The Bormann Brotherhood

by William Stevenson

  Then she stamped away to write her notes. The most vivid picture in her mind was Bormann in the bunker scribbling “in his everlasting exercise books and bits of cardboard,” as if to record the momentous events for posterity. She thought he planned to escape so the papers might take their place “among the great chapters of German history.” Hanna Reitsch contributed one of these chapters herself, both in her aviation career and in her subsequent testimony before Allied interrogators.

  In the nearby streets of Hamburg shuffled the former Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, still suffering delusions of grandeur at the same time that he tried to find employment in his old trade as a wine peddler. He called himself “Reiser” and wore dark glasses, a black ambassadorial Homburg, and a striped black suit. In his pocket was a letter he had composed to Winston Churchill, part of which is worth quoting as a reminder of these ingratiating and even self-abasing characters. Ribbentrop had made plain his hatred for the British, yet he wrote now, in his abominable English, “to place myself at the disposal of the British Commander in Chief…. I do not know if the old and noble English custom of fair play is also applicable to a defeated foe. I also do not know if you wish to hear the political testament of a deceased man.” He was offering to convey the Führer’s last message, blithely ignoring the fact that this had been given to Martin Bormann. He sought an audience with Churchill to convey Hitler’s message, entrusted to him “personally and verbally.” He had wanted to join the fighting in Berlin but the Führer said no, he must await further instructions in a safe zone. And so here he was, ready and eager to discourse at length on matters of consequence. “In spite of all disappointment and embitterment about the repeated English rejection of the German offers the English-German collaboration has to this last hour always been the political creed of the Fuehrer.” He had always considered England his second home. When Germany was winning the war, the Führer and he had never wanted to violate English prestige and esteem. And he took up the refrain that was to haunt the Allies: he had had no idea of what was going on inside those concentration camps. He had once caught some rumor concerning ill-treatment of Jews and of course he had gone straight to the Führer, urging “immediate change. The Fuehrer kept the report… and gave me clearly to understand this was a question of the interior authorities.”

  There were two exits for escaping Nazis, unwittingly provided by Hitler at the humble suggestion of Bormann.

  South of Berlin was the “last bulwark against Bolshevism,” as Hitler saw it. This was the Alpine Fortress, centered on the Führer’s lands at Berchtesgaden. The real master of those estates was Bormann, and the notion of turning Eagle’s Nest into a fortress was his. The monster created by Frankenstein (as one Communist spy called Hitler*) was about to destroy his master. He needed this last extravaganza to cover his tracks.

  Northwest of the Führer’s bunker was Project North. This was the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Kanal at Kiel, on the tip of Germany nearest Sweden.

  The first area was in fact the hub of escape routes into Switzerland, Austria, and northern Italy. From it flew captured American bombers on secret missions. So far as Hitler was concerned, they were dropping agents behind enemy lines. In reality, they were delivering major Nazis to sanctuaries like Spain.

  The Kiel area provided access to U-boats and other vessels at the naval bases around Hamburg. In Hitler’s last hours, it was the headquarters of Grand Admiral Doenitz, actual successor to the Führer. Doenitz was performing in one of the war’s great charades. It began on an old steamer, the Patria. It ended with comic-opera cabinet meetings in a Flensburg schoolroom, where each day’s business began with the new Minister of Food measuring out a thimbleful of rye to each of his colleagues.

  Göring, skulking in the mountains at Berchtesgaden, gulped paracodeine tablets and worried about his magnificent art collection of some 1,300 paintings, which came in part from property confiscated from Jews sent to the gas chambers, and which was worth the equivalent of $180 million. This valuation was made in May 1945; a quarter-century later the figure was many times greater.

  So much that was taken for granted by May 1945 was to prove infinitely more valuable in the 1970’s. A long war had just ended. Allied interrogators moved in a daze through the motley collection of Very Important Prisoners. In the schoolroom where Doenitz conducted the new German government in the style of the old imperial cabinets, there was an argument about appointing a Minister for Churches. Nobody mentioned synagogues, for there was nobody there who would admit then or later that he knew the fate of the Jews. There was another debate on reshuffling the Cabinet. Nobody mentioned that there had not been a German Cabinet meeting for the past twelve years. Somewhere along the line, messages had been received that Hitler was dead; that Eva Braun had become Mrs. Hitler and was dead, too; and that Martin Bormann had broken loose, a piece of news that must have briefly tightened the muscles in the Grand Admiral’s face before he got back into one of the dignified limousines requisitioned from the Führer’s stable. The beautifully polished Mercedes moved at a stately pace between mud-spattered British scout cars and canvas-shrouded cannons of grubby British tanks. The distance between the school-cum-cabinet and the Grand Admiral’s villa was all of five hundred yards. Fortunately, he had an invitation from the Duke of Holstein to move into quarters better suited to the successor to the Führer of the Third Reich: a castle that had been in the Duke’s family for three hundred years, and that would lend a suitable air of pomp and circumstance to the leader of a government dealing with grave matters. Hitler’s personal photographer had sent one of his best assistants to capture on film the deliberations of President Doenitz and Ms chief of the high command of the armed forces, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel. They were all living in a dream.

  On May 21, 1945, two days before the arrest of the entire Doenitz government (which had been simply overlooked by the Allies during the three confusing weeks after Hitler’s suicide), an odd-looking man with a black eye patch walked out of Flensburg. The man carried papers that identified him as Heinrich Hitzinger. On his right and his left walked a military adjutant of the Waffen SS. All of them wore ordinary field-police uniforms, with forged documents in the pockets. They were hoping to make it through Allied control points to their new destination, some five hundred miles south—the alternative named by their late Führer, the Alpine Fortress.

  The man in the middle of this trio was in fact SS Field Marshal Heinrich Himmler. He had gone through a discouraging encounter with the Grand Admiral, who cocked his pistol and told the Field Marshal there was no place for him in the new Cabinet. Furthermore, Doenitz quoted a message from Bormann saying that Himmler had been talking treason with the Swedes. The whole episode had dampened Himmler’s spirits to the point where he delayed his departure by several days. Not very hopefully, he had looked for Gauleiter Erich Koch, who was to have arrived aboard an icebreaker from East Prussia with plans, if it came to the worst, to board one of the U-boats commanded by dissident captains. (Koch, as it happened, had reached Flensburg, but was hard to spot behind an enormous mustache he had grown since the days when he whipped the Ukrainians into line.)

  The sad little procession, now augmented, faltered at a checkpoint between Hamburg and Bremerhaven, where other U-boats waited for an opportunity to slip away. Himmler knew there were plans for escape among Bormann’s friends, and he hoped some of them, like Koch, would overlook the fact that Bormann wanted him destroyed as the last of a long list of enemies. Yet thoughts of escape were tempered by Himmler’s earlier conviction that “Europe in the future cannot manage without me. It will still need me as Minister of Police. After I’ve spent an hour with Eisenhower, he’ll appreciate that fact.”

  The former king of the concentration camps was in some such reverie, it seemed to the first British Army Intelligence Corps sergeant who screened the group. The sergeant did not recognize Himmler, and it was only in retrospect that he decided the man was mentally a million miles away. This could well have been the cas
e. Himmler is quoted by Count Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk, Doenitz’s Foreign Minister, as being convinced the long-awaited war between the Bolsheviks and the Western Allies would break out any moment, whereupon the Nazis would become the tremor in the scales “and achieve what we could not achieve in war.” Schwerin von Krosigk, one of Germany’s innumerable counts, had once regarded Himmler as the destined savior of Germany. At this later stage, he tried currying favor with Eisenhower by stating virtuously that he and Doenitz were planning to conduct an investigation into concentration camps.

  The British sergeant shunted the group aside. They now wore a mixture of civilian and military clothing in which the coarse gray uniform jackets of the German Field Security Police stood out. If they had worn plain German Army togs, all might have gone well. The Field Security Police, however, had become part of the Gestapo and were on the list of indicted organizations. Two of Himmler’s companions were SS Colonel Werner Grothmann and Major Heinz Macher, who both caught attention by a peculiarity of gesture: they behaved as if they gave orders rather than took them.

  They had trudged about ninety miles. They were picked up and trucked to British Interrogation Center No. 031, on Lüneburger Heath, where Field-Marshal Bernard Montgomery had his headquarters. The officer commanding the center, Captain Thomas Selvester, stared hard at “a small miserable-looking and shabbily-dressed little chap.” Himmler had shaved his mustache and was still wearing the black eye patch. Nevertheless, Selvester made him fall out and sent for Montgomery’s intelligence chief, Colonel Michael L. Murphy. “You’re Himmler,” said Murphy. The man removed his eye patch and put on the familiar rimless spectacles.

  In reports of the catastrophe that followed, few details have escaped the dead hand of official secrecy—perhaps for good reason. Himmler began to talk, and somebody’s clumsiness silenced him forever. Neither Murphy nor Selvester was under any illusion about the problems in dealing with Nazis who remained fanatical to the end. The danger was always that they might kill themselves before talking. So Himmler was handled gently at first. Captain C. J. L. Wells, of the British Army Medical Corps, found a capsule of cyanide in one of Himmler’s pockets, and he said quietly that it might be best to have the prisoner stripped.

  Himmler was in a state of nervous agitation. But the calm efficiency of his captors encouraged him. He was explaining his importance to the Third Reich, and his hopes for the future of a new Germany, in which doubtless he would have a big part to play. It was Bormann who had caused his difficulties. Bormann had tricked him into the role of a tin-pot war lord. The bitterness came vomiting out. Himmler had been betrayed by Bormann.

  This outburst began before anyone had time to strip Himmler. Guards stood back, listening. Himmler said he was aware of secret arrangements made by the “Bormann clique.” Cowards had been preparing places of sanctuary abroad, and of course the rank and file followed. What else could you expect when the leaders ran away? The files on a million SS men alone were at this moment being systematically destroyed. His audience stood silent, aghast, disgusted, aware that the rat was cornered and would betray everyone. A month ago he had been an ersatz war lord. Now he was having a tantrum. Hitler’s head of the SS, commander in chief of the Replacement Army and an army group in the field, this chief of a police force so complicated that his captors had not yet unraveled the machinery, was once again the Bavarian schoolmaster’s son, shrieking for attention, demanding to be properly recognized. The combination of a violent temper and one of the most heavily burdened consciences in Christendom (for Himmler had not formally broken with the Catholic church, and in the church’s eyes he remained a member) produced an avalanche of words, out of which, with luck, some hard facts might be extracted.

  Bormann had disappeared from the Führer’s bunker twenty-three days ago. The denunciation by his archenemy was about to begin. A British officer of exalted rank was called. He was a man unaccustomed to dealing with vermin. Himmler was in a state of hysteria. What he needed at this point was recognition: a handshake, an attitude of “We’re all brothers of the same military caste,” some hint that he had been right to suppose the enemy understood better than his friends what a fine upstanding soldierly man he had always been. Probably nobody can be blamed for what happened. The Briton of exalted rank bawled out the doctor for not stripping the prisoner according to regulations. Guards grabbed Himmler to remove his clothing. Then would he stand naked, a gray and wrinkled little man who had rejoiced for so long in his jack boots and ankle-length military greatcoat.

  He turned his head, and his lips were drawn back. Dr. Wells pushed a finger into Himmler’s mouth, probing between the rotting teeth. To get a better grip, he pulled him by his thinning hair, twisting his head around into the light. What Wells had seen was “a small black knob sticking out between a gap in the teeth in the right-hand lower jaw.” It was a special capsule encased in hammered silver which had turned black. Himmler bit down, and potassium cyanide squirted from the crushed Zyankali vial.

  A grim struggle followed. Himmler was forced to the floor and rubber tubes were thrust down his throat. Emetics were pumped in. The contents of his stomach were pumped out. It took fourteen minutes before the commander of the organization that had destroyed six million human beings, and maimed or mentally twisted millions more, jerked his legs for the last time. The damp air was heavy with the frightful odor of potassium cyanide and sweat. The poison began to turn the corpse green. The face, captured in an official photograph, was that of a rabid fox. Later it relaxed into the features reminiscent of the shortsighted nonentity in another photograph, one showing a younger Himmler in a group of untidy men crowding an ancient panel truck bearing the legend STOSS-TRUPP-HITLER/MÜNCHEN 1923.

  The man who had fancied himself a reincarnation of Henry the Fowler was dead. Henry, a medieval Duke of Bavaria, had himself crowned without the formal offices of the Catholic church, and Himmler had studied for the priesthood but rejected any formal loyalty to non-Germanic authority. Henry the Fowler had advanced against the subhuman Slavs, and so, in his fashion, had Himmler.

  Montgomery’s intelligence chief, looking down at the corpse of the Grand Inquisitor surrounded by a grisly litter of enamel basins and rubber tubes, swabs and bile, clenched his fists in despair. “That was the one man who could have told us where Bormann went to earth.”

  Another man who might have been in a position to tell was caught in Misery Meadow, on the other side of Germany, in the Alpine Fortress. This was General Reinhard Gehlen, who had buried the microfilms and dossiers with which he demonstrated to Washington within a few more weeks his theory that the real enemy of all right-minded people was Bolshevism. This magnificent distraction began on the very day Himmler killed himself. Its repercussions caused the Western Allies almost at once to slacken their hunt for Nazis and begin to recruit German professionals for the war predicted by Gehlen.

  American intelligence officers were hopping around the mountains “like fishermen in a shoal of big fish driven into the shallows” said Victor de Guinzbourg, the U.S. Army’s Counter-intelligence Corps sergeant who netted Gehlen and went on to greater things as an army intelligence colonel. Hermann Göring was caught. Julius Streicher, the worst of the Jew-baiters and publisher of racial pornography, was found lurking near the ruins of Hitler’s mountaintop mansion. The former overlord of Italy, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, gave up with his Army Group G, which Bormann had taken care to let everyone know would “circle the Redoubt [the Alpine Fortress] with steel.”

  One American spotted a man whose description had been given by Hitler’s masseur: “A tough, callous ox. A block of wood. Coarse, hard-bitten, capable only of thinking when he’s drunk. A giant, built like a lumberjack, heavy chin, thick neck, straight line down the back of his head. Looks like a big grizzly. Small brown eyes that move like a viper, all glittering. Bad teeth, some missing so he hisses.” The masseur, Felix Kersten, knew the details only too well, for he had worked over that Gestapo killer’s thick body: it was,
of course, Ernst Kaltenbrunner. He had shaved off his mustache, for a disguise.

  His mistress, Countess Gisela von Westrop, had bags stuffed with fake dollars and British pound notes manufactured by the death-camp inmates whose sentences were suspended so long as they kept up production of counterfeit money in the biggest criminal operation of its kind in history: Operation Bernhard. At the time, Kaltenbrunner’s captors were unaware of the use this hoard would serve, for the Countess carried only a minuscule part of it, along with gold and jewelry from Kaltenbrunner’s gas-chamber victims. She was allowed to go, but more was heard of her later, for she was on her way to Swiss banks where more liquid assets had been thoughtfully provided for the escape organizations of which she was the “social secretary.”

  The fishing continued. Robert Ley was trapped; he was the head of the Labor Front, who deported millions of slave workers, who promoted a “death ray” invention, and who nearly persuaded Hitler to release a new poison gas over London. And out of the woods came a leader of the Werewolf hunting units, Otto Skorzeny.

  The prison cages at Augsburg stood athwart one of the lesser escape routes to Italy. They were crammed with a motley collection of German VIP’s: field commanders, air-force chiefs, top SS and Gestapo leaders. Above them loomed one of the great castles of Austria, and such was the natural innocence of Allied soldiers that none cared to disturb the frightened inmates behind its ivy-covered walls. This was a pity, for it might have impeded the plans of the prisoners below if the castle had been occupied in the way it most assuredly would have been if a victorious German army had conquered this region instead of easygoing Texans of the 307th CIC unit, mostly thinking about when they could get home. Inside the castle was Bishop Alois Hudal, the cleric who planned to bring Martin Bormann out alive.