The Bormann Brotherhood

by William Stevenson

  The murder of Geli, now that it can be reconstructed, shows Bormann instinctively playing on Hitler’s fear of the Jew as an image of his own darker self. The reality of his family background was forced on him by his niece. Geli was the daughter of Hitler’s half-sister, Angela Raubal. She had worked as housekeeper for a time in the alpine farmhouse that became famous as Eagle’s Nest. Geli went to live with Hitler in the Munich flat, a safe eighty miles away from her mother. The girl chattered more than was good for her; she confronted Hitler with allegations about his grandmother, Maria Anna Schicklgruber, and the Rothschild affair.

  The tension she created apparently came to a boil during that 1931 Oktoberfest. There was, it seemed, a violent quarrel over Geli’s Jewish lover in which she retaliated by demanding to know how Hitler could revile the very race of people whose blood he carried. She spat out the gossip, common in Vienna, that Austria’s Chancellor, Engelbert Dollfuss, had ordered an investigation into the family’s history.

  The scene is not hard to visualize. We know now that Hitler suffered from masochistic and perverse tendencies that made him grovel at women’s feet, eat dung, and drink urine. We know now that he made the Jews a symbol of everything he hated in himself. We have the evidence of other women—Unity Mitford, who tried suicide later, Rene Müller, who did kill herself—that he begged to be punished and humiliated in the bedchamber and then exploded into supermasculine outbursts: “Brutality is respected…. The plain man in the street respects nothing but brutal strength and ruthlessness. Our people will be free when they learn to hate, hate, and hate again.”

  When the paunchy, skinny-legged Hitler exposed all his physical ugliness to Geli, begged her to humble him, and then met with defiance and some unpleasant truths, he reacted in the same way that he was to react three years later, when Dollfuss was assassinated, on his orders, by Austrian Nazis because it was suspected he had all the facts of Hitler’s ancestry.

  Geli died brutally. Her brother Leo accused Hitler of responsibility. But Leo Raubal was living at the time in Vienna and he was never able to reopen the case. Nevertheless, he threatened so often to bring Hitler to justice that he died violently in the Balkans, where he was sent on military orders and where he was killed in 1942 in circumstances never explained. A son of Hitler’s brother made the same accusation but not the same mistake: William Patrick Hitler denounced Uncle Adolf from the safety of New York, to which he fled in 1939. The murdered girl’s mother left Hitler’s employ and married a Professor Hamitsch, in Dresden, where years later she said that Martin Bormann extracted from her a promise never to discuss the dropped charges against her half-brother. The whole family specialized in intermarriage, and Hitler’s relatives may have preferred not to wash dirty linen in public anyway, especially since his relations with Geli added incestuous undertones to an already squalid affair. Still, faint squeaks of disgust escaped from the Hitler-Schicklgruber tribe from time to time. His full sister, Paula, changed her name to “Frau Wolff” and took a job addressing envelopes for an insurance company. After 1945 the Bavarian Free State confiscated Hitler’s property and tried to return to Frau Wolff the contents of her late brother’s pockets. She could not be traced, but in the attempt, a carbon copy was discovered of a deposition she had made to the Vienna criminal-investigation agency. Dated October 1931, it stated that her life was threatened by members of the German Gymnastic Association, which provided camouflage for young Nazis and future SS troops. The threats, she said, followed a comment she made that her brother Adolf was a murderer but also mad and ought to be locked up. The original of this report had been removed. It quoted Hitler’s sister as saying that Geli would be alive still if someone had only warned the poor thing.

  A young Englishwoman could have warned her. Winifred Wagner was a daughter-in-law of Richard Wagner, whose doomsday music and tribal operatic themes so thundered through Hitler’s head that he showed an unbalanced respect for the man he called “His Excellency Baron Richard von Wagner, Privy Counsellor and Chief Conductor.” This exaggerated respect for titles was typical of Hitler and might have been mistaken for some form of self-ridicule, the stuff of Gilbert and Sullivan. With Hitler, it was no joke.

