In 1944 General Arturo Rawson, leader of the Argentine coup which ousted the civilian government, told a US embassy official confidentially that many top Nazi technicians and party bigwigs were already in his country.
On January 22, 1945, on the letterhead of the German Ministry of War, Heinrich Himmler notified Nazi gauleiters in Europe that certain party leaders would be sent abroad on a top secret mission. The next month 340 Nazi stalwarts received orders to leave. All were traced to Argentina.
Six weeks after Germany collapsed, a number of Nazi submarines sought refuge in the Argentine. The Argentine government acknowledged that some had arrived. But the most significant arrivals were kept secret.
Allied intelligence knows that in the summer of 1945 Hitler and Eva Braun disembarked from a U-boat off the Argentine coast in the vicinity of San Clemente del Tuya. Eva was wearing masculine attire. One source of this information is a top Nazi who had also been landed by submarine. This man, nabbed long afterwards in Montevideo, Uruguay, received immunity from prosecution when he turned informer.
Spruille Braden, then US ambassador to Argentina, received the San Clemente del Tuya report and asked the Argentine government for an explanation. Argentine officials insisted the report was false, but refused to give any further information. Braden thereupon sent US intelligence operatives into the San Clemente del Tuya area.
They received nearly 100 eyewitness reports from natives who said two submarines off the coast had delivered a large number of persons to rowboats. The boats headed for a remote section of the shore. Natives who got too close to the landing site were turned back by armed guards described as Germans.
Shortly after Braden started his investigation, a respected democratic newspaper, Critica, published in Buenos Aires, reported from an authoritative government source that Hitler and his top Nazi aides had been transported to South America. The publisher immediately received this threat:
“Stop the presses and suppress that story.”
Critica did not yield. A band of armed Nazis, shouting “Heil Hitler” and “Long Live Germany,” stormed the paper and tried to burn down its building. Truckloads of newspapers were burned in the streets. Before the siege ended, two persons had been killed.
The Intense search for Hitler by the Allies immediately after the war was stymied by the lack of Argentine cooperation. Braden has told the Police Gazette:
“If the Argentine government had cooperated with us we could have captured the top Nazis. We had information from the best informed and most authoritative sources that Hitler as well as Martin Bormann was hiding out in Patagonia.
“When I sent my agents there to investigate, they were ordered out of the region by armed guards who were Germans. Without the cooperation of the Argentine government, we were powerless to capture anyone there.”
Government Shields Dictator
It remains up to the Argentine government today to decide whether Hitler will ever be captured. As Braden put it: “Unless the Nazi element in the Argentine can be extirpated, it will remain a serious threat for the future.”
In 1949, British intelligence, in rounding up a Nazi underground cell in Berlin, discovered documents which linked Bormann with the rebirth of Nazism there. And, significantly, the correspondence of top Nazi leaders in Argentina still closes with “Heil Hitler.”
Over the years since the war Argentine governments have come and gone. Dictator Peron has long since been booted into exile. But the Nazi element is so well heeled and firmly entrenched in Argentina that the ups and downs of one regime or another have no effect on it. No matter who is in power in Buenos Aires, he must play ball with the Germans.
And the future?
Although the Allies have lost interest in Hitler, the Nazis have not lost interest in the conquest of the world. Top-secret documents confirm that the Nazis are biding their time patiently, maintaining ties with sympathizers in Germany and dickering sporadically with the East German Communists—just as Hitler once dickered with Stalin.
The Nazis are waiting for the right moment for a new power grab. With their tremendous buildup of strength in Argentina, the “right moment” for the Nazis might come sooner than either Americans or Europeans expect.
The Ever-Looming Threat of the Nazi Party
You know that friend you had when you were younger who would tell these outlandish stories about what he’d done or witnessed in his life? The one you thought was making it all up, until one day you found out at least some of it was actually true? And from that point on you opened up to the possibility that maybe, just maybe, everything he said was true? In this section, your friend the Police Gazette gives you that moment.
The Gazette claims the Socialist Reich Party, the successor to the Nazi party in postwar Germany, was getting support and direction from both former Nazis and the Soviet Union. Think of it, Hitler—assuming he’s alive—and Stalin working together to bring Nazis back to power in Germany. But it gets better; the Gazette claims that not only did the Soviets give support to the SRP, but that the SRP was also getting more support than the West German Communist Party! The reader would be within reason to declare “Ridiculous! This could never happen.” But do a little research, then come back and tell the Police Gazette it’s wrong. We’ll wait. …
The Police Gazette goes in depth into the very real issue of a resurgence of right-wing extremism in Germany. Because most top Nazis either fled or were brought to justice at Nuremberg doesn’t mean there weren’t still tens of thousands of true believers left behind from the rank and file who’d gone through twelve years of indoctrination plus the embarrassment of a lost war. These were the kind with violent tendencies and chips on their shoulders looking for something to do, the kind that almost made mince meat out of Paul McCartney during the Beatles’ tenure in Hamburg in 1960. And the Gazette correctly points out how the West German government struggled to keep this burbling underground in check for at least twenty years after the war.
So, you’re a Nazi—with a very particular skill set—who decides Germany is not the place to practice your craft anymore. Could a freelance consultancy be in your future? “Have swastika, will travel?” The Police Gazette lets us know Juan Perón wasn’t the only one hiring. Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt also found a need for experienced professionals in the fields of eliminating enemies and creating empires. When one door closes, another opens. Indeed.
HITLER’S AIDES ARE SHAPING THE NEW GERMANY
by GEORGE McGRATH
WANTED: Martin Bormann, Hitler’s secret ambassador. The Allies are looking for him.
Though Adolf Hitler is hidden away in the Antarctic, there is good reason to believe his presence is felt very strongly in Germany today. How is this possible? It is possible because the image of Hitler still serves for countless Germans as a reminder of the good old days. It is also possible because agents of Hitler’s dreams and ideas are fanning the flames of Nazism in Germany and wherever persons of Nazi sympathies live throughout the world today. Chief among these agents is Martin Bormann.
In Hitler’s last will (Police Gazette, January, 1951) Bormann was named Minister of the Nazi Party. Observers of the German political scene feel sure Bormann is acting in that capacity today. Though other Nazis of record—including Major General Otto Ernst Remer of the Socialist Reich Party—are the nominal leaders of the new Nazi movements, there is conclusive evidence that Bormann is the behind-the-scenes force directing the entire organization.
How strong is the Nazi movement in Germany today? According to reports on Western Germany by John J. McCloy, US High Commissioner, the neo-Nazis, represented by the SRP are a resurging political threat. “They invent scandal and rumors about the democratic parties and parliamentary leaders and dub anyone who opposed Hitler a traitor. They vilify the Allies and seek to distort Allied policy and the genuine desire of the Western Powers to bring Germany back into the community of nations as a democratic partner.”
Last year, McCloy’s report continue
s, the SRP garnered 11 percent of the total vote in the state elections in lower Saxony. In Bavaria, for example, 15,000 of the 35,000 government employees are former Nazis. The same is true throughout Western Germany.
Clever former party members are, in most cases, directing the new Nazi movement. But onetime Nazis who knew him in the old days feel sure that even the cleverest are taking orders from Hitler through Martin Bormann.
Bormann, they indicate, is not only rallying Nazi sympathies in Germany, he is rounding up would-be members of the new movement all over the world. Since the end of World War II, reliable reports have indicated Bormann has been, at one time or another, in Russia, Italy, Spain, Chile, and in various parts of the Russian, American and British zones of Germany. And wherever he has appeared, he has left his mark.
Whether luck, or fate, Hitler chose Bormann for the role he now plays, it was a strategic choice. A veteran of two world wars, he was a fanatic Nazi up until the surrender of Germany, Even then, with Russian forces almost smothering Berlin, he made a frantic attempt to rally the German people in a last-ditch fight.
Bormann is 52 years old. He was born in Halberstadt, in Eastern Germany. At an early age, he acquired a taste for war, violence and struggle. After serving the German forces in World War I, he joined a volunteer group in the Baltic states to fight the Russians. A few years later he was active with the effervescing ultra-nationalist groups that were a part of the German political scene in the early twenties. He was involved in some political assassinations perpetrated by one of the groups, and in March, 1924, was convicted as an accomplice and sent to prison for a year.
Less than two years after leaving prison, he joined the Nazi party. Like a number of others who were later to gain prominent posts, Bormann started with the Nazi party press. He worked up to a position of importance in the SA, and when Hitler came to power, he was named chief of staff to Rudolph Hess. By 1942, he had become secretary to Hitler, an honorary official of the SS, and he had pledged to give his life for the Fuehrer.
When Berlin fell on May 2, 1945, and the Chancellery was in ruins, rumors said that Bormann, as well as Hitler, had died. It soon became obvious that both men were very much alive. Four months after the end of the war, American intelligence picked up a report from Scandinavia to the effect that “Martin Bormann made a 22-minute speech yesterday (August 21) on a secret radio station. This speech was heard in Stockholm. The secret radio reported that ‘Hitler is alive and in good health and that loyal Nazis will once more make themselves conspicuous as soon as proceedings against Goering and other Nazis end.’”
Party fanatics didn’t have long to wait. During the next few years Bormann was reported at various places in the American and French zones of occupation. Military police and constabulary forces of the occupation armies were called out on short notice to blanket, block off, and search large areas of the country. Their tips, forwarded from otherwise reliable sources, always came too late. Bormann was never uncovered.
About this time the story was circulated that Bormann had escaped to Russia, or at least had access to the Russian zone and to Russia. This was stated flatly, in May 26, 1948, by former SS Obergruppenfuehrer Gottlob Berger, while he was testifying in the Wilhelmstrasse trial.
Berger explained that Bormann, to his knowledge, was a secret confidant of the Kremlin and had escaped to Russia when the collapse came. He added that he had noticed Hitler’s orders concerning the treatment of Western powers had become more severe towards the end of the war, and that this was undoubtedly due to the influence of Bormann to the fuehrer. Already the sinister mind of Hitler’s crafty lieutenant was shaping the pattern of things to come in the German postwar scheme.
The testimony of Berger was expanded, outside the court, by Dr. Froeschmann, his counsel, who stated that Berger was firmly convinced Bormann was in Russia and would appear as Commissar General for Germany “when Russia is able to gather all of Germany into her sphere of influence.”
Saw Bormann with Russians
Subsequent developments indicated that Berger may have known only half the story. Early in 1949, the Marburger Presse interviewed Vassilie Vassilevsky, a Soviet officer who had fled to Western Germany. Vassilevsky declared he had substantial information on the activities of Martin Bormann in the Russian zone, based on material accessible to him in his capacity as political officer of the Red Army. He claimed to have seen Bormann behind Russian lines.
Vassilevsky called attention to a speech in 1947 by the chief of the political section of a Soviet guard division who stated “A leading NSDP (Nazi party) politician and personal friend of Hitler’s helped the USSR in its struggle against Hitler’s Germany to its victorious end.”
The ex-Soviet officer also pointed out that Bormann’s name had rarely been mentioned by Soviet war propaganda and that, in contrast to other leading figures, Bormann had maintained an attitude of positive self-assurance in the fuehrer’s bunker up to the end. Subsequent events have indicated good reason for this assurance.
More recent reports have quoted a Russian major in Berlin who described Bormann as “our best technician in civil war.” Traveling under false papers provided by the Soviet secret police, sometimes using an alias, sometimes not, Bormann has moved all over the world, encouraging, coordinating and stimulating the underground movement which—financed by Russia—is attempting to mold a striking force around a core of former SS officers.
