunnels during the years, feeding information to foreign stations and decoding incoming messages. On April 26, 1945 the last signal went out: “Conditions compel us to suspend communications but please stand by on schedule once a week. Do not despair. We will look out for you and protect your interests as usual.”

  Someone else had taken over.

  * By 1972, Sorge was publicly recognized as a Soviet Union Hero, with his name on a Soviet tanker and a Moscow street and his profile (much improved by the artist) on a four-kopek postage stamp.

  PART THREE

  THE CONDEMNED

  CHAPTER 27

  The mystery of Martin Bormann is that nobody appears to care and yet so many are involved. For some, there is a primitive lust for revenge. Others, haunted by guilt or fear of exposure, are torn between a desire to bury the legend along with the corpse and an instinctive need to justify their role. Those who fought the Nazi terror before and during World War II sometimes wish to believe that it could happen only in one place and in one stage of man’s history. Not too many of us are prepared to look into our own hearts and recognize pieces of the ultimate puzzle. This is not so much what happened to Bormann, instructive though this may be. The real puzzle is how a supposedly civilized society, not far removed from our own moral and material hopes and ambitions, nonetheless gave birth to Bormann’s perverted vision of a brotherhood.

  Nations, like individuals, suffer from the same mixed motives and fearful hesitations. Among the more enlightened, the rule of law is allowed to waver and bend but not to break. Idealism is never quite abandoned although it frequently needs the reassuring support of rationalization. There are other nations and organizations which do not feel the need for restraint because they have no declared burden of conscience.

  For too many, self-interest is their estate, practicality the key to the gate. If there are exceptions, they are found among that half of the world’s population today which was not even born when the Third Reich fell and Martin Bormann vanished. For them, this is history. And among a hopeful few, there is a need to know that transcends fear or meanness or self-justification or prejudiced revenge.

  It is not too difficult to determine the motivation of those few private persons who seek to solve the riddle of Martin Bormann. One can ask and expect a reasonable reply. But what can one deduce about the motivations of nations and institutions? Do the efforts to prove that Bormann died in Berlin in 1945 have more to do with an entire society than they have to do with morbid curiosity? Do the dental mechanics, the forensic experts, the Berliners with sudden flashes of memory in the 1970’s come to bury Bormann or to bury the past?

  The nightmare will not stop. The Federal Frontier Force was authorized by the Bonn government in June 1972 to supervise demonstrations and strikes. Ex-SS General Paul Wilhelm Felix Boulay thus became entitled to order domestic searches, arrests on the spot, and confiscations. Boulay was a member of the Bandit-Fighting Units, which during the war had the power to conduct mass executions of villagers in Nazi-occupied Europe. He won the Iron Cross for his “untiring energy.” The Bandit-Fighting Units were explained at Nuremberg by his colleague SS General Ernst Rode: “[Bandit Fighters] was another name for patriots…. The fight against bandits was an excuse for the systematic extermination of Jews.”

  The old German-American Bund, which used to propagandize Nazism in the United States in the 1930’s was revived forty years later by a Bavarian Member of Parliament, Walter Becher, whose commentaries as a Nazi journalist dwelt upon the need to purify the Germanic peoples. Becher’s new interests in his old age were the German-American Heritage Group and the Federation of American Citizens of German Descent. The latter, in its regular publication, the Voice of Federation, complained in 1972 that the West German press was in the hands of Jews and Reds.

  Manifestations of patent eccentricity or examples of absentminded bureaucracy? Then what about Judge Hans Heinsen, of the West Berlin Criminal Court, who was a Nazi party member and an SS officer? He solemnly affirmed that he had never been a member of the Nazi party when he was first appointed a judge. Now, say the legal authorities, he cannot be charged with fraud because five years have elapsed since he made his declaration.

  Sara Neubeck was sent to a death camp because she was found guilty in 1941 of collecting money to help migrants in Brussels, presented as a treasonable activity by a Nazi state prosecutor named Hubert Schrübbers. Is this man qualified to be chief of the Federal Office for Protection of the Constitution, the job once held by Dr. Otto John?

  And the nightmare grows.

  It is plain that the great powers who fought together in the war against oppression have taken little trouble to clean up the pockets of Nazis and their sympathizers, who, in areas like the Mideast, have been free to pursue the same old hate campaigns as before. Arabic versions of Mein Kampf, for instance, were weapons in the war against Israel. The end of that dangerous book did not come with the end of its author. Kitbag editions of Mein Kampf, Hitler & Nazism were found among the personal possessions of Egyptian officers captured in the Sinai campaign. The Arab edition with its notes and commentaries is quoted as an authority on an alleged Zionist conspiracy. It continues to circulate because Brotherhood groups subsidize foreign printings. (Mein Kampf is banned in Germany, in effect, because the copyright is now held by the Bavarian state government, which consistently refuses a license even for a critically annotated edition.) Spanish editions circulate in Latin America, but Jewish organizations on the whole take this fairly calmly, arguing that few readers today are likely to take Hitler seriously. Nevertheless, the London Jewish Chronicle was sufficiently concerned in 1972 to run a column which said in part: “There are elements in the book—the promise of discipline, authority and order—which can be very attractive in our chaotic age, especially where the price paid for Hitler’s new order is unknown or forgotten. Memories are short and the public remains oddly receptive to strange, even crazy ideas and to produce a book with the history of Mein Kampf at such a time is an act of moral abdication.”

