The Bormann Brotherhood

by William Stevenson

  * An epidemic of Nazi films broke out in 1972, mysteriously recovered from unnamed “Swiss caves,” as the result of an agreement among U.S. television companies to pay royalties. The British so far still refuse to meet the financial demands of the purveyors.

  CHAPTER 7

  Martin Bormann began to plan for a Fourth Reich after the German defeat at Stalingrad. He called secret meetings in 1943 of those industrialists who financed Hitler’s rise to power ten years earlier. They listened to Bormann because he had demonstrated a superior talent in the money game, in conspiracy and the shuffling of secret funds. It was not Bormann’s fault that the Führer had lost his ability to hypnotize the masses. Bormann proposed the distribution of liquid assets to safe parts of the world; the accumulation of gold and other treasures in the Alps; and the assembly of bodyguards of devout Nazis into an Alpine fortress with escape routes into nearby countries. Out of this grew notorious organizations, among them ODESSA, for the protection of Nazis and the preservation of the faith. The full story took another thirty years to surface. The clues floated into public view at long intervals.

  Bormann’s preparations had been known to the wartime Allies. In 1946, a few details leaked into an American Treasury report. British and U.S. Treasury agents were on the trail but they wanted to maintain total secrecy. They were in competition with the Soviet Union for the capture of the Fourth Reich’s hidden leaders and funds worth 800 million American dollars. By 1973 the situation had changed. Bormann’s financial wizardry at war’s end virtually made sure that Nazi funds would be inflated into a vast fortune. Gold was now regarded as the only safe source of wealth, and some ninety-five tons of it were thought to be still in Nazi hands. This was a great deal in a world where only 75,000 tons of gold were known to be cumulatively in private and public ownership. The situation had changed politically, too. Once covert Nazis were challenging their enemies to come and get them if they dare. Some hungered to prove that they had been right all along, and that National Socialism was the best antidote to Communism. Others had prospered in lonely places, having used Bormann’s funds to pile up their fortunes: these men wanted to spend their money freely in their declining years. If Martin Bormann was alive, he was more likely now to be challenged to come into the open. In these new circumstances, the professional Nazi-hunters saw no value in further secrecy. It was possible for the public to get an over-all view, to put together scraps of history. Then the exposure of ODESSA and its brother organizations began.

  ODESSA was no longer an intriguing fiction; it was a hard reality. It was an organization for the protection of former SS and Gestapo men who became, in their turn, the guardians of the party and its philosophy. ODESSA had branched into new adventures as postwar society became more tolerant of men involved in war crimes. It began to change as more and more of its children crept back into German public life. It became the parent of new organizations that took up the campaign to put into key jobs those who believed in National Socialist ideals. All owed their financial existence and took direction from the Brotherhood strategists. There were groups like Comradely Aid (Kameradschaftshilfe) to take care of military experts; the Salzburg Circle to train defendants awaiting trial for war crimes; Action-for-Comrades to filter into the police agencies those who sympathized with any campaign to disown Hitler in order to make National Socialism again acceptable.

  All had roots in the talks that began in 1943 and reached a climax at Strasbourg the following year, twenty days after the plot to kill Hitler failed. In the Hotel Maison Rouge on August 10, 1944 were gathered the heads of industrial dynasties once again in need of Bormann’s talents. The War Ministry and the Ministry of Armaments were represented. Ostensibly, they brooded upon the need to dispatch abroad the blueprints of secret weapons. In truth, nobody there believed in either Hitler’s magic or the wild promises of secret devices for mass destruction. Technical men like Willy Messerschmitt had produced such great aircraft as the Me-109. They were not fools. They knew they were beaten, (Messerschmitt later slipped into Spain and built up a small hardware business while continuing to design new aircraft.) The concern for the safety of Germany’s industrial secrets concealed the real purpose of the conference, making it possible to enlist the co-operation of German intelligence and police agencies abroad, whose more dogged and dogmatic servants would have been outraged to learn that industrialists were preparing for postwar economic operations. In truth, each industrialist was to set himself up abroad, unobtrusively, and with party aid. In return, the party (which here meant Martin Bormann) would expect to draw upon financial reserves later.

  The Strasbourg conference was documented in detail. The files were discovered by American counterintelligence. The information was distributed among Allied government agencies concerned with the recovery of stolen goods. Some of the contents leaked out through the Italian Government Recovery Office, which sought stolen art treasures and discovered that Bormann had arranged for them to be stored inside the Alpine Fortress. Other details were disclosed after President Juan Perón’s overthrow in Argentina, when Sylvano Santander, later appointed ambassador to Spain, took charge of investigations into Nazi-financed commercial enterprises in Latin America. The Czech government exposed a part of the mystery when divers lifted out of Black Lake a number of sealed boxes containing similar information and other Nazi documents. But Prague, regarded in those days as Communist and untouchable, found willing listeners mostly in countries like Yugoslavia. The government there was fascinated to receive from the Black Lake boxes a list of 1,800 Yugoslavs who had been secret Gestapo agents.

  All these bits and pieces interlocked. ODESSA’S sources of money were made clear. Bormann had directed an intricate plan for the distribution of funds through foreign companies which were listed by the U.S. Treasury Department in a 1946 report. The list covered 750 different business enterprises scattered from Switzerland to the Mideast and Latin America. There were 200 in the Iberian peninsula; 35 in Turkey; 98 in Argentina; 214 in Switzerland—“a technical network,” as it had been described at the Strasbourg conference, manned by self-professed experts in industrial processes. Research institutions had been established near lakes and hydro-power plaints so that the “engineers” of a new Fourth Reich had the camouflage of scientific inquiry to cover their hoarding of material and funds. ODESSA’S early days were financed by the sale of discarded U.S. and other Allied weapons, transport, and scrap metal through Mideast import-export agencies.

  Valid German securities, issued in the 1930’s and still convertible three or four decades later, were moved out of the Third Reich through the network of foreign companies under secret German control. These were worth, in 1944, about $100 million. The postwar federal government would not cash these securities without proper identification of ownership. This position had been anticipated by Bormann. Many a minor SS officer has told of being required by his superiors to write his signature and bank account number on blank sheets of paper for the purpose of eventual withdrawals. These bank accounts were to be used by prominent Nazis and businessmen who, as recorded in the captured documents from the Strasbourg conference, might expect to spend some time in jail on charges of war crimes. The whole point of the conference was to face realistically the period of Allied occupation. The wives and children of major war criminals would be looked after. Less obvious figures from Hitler’s past would rebuild the party’s foundations, abroad if necessary, in Germany if possible.

  The machinery was set in motion to concentrate and conceal the sources of future wealth. A network of railroads brought “subhumans” from all over Europe to the death camps. The same brisk efficiency organized traffic in the other direction. Art treasures, jewelry, precious stones, gold teeth, and loot were freighted into the Alpine Fortress. A German company, Degussa, melted gold fillings into gold bars. The Reichsbank’s special department for stolen goods (not, of course, identified in such frank terms) took charge of assets that would be difficult to convert immediately into liquid cash.
The concentration camp at Oranienburg processed the gold and crated the jewelry. Everything was funneled into the Altaussee region of Hitler’s Bavarian retreat. There, the myth of a last Nazi military stand was fostered. The Alpine Fortress was, of course, a natural piece of camouflage. There were 17,500 residents registered there in 1944, and a year later the U.S. occupation authorities counted 80,000 adult civilians. They were not soldiers fighting to the end. They were the families of German notables, and men already traveling the secret escape routes. The confusion was majestic. The Gestapo chief Ernst Kaltenbrunner dispatched from Berlin to this region, according to British Treasury agents, fifty cases of gold coins, two million American dollars, two million Swiss francs, five cases of diamonds and other precious stones, and a quantity of gold bars, all buried in the grounds of the house where he finally took refuge. Josef Pucherl, a local farmer, dug up two iron boxes containing more than 10,000 gold coins some time after Kaltenbrunner’s capture.

  The Organisation der SS-Angehörigen (ODESSA) did not function well in the beginning. Bormann’s own accountant, an economist of eccentric imagination, Dr. Helmut von Hummel, had to bury some $5 million worth of gold coins near Hitler’s retreat before himself going underground. He had failed to make contact with “Haddad Said,” in reality SS Captain Franz Roestel, an escape organizer who later commuted on Brotherhood business between Spain and Uruguay. By then, the escape lines were fairly secure. They linked distribution centers, and each line was knotted at fifty-mile intervals with wayside sanctuaries. The staff at each station knew only about the next station up or down the line. Die Spinne (The Spider) took its name from this system. The main threads ran between Hamburg and Rome by land, and between Hamburg and Genoa by sea. Almost inevitably, they overlapped Jewish escape lines. Much of what is known now about ODESSA and its more sophisticated partner, Die Spinne (used for large-scale operations only), comes from Israeli dignitaries who were experts in the early postwar years at moving thousands of survivors out of Europe. Thus Ante Pavelić, the Nazi chief of the Croat breakaway state, escaped along a route overlapping a Jewish line to Rome. There, the Catholic church had given refuge to half of the surviving 8,000 Jews of that city at the same time that help was also provided for Nazi escapers.

  The confusion and urgency of the times had been foreseen by Bormann. Refugee camps were utilized to make contacts. What might have surprised him was the speed with which this primitive start developed into a more intricate system. By 1955, German prisoners released from Russia were directed to lawyers who would protect their interests. ODESSA had branched into legal activities to test public acceptance of returning Nazis, and subsidiaries like HIAG used political pressure at home and abroad to take the heat off the fugitives. HIAG, for instance, led the Bonn government to permit former SS officers to join the new federal army, and to keep the same rank as they had held under Hitler. HIAG, an acronym for the German title of Mutual Aid Committee of Soldiers of the former Waffen SS, showed how much things had improved when it put on a public platform General Kurt (“Panzer”) Meyer, the SS commander who was sentenced to death by a Canadian tribunal. On May 20, 1960, Meyer was not only a long way from execution, but also out of jail and addressing HIAG’s mass meeting thus: “SS veterans will continue to fight for the things for which our dead have fallen.” Nobody questioned his implied argument that the dead Canadians (whose massacre led to Meyer’s death sentence) had fallen for the wrong cause.

  Such a bold reversal of values shocked those who had fought against fascism. It demonstrated how rapidly and luxuriantly National Socialist ideas revived under ODESSA’S protective wings. The evidence had always been there that Martin Bormann and his henchmen were capable of infinite ingenuity. The new growth was no more astonishing than that of AHSDI, the Adolf Hitler Fund of German Industry. It placed at Bormann’s disposal in 1933 an unknown fortune contributed by German industrialists. Each year they gave more, and each year Bormann built up the Third Reich a little more extravagantly. Within a decade, AHSDI provided the financial resources for the Führer to govern Europe and hammer at the Kremlin doors. ODESSA’S secret rise was slower; its changes less vivid.

  “The Nazi regime in Germany has developed well-arranged plans for the perpetuation of Nazi doctrines after the war,” reported the Research and Analysis branch of OSS in March 1945. “Some of these plans have already been put into operation and others are ready to be launched on a widespread scale immediately upon termination of hostilities in Europe.”

  This prediction was based upon deciphered radio communications between Germany and secret stations in South America. The messages were intercepted by British intelligence from a base in Bermuda, in concert with American code breakers. Most of the traffic was between Berlin and Buenos Aires. The outward-bound messages were relayed by the powerful German Navy transmitter at Bordeaux, in occupied France. “Little Bill” Stephenson’s headquarters in New York processed an immense amount of secret traffic, totaling over one million code groups a day. Intelligence on Nazis in South America was gathered mostly by Stephenson’s network for reasons connected with U.S. foreign policy in that region. He sent to General Donovan as much information as he could, knowing that the OSS had gathered “the most brilliant team of analysts in the history of intelligence.” In return, reports were passed to the British by American intelligence men: notably, Allen Dulles, then heading OSS in Switzerland, who on one occasion collected some 2,000 microfilm photographs of German diplomatic correspondence during a period of eighteen months. Much of this correspondence was directly concerned with South American plans and thus provided independent confirmation of what Stephenson’s radio intercepts had disclosed.

  The German postwar plans, as seen by the OSS analysts, were summarized thus: “Nazi party members, German industrialists and the German military, realizing that victory can no longer be attained, are now developing postwar commercial projects, endeavouring to renew and cement friendships in foreign commercial circles and planning for renewals of pre-war cartel agreements.

  “German technicians, cultural experts and undercover agents have well-laid plans to infiltrate into foreign countries with the object of developing economic, cultural and political ties. German technicians and scientific research experts will be made available at low cost to industrial firms and technical schools in foreign countries. German capital and plans for the construction of ultramodern technical schools and research laboratories will be offered at extremely favourable terms since they will afford the Germans an excellent opportunity to design and perfect new weapons.”

  A modified version of this report found its way into State Department and Foreign Office files:

  “We are in possession of photostat copies of several volumes of German plans which include a propaganda program directed at removing Allied control measures by ‘softening up’ the Allies through a subtle plea for ‘fair treatment’ of Germans. Later the program will be expanded and intensified with the object of giving rebirth to Nazi doctrines and furthering German ambitions for world domination. Unless these plans are checked they will present a constant menace to postwar peace and security.”

  Secret contacts had been made with influential Germans who might be persuaded to help the Allies in the climactic months of the war. There was a difference, however, in the motives of such Germans. This may seem elementary now; then, it was less acknowledged. There were German military commanders who wanted badly to escape the consequences of defeat and who had already convinced themselves that they had all along fought Bolshevism. There were Nazi party officials, Gestapo and SS chiefs, and large groups of defecting German intelligence agents who wanted to get out of the ruins of the Third Reich to rebuild the faith abroad and rekindle it inside a reborn Germany when memories had faded. Important to these hardline Nazis were the voluminous notes taken by the literal-minded evangelist of the movement, Martin Bormann. These Bormann Papers, as they were called later, were regarded with the same possessive awe as the great religious documents of the
past or the works of Marx and Lenin.

  It was known that Bormann had prepared these papers long before he left the burning ruins of Berlin. “George Wood,” a senior German Foreign Office man, supplied this kind of information to Allen Dulles, along with data on German intelligence nets that might provide transport, shelter, and safe haven. Similar informants reported that the Führer himself had authorized Bormann to take charge of a special staff of stenographers and typists who would set down fresh installments of the thoughts of the first leader of the National Socialist movement. Thus the faith would be preserved.

  Before a full-scale hunt for Bormann could be mounted, however, the conflict between Russia and the West produced a new set of priorities. In this political climate, attention shifted away from escaping war criminals, who were favored already by the physical conditions of ravaged Europe and the structure of various Nazi agencies Bormann had counted upon to help his escape and the safe evacuation of his papers and financial resources.

  There were eight million men and women who belonged to the Nazi party when Germany capitulated. Bormann was among the hundreds of more highly placed Germans who had the right to wear the death’s-head insigne, the black uniform, and the runic double-S flash as an honorary SS officer.

  The word “honorary” was not the invention of some Nazi wit. To belong to the SS was, in that fanatical atmosphere, an honor. The SS guarding the Reich Chancellery were men chosen for their tall slim figures and their blond, blue-eyed beauty, from which Hitler was reputed to get a certain satisfaction. The SS ran the death camps and held the key positions in the farmers’ advisory bureaus and departments on racial policy. The SS chieftains were the watchdogs over science and health, with the key to the scriptures of the Führer. They were “a new form of religious sect,” said Eichmann’s aide in butchering the Jews, SS Major Dieter Wisliceny. There were SS sections devoted to German archeology, baby farms, and collecting skeletons (“preferably undamaged” was the proviso in a request to Professor Hans Fleischhacker* regarding Jewish specimens, which “should be done to death without harm to the skull”). There were SS institutes for alchemy and astrology; for the adaptation of horses to the steppes, but not, oddly enough, for the experimental uranium pile in the Black Forest. The SS ran night clubs in foreign capitals. Their business enterprises were in parts of the world conveniently located for the more farsighted Nazis, those who were later wanted for war crimes.