The Bormann Brotherhood

by William Stevenson

  Axmann knew about the escape routes through the Alps. He knew the Werewolves and the Alpine Fortress were planned to have a maximum effect as propaganda to deceive the enemy. He knew Bormann would head in the opposite direction, toward northwest Germany and the big U-boat pens near Flensburg. Axmann had done nothing so wrong that an Allied tribunal would punish him, and so he had no need to run away. He was far more useful as a decoy.

  He became a remarkably prosperous businessman considering his late start. So did Schirach, who served twenty years for crimes against humanity and came out of Spandau Prison straight into a lucrative publishing enterprise. Both these Hitler Youth leaders had behaved with unswerving loyalty, and they got their reward.

  Martin Bormann can hardly have foreseen the use made of another bit of real estate in the Bavarian retreat which fell into his hands after the departure of Hess to England, and which was taken over by an Allied mission after his colleagues were hanged. This was the “White House” and the surrounding settlement at Pullach, about six miles south of Munich. Bormann’s family used the old Hess house to entertain. The settlement provided rest and recreation for officers in charge of Dachau concentration camp when the sounds and sights became too much for them.

  Into it moved General Gehlen and his intelligence staff after Bormann disappeared. The so-called Gehlen Org was financed by the West and directed against Soviet interests. The irony was complete. The Brotherhood had a friend in Bormann’s old mansion. Over the front door the German eagle held in its claws only a few remaining bits of the swastika. The graceful young men on their pedestals in the garden had turned a moldy green since Hess admired them. But on Gehlen’s dining-hall wall there survived the bosomy blondes who, true to the official Nazi vision of German womanhood, placidly wove daisy chains or clasped sheaves of wheat to their big breasts. Over Hitler’s former intelligence chief’s house now flew the Stars and Stripes. On a brass plate on the gates appeared the disarming words SOUTH GERMAN INDUSTRIES UTILIZATION COMPANY. Guards dressed as Bavarian gamekeepers, with leather shorts and embroidered suspenders, patrolled the high walls and the new electrified fencing. Inside, the former Hitler Youth training center became a training school for spies.

  When Pullach was built for Hess in 1936, it was surrounded by a wall about a mile long. By the end of Gehlen’s first year, entirely at the cost of the United States, a large staff toiled over Russian secrets and Bolshevik conspiracies inside a fortress built to Gehlen’s architectural sketches. Some defectors from this agency thought they saw in Gehlen at this time an echo of Hitler: not just the physical resemblance, but the grandiose schemes. There were three levels of underground bunkers. Strongrooms were embedded in steel and concrete. Houses were modernized for the staff, who were discouraged from going outside except on business, and whose families had no contact with the local villagers. Doors and gates around the Pullach compound were operated by electric relays. Closed-circuit television not only scrutinized visitors but, later, also recorded them.

  When the Gehlen Org became part of the federal German government, it continued to receive most of its money from American sources. The Free Europe Committee financed propaganda over Radio Free Europe, and the sponsors came from some of the largest and most respected of American business enterprises. Gehlen’s liaison officer with this new toy was a former SA Brown Shirt leader, Peter Fischer, who went under the alias “Major Fiedler.” During the war he had worked radio deception techniques to catch British agents sent into the Low Countries by air. His boss then was SS Major Josef Schreieder, who boasted that no Dutch resistance worker escaped his clutches.

  Radio Free Europe was conveniently close when it began operations in 1950. It occupied a park in the heart of Munich. In time it grew into a chain of radio transmitters beaming anti-Communist information sandwiched between attractive programing into just about every part of the Soviet and Chinese Maoist countries. When uprisings did take place against Communist oppression, the rebels would say later that agents from Pullach and the promises of RFE broadcasters had led them naturally to expect support and, eventually, a democratic paradise. Doubtless those who escaped did find help in resettling. It was cold comfort for rebels against Russian overlords. But most of the Gehlen-type operations were all talk and little action. Risks were taken with other people’s lives in truly bureaucratic style.

  Gehlen’s prominent employment by the West cannot have seemed to the Russians like a friendly gesture. Behind him were the U.S. Council Against Communist Aggression, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, American Friends of Russian Freedom, and other “citizens’” committees. He even had his agents attend world conferences of Moral Re-Armament.

  The murderously infantile approach of Germans to secret-service work was captured by Walter Schellenberg’s description of his own wartime office: “Microphones were everywhere. They were hidden in the walls, under the desk, even in one of the lamps, so that every conversation and every sound was automatically recorded…. My desk was like a small fortress. Automatic guns were built into it which could spray the whole room with bullets. All I had to do in emergency was press a button and both guns would fire simultaneously. At the same time, a siren would summon the guards to surround the building and block every exit…. On missions abroad, I had an artificial tooth inserted which contained enough poison to kill me in thirty seconds. To make doubly sure, I wore a signet ring in which a gold capsule was hidden under a large blue stone. The capsule contained cