The Bormann Brotherhood

by William Stevenson

  Bormann flickered in and out, a few brief seconds here and there, never identified on the dope sheets, never more than the same slightly bookish figure with a slim briefcase and a fixed smile.

  And always behind Bormann came the same dapper little man in gray jacket and black riding breeches that I had learned to recognize as Gestapo Müller. He was a surprisingly handsome figure in that mob. Even in old newsreels, one caught the characteristic flash of eyes that seemed everywhere at once.

  Here were the two men in the front seat of Hitler’s Mercedes, driving to the heart of that region where so many Nazi leaders later vanished: the Alpine Fortress. The potholed road climbed between steep slabs of rock. Now the men stood before huge bronze doors. Obviously this film had been shot to record the entrance to the Führer’s impressive retreat. A long tunnel struck into the flank of a mountain. At the far end, an elevator plated with copper waited to lift Bormann, Müller, and the cameraman up through several hundred feet of rock to the home of the Reich Chancellor.

  In the postwar analytical study of Bormann’s influence over Hitler, the stunning approach to Eagle’s Nest had been likened to a return to the womb. The top of the vertical shaft opened into a great gallery of Roman columns, a circular hall with windows all around, giving a sense of floating in the golden glow of an alpine twilight.

  Bormann had supervised the construction of this eyrie since he first got his hands on the Berghof and began lacing the landscape with barbed wire, pillboxes, and blockhouses. Did he consciously cater to Hitler’s sexual fantasies? I doubt it. He seemed more like a man with an instinctive way of manipulating others.

  The film I was watching went back thirty years. Bormann’s power was then real. Hess had gone. Of a lunch in a Berlin restaurant, one of the guests later recorded: “We were talking about Hitler’s grave mood. Bormann said to him, ‘You are burdened with worries and the successful conclusion of the great campaign depends on you alone. Providence has appointed you as her instrument to decide the future of the whole world. You have studied every detail of the task. I am certain, Mein Führer, you have planned everything thoroughly. Your mission will surely succeed.’ ”

  At dawn the next day, June 22, 1941, three million German troops struck eastward toward Moscow and the Caucasus.

  The chronicler of that moment when Bormann patted his Führer’s head was the rising star in the foreign intelligence service, Lieutenant General Walter Schellenberg. Two months later, he was observing the struggle between Bormann and the next on the list of victims; a struggle that seemed more important than the terrible battles foreshadowing defeat in the east.

  The new rival was Heinrich Himmler, whose SS empire functioned as a law to itself. Bormann looked for an ally inside the SS apparatus and found him in the preposterous figure of Ernst Kaltenbrunner. Even Himmler had confessed privately his fear of the giant Austrian, who had gone to school with Adolf Eichmann and been blooded alongside Otto Skorzeny in Austria. Bormann had been subsidizing Kaltenbrunner since prewar days, and when Himmler saw him in 1938 to bail him out of debts incurred from drinking and whoring, the scarred giant had roared with laughter. He was in Bormann’s pay already, and the SS chief’s prissy lecture on how to live within one’s means struck Kaltenbrunner as hilarious.

  Before the conflict with Himmler reached its climax though, another competitor was removed from the scene. SS General Reinhard Heydrich was the overlord of a system of terror in May 1942 that had no precedent. He was known as the “Butcher of Prague,” although officially the title was “Reich Protector.” He was also supreme boss of the gangsters and thugs of the Gestapo and other forms of security police. On the twenty-seventh day of that May, the Protector was being driven in his open green Mercedes from Prague to his summer residence when two agents, parachuted from Britain months before, rolled grenades and fired Sten guns from a point of ambush. Heydrich the Butcher died after days of agonizing pain from splinters of steel and horsehair driven upward into his spleen and liver.

  An investigation was led by Gestapo Müller. The pieces of grenade were of English origin. He traced back the movements of the agents and concluded that the killing was a consequence of information squeezed out of the lately departed Deputy Führer. The killing was of the greatest advantage to Bormann, and again the question was raised: had the Führer’s secret master planned this operation, too?

  Schellenberg thought so. He noted in his diary the lamentations at Heydrich’s funeral. Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, director of military intelligence, was in tears. Himmler lectured the assembly: “Intelligence achievements in this special sector cannot compare with those of the British secret service.” A state funeral oration was delivered by the Führer, and Schellenberg wrote that he could not help feeling the whole spectacle was like something in a Renaissance painting. Meanwhile, all the people in the Czech village where the assassination took place had been herded into their local church, which was then set on fire. Anyone who tried to escape was shot dead.

  Now, a man who would become Bormann’s monstrous ally moved into the slot vacated by the slaughtered Heydrich. The new man was that scar-faced giant and veteran of the early bully-boy days, Ernst Kaltenbrunner.

  The Brotherhood was closing ranks. Another ally, Erich Koch, was made Reich Commissar of the Ukraine. He was a fellow pallbearer with Bormann at the funeral of an early Nazi martyr, Leo Schlageter, whose execution had led to the Kadow murder. Graduates of that group shared mutual fears and needed each other for favors received or given. They had embraced Kaltenbrunner, a member of the original German Brotherhood in Austria, and widened their scope because this brought into the secret fraternity such young adventurers as Otto Skorzeny, who later became Hitler’s freebooter, with a license to kill and the freedom to collect and store away all the weaponry and wealth to help the Brotherhood survive any disaster.

  And disaster was clearly on the horizon. This was the time of the Battle of Stalingrad. It was a turning point in the war, and Bormann recognized this, long before others, caught in the detail of military operations or the bureaucracy of slave labor and mass liquidation.

  The bull-necked Koch had been put into the Ukraine to whip the Russian civilians into line and feed the German factories with able-bodied men and women. He was helped by another Bormann appointee, Fritz Sauckel, who shipped three million workers to stoke the fires of the Ruhr. Five million Russian soldiers were captured and treated as slaves, with a total disregard for the usual rules of war. Out of this number, four million died from neglect, ill-treatment, or the conditions in the camps. Among those who died slowly and in black misery was Stalin’s son Jacob.

  Revenge came in the winter of 1942. A trap was set at Stalingrad on the basis of information leaked from Hitler’s court. The source of this information was close to Bormann.

  At Stalingrad, the armies of two rival ideologies clashed in a struggle for possession of a city that was not originally considered a prime military objective. Hitler’s plans were to strike for the oil of the Caucasus. Behind his armies, the Slav population was to work German farming colonies in the Ukrainian granary of the Thousand-Year Reich. The Russians shared bottom place with the Jews in that outrageous philosphy which put the master race, the Germans, at the pinnacle of human evolution.

  All this and more was known to Stalin in the greatest detail. He diverted Hitler from his Caucasian objective by planting the idea that Stalingrad had great symbolic meaning. He then drew into the Stalingrad area the best of Hitler’s Blitzkrieg forces. Finally he circled the entire battlefield and moved through the long winter nights a vast assembly of tanks, artillery, and men. In his speech on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Revolution, November 7, 1942, Stalin had made the cryptic statement: “There’s going to be a holiday in our street, too.” He was referring to the street and the city named after him. Less than two weeks later, the trap closed there.

  The historian writing after the event has information denied to the generals conducting a battle as complex as Stalingr
ad and of such a vast scale. A German field marshal captured there, Friedrich von Paulus, did not suffer afterthoughts. Nor was he under the usual compulsion to rewrite history in order to exonerate himself. He remained in the Communist camp. He was denied any opportunity to compose his memoirs. He had nothing to gain from distorting the facts: indeed, he had a great deal to lose, including his life. He conveyed to the West his conviction, many years later, that someone with an intimate knowledge of Hitler had kept Stalin informed of each stage in the Russian campaign.

  The catastrophe at Stalingrad unmanned Hitler totally. He shared his table now with nobody but Bormann.

  The following month, thinking perhaps to lift Hitler out of his gloom, Bormann decreed “preparatory measures to solve the Jewish problem in Europe.” He was again demonstrating his natural instinct for pacifying his man: in this case, Hitler, whose outstanding defense mechanism was what we call now “projection,” by which the ego protects itself by attributing unpleasant impulses to others. The Jew was a symbol of everything Hitler hated in himself. Now, the turning of the tide against the Nazis at Stalingrad was blamed on the Jews. He recovered his self-esteem in Bormann’s ordinance: “For 2,000 years an unsuccessful battle has been waged against Judaism. Only since 1933 have we started to find ways and means in order to enable a complete separation of Judaism from the German masses. … A complete removal or withdrawal of the millions of Jews residing in the European economic space is therefore an urgent need in the fight for the security and existence of the German people. Starting with the territory of the Reich, proceeding to the remaining European countries included in the final solution, the Jews are being deported to large camps which have been established … where they will either be used for labor or transported still further to the west.”

  In this way Hitler recovered a little of his courage. Beaten in the field, he smashed the helpless in their homes. By the end of that winter, Bormann had purchased a formal recognition of his power with the lives of those who were driven to the death camps. He had saved the Führer’s face, and his reward was his formal appointment, on April 12, 1943, as Secretary to the Führer.

  Hitler never again performed his public act of talking to a massed German audience as if he were seducing a woman. This change in behavior told Bormann that the marionette would not again be jerked into life. He needed the Führer to put the seal of approval on his own maneuvers within the Nazi movement, but already he mentally divorced the movement from the nation where it was born. This was clear in his notes, his letters, and his actions, which always gave the lowest priority to the fate of Germany. It explains his personal orders toward the end of the war that would have reduced Germany to total ruin and the German people to corpses. He was concerned instead with a future based on Nazi philosphy, financed by Nazi loot, supported by a personally loyal Brotherhood of the kind that flourished before Germany had seemed to offer an imperial base for the creed of the superman.

  Stalingrad robbed Hitler of that singular quality which provided a means of control over the masses. Before, he had aroused in massed German males the sense of virility required by men who manifest all the characteristics of the feminine-masochistic type, wanting to display their manliness by being bullies while simultaneously groveling under harsh orders. He was no longer capable of doing this, and Bormann wisely removed him from the stage. When Hitler did appear before his generals, they later described him as a quivering caricature of the man who thought of himself once as the new Emperor Barbarossa. Nothing the Führer did passed unobserved by Bormann. He monitored every action and listened carefully to the monologues delivered to the closed circle of the court. Accounts of Bormann during the last two years of the war fortify the belief that he was waiting patiently for the collapse of Germany and the moment when the dying Führer would hand over the documents making him the legitimate heir to the movement.

  The figure of the Führer was vital in those dying months. Bormann was surrounded by enemies who held superior rank outside the party. Their hatred for him echoes down the years. He needed to strengthen his position by making the Führer issue the required orders. As Secretary he had acquired that hidden and secret power which is always the more terrifying for being anonymous. He could initiate or interpret orders, and his voice would be the voice of Hitler. The people obeyed because they feared and worshipped that abstract authority.

  Already it had become evident that some powerful men recognized and respected his greater power. Gestapo Müller, still doggedly inquiring into the precisely timed execution of Heydrich, learned from witnesses that the Reich Protector before his murder was once kept waiting outside Hitler’s office. Despite his impatience, Heydrich recoiled when the Führer emerged with Bormann, who immediately tugged Hitler in another direction. Schellenberg (who had been told now to concentrate entirely on secret-service activities abroad) recorded that “Heydrich, though convinced of his own power, showed he was afraid.”

  Bormann was master of Wolf’s Lair, the East Prussian headquarters which impressed Albert Speer as being virtually an animal cage for the Führer. The visitor had to penetrate a series of security rings of electrified barbed wire and get permits to travel through a forest patrolled by wolfhounds before he was granted an audience with the Secretary, who would then convey the nature of his business to Hitler.

  Bormann had his eye on Speer, who could slip through Hitler’s defenses on the basis of their old friendship and long talks about architecture. The War Production Minister said, with that arrogance which led so many Germans to underestimate Bormann: “He stood out by his brutality, his lack of culture. A subordinate by nature, he treated his own subordinates as if he were dealing with oxen. He was a peasant.”

  The peasant’s control was enough to drive the German military caste out of its collective mind. He told General Alfred Jodl: “Never remind a dictator of his own errors. This is a psychological necessity. Otherwise he will lose confidence.”

  Jodl admitted later to the tribunal which hanged him that, as chief of land operations, he followed that dictum. Had he contradicted Hitler, he would have been in trouble with Bormann for disturbing the Führer’s meditations.

  “The more absurd the Führer’s ideas, the more rapturously you should welcome them,” Bormann advised another visitor, who was thunderstruck by Hitler’s plan to sabotage the big Russian industrial center at Magnitogorsk, far beyond the Urals. “All you should do is make showy preparations. Keep giving assurances that plans are going forward full speed. Then, gradually, drop by drop, spread the notion that certain outside factors may defer the glorious consummation of this affair. The sense that things may be deferred should seep through in such a way that the author of the project finds himself wondering at his own earlier enthusiasm and begins discreetly to shelve the whole thing—if he hasn’t already forgotten about it.”

  Some of the crazier schemes originated with Bormann or were palmed off onto the Führer during sessions around the fireside. At the time, they seemed to Allied observers to be part of the childish gangsterism of the Bormann crew. Gangsterism there was, but conceived with an eye to the future. When British commandos tried to kidnap Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, the first intelligence reports were snapped up by Bormann.

  He was building a picture of international Nazism. Spy chief Schellenberg was expected to send him a copy of all operations abroad. In this way Bormann knew the Nazi networks in the Mideast and Latin America, and the large German espionage bases in the Iberian peninsula. He knew the names of Nazi agents and sympathizers, including that of an Egyptian named Anwar Sadat, who was destined to become the President of the United Arab Republic. With the benefit of hindsight, one can see that the self-appointed guardian of an ideology, with his Brotherhood watchdogs, would require a thorough knowledge of those territories where Nazism had taken root or would find friendly accommodation. He had at his finger tips all the details required for moving money secretly through the channels arranged for German espionage funds, for moving special ca
rgoes like the dismantled rockets shipped by U-boat to Japan, and for establishing fortified camps abroad for survivors of the coming collapse in Europe.

  There was nobody to supervise his requests for this information. It was held to be either information required by Hitler or, if it seemed too trivial, a matter of petty detail occupying the fussy mind of the Secretary. He was regarded with amused contempt by middle-rank Nazis and by those chieftains not directly engaged in a power struggle. This was his strength, of course, this contempt he invited by his deliberate display of coarse manners and lack of refined knowledge. He created fear in men like Himmler, who recognized the peasant cunning and who said: “He would wreck a scheme to end the war by twisting it into a compromise with Stalin.” He doubtless rejoiced in the aristocratic superiority of the chief of the General Staff, General Heinz Guderian, who spluttered: “Everything had to be done through this sinister guttersnipe.”

  Guttersnipe … peasant … a pig rooting for potatoes—these were useful terms of camouflage for a man who had disposed of Röhm, Streicher, Hess, possibly Heydrich, and who was moving in for the kill against Himmler, Goebbels, and Göring, a man who built up party funds in the years of early starvation with schemes like compulsory insurance for all Nazis, who found a way to charge royalties whenever Hitler’s profile appeared on postage stamps or posters or government bills, and who trapped the slippery Himmler in the end by getting him appointed to the hopeless and humiliating post of Supreme Commander of Army Group Vistula, which horrified the soldiers and made Himmler radiant with dreams of glory never to be fulfilled.

  Long before the July 1944 plot to kill Hitler, Bormann had taken control of the routes to freedom and the large stores of wealth established abroad. The truth was best expressed by the Führer himself when, nearing his end, he screamed at his personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann: “Whoever is against Bormann is against the state.”