The Bormann Brotherhood

by William Stevenson

  “I kissed her without further ado and quite scorched her with my burning joy. I fell madly in love with her. I arranged it so I met her again many times and then I took her in spite of her refusals. You know the strength of my will against which M was of course unable to hold out for long. Now she is mine and now—lucky fellow—now I am or rather I feel doubly and unbelievably happily married…. What do you think, beloved, of your crazy fellow?”

  Mrs. Bormann replied at once: “I am so fond of M myself that I simply cannot be angry with you.” She considered it a thousand pities that M should be denied children, and Martin ought to be able to order the situation “and see to it that one year M has a child and the next year I have a child, so you will always have a wife who is serviceable.”

  M had come out this night in 1965 wondering if her lover’s remains might be among the skulls and bones shoveled from the clay of a public park near the Lehrter railroad station. A forlorn hope, no doubt. Identification would have to be made in a forensic lab. In any case, one of the minor mysteries that surrounded the great central puzzle of Martin Bormann’s fate was that the authorities tended to contradict each other. There were several dentists who claimed to remember Bormann’s teeth. There were police who said they knew Bormann’s prints were lost, and other, more majestic, figures of the law, the prosecutors, who themselves differed about the existence or even the value of thumbprints or fingerprints which might or might not be authentic. Bormann had been erased from the public records, his tracks smoothed over, even his photographs rarely seen. He carried this passion for secrecy to the point where he referred to his mistress as “M” even in his letters to Gerda, whom he called “Mommy” most of the time.

  Others shared with M something more than idle curiosity in this ghoulish spectacle of police raking over the remains of those killed inside the Russian Iron Ring of twenty years ago. There was General Gehlen, who had moved into the villa Bormann once occupied. Also watching were Gehlen’s chief and, according to him, only enemies, the Russians. The British secret service, which had its own ideas about where Gehlen really thought his enemies lay, was also represented. A man from Vatican intelligence was there, sent by the Prelate Volmy, who led the Roman Pontificate in “ideological countermeasures” against Communism in Latin America. There was an observer for Father Martin Bormann, Jr., a Catholic missionary who had just narrowly missed death in the Congo. Father Bormann was the eldest son of the man they were digging for.

  An old man pottered through the rubble. Albert Krumnow, a retired mailman, thought he remembered burying bodies here on Russian orders, about five hundred meters from the present Sandkrug break in the Berlin Wall. He may have been encouraged by the reward of 100,000 marks (about $25,000) offered by the Frankfurt Prosecutor’s office for information leading to Bormann’s discovery. The old mailman had come forward to say that he recalled finding papers on one body which identified it as Bormann’s. Why had he waited so long? And where were the papers now? An investigator from the Vienna Documentation Center, listening to the vague replies, reported later that the old man had been duped by the Brotherhood, which was taking over the task of protecting ex-Nazis and preserving the spirit of their philosophy.

  M returned to her flat on the other side of the Berlin Wall. Behind her, and along the banks of the River Spree, men in white overalls still picked gingerly among clods of earth. Rusted helmets, the pitted barrels of rifles, shrunken boots, and rotted webbing were separated from the bones that emerged seemingly without end, glowing in the darkness. She said later that she believed these false alarms were deliberately sounded by the Brotherhood to divert attention from their operations abroad. “But,” she said with a shrug of thin shoulders, “I really cannot pretend to know about these things.”

  Her real name was Manja Behrens. She had irritated Gerda Bormann because of her timidity, not because of her affair with Martin. She had read Gerda’s letters proposing that her husband impregnate M and then his wife, turn and turn about, so that one or the other would always be carrying a good Aryan child. This and other matters made Manja Behrens choose the East. It was a puritan reaction, for the actress had had strong religious beliefs at one time; a rejection of what seemed to her to be a continuation of corruption in the plump and sex-obsessed West.

  Three weeks after the digging near the Lehrter Station, she heard that none of the exhumed bones could be identified as being her lost lover’s. The news came as no real surprise. She had made a similar but more secretive journey during the night of September 25, 1963 to the German military garrison at Kreuzberg, in West Berlin. There, a group of gravediggers had brought out of the cemetery a worm-eaten coffin. A marker, placed by the family, said that here were the last mortal remains of Heinrich Müller. Müller was second on the list of the 160,000 most-wanted war criminals in the eleven states of West Germany. At the top of the list, of course, was Bormann.

  When reports that Bormann had escaped from Berlin were published prior to 1963, the case of Gestapo Müller was quoted as a convincing example of how the two most wanted men could not really be expected to have broken out. He, too, had supposedly crossed through Russian lines. And yet, look! Here was his grave, properly registered and marked in accordance with military rules and regulations.

  Now, in late September, it turned out that the grave contained none of Müller’s bones. What appeared to be a single skeleton was made up from parts of three different men, and, according to scientific tests, none of the bones could have been Müller’s. Someone had deliberately and with calculation prepared a fake corpse and given prominence to the grave of the wanted man. For eighteen years there had been a regular Sunday charade of placing flowers on the grave of the man who wasn’t really there. If Gestapo Müller had friends who would bury his past in order to keep him alive, then the same might well be true for Bormann.

  M was always an intelligent observer, without pretensions; and like the girls of her generation, she did not ask questions of the male, who was dominant. During the long wait after Bormann vanished, she was treated well by the East German government, and in return she repeated what she had seen and heard. Her testimony was the more effective because it came from a young woman accustomed to discipline and in the habit of keeping her imagination under tight rein. Gerda Bormann’s judgment that M was somewhat stupid and afraid can be disregarded: it is the remark of a wife breaking through the crust of dogma. It can be said that M’s recollections confirmed what others said about the way Bormann won power over Hitler.

  The three years that followed the death of Hitler’s niece were busy ones for Bormann. He was sidling into a central position backstage where he could exercise full control of his puppet and remain unseen. He was not at all sure of his power and he could not afford to draw the fire of his rivals. The job to which he aspired lacked glamour and the glitter of high military rank. He needed to manipulate the weak and indecisive Deputy Führer, Rudolf Hess, get rid of him, and then take his place, with a more clearly defined authority over the Nazi party machine.

  His success was recognized only in 1941, and then not by his enemies at home in the Third Reich but by Germany’s enemies in the West. Hess had flown by himself to Scotland, where he parachuted into that war camp with an extraordinary tale. He was interrogated by Winston Churchill’s personal investigator into the mystery, Lord Beaverbrook, who disguised himself as “Dr. Livingstone.” From this encounter stemmed the first of the long-range studies of Martin Bormann.

  In 1934, however, Bormann was regarded as a nonentity by all except Hitler. Few knew his name. Fewer knew what he looked like. He stabbed in the back Hitler’s right-hand man of that time, Ernst Röhm, in what became known as the “Night of the Long Knives.” The details of how this was done, and how it led to the wartime flight of the Deputy Führer, emerged only from the long and difficult investigations launched as a result of Beaverbrook’s recommendations to Churchill and the subsequent request sent to Roosevelt for American co-operation.

  Röhm ha
d been working in Bolivia. During his absence, in those three years after Geli’s murder, Bormann had made the necessary moves to place himself behind Hitler and in control.

  Bormann solidified his mastery of the party machinery and released a swarm of memos. These were never self-incriminating. Nothing went out over his signature that might be used against him by his enemies. And he saw enemies everywhere, even and especially among those with whom he formed temporary alliances. The paperwork was designed to impress and flatter the Führer. Private notes and dossiers of confidential reports were to provide Bormann with the stuff of blackmail. He kept all the personnel files and saw the confidential reports of all the intelligence organizations, which gave him an advantage over the chiefs of those same agencies, who seldom got to see the secret accounts of their rivals. He decided on promotions and demotions within the party, whose supremacy he guarded. Above all, he dogged Hitler’s footsteps, anticipating his wishes, interpreting his dreams, soothing his days, and softly and unobtrusively directing the long mealtime conversations that led, for some guests, to an early grave or a sudden more earthly elevation.

  Bormann learned to construct private agencies. These balanced on friendships which in turn depended upon favors given and received. The Gauleiters and the body of men beneath them were increasingly a source of strength. They provided him with unparalleled experience in maneuvering individuals. His influence extended into the armed forces, by nature and tradition hostile at first to this outside interference. He probed police organizations and put key men into his debt. The complicated machinery of the Nazi apparatus—political, military, and security—was always clearly laid out in a mind that thrived upon this kind of nutrition. He had an extraordinary memory for the tiniest details, which baffled outsiders.*

  A crisis arose just when Bormann had settled into the saddle as Chief of Staff to Rudolf Hess. The way he handled the crisis is illuminating. It shows him getting a firm grip on agencies that might have become hostile. It reveals his total disinterest in human loyalties. It provides a brief guide to Nazi interest in South America in the 1930’s, and Bormann’s own familiarity with a region that always aroused romantic German visions of “partnership” with allegedly backward nations. The partnership required from the inferior natives of Latin America a willing supply of cheap labor to gather raw materials that would feed the Ruhr factories.

  This crisis, in the spring of 1934, began when Bormann realized that Hitler meant to crack down on the Brown Shirts. It made no difference that Bormann himself had served four years on the staff of the Supreme Command of the SA (Sturmabteilung) storm troopers and on the face of it was on close friendly terms with SA leaders. He began at once to pass information on the SA to his father-in-law, party disciplinarian Walter Buch, with particular emphasis on the SA Chief of Staff, Ernst Röhm.

  Captain Röhm had trained the army in Bolivia, an important South American source of tin and a primitive mountain state in the high Andes whose economy was dominated by German firms. Previously, German General Hans Kundt led a group of German military advisers for the Bolivian Army, which absorbed almost half the national budget, despite the country’s extreme poverty. Röhm had been sent by Hitler to build the army more in keeping with Nazi ideas than with old General Kundt’s staid imperial concepts. The two men had little difficulty reaching a compromise. They dressed the troops in Nazi-style uniforms, drilled them in the Nazi salute, hung the Führer’s portrait in the canteens, and prepared the way for a German-equipped air force. They agreed that an Italian military mission, preaching fascist theories, would help dampen any suspicion that the Germans had taken over while simultaneously making sure they did. They selected a proper pro-Nazi president for the future, an up-and-coming Bolivian whose father was a German doctor: Germán Busch.

  Röhm was a snub-nosed, stocky Bavarian with a battered florid face. He was a monarchist, and gained influence during the struggle against Communists when the Bavarian monarchy was overthrown in the aftermath of World War I. He organized a so-called home guard similar to the Freikorps. In Munich he met Hitler in another of the secret societies that kept popping up in Germany: the Iron Fist. He boasted to Hitler that he had helped execute Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, the two German Communists who are remembered in East Germany today as revolutionary martyrs (but not in the West, where the Bonn government in an official bulletin described the man who ordered the killings as “the well-known Freikorps leader, Major Pabst, who prevented the Bolshevizing of Germany”). The murders were on a par with political killings characteristic of the period. Other Freikorps groups were obliged to disband for less. But in the case of the two Communist leaders, shot on January 15, 1919, it was ten years before an open court looked as if it might act against Pabst and his group. By then, Röhm’s own secret army had grown into the Nazi SA storm troopers. Pabst became a Nazi hero.*

  Röhm came back from Bolivia full of what his troopers would have called “piss and vinegar,” cocky and ready to take on any helpless crowd of little old ladies. His forces grew in number to three million bully boys, and he was all set to take over the professional army.

  The regular German Army, seeded with young aristocratic officers, was not as virtuous and above thuggery as its survivors have since protested. Bormann, at a disadvantage because his career as a cannoneer lacked the luster of service at the front, knew this. He saw the danger of an alliance between the army and Röhm’s Brown Shirts. His strategy was based on the superiority of the party over all other elements.

  Since the murder of Hitler’s niece, Bormann had cultivated groups of men in Munich who either were serving in the police or were known to the police as reasonably successful criminals. There was a watchmaker convicted of embezzlement: Emil Maurice, whose brother Ernst had intimate knowledge of the murdered girl. There was Christian Weber, a former stableboy. They called themselves “headquarters guardsmen” and formed their own protective squadrons, known as the SS (Schutzstaffel). They wore black ski caps with a death’s-head button and black-bordered swastika armbands. They were led by Heinrich Himmler, the Police President for Bavaria, who was very much aware of the real influence exercised by Bormann behind the scenes.

  In the early hours of June 30, 1934, the opposing SA leaders were caught in their beds and swept into makeshift prisons, where, during the next three days, they were shot one after another in accordance with a mysterious list of condemned men which Hitler saw only after the massacre. The list was a subject of endless controversy and speculation.

  This Night of the Long Knives led to Captain Röhm and 921 others being trapped and subsequently killed, in ways more amateurish than might be supposed from reading accounts of the purge. Bormann issued a tidy if emotional version through the Table Talk Notes that supposedly conveyed Hitler’s thoughts.* Once again, however, this was Bormann’s filtered version. In public, Hitler said fifty-eight were executed. All through the reports of that period runs the thread of Hitler’s uncertainty of what was happening.

  General Kundt dispatched urgent and earnest pleas from Bolivia for information on Röhm’s fate. The German military mission was then caught in an awkward posture, which had nothing to do with events far away at home. Bolivian troops were fighting for an unimportant piece of land claimed by neighboring Paraguay. The forces of Paraguay included an artillery officer, Alfredo Stroessner, son of a German brewer. (Later on, as President of Paraguay, and dictator of the toughest of totalitarian states, Stroessner provided sanctuary for Nazi war criminals with the same enthusiasm as that displayed by Bolivia.) Now, Bormann, acting as always in the name of the Deputy Führer, assured Kundt that Röhm’s “gang of fairies” had gone down to defeat.

  Bormann had wiped out the biggest threat to his own secret authority. He must have known that he could handle the regular army, and he was confident that he could outwit the SS under Himmler. These forces recognized the over-all superiority of the Nazi party as already laid down by the Führer. But Röhm had seemed ready to challenge party omni
science. He was shown to have been at the center of a conspiracy that in retrospect Hitler could regard as a direct attempt to defy party rule. The source of evidence was Bormann’s own police file; and the interpretation placed upon Röhm’s actions was Bormann’s, too. He was never caught among the gunmen, naturally.

  The mysterious hand that placed Röhm on the list of those to be summarily executed was thought to be that of the leader of the rival SS. It was an obvious deduction. But Himmler always denied this in private; and from that date he was seen to be in fear of Bormann.

  The Führer and Bormann were reduced frequently to malicious laughter over the strange posturings of Heinrich Himmler and his Secret Inner Order of the SS. Himmler never ceased to look like what he was: the myopic son of a greengrocer with a wild concept of a new aristocracy that would govern Germany and then Europe and finally the world. He held mystical gatherings in a monastery, where his inner circle of twelve disciples bestrode chairs on which each name was engraved on a silver plate.

  Himmler was a child in the hands of an expert wet nurse like Bormann, and he was comfortably kept in place without knowing it. He became “Uncle Heinrich” and godfather to the fourth Bormann child, conceived after the blood purge. In return, he made Bormann an SS Gruppenführer, a major general. This did not mean, as overenthusiastic Nazi hunters have sometimes assumed, that Bormann went through SS procedures, which would have marked him for life and left details of his physical appearance on the record. It is one more small indication of Bormann’s effective control over Himmler that he never participated in SS ceremonies and treated the title as purely honorary. When the SS columns marched past Hitler’s reviewing stand, Bormann was up there looking down. Newsreels of the year 1937 show him in attendance on Hitler; and an examination of the film, frame by frame, starkly demonstrates his separation from the only other person who might stand between him and Hitler: the Führer’s Deputy, Hess.