Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler

by Simon Dunstan

  Heinrich Himmler, as national leader of the SS and chief of German police, was already ruler of the entire security and police apparatus, but his ambitions for expanding his SS empire knew no bounds. The whole machinery of government was interpenetrated by Himmler’s practice of awarding parallel SS ranks to functionaries of every kind. Adm. Canaris’s Abwehr military intelligence department, answerable to the Armed Forces Supreme Command, was a particular target for Himmler’s ambition. Its activities were mirrored by the intelligence and counterintelligence branch of the SS, the Security Service—Sicherheitsdienst. This was commanded until June 1942 by Himmler’s deputy, SS and Police Gen. Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the Reich Main Security Office. Each agency scrabbled for supremacy at the expense of efficient operations against the common enemy.

  Canaris and Heydrich, who shared a mutual love of riding and of music, maintained an ostensibly cordial relationship. They sometimes dined together en famille. The cold-blooded killer Heydrich was also an accomplished violinist and he often played for Canaris’s wife. When the professional rivalry became too intense, however, Canaris betrayed Heydrich’s movements in Czechoslovakia to Britain’s MI6. Two parachutists of the Czech Brigade, Jan Kubis and Jozef Gabcik, threw an antitank grenade at Heydrich’s open-top Mercedes in a Prague street on May 27, 1942. Several fragments and bits of horsehair seat upholstery entered Heydrich’s back. He was at first expected to recover from the operation to extract the debris, but the wounds became infected and he died a week later. The death of the central architect of the “Final Solution”—which he had unveiled at the Wannsee conference that January—led to mass reprisals that killed about 5,000 Czech men, women, and children.

  AMONG THE ABHORRENT FIGURES at the pinnacle of the Nazi hierarchy, popular history recalls in particular the flamboyant, drug-addicted Luftwaffe commander in chief Hermann Göring, the occultist security overlord Heinrich Himmler, and the odious propaganda minister and de facto interior minister Joseph Goebbels. In truth, however, the most devious of them all, and the master of palace intrigue, was the relatively faceless party chief Martin Bormann. Hitler’s shadow and gatekeeper for much of the Third Reich, Bormann was a figure forever lurking in the background at the Führer’s elbow. His battlegrounds were the card-index file and the double-entry ledger. His principal weapon was the teleprinter, through which he issued a torrent of instructions to his ubiquitous regional gauleiters (district leaders). To these party officials, Bormann was known behind his back as the “Telex General.”

  Bormann had come to the Nazi Party relatively late, joining only in 1926, so the Alte Kämpfer (“Old Fighters”) who had supported Hitler in the Munich putsch attempt tended to dismiss him. Nevertheless, he held the party membership number 6088 and was therefore eligible for the Gold Party Badge, awarded to party members with a registration number under 100,000. Bormann’s first job was to run the relief fund for the storm troopers of the Sturmabteilungen (SA—the party’s brown-shirted uniformed part-time activists) who were injured in brawls and riots. He cannily negotiated reduced premiums to the insurance company concerned while at the same time increasing the contributions from NSDAP members by 50 percent; furthermore, the payment of dues was now compulsory, while any payment of benefits was at Bormann’s sole discretion. In short order, this scheme raised 1.4 million reichsmarks in a single year—much to Hitler’s delight. The Führer moved Bormann and the SA fund into the NSDAP proper. Bormann now worked at the Brown House, the party headquarters in Munich, where he aspired to taking over the post of party treasurer from Franz Xaver Schwarz.

  Meanwhile, he progressed to controlling the finances of the Adolf Hitler Spende der Deutsche Wirtschaft, the “Adolf Hitler Fund of German Business.” This AH Fund was originally established as “a token of gratitude to the leader” in order to provide campaign funds and finance for cultural activities within the NSDAP. In reality it became Hitler’s personal treasure chest, with revenues gathered from many sources. The most important were the contributions made by industrialists—such as Krupp and Thyssen and of course IG Farben—who were benefiting enormously from German rearmament. In essence, this was a tax amounting to one-half percent of a company’s payroll, payable directly to the Führer. In its first year alone, 30 million reichsmarks poured into the coffers of the AH Fund.

  In 1929, Bormann married Gerda Buch, the daughter of a senior party official, and on July 3, 1933, he was appointed chief of staff to the deputy Führer, Rudolf Hess. Hess was as uninterested as Hitler in paperwork, so Bormann’s skill in turning Hitler’s spontaneous verbal directives into coherent orders was invaluable. The Führer would comment approvingly that “Bormann’s proposals are so precisely worked out that I have only to say ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ With him, I deal in ten minutes with a pile of documents for which with another man I should need hours.” On October 10, 1933, Hitler appointed Bormann as a party Reichsleiter or national leader, making him fourth in the Nazi hierarchy behind Hitler, Göring, and Hess. The intertwining of party and state authority, as described above, would henceforth give Bormann all the freedom of maneuver that he needed.

  BORMANN’S ABILITY TO INGRATIATE HIMSELF with the Führer was uncanny. He altered his sleeping pattern to coincide with Hitler’s and even mimicked his master by eating vegetarian food and avoiding alcohol when they were dining together—although in private he gorged himself on schnitzel, wurst, and schnapps. As one regional gauleiter commented, “Bormann clung to Hitler like ivy around an oak, using him to get to the light and to the very summit.” This he achieved after Deputy Führer Hess—already a marginalized figure—embarked on his bizarre solo flight to Scotland on May 10, 1941, apparently to seek a peace agreement with opponents of the British government. Hess’s departure from the scene allowed Bormann to get even closer to Hitler. He was now entirely responsible for arranging the Führer’s daily schedule, appointments, and personal business. He was always at his master’s side and never took a vacation for fear of losing influence. His reward came in April 1943, when he was appointed secretary to the Führer and chief of the party chancellery. The latter post gave him immense influence over the gauleiters who controlled every district (Gau) across the Third Reich. He was now so indispensable that the Führer was prompted to say, “To win this war, I need Bormann.”

  He also needed Bormann to control his personal finances. At a dinner party with Himmler in October 1941, Hitler had declaimed, “As far as my own private existence is concerned, I shall always live simply, but in my capacity as Führer and Head of State I am obliged to stand out clearly from amongst all the people around me. If my close associates glitter with decorations, I can distinguish myself from them only by wearing none at all.” This claim of monkish asceticism was not strictly true. Hitler enjoyed a lavish lifestyle at his Bavarian residence, the Berghof, in the mountain village retreat of Berchtesgaden in Obersalzburg municipality. Besides the Berghof itself, separate villas were provided at Obersalzberg for all the notables of the Nazi hierarchy. This compound had all been created for the Führer by Bormann and financed from the AH Fund to the tune of about 100 million reichsmarks. With its splendid views of the Bavarian Alps, the Berghof was Hitler’s favorite retreat. This was where he spent time with his mistress, Eva Braun, and entertained foreign visitors and his close and trusted associates—his Berg Leute, or mountain people.

  As Otto Dietrich would write,

  Bormann then assumed economic and financial direction of the entire “household of the Führer.” He was especially attentive to the lady of the house, anticipating her every wish and skillfully helping her with the often rather complicated arrangements for social and state functions. This was all the more necessary, since she herself tactfully kept in the background as much as possible. Bormann’s adroitness in this matter undoubtedly strengthened his unassailable position of trust with Hitler, who was extraordinarily sensitive about Eva Braun.

  There was, however, no love lost between Bormann and Braun; behind his back she called him an �
�oversexed toad.”

  With his brilliant business acumen, Bormann found many ways to bolster Hitler’s personal fortune. Apart from the considerable income derived from royalties on Mein Kampf—which, since it was required reading in German schools, sold millions of copies—Bormann devised a scheme to capitalize on image rights whereby Hitler received a payment for every use of his likeness, be it on a postcard or even a postage stamp. These monies were paid into a separate Adolf Hitler Cultural Fund to support the performing arts and to purchase paintings for the Führer’s personal collection. By the outbreak of war in 1939, Hitler’s annual income was immense, but—thanks to a deal that Bormann had arranged with the authorities—he paid no income tax. Like other Nazi leaders, Hitler had foreign bank accounts, including one with the Union Bank of Switzerland in Bern and another in Holland. These accounts received the royalties earned on Hitler’s book sales abroad and, more importantly, allowed him to indulge the one passion in his life besides politics—his obsession with art.

  Chapter 4

  THE RAPE OF EUROPE

  AS A YOUNG MAN IN VIENNA before World War I, Hitler had nurtured ambitions to be an artist and an architect, despite the fierce objections of his overbearing father, Alois Schicklgruber. In 1907, he applied to the Academy of Fine Arts but failed the entrance examination. Desolated, he applied again the following year but was rejected again, his portfolio winning only a cursory glance. This was a turning point in Hitler’s life. Attributing his rejection to the panel of academicians being Jews, he nursed a deep embitterment toward the Jewish race, although, ironically, on the few occasions that Hitler ever sold any of his paintings, it was through the Jewish Hungarian art dealer Josef Neumann.

  For the next few years Hitler lived a vagrant’s life “of hardship and misery,” as he later recalled in Mein Kampf. His only solace was found in Vienna’s many art museums and the city’s deep tradition of classical music. His musical tastes were catholic—Beethoven, Bruckner, Chopin, Grieg, Schubert, Schumann, and even Mahler and Mendelssohn—but his abiding favorite was Richard Wagner and he knew the opera Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg by heart. Hitler gave up painting after World War 1 as his political career progressed, but he retained an illusion of himself as a great artist throughout his life and his interest in architecture never diminished.

  Once in office as chancellor, Hitler pursued his obsession of “racial purity” with ruthless zeal, in parallel with a breakneck program of centralizing all power in the party’s hands. The Nazis’ election in 1933 was followed almost immediately by their virtual destruction of the German constitution in response to the Reichstag fire and, on the death of President Paul von Hindenburg in August 1934, by Hitler’s assumption of the dual leadership of the Nazi Party and the state as Führer (leader)—a coup d’état endorsed in a plebiscite by 38 million German citizens. Once parliament and the courts were castrated, the regime enjoyed unfettered power and was free to institute a policy of Gleichschaltung (enforced conformity), consolidating its hold over the nation by the elimination or neutering of any organized bodies that were outside the complete control of the Nazi Party. A spate of decrees revoked individual liberties and rights of association, silenced the media, banned rival political parties and free labor unions, and destroyed the independence of regional governments and the judiciary. The death penalty was introduced for a wide range of politically defined “crimes,” and there were mass arrests not only of communist, social democratic, and Jewish activists but also of freemasons, gypsies, homosexuals, and any others deemed deviant in the eyes of Nazi orthodoxy. Most of these “pariahs” were incarcerated in the fifty concentration camps that were opened during the Nazis’ first year in power.

  In April 1933, Julius Streicher, the notorious Jew-baiter and editor of the Nazi weekly newspaper Der Stürmer (The Attacker), orchestrated an economic boycott of Jewish businesses. Dr. Joseph Goebbels, head of the newly founded Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, called for the “cleansing by fire” of “un-German” books, particularly those by authors of Jewish background such as Einstein, Freud, Kafka, and Marx—and even the works of the revered German nineteenth-century poet Heinrich Heine, whose tragedy Almansor contains the warning “Where they burn books, they will in the end also burn people.” On May 10, a crowd of 40,000 watched the burning of 25,000 books in Berlin’s Opernplatz. In November 1933 a national referendum showed that 95 percent of the population approved of Nazi policies, even as their rights and freedoms were being systematically destroyed.

  IN THE HEADY DAYS following their electoral victory, the Nazis concentrated on eliminating political opponents of the center and left. Now they had the opportunity to turn on the Jews. By 1934, all Jewish shops were prominently daubed with the word “Juden” or the Star of David, and storm troopers of the SA frequently hung around outside them to discourage customers from entering. Increasingly, Jewish business people were forced to close down as they lost their livelihood. Soon, German Jews were being forced out of the professions and government employment as doctors, lawyers, teachers, scientists, and civil servants. Shops and restaurants refused to serve Jews and they were banned from public parks, swimming pools, and even public transport. German children were imbued with anti-Semitism during school lessons and even during playtime—the object of a popular children’s board game was to render particular areas of Germany Juden Frei or “Jew-free.”

  A major step in the process of “Aryanization” of all aspects of German society was taken on September 15, 1935, with the enactment of the so-called Nuremberg Laws. Henceforth, marriage or sexual intercourse between Jews and Aryans was expressly forbidden, and Jews were deprived of their political rights as citizens. Increasingly, Jews attempted to emigrate to France, Switzerland, and further afield, but they were rarely made welcome and many were refused entry. Out of a total Jewish population of some 525,000, about 170,000 had already left Germany before October 5, 1938, when a decree invalidated their passports. The Swiss insisted that German Jews who needed traveling documents for emigration purposes be reissued passports with a large “J” for ready identification and rejection at the border. Many Jews could not afford the ever-increasing cost of emigration. Those who could were not permitted to take any capital with them, and few had any money left after being forced to sell their homes and businesses at greatly discounted prices to pay the Reichsfluchtsteuer (“escape tax”). Dealers in art and antiquities were specifically targeted, and this enforced liquidation of about 80 percent of such businesses in Germany caused a glut on the market and a sharp slump in prices.

  On November 9, 1938, racial violence—sparked by the assassination of a German diplomat in Paris by a young Jewish Pole whose family had been deported from Germany—reached new heights. That night Jewish homes, properties, and synagogues across Germany and parts of Austria and the Sudetenland were attacked and burned in the orgy of destruction known as Kristallnacht—“Crystal Night” or the Night of Broken Glass—from the amount of broken glass it left carpeting the streets. At least ninety-one Jews lost their lives; another 30,000 were arrested and largely consigned to concentration camps. The survivors were actually forced to pay the material price of this pogrom. Replacing all the broken windows would cost some 25 million reichsmarks, and since almost all plate glass was imported from Belgium this had to be paid in scarce foreign currency. By now, the avaricious Hermann Göring was in charge of the “Program to Eliminate Jews from German Economic Life” and he decreed that all Jews remaining in Germany were to provide the Reich exchequer with “atonement payments,” totaling 1 billion reichsmarks, to cover the costs of repairing the damage. In addition, any insurance payments made to German Jews were confiscated by the state.

  KRISTALLNACHT WAS THE CLEAREST WARNING YET to German Jewry of their perilous situation, and, between then and the outbreak of war in September 1939, approximately 100,000 Jews somehow found ways to leave the Reich. Another Nazi legislative novelty was about to suggest that any who were unable or unwilli
ng to do so might find themselves at the mercy of a state prepared to commit mass murder.

  Among the plague of new legislation enacted in 1933 was a law for the compulsory sterilization of people suffering “congenital mental defects, schizophrenia, manic-depressive psychosis, hereditary epilepsy, and severe alcoholism.” Germans were not alone in their enthusiasm for the pseudoscience of eugenics, which in the 1920s–30s was widely espoused across Europe and America in the interests of “racial hygiene.” One of its advocates was John D. Rockefeller, the founder of Standard Oil of New Jersey. It was his Rockefeller Foundation that provided much of the funding for the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, Germany’s most prestigious medical school, to carry out studies on “anthropology, eugenics, and human heredity” under the direction of a Swiss psychiatrist and fervent Nazi, Ernst Rüdin. A mass program of sterilization of both the mentally ill and social misfits, as determined by 220 district “hereditary health courts,” was instituted. Among the several hundred thousand victims were such undesirables as convicts, prostitutes, and even children as young as ten from orphanages.

  By inexorable Nazi logic, the next step was euthanasia or “mercy killing.” This program began in 1938 under the auspices of Hitler’s personal physician, Dr. Karl Brandt. At first the victims were limited to mentally and physically handicapped children who were killed by lethal injection. But the program was soon extended to handicapped adults and to anyone judged an incorrigible social deviant. When lethal injection proved time-consuming and less than efficient, a bureaucracy of murder was established; this was designated the T4 program after the address of its headquarters at Tiergartenstrasse 4 in Berlin. The program was codified in law by decree of the Führer in October 1939. At every mental institution false bathhouses were built, where the victims were killed at first by carbon monoxide and later by poison gas.