  It is conceivable that pragmatic arguments have been put forward for tolerating the Brotherhood so long as it could be controlled and even utilized. It is hard to see what these arguments are, beyond the old police dictum of setting a thief to catch a thief. It may have led some searchers to secret sources of funds; and it is probable that the Brotherhood is loosely linked and each group concerned only with financial agreements and under-the-counter arrangements that defy public analysis. If the Western Powers have covertly made use of Brotherhood expertise in regions where they sought to counter Soviet influence, this can only lead to a debacle like that of the Gehlen Org. There disaster struck and the declared aims were totally frustrated because it was supposed that a fervent Nazi was necessarily an anti-Communist. A fervent Nazi is not necessarily anything but a fervent Nazi.

  The return of many German exiles can be explained on the grounds of old age, nostalgia, and of course a growing sense of confidence that the courts are not really keen to punish the big offenders.

  The return of confidence was evident in the activities of men like Colonel Hans-Ulrich Rudel, the Brotherhood’s and ODESSA’S great friend, known to all in need of help, and back in circulation and very active again by the 1970’s. Rudel, who boasted of being the most highly decorated officer in the Wehrmacht, spread the gospel according to Hitler and as interpreted by Udo Walendy. The latter rehashed most of the sophistries put forward by official Nazi propaganda in the 1930’s to prove Mein Kampf was not an indictment of the Führer. A young neo-Nazi, he used the political testament that Bormann had waited in the Führer’s bunker to get from Hitler, with the idea that after the collapse, the philosophy could be resurrected.

  Rudel command
ed the Folk-True Youth (Volkstreue Jugend), which he wedded to other militant youth groups. They were lectured on the thoughts of Adolf Hitler. These might have been subtitled “Afterthoughts,” since they came at the end of the Führer’s life. Some samples: Germany had no option; Our enemies hate National Socialism because it exalts the qualities of the German people; Adversity is the indispensable prelude to a great renaissance where the German people are concerned; Germany’s enemies forced the war upon us; I have opened the eyes of the whole world to the Jewish peril.

  Rudel traveled a great deal between the respectable villas that constituted a Nazi-minded community in the South Tyrol and settlements in Latin America, encouraging fugitives to test the climate by returning to Frankfurt with him. Most declined. But with Rudel to push him, Walendy addressed youth camps, using Bormann’s collection of papers sent out of Berlin at the last moment and recording Hitler’s ideas in the last weeks.

  In Munich, a German friend took me along to one of these camps. This was a Brotherhood revival meeting. The group represented the New European Youth, the Viking Youth, and the Federation of Homeland-True Youth. Their aims were described as “national resistance to subjugation” and “restoration of Germanic Folk Territory.” The boys saluted with “Heil Dir” (Hail to you) and drilled with pellet-firing rifles. Their hero for a Greater Germany was Franz Josef Strauss, Bavarian head of the Christian Democrats, who has protested in the past that a nation cannot be forever treated like a naughty child.

  And of course a nation cannot be treated that way. This particular movement was a collection of failures, as the mass-circulation West German weekly Stern pointed out: teachers who could not deal with young rebels; civil servants who were frustrated; and, especially, the sons and daughters of old Nazis either in self-exile or just returned.

  Still, these youth groups illustrate the use to which Bormann intended the Hitler chronicles to be put. And there is something disturbing in Stern’s rationalization that the Munich revival was a collection of failures. That same description would easily fit the early Nazi meetings.

  Perhaps the woodsy gatherings of children were not worth much serious attention. Yet it was apparent that some form of public opinion was at work, or else the West German judiciary was letting the most notorious Nazi war criminals literally get away with murder. The International Concentration Camp Committee, an authoritative source, accused the judges of going out of their way to accept defense excuses that had the effect of postponing trials for years on end. The Secretary of the committee, an Austrian Jew who survived Auschwitz, Hermann Langbein, a man of undisputed integrity, told me that he was not driven by a desire for revenge. All civilization suffered if the law in a powerful nation like the new Germany became perverted.

  His examples of delayed justice would fill a book. One that caught my eyes was that of Dr. Werner Best, charged with taking part in the murder of 8,723 Polish intellectuals as chief of the Nazi Security Service. The case was dropped six months later because of Best’s old age. So far as I could see, the reason for bringing him into court at all was to satisfy public agitation, led by East Germany and the Polish government. His background was well documented. He was sentenced to death in Denmark for his efforts there, as Reich Commissar, to destroy the whole Jewish population. It was Best’s notion at the outset of the anti-Jewish purges in Germany to have all passports held by Jews marked with a large red “J.” He gladly endorsed Bormann’s proposal that to simplify identification, all Jews should be obliged to make use of the middle name “Yid.”

  But Best had been running an industrial intelligence organization after the war for I. G. Farben’s associates and was legal adviser to the Stinnes Trust, one of the largest West German military-industrial complexes, which was forgiven its criminal involvement with Nazi atrocities because in the postwar hysteria it preformed a dutiful role guarding the western bastions against Russia. Thus the wheels of justice were persuaded to grind exceeding slow. Best was hauled into court but got released when that ingenious loophole was discovered by which it could be shown that he did not act with malice aforethought during the war and was therefore guilty only of manslaughter. Then, by attrition, the case against him wore down to the point where Best’s health could not stand up to another inquisition. By 1972 he was, in effect, a free man. To one of the killers was given a full measure of the mercy he had never shown others.

  CHAPTER 28

  On the Putumayo River lives an old man with a dugout canoe and an outboard motor. This gives him mobility along the rivers that divide those small countries, which, like the Amazon, broaden as they descend toward the sea until they merge with the immensities of Argentina and Brazil on the east side of the vastness of Latin America. Here it is hard to make use of words like “countries,” for the boundaries are fuzzy.

  Where the old man putters in his canoe may never be known. He regards the landscape differently from most of us. He sees trails and waterways. He has little need of roads. He has the same peasant cunning that enabled Bormann and so many others to move with relative ease through the Bavarian Alps while Allied soldiers were confined to tanks and tarmac. He is familiar with the dark interior in the same way that the Communist agents of the 1920’s and ’30’s were familiar with the brooding mountains where so many cultures met. The great escape artists of that prewar period, men like Marshal Tito, who was then a mechanic hurrying back and forth between one illegal group of unionists and another, hiding by day and traveling by night, these veterans of early revolution would know how the old man sees the world differently. He, and they, returned to the ways of the hunter and the hunted.

  The Putumayo River permits the old man to visit Peru and Ecucador. In the first country is a banking institution that conceals, it is said, the Bormann Papers. The second country shelters Alfons Sassen, the representative of the Brotherhood business enterprise known as “Estrella.” It is said, too, that Sassen is financed by Dr. Josef Mengele, who controls now such funds as remain liquid from the sale of European loot. Sassen was sentenced to death in his absence by a Dutch court for war crimes; the details are drearily familiar. He was once a police captain in Ecuador, which is where the old man was provided with identity papers in 1952 before he made his small nest of rubbish on the Colombian side of the river.

  The old man can navigate to the Amazon and swing up another tributary and so in time arrive in Bolivia, where it is possible to buy, for $57,000 (the price has gone up since the Swiss manufacturer Josef Hieber bought one), an honorary title as Bolivian consul-general in some area where one wishes to make a social splash.

  But these are vast distances for an old man in a canoe. They are vast distances for investigators. It is quicker and just as discreet to travel by light plane.

  The Brotherhood and its manifold organs had planes and seagoing ships at their disposal. Landlocked Bolivia bought a Brotherhood vision of a navy, which in the end consisted of a freighter and then another freighter and then another, commanded by Rear Admiral Alberto Albarracin and trading under the grandiloquent title of “Transmarítima Boliviana,” with finally a Grand Admiral and Commander in Chief, Horacio Ugarteche, who announced, “We shall carry the Bolivian flag through the free ports of the world.” And indeed they did. For Bolivia is in essence run by German businessmen, and the Brotherhood found cargoes of arms without much difficulty. Then a scandal in 1971 forced the “official” Bolivian government to take action. The navy was a registered company in Panama and Hamburg. In both those places, its assets were seized to pay creditors. But few assets existed. The manager of this vast enterprise, chartering vessels to move guns and cocaine around the world, was none other than Klaus Barbie-Altmann, that slippery Bolivian businessman and erstwhile murderer who was tracked down and exposed by Beata Klarsfeld.

  The probability that the Bormann Brotherhood has been quietly breaking up does not diminish the stature of Beata Klarsfeld. The probability that the Bormann conspiracy was known to the Soviet Union and separately to the West cannot dim
inish what this German girl accomplished by forcing a smug and prosperous society to look more deeply into its soul.

  For some time there had been “sightings” of Bormann in many parts of Latin America, and it would be tedious to list and examine them all. The old man in the canoe could be Bormann. He was a man of disguises even when he was the secret ruler of the Third Reich. A country retreat on the Putumayo might look, to more sophisticated and perhaps arrogant eyes, like a rat’s nest or the lair of a small and frightened fox.

  It is not the dramatic end desired by many different people for different reasons. It would be tidier to have him publicly hanged; then we could parcel up our consciences and tie them tight with legal ribbons. Such an event seems most unlikely. And so the legends go on, and grow, and change. There seems something almost supernatural in the way he comes back again and again. Eichmann in the glass booth in Jerusalem talked much of the time about Bormann as if he were alive and almost with him during the trial. A Dutch ex-SS officer, Willem Sassen, claimed he had hours of tape recordings in his Argentina home. There, Eichmann talked, before his capture, about how he and Bormann escaped. A disturbing thought, that. The voice of the dead Eichmann echoing tinnily through the hideaway of that Dutch Nazi in Buenos Aires, re-creating the actions and the words of this elusive Bormann….