The pivotal force, which has enabled Bormann to work for the Communists while conveying Hitler’s orders as well, is an effort to undermine and destroy the influence of Great Britain and the United States, and restore to Germany its unity—under a Nazi regime. Hitler’s genius—as executed through Bormann—perceives that the most direct and effective way to that goal is through the Russians.
Bormann started playing the Russian game in short order. It has been revealed that, early in 1946, he had so completely sold himself to the Russians that they dispatched him—accompanied by a former Gestapo official named Wilhelm Koener—to China where the instructed Mao Tsetung in the organizing of a secret police force which would have the ruthless, fascistic effectiveness of the Gestapo.
Between trips for the Russians, Bormann returned to rally forces in Germany. On February 7, 1949, the editorial office of a weekly Munich news magazine received—following publication of an article entitled “Martin Bormann—Stalin’s Gauleiter”—a letter signed “M.B.” and posted in nearby Wurzburg. It protested statements made in the article. Handwriting experts established the fact that the letter was written in the same hand as a letter of Bormann to Admiral Doenitz, dated April 29, 1945.
During this time, intelligence sources had received reports from Chile, Spain, and Turkey, indicated Martin Bormann had been seen in each of these places, Rumors have indicated he was also in Argentina, a hotbed of Nazi activity and for a long time a haven for fascists who fled Europe at the end of World War II. Four prominent Germans now in Argentina, according to reports, are General Adolf Galland, the Luftwaffe’s leading tactician; Kurt Tank, the Focke-Wulf designer; Guido Beck, Czech atomic scientist who aided Nazi experiments; and Hans Ulrich Rudel, the Luftwaffe’s fighter ace.
Heads Ring of Smugglers
One of the most recent corroborated reports indicated Bormann has been in Italy. The report, picked up by American intelligence officials in 1950, indicated a young smuggler, arrested near Levanto, had stated that Bormann was alive and living on the Italian Riviera. He had entered Italy, the report continues, thanks to a clandestine organization for the expatriation of German war criminals to South America via Genoa. The young smuggler named Bormann as head of the organization. He also added that Bormann had changed his name to Becker and had undergone operations to change his appearance.
But, Bormann’s chief role has been in Germany itself, where, since 1948, a host of political parties under the ultra-nationalistic banner have cropped up to plague the government of chancellor Konrad Adenauer. For the most part, these parties have directed the
ir appeal to former Nazis, refugees, landed aristocracy, professional soldiers, and other dissatisfied elements in Germany. Most of these appeals have been ineffective, at best.
One exception to the generally weak extreme-rightists however, is the Socialist Reich Party (SRP), which seems to have high-level masterminding, reminiscent of the old Nazi Party itself. In a recent Lower Saxony election the SRP polled some 367,000 votes, enough to seat 16 SRP candidates in the state legislature.
It’s almost impossible to distinguish the philosophy and tactics of the SRP from those of the Nazi Party, Military music plays throughout the meetings, and strong-arm squads, insignia, and violently emotional appeals all are mindful of the Nazi regime of old.
The SRP speakers have revived the “stab in the back” legend to explain the defeat of the Third Reich. All Germans who opposed Hitler are termed traitors. Significantly, the SRP, favors the creation of Europe as a “Third Force” between East and West.
It is this “Third Force” lure that points up the relationship of communism to Hitler’s orders for the revival of the Nazis in Germany. The Communists, too, have baited their line with talk of a “Third Force.” And there are other signs of the close kinship that Bormann apparently has brought about by working for the Communists and Hitler at the same time.
Obvious Appeal to Communists
At neutralist conferences, such as the so-called German Congress in Frankfurt last year, Communists and Communist stooges openly rubbed shoulders with SRP delegates. More significantly, the Communists and their youth auxiliaries, no longer interfere with SRP meetings. During the Lower Saxony elections, even Communist hecklers stayed away from SRP rallies. Bormann’s spadework in setting up a mutual admiration society between the interests of Hitler and Stalin seems to be paying off. Hitler, in his Antarctic hideout, can well afford to gloat.
Hitler Is Alive! Page 21