The Bormann Brotherhood

by William Stevenson

  “Then I shot him,” said Gray.

  We were looking through the windows at the river boats. A pretty girl walked along the embankment, followed by a Thames Television van, a mobile camera, and about a dozen figures whose identities were concealed by long hair and sunglasses. A quiet summer’s day, Britain on the verge of going into the European Common Market, Willy Brandt about to take West Germany into a new relationship with the Communist East… and here was Bormann, back to haunt us. The skeleton in everybody’s cupboard.

  “You shot him?”

  “I stood in the middle of the road with the Sten and got him on the run at a distance of about a hundred feet.”

  I did not doubt Gray’s honesty.

  “And then?”

  “The rest of the gang fired back. I rolled into a ditch. They grabbed the body of Bormann and went on shooting.”

  “What gang?”

  “Well, we knew it as Die Spinne, the Spider.”

  “You knew the name then? Or you read it since?”

  He shifted his large bulk. “I knew the name. One of the escape organizations. The Americans and the British could never get the ringleaders.”

  He took up his story again. He had hidden in the ditch, afraid to move. He saw two men lift what he believed to be Bormann’s body and haul it to the bank of the fjord. He heard splashing noises and then a silence. He got up, walked to the edge of the water. There was a fitful moon, layers of mist, and lights glowing in the distance. Standing there, he saw a small rowboat silhouetted against the brighter northern sky. The boat rocked unsteadily. Two men stood upright, holding what he believed to be a weighted sack. The sack went overboard with a splash that Ronald Gray can hear to this day.

  A curious story. Gray was not acting with the knowledge of regular British military authorities, and yet he was never charged with breaking regulations. He said nothing publicly until 1965, when he was outraged by the prospect of an amnesty for German war criminals. He got in touch with West German judicial authorities. And after that, according to his version, he got the runaround.

  Checking parts of his story was easy enough. Captain Grundy was now a Liverpool advertising man. Ursula Schmidt had married Robert Brookes, a Welshman, and now lived in Rhyl, although she frequently visited her family, who had moved from No. 41, Bismarckstrasse, Flensburg, to a new home in Bad Godesberg.

  Did Gray run escapees across the border with tacit British Army approval in order to catch ringleaders? The War Office knew nothing of such a game. Then why was he not put on charges? No answer. His record since then made it clear that authority had every confidence in him: he was in Berlin in 1948, on a renewed British Army contract, engaged in intelligence work.

  And the State Prosecutor in Frankfurt, where the main work was done for years to bring war criminals before West German courts? He was, at the time, Joachim Richter, according to Gray, who made several trips to the Frankfurt office. Gray claimed that his sworn testimony, his letters, and his later submissions were all “lost.” He had inquired into the background of the small staff. He believed that for many reasons none of them wished to pursue inquiries into Bormann’s fate.

  “Your Bormann?”

  “The man I saw dropped into the fjord. They could easily drag for the skeleton, even now. But any kind of Bormann. It’s possible I was meant to see a ‘dead body’ dropped into Flensborg Fjord that night. It’s possible I’ve been wrong. I don’t understand, though, why nobody wants to investigate my story!”

  Gray had impeccable references. He was not a man obsessed. He was in his late forties, good-humored, physically very fit. He liked West Germans, had fought against Communist forces in Korea. He had suffered no personal losses from Nazi bestiality. He read Communist publications from East Germany with an open mind, but his adult life had been spent in a disciplined Western environment.

  He was telling what he believed to be the truth.

  The mystery of German official disinterest is a matter for conjecture. But it is a fact that the Cold War dampened interest in Nazi war criminals. There are qualified observers who say the Cold War was started deliberately by the only Nazi spy chief to be taken straight from Hitler’s side to ours; and these observers are far from being Communists.

  Gray’s story happens to fit into a reconstruction of events following the night Martin Bormann slipped out of the Führer’s bunker in Berlin. The refusal to give it credence is understandable. In 1959 the West German government felt obliged, for reasons of diplomacy, to open an office that would co-ordinate investigations into crimes committed during World War II. Its title is “Ludwigsburg Central Office for the Elucidation of National Socialist Crimes.” It lacks any power to prosecute. Its job has been somewhat romanticized as being the pursuit of the guilty. Not all guilt, however. Not guilt involving torture. Only Nazi crimes of mass murder.

  It was born late. It depended on the co-operation of the state authorities, most of whom ignored its representations. Its investigators were regarded with distaste by other police agencies. Its lawyers knew that the judicial system was infiltrated with former Nazis, and therefore their own careers were unlikely to prosper if they looked too closely into that can of worms. Five years after it opened, twenty years after Bormann disappeared, the man in charge of the Ludwigsburg Office was found to have been a member of the Nazi party, a storm trooper, and a judge in Hitler’s people’s courts.

  As somebody pointed out to Gray, he was lucky to be alive. He was sticking his nose into a very strange business indeed.

  Why, then, pursue it? I had asked that question a hundred times since the mystery of Martin Bormann first began to plague a world anxious to forget and perhaps afraid to look too deeply into a recent chapter in the history of that part of the human race which has prided itself upon being superior and civilized. I had asked the question, not because Bormann interested me, but because the mystery fascinated so many others. It was partly because Bormann represented secret power; and in our disheveled human condition today, we suspect that the trappings of democracy are more of a dangerous camouflage than before, that real power begins where secrecy begins.

  Martin Bormann, we see now, possessed that secret power.

  He possessed it to such a degree that he was able to escape the gallows.

  The lady in Jacob’s Well Mews said: “Don’t fall for the temptation of the treasure hunt.”

  I murmured something about being too old for treasure hunts.

  She nodded. “The treasure hunt is chasing up every story that Bormann’s alive.”

  “I don’t collect such stories. I haven’t time, resources, or even the inclination to chase them.”

  She glanced down into the narrow lane behind Oxford Street where crumbling old gardeners’ cottages have been converted into smart but discreet offices or the kind of cozy mews flats occupied by actresses. Her whole professional life was concerned with democratic institutions in Germany. She betrayed no signs of damage, even though she had lost an uncountable number of relatives in the camps. She was surrounded by the records of torture, mass killings, and medical experiments on captive humans. She journeyed frequently to Germany and she was determined to believe the best: the West German schools were making a real effort to look at their own people’s recent past; the courts were doing their best to see that justice was done. She refused to lapse into the role of a mild but implacable Jewish monomaniac who would never rest until every German accused of genocide had been brought to justice.

  “All we know for certain is that there have been false trails without number because there is a sinister romance surrounding his name. Who has the slightest idea of what Bormann looks like? You may say there are photographs and descriptions. And I reply that these are the pictures and details that fit anybody and everyone. Come into the street, and I will point you out twenty Bormanns in the space of twenty minutes.”

  Out of the mews and across the street is London’s famous old Spanish Catholic Church. Farther along George Street is one o
f those unobtrusive London hotels that never have to advertise: Durrant’s. Here in wartime stayed the secret agents who had business with the Baker Street Irregulars (the British Special Operations Executive), just around the corner, before parachuting into Nazi territory. Here I met Dr. Otto John for the first of our discussions. He was one of those tortured Germans, or so it has always seemed to me, who are torn between their perception of what is right and their instinctive loyalty to their own people. He had twice been called a traitor by General Reinhard Gehlen, who tried in postwar West Germany to ease his rival out of the top job concerned with internal security. John had crossed into Communist East Germany, had been taken into the Russian interior by his opposite numbers in the Soviet secret service, and then had escaped back again into the West.

  He smiled resignedly when I mentioned the analogy of the treasure hunt. “You mean the lost Nazi treasures, the forged banknotes, the stolen art treasures, and Bormann’s hoard of gold coins?”

  “I don’t mean anything. This is all incidental. Did you just get fed up with what you discovered as Bonn’s head of security? Is that why you crossed over to the Russians?”

  He shook his head. We were drinking gin-and-tonics in an elegant back-room bar. “Let’s talk generalities,” he said. “The Nazi war criminals exist but who judges them? Certainly the Communists can get convictions. They drag these creatures into court when the case is already settled, and then shoot them. But in a free society? You need witnesses. Not silent witnesses. I mean men and women able to use the power of words still. There were few enough twenty years ago. Even then, those who could have said ‘I saw this,’ ‘I heard that’ were often unable to speak. What remains now? Files. Millions of words, and cellars filled with documents, and a few dedicated Germans honestly trying to secure justice. The German authorities know the identity of major war criminals, they know where they are, they know their abominable histories. But these days, the Bonn government would be wasting votes to go after them, even if it could. The public is not concerned any more. The few Germans who want justice done, they cannot get a legal grip upon the guilty, and the guilty know it. The guilty are beginning already to boast of their actions, and say they acted for the good of the nation. They cannot be brought to trial for lack of compelling evidence.”

  Dr. John was a German liberal who hated Nazism and was convinced that he must act against it. He conspired against the rule of Hitler and failed. His brother was shot in the aftermath of the July 1944 bomb plot. He spoke out against Konrad Adenauer’s regime after the war and failed again. He had been in prison or internment in Germany, in Portugal, in England, in Russia, and now in effect he was exiled from his homeland again. He had given information to the British secret service during the war before making the dangerous trip back to Berlin, where, since 1942, he had been in touch with men who wanted to destroy Hitler and all his works. His friends of the resistance—those who survived—helped him gain office as head of BfV Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, the Federal Office for Protection of the Constitution). The former opponents of Nazism were resolved to prevent this post from falling into the hands of ex-Nazis. And former Nazis were equally resolved to get John out. The most talented of the old Nazis was Gehlen, who, as head of the new German secret service, used his position to rescue old SS and other Nazi comrades.

  John’s experience with double-dealing and betrayal was not likely, I thought, to make him talkative in this year when East Germany was finally recognized as a separate and independent nation. But there comes a time when a man no longer cares about consequences to himself and becomes wholly concerned with truth. That doesn’t make it any easier, of course. Who defines truth? For what the comment is worth, I felt that Dr. John’s struggle to keep life in focus had just begun in the autumn of 1972. The lady in Jacob’s Well Mews took a cold and intellectual view of events; perhaps because it was her only protection, her only way of remaining sane. John was, and probably always had been, an emotional person whose “defection” to Russia and back again seemed to be a consequence of his own horror at what his people had done and might be doing again.

  “Is it really so hard to get an extradition order against a notorious Nazi?” I asked him.

  “Yes. I was—I am—a lawyer. I know.”

  “It’s not enough to say ‘I accuse’?”

  “That’s what the Nazis said.”

  “Then Bormann has little to fear from the law?”

  “Even Hitler would not be prosecuted in West Germany once the statute of limitations ran out.” He glanced around the lounge: leather-upholstered chairs occupied by straight-backed tweedy Englishmen and frail ladies in floppy hats. “Bormann could walk in here now and I wouldn’t be surprised. He could wear his name around his neck and offer evidence of his identity and I wouldn’t be surprised if he was asked politely to keep his voice down.”

  CHAPTER 2

  In the latter half of 1972, certain European and American newspapers published a series of reports by a serious, respected writer who claimed to have discovered Martin Bormann alive in South America. Bormann, who leads all lists as the most wanted of the condemned but unexecuted Nazi war criminals, seems capable of provoking headlines at the drop of an allegation. Within weeks of those published reports, investigations by other journalists and authorities cast substantial doubts on the authenticity and value of the evidence supporting this “discovery.” This was not the first claim since his disappearance more than a quarter-century ago that Martin Bormann has been found “alive.” It will not likely be the last.

  Hardly had the journalistic ripples of the 1972 “live” discovery of Bormann quieted down when the first of the 1973 “dead” theories surfaced, this one in a West German newspaper. A skeleton, one of two unearthed accidentally in West Berlin by a labor crew in December of 1972, was studied “for more than a month” by Dr. Heinz Spengler, Director of the Institute for Forensic Medicine. He based his conclusion, the story continued, on “comparisons of the skull with photographs of Bormann, discovery of a mended collar bone break such as one Bormann had suffered, measurements of the skeleton, and correspondence of the skull’s dentures with a sketch of Bormann’s teeth made by his dentist.” This would seem a reasonable scientific procedure conducted over a substantially long enough period to reach an authoritative finding. Or, on reflection, does it seem reasonable?

  In all my searching I have been able to find no fully detailed physical description of Martin Bormann. Few photographs of the man exist. Such recollections of Bormann’s height as have been noted by those who knew him vary by as much as four to six inches. His actual dental records do not exist; the comparison made in this recent instance relies solely on the memory of a dentist who had not seen his patient for almost thirty years. Yet such evidence seems to have persuaded Dr. Spengler to venture the unqualified statement “There is no longer any doubt. One of the skeletons is the remains of Bormann.” That is not the first time skeletal fragments purporting to be the earthly remains of Martin Bormann have been discovered.

  The puzzle of Bormann’s fate persists now as it has over the years, over the decades. Thousands of trained professionals—military and diplomatic intelligence agencies of at least ten nations—have attempted to pick up the trail that started in the flames of crumbling Berlin as the city fell to the Allies in May 1945. Independent investigators—journalists in search of history, unofficial groups in search of vengeance—have joined the strange, unending pursuit. Bormann’s whereabouts has been publicly reported, always without eventual confirmation, always without concrete proof, in places as distant from Berlin as mainland China and South America. Rumors and theories, perhaps feeding on one another, have sent him over the northern borders of defeated Germany into Scandinavia, or south into the lonely mountain passes of the Alpine Fortress. Tales, unsubstantiated, have him escaping by submarine, plane, boat, truck, or foot. The search for Martin Bormann has not yielded its quarry.

  Ronald Gray’s brief crossing of the uncertain path has p
rovided him with a bizarre, frightening memory and a gnawing question that evades an answer. Bewilderment.

  One professional investigator, hardened by hard fact of a hideous, endless variety, warns against getting caught up in a single foolhardy obsession. Cool logic, cold comfort.

  And one soul, a benevolent spy, bent by the weight of spent idealism, self-doubt, guilt, and the realization of the human capacity for deceit, muses on whether civilized society can be long spared its blind, mannered suicide. Skepticism forged into cynicism.

  Is that where the puzzle of Martin Bormann leads—to some miserable way station on the road from confusion to despair? Is it the stuff of sporadic news stories, the framework for occasional retrospective articles, the germ for novelists of international intrigues? Yes, it is surely all of that. But it is more, much more. This is a puzzle that, in its way, is a mirror to the darkest reaches of the mind of modern man.

  Gray was one of many men drawn unwillingly into the mystery. I was another. Martin Bormann crossed my path near the end of World War II and has kept crossing it year after year. He was like some ghost plucking at my sleeve until I would hear what he had to say. Vanity might lead me to say I recognized, even in the last days of the war, something of its grim importance. I did not. It was easy to hunt for a single man, far easier than to see the significance of the terrors he wrought and the insidious hold he had on the future.

  Martin Bormann vanished when he was forty-five years old. That is a simple statement. Other guilty men vanished with him. That is also a simple statement. Did they escape because most of humanity was too stunned by the enormity of their crimes, because it was assumed that nobody would conceal such monsters? As the years passed, it became apparent that they escaped because there were carefully laid plans, brilliantly conceived to give them immediate sanctuary and eventual survival. What seemed so simple when Ronald Gray had his strange encounter at Flensburg had now become complex beyond words. The puzzle broke into fragments, and these in turn broke into smaller pieces. And there was outwardly no visible shape to it.