The Bormann Brotherhood

by William Stevenson

  Rossbach’s organization, masquerading as the Union for Agricultural Professional Training, recalled at that time one of its former members, Walter Kadow, who became the first recorded victim of Bormann’s talent for destroying those he regarded as rivals. Kadow, a young schoolteacher, borrowed 30,000 marks (a paltry sum when translated into present terms, about four dollars, but a great deal to a family which could buy groceries for a week with such an amount) from the group’s treasury, of which Bormann was the guardian. Bormann announced that he would make Kadow work until he had paid off the money, but he also whispered to the group’s strong-arm section that Kadow had betrayed the Freikorps soldier shot by the French. When the teacher returned to headquarters, he was taken at night into the forest and beaten until his teeth fell out and his arms and legs were broken. His throat was then cut. To cap the night’s work, two bullets were fired into his head.

  Years later, the Führer’s Order of Blood* was awarded to Bormann for this object lesson to traitors. But in July 1923 there was still some measure of morality abroad. Bormann was placed under investigative arrest in Leipzig, and eight months later stood trial, along with other members of the Rossbach group, for Kadow’s murder. From the trial records, Bormann emerges in his classic role: he had only told the others what to do, provided a car and weapons, and he denounced Kadow as a traitor and a Bolshevik. (Kadow was never shown to be involved in the Freikorps soldier’s execution; nor had he displayed interest in left-wing politics.)

  Bormann got away with murder. He did it with the style that became his trademark: “I’ve signed nothing; you can prove nothing.” The man who kept voluminous notes on the activities of others was nimble in keeping himself out of documents. He left no fingerprints because he handled no weapons. Even the thumbprints about which there was to be so much speculation were later extracted from the records of the State Court for the Defense of the Republic of Leipzig.

  The court sentenced Bormann to a year in prison. His puppet, Rudolf Franz Höss, who was to have studied for the Catholic priesthood, got ten years’ hard labor. Höss betrayed no bitterness at taking the rap for Bormann; he could never pin down in precise detail how it was that Bormann manipulated the affair. His jail sentence was terminated by a general amnesty, and he was rewarded by a series of promotions, which led ultimately to the post of commandant at Auschwitz. Thus he became the SS Report Leader at Dachau concentration camp when he should have been serving time himself. Bormann continued to take a protective interest in his career as a mass killer.

  By this early age, Bormann had developed principles that would guide him through life: never be directly responsible for controversial decisions, never leave your imprint on anything, never forget to advance the interests of those who can help you and those who can hurt you. Many of his victims were advanced by him into situations from which death was the only exit. He carried his fear of leaving any tracks behind him to the extreme and induced Hitler to sign the order that Bormann must not be photographed.

  Hitler at this time was serving fourteen months because of the failed Putsch of 1923. The Nazi party had been declared illegal, but the ban was lifted in 1925 and Hitler, free again, revived it. By then, Bormann had joined another anti-Semitic group, the Frontbann, which was a successor to the German Fighting Union. These militant groups shared the same aims: make Germany the most powerful nation, crush Communism, destroy Jews.

  Bormann was a hired hand, in charge of peasant farmers who rented their land from his employers, when he became Nazi party member 60/508. He served as press chief of the party in Thuringia, and then as business manager. Here he learned to make more skillful use of party funds; here he learned that power resided in the Gau. There were forty-one such administrative regions into which Germany was divided by the Nazis. A Gauleiter was a dictator in his region.

  A joint intelligence study made by American and British experts following the wartime flight of Rudolf Hess showed just how clever Bormann had been to concentrate on power within the party. The barons of the Third Reich were these forty-one Gauleiter,* and the 808 Kreisleiter, 28,376 Ortsgruppenleiter, in charge of towns or sections of large cities, 89,378 Zellenleiter, over Nazi cells consisting of several districts in each city, and, underpinning this structure, several hundred thousand Blockleiter, who were small gods in their own neighborhoods.

  Hitler had a sentimental regard for these subordinates, and he maintained it against pressures from other power groups, including the military. A year after he became Chancellor of the German Reich, he said at the National Socialist German Workers’ party rally in Nuremberg: “The state does not command us. We command the state.” The Nazis were the only legal party by then, and in effect the Führer’s statement placed the party in supreme command. All party matters were handled by the Office of the Deputy Führer, Rudolf Hess, who explained all this in considerable detail after his flight to Britain, which owed its inspiration to Bormann.

  How did Bormann advance from being an ex-convict in 1926 to Reich Leader and Chief of Staff to Hess by 1933, shortly after Hitler came to power?

  For one thing, he married the sturdy, pure-blooded Aryan, blonde daughter of the man who kept party discipline: Walter Buch, Chairman of the party “court.” The girl, Gerda, was fanatical in her devotion to German folklore and her hatred of all forms of religion. She met Bormann in 1928 when he became a staff officer of the Supreme Command of the Brown Shim, the storm troopers who beat down anyone who spoke against the party at Nazi rallies. Hitler was a witness to the marriage, and shortly afterward Bormann became leader of the Aid Fund of the Nazi party, and placed large numbers of key party officials in his debt by the discreet distribution of loans.

  Bormann’s wife had studied at the feet of Julius Streicher, who preached the central ideology of the movement: Jews were the cause of the disaster that had befallen Germany. He had been tried for offenses that ranged from sadism to rape. As Gauleiter of Nuremberg, he had ceremoniously launched the demolition of that city’s main synagogue. He had seen the halo around Hitler’s head and soon became a trusted disciple and mouthpiece. Through his writings and his publications he gave a theoretical structure to the policy of stamping out the weaker races in order to strengthen the fit.

  By 1930, Bormann had a son named Adolf, in honor of Hitler. And he had Gerda’s wholehearted support in his efforts to help unmarried German girls procreate out of wedlock. Gerda was to bear him ten children, but she thought “the Bull” should produce more in order to outpopulate lesser breeds. She thought the Slavs should become slave workers: their fertility was undesirable. She wrote: “Every single child must realize that the Jew is the Absolute Evil in this world.”

  The Jew as the source of all evil haunted Adolf Hitler, who feared that his own blood was “tainted.” This led to the brutal murder of his niece and mistress. The details were lost at the time, for the Nazis were already on the march and violent killings became the order of the day. Forty years passed before the full story unfolded. This was understandable enough. Students of the period were concerned with a scholarly review of documents, events, and speeches dealing with the larger issues of world politics and the clash of ideologies. The professional police investigators who might have looked into the murder were never allowed to see the evidence, and lost interest. It was only when Bormann’s disappearance became a matter for serious conjecture, and intelligence agents began to dig into the ugly details, that an incredible episode in Hitler’s life came to light. This explained exactly how Martin Bormann was able to gather into his hands all the strings required to make Hitler dance to his tune.

  * The Nazi Blutorden was struck for those who had served time in the Weimar Republic’s jails.

  * The word meant simply the leader of a political region under Nazi control, but it became synonymous with brutal chieftains who drew their power directly from the Führer. In practice, this meant, in later years, that the power came from Bormann.

  CHAPTER 4

  Bormann’s power ove
r Hitler began with the murder of Hitler’s niece, Angela (“Geli”) Raubal, who catered to Hitler’s perverted sexual needs. She was still in her teens when her uncle first lay on his back and required her to crouch naked over his face and urinate on him. This activity spread into other forms of obscenity, until the girl protested to friends: “He’s a monster. Nobody can imagine the things he wants me to do.”

  Drawings made by Hitler showed Geli “in positions and in detail which would not be allowed by a professional model,” according to Ernst (“Putzi”) Hanfstaengl, the future foreign press chief. These drawings got into the hands of a Munich dealer, who sold them to Bormann for money drawn from the Nazi party funds under Bormann’s control.

  On the evening of September 18, 1931, the noise of the Bavarian capital’s Oktoberfest drowned a gunshot in the luxury apartment on Munich’s Prinzregentplatz where Geli lived on funds paid out of Nazi coffers by Bormann, who was already Hitler’s personal paymaster.

  Among the investigators called to the spot was Heinrich (“Gestapo”) Müller, then on the local detective squad. Müller paid the minimum regular contribution to one of Bormann’s devices for raising money, but he was otherwise unwilling in those days to stick out his neck for the Nazis. He was ambitious, however; “bent on recognition from his superiors under any system,” to quote from the political appreciation of Senior Criminal Inspector Heinrich Müller in the Munich-Upper Bavarian Gau files of the period.

  Müller found the girl lying dead beside what turned out to be Hitler’s revolver. Her naked body was bruised and her nose had been broken.

  What happened next has been described by Gerhard Rossbach. He told me, in his Hamburg home, thirty-five years later, that Bormann arrived at an understanding with Müller which resulted in the girl’s body being shipped back to Vienna in a sealed lead coffin without further questions.

  Rossbach, who was a Nazi intelligence agent in France and Turkey during World War II, was known to Western intelligence as an old man with a considerable and reliable memory for detail. Until his death, at the age of seventy-four, on September 1, 1967, he was consulted regularly by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and historians. His account of Geli’s murder tallies, in matters of detail, with the recollections of Dr. Otto Strasser, who, after having lost a power struggle with Hitler, found refuge in Canada until the war was over.

  Hanfstaengl, another of the few men who knew Hitler and Geli well in those days, agreed that the girl was pregnant at the time of the murder. “She could not have been put in the family way by Hitler,” said Strasser, somewhat prudishly. “He was not capable of normal intercourse.”

  Geli was regarded as an oversexed and foolish girl who talked too much. She told Brigid Hitler, the wife of Adolf’s half-brother Alois, that she was pregnant by a Jewish artist whom she wanted to marry, and apparently made the same statement to Hitler in a moment of alcoholic indiscretion during that Oktoberfest mood of mass hysteria. On the night of the murder, she seems to have told Hitler that she wanted to get away from him and return to Vienna. There must have been a fearsome quarrel, because the contents of the apartment were scattered and broken. The news that his mistress had enjoyed normal sexual relations with a Jew undoubtedly struck at every vulnerable point in Hitler’s make-up.

  He was a man easily made to feel sexually humiliated because of his own genital deformity. He lacked a left testicle, a condition known as monorchism, which led to feelings of inadequacy and those self-punishing encounters with women that characterized his sex life.

  He had also at this time chosen, as a major theme of the speeches that were winning him such ovations, the subhuman and corrupting nature of the Jews. The purity of the Aryan blood had to be protected against the syphilitic rottenness of inferior races. He regarded Jewishness as a disease, and his obsession with syphilis had first become evident in Mein Kampf.

  His mistress may have been taunting him without fully understanding the danger she was in. She must have known his fear of impotence (which later imposed upon his physician, Dr. Theodore Morell, the necessity of adding pulverized bulls’ testicles to the regular pharmacopoeia of dexedrine, pervatin, cocaine, prozymen, ultraseptyl, and antigas pills poured down the Führer’s gullet). She had certainly shared in bizarre scenes like those described by the actress Rene Müller to her film director, Zeissler. “I spent an evening at the Chancellery and expected to go to bed with him,” Rene said, according to Zeissler’s account, given in Hollywood to OSS agents in 1941. “We got undressed and then Hitler fell on the floor. He began screaming accusations against himself. He begged me to kick him. He made so much noise I did kick him, hoping he’d quieten down. The more I kicked, the more excited he became.” (Rene committed suicide soon after, and Zeissler fled to the United States.)

  Geli had apparently caused him to fly into one of the rages that filled his associates with fear and later led to those acts of insanity performed on his behalf by Bormann: an order to dispose of another hundred thousand Jews or a decision to fling whole armies into an obvious Russian trap at Stalingrad or a request to bring the Duke of Windsor to chat about the monarchy. His career would have come to an abrupt halt if the case against him for the brutal killing of twenty-four-year-old Geli had gone to trial.

  Heinrich Müller would not have risen to the dizzy height of Gestapo chief, with the rank of general, if he had not had the wit that night in September to scoop up the incriminating evidence in Geli’s flat: the letters which made it clear that she planned to leave Hitler and that she had been having passionate and normal affairs with men he regarded as inferior, including his own chauffeur and bodyguard, Ernst Maurice; his personal revolver, which was demonstrably the murder weapon; intimate notes exchanged with the young Jewish artist; a reference in her diary to Hitler’s godfather, Prinz, “that Viennese Jew.”

  Was Hitler’s godfather a Jew? The police dossier opened new avenues for speculation. Bormann took possession of all papers in the case, and after Inspector Müller got his reward and became Gestapo chief, a series of special Gestapo reports on the family background revealed that Hitler’s grandmother had been a servant in the household of Baron Rothschild and that her illegitimate son, Alois, father of Adolf, was generally supposed to be the result of an alliance with one of the Jewish aristocracy. Certainly there was no disputing the fact that Alois chose a Jewish godfather for his own son. This information proved dangerous to those who came into possession of it without Hitler’s approval. But Bormann himself looked into the matter, and Müller produced the Gestapo investigative reports, dated 1935, 1938, 1941, 1942, and 1943, on Hitler’s family history. In those years, Hitler could destroy anyone within the Nazi empire who said he was one-quarter Jewish. It was a different story in 1931, however, when he was preparing to become the first dictator to make use of mass propaganda based on the Big Lie, the biggest part of which was his bombastic autobiography, Mein Kampf, and its racial-nationalist (Völkisch) philosophy. The German peoples were the creators of culture above all other races, with the Nazi party above them and Hitler at the apex. It was inconvenient, to say the least, during this critical year of 1931 to have Hitler suddenly identified with the Jews, whom he had made the scapegoats for all Germany’s troubles.

  Geli may have known of Hitler’s secret fears in this matter. Those who were to reminisce about those days—Hanfstaengl, Strasser, Hermann Rauschning, Konrad Heiden, Winifred and Friedelind Wagner, Ernst Röhm, and the host of young women captured by some strange quality in his eyes and voice—all agree that Hitler had never confided in any friend except Geli; and that after her death, Bormann inherited the perilous role, though if there were perils, there were also compensations.

  Bormann disposed of Geli’s corpse with crafty dispatch. She was declared a suicide in Munich. She was buried by a Catholic priest in Vienna. Suicide and consecrated ground are not usually compatible among Catholics. But Bormann probably stopped awkward questions with the same Nazi party funds with which he silenced Müller and took over the p
olice files.

  This concealment could have destroyed a less cunning man, for the knowledge was dangerous. Bormann was clever enough, at the time, to perform the dirty work while playing the role of Hitler’s most obedient servant. This was intensely satisfying to Hitler, eighteen months before he came to power. He regarded Bormann as a bull-like symbol of brutal masculinity; and although Hitler never left evidence of homosexual activities, his private confusion concerning his sexual role and his instinctive disgust with normal sexual relationships aroused in him an admiration for someone as musky as the younger Martin, at that time in his prime, a thirty-one-year-old sexual primitive.

  Bormann swept clean the area around Hitler’s pedestal while preserving every scrap of dirt. Once the Munich police, through Müller, had closed the records on Geli’s death, Müller himself appeared to be in Bormann’s pocket. All the subsequent investigations into Hitler’s real family history (as opposed to the romanticized “official” version) were conducted by Müller for Bormann. Most astonishing of all, Hitler’s timid and hidden side, the second half of the split personality, knew about and secretly hungered after the Gestapo reports, which followed the realization of his dreams: himself at the apex of the Third Reich and the Jews crushed beneath Germanic superiority. It was a strange obsession. Hitler had to know if there was Jewish blood in his veins, as if he carried a picture of the Judas in his soul who betrayed the Christ within him again and again. Hitler and most of the men around him were Catholics, and during the war the Führer received communion. When he first came to Berlin and saw its luxury, he said that he thought himself Jesus Christ driving the money-changers from the temple. The persecuted Jews were to become the visible manifestation of Christ Crucified.