  He permitted Winifred a few glimpses of his perverted tastes. She and her three small children were taught to call him “Wolf,” a name with which the entire Schicklgruber clan seems to have had a grim obsession.

  Winifred was expected to marry Hitler after she became a widow. She supported his political views and therefore confided little of her misgivings about him as a man. But one of the children, Friedelind, later told Allied intelligence agents that he had asked Winifred to whip him and that he treated her sometimes like his mother, asking her to punish him. He had a cottage built on the Wagner estate and appointed Bormann to manage it after Winifred’s husband, Siegfried, died. Bormann was given the task of building up the annual music festival, founded there at Bayreuth by Richard Wagner. For a long time in the 1920’s and early ’30’s, Winifred’s home was the one place where Hitler was seen to relax without the customary guard of blond young thugs, but always with Bormann in attendance.

  Winifred did make some mild observations, however, which seem to have been authenticated by many independent sources. She disliked, for instance, the way Hitler responded to “the musk-ox figure” of Bormann. She thought Hitler got pleasure from Bormann’s undisguised sexuality. She had heard Hitler once call him “Bubi,” which was a term of affection used among homosexuals. She sensed a desperate battle between a soft and indecisive personality within Hitler and another force, “like that of a beast,” which responded to Bormann’s oppressive and silent presence. But it was Friedelind who spoke openly of Hitler’s love of pornography and other strange matters. Winifred contented herself with an occasional comment, in letters to her family in England, suggesting that Bormann was at least open in his disregard for Wagnerian music whereas Hitler “tries very hard to comprehend, so hard that sometimes I could wish he were (with regard to his equal ignorance) more frank.”

  She might have saved Geli from moral corruption and death if she herself had been more frank. Geli was seventeen when she came with her mother from a Vienna back street to join Hitler. She was treated at first like any favorite niece of a rich uncle. Winifred arranged for singing lessons, and Geli, taught by two of Germany’s most distinguished music professors, was to become a Wagnerian soprano. She was a bridesmaid at Bormann’s wedding in 1929. Hitler was then forty years old, a critical age in those days for a bachelor whose dreams of glory were still unfulfilled and whose sexual frustrations were perhaps further complicated by the spectacle of Bormann embarking upon a normal family life.

  The whole atmosphere reeked of “furtive unnatural sexuality,” wrote Hermann Rauschning, who later broke with Hitler. “Surreptitious relationships, substitutes and symbols, false sentiments and secret lusts—nothing in [Hitler’s] surroundings is natural. Nothing has the openness of natural instinct.”

  Another girl sucked into this “evil emanation” was Henny Hoffmann, whose father was a party member. Henny would be called today a hundred-dollar party girl. In a drunken moment she told her father some of Hitler’s bestial habits. Her revelations were of a nature that might well disgust the most profligate young rake. Heinrich Hoffmann used the information to blackmail Hitler into appointing him the party’s official photographer, with exclusive rights that made him a millionaire. Henny married the notorious homosexual Baldur von Schirach, who was sentenced at Nuremberg for war crimes including the deportation of Austrian Jews to liquidation camps. (Hoffmann survived to make another postwar killing with his photographs; and in 1966 a West German literary agency offered Schirach, no longer in jail, $150,000 for his memoirs.)

  The Munich detective squads were long accustomed to savagery that went unpunished. Heinrich Himmler, who became an SS Field Marshal, had wriggled out of well-documented charges that he had murdered a Munich prostitute with whom he lived and from whose earnings he drew a percentage. This
was a period of political killings in the medieval tradition, and it had enabled Bormann to serve only one year for his part in the murder of Kadow. This ancient view of Germanic justice was lenient toward soldiers who claimed that they had carried out the sentence of impromptu military courts against traitors. Bormann persuaded Müller, or the Inspector allowed himself to be persuaded, that the murdered niece had been a threat to Germany’s New Order; and having provided an argument to satisfy moral objections, Bormann produced more tangible inducements. Müller, already widely known for his soaring ambition, was promised power and a title to dazzle this former sergeant-pilot turned policeman.

  Geli’s funeral was attended on Hitler’s behalf by Ernst Röhm, the Brown Shirt leader, and Himmler, the bespectacled ex-teacher who was head of the Black Shirt SS Guards. “Butcher” Himmler was already beholden to Bormann, and so, it seemed, was Müller; but Röhm could and did talk, and he was accordingly executed by yet another summary military court some three years later.

  Otto Strasser, although a notorious gossip, swears that his brother Gregor spent several days and nights at Hitler’s side after the murder, fearing he might commit suicide in what appeared to be his paroxysms of grief. There were terrifying scenes when Hitler would wake up with convulsive shrieks for help. Gregor, who was then high in Nazi party councils, reported that Hitler sat on the edge of his bed shaking so that the whole room seemed to vibrate, yet unable himself to shift position. Once, his lips turned blue and he pointed to a corner of the bedroom crying: “It’s him! He! He! He’s been here….” His voice became guttural and, in Gregor’s own words, “Horrible sounds emerged and strange words which were not in any language known to man.”

  Bormann noted these indiscreet stories. He had witnessed such scenes himself but took care not to confide them until very much later, and then only to his wife. He drove a wedge between Hitler and Gregor Strasser, Otto told me in Montreal. Three years later, Gregor was murdered, too. The weight of circumstantial evidence, gathered through the years, indicates that Bormann was again the mastermind. This was always the view of Otto Strasser, who recovered his German citizenship in 1954 and left Canada to pursue his own investigation into Bormann’s past.

  Even without such secondhand observations, it seemed to expert analysts during and after World War II that the murder of Geli Raubal was a pivotal moment in Bormann’s career. She might have prevented Hitler’s subsequent incurable paranoia. She was a normal, if highly sexed, girl, who had a variety of lovers. She could have used her influence on Hitler to relieve some of his frustrations and redirect his energies into less destructive channels. After her death, Hitler turned her room in the Munich flat into a shrine, where fresh flowers were placed each day beside a statuette made in her likeness. He locked himself in her room on the anniversary of her death and meditated for hours. Her room in his Bavarian “fortress” was left untouched during the remodeling of the Berghof into the palatial quarters that befitted his image of himself as an emperor.

  This imperial phase began with Geli’s death and lasted almost twelve years, until the catastrophic military defeat at Stalingrad, which was interpreted by Hitler as another public exposure of his own lack of real manhood. He then withdrew from the public appearances that throughout 1931-1942 were reported by chroniclers of the time as nothing less than sexual orgies, in which Hitler worked up the crowds until they reached an orgasm of roars and shrieks and fainting women.

  The man who stage-managed these public appearances was Bormann. His work behind the scenes was described to me in 1972 by the former opera star who became Göring’s wife. Göring himself told a press conference shortly before he committed suicide that “Bormann stayed with Hitler night and day and gradually brought him under his will so that he ruled Hitler’s whole existence.”

  Bormann made sure that Hitler never again found the satisfactions offered by Geli. The Führer lost his mysterious empathy with a crowd if there was the briefest introduction of sexual relief in his private life. He was introduced, through Bormann, to a young and asexual physical-fitness enthusiast named Eva Braun, who remained until the end as Hitler’s official mistress. Eva was part of the window dressing. When she realized her role, she became increasingly frank in expressing her hatred of Bormann, who was seldom absent when she and Hitler were together. Others have recorded the strange insistence with which Bormann kept at her side. He permitted Eva a limited role as a kind of substitute mother: a role played by many women in the Führer’s life, a role that required them to listen for hours while he talked about himself. When Hitler decided that Eva must die at his side, he placed center stage in the death scene a vase of red roses, which had been his mother’s favorite flower and which he had always associated with her funeral.

  In speculating on how Geli might have redirected Hitler’s spermal energies, we should not forget the state of mind then existing in millions of Germans. The vast stadiums were filled with crowds which came of their own volition. Hitler, according to his associates, spoke often of handling these crowds as though seducing a woman: the masses responded in a typically feminine way, he said, and they enjoyed what he was doing to them. They were not being raped. They were eager participants in orgies that happened to be on a scale larger than that familiar to a later generation in the form of mass gatherings of young people drugged in other ways. The pimp who stood aloof from Hitler, the drug pusher himself, was Bormann. He had the mind of the animal trainer who starves a beast before shoving it into the circus ring.

  CHAPTER 5

  The mind of Martin Bormann had its own peculiar twists. He was a practical psychologist with a peasant’s natural instinct for sizing up another person. He had a contempt for the pretensions of society but he knew how to make use of them. His exploitation of Hitler’s sexual aberrations from the Geli Raubal period was singleminded, ruthless, and largely invisible to anyone excluded from the bedchamber. He was manufacturing a monster, and Geli had endangered his work. She knew how to satisfy Hitler, she was willing to do it, and she could have been persuaded to continue in this role if Bormann had so wanted. But a placid Führer was the last thing he needed.

  Much of this became known through studies that were assembled, after Bormann disappeared, under the title “The Life Past & Future, Mind & Conduct of Nazi Party Reich Minister Martin Bormann.” They were the result of a technique pioneered by Anglo-American intelligence experts, based upon several older methods of examining an enemy at a distance. This technique is known today as prosopography, from a Greek word meaning the representation of an absent or deceased person as if he spoke and acted in our company. It grew out of the work of professors of ancient history like the Oxford don Ronald K. Syme, who could make a Roman emperor come alive by a painstaking study of the people around him. A long-range psychoanalysis of Bormann was conducted by teams of specialists, and their work was based upon interviews with those who had known him intimately.

  One of these was the mistress of Martin Bormann himself. She was entirely different from Geli and found nothing in common with Eva, who could suppress her own sexual instincts for the sake of the comparative fame and fortune that went with playing mother to Hitler. Bormann’s mistress vanished into Communist East Germany after the war. She proved eventually to be a great help in producing the final study on the mind of Bormann, which brought into closer focus the interplay between the Führer and the Secretary.

  She believed Bormann used his familiar trick of whispering gossip into Hitler’s trusting ear so that he became suspicious of Geli. At the same time, Bormann encouraged the girl to have other affairs, and was a kind of liaison officer between Geli and her lover. He was the confidant of both, and he built up the misunderstandings and tensions that led to murder. His control over Hitler increased twofold. He had disposed of the girl who could pull some of the strings that made Hitler dance. He had disposed of the evidence that Hitler shot the girl.

  These were matters of which Bormann’s mistress had no direct knowledge. She was too yo
ung to have moved in early Nazi circles. She did have a strong memory of her conversations with Bormann, however; and it was unlikely that she would have known certain details from any other source. These details conformed with what Allied investigators discovered more than thirty years after Geli’s murder.

  This mistress of Martin Bormann was known as “M.” She materialized out of the shadows like some member of a conspiracy to keep alive the memories of the past.

  She was living quietly in East Berlin when the District Attorney’s office in the Western Zone bowed to political pressures and agreed to have yet another ceremonial digging up of an area said to have been turned into a mass grave by the Russians. The Red Army, fearing the spread of disease, had ordered the burial of thousands of bodies that littered the Berlin streets on the day Bormann vanished.

  M since then had returned to her profession as an actress. During the night of July 20, 1965, she slipped out of her apartment and crossed into the Western Zone, with every intention of going back. She was an attractive, middle-aged, and slender woman, who had been allowed to live in the decent obscurity denied her by Mr. and Mrs. Bormann. They had immortalized her in some of the strangest love letters known to literature. Her seduction was described by Bormann in a letter to his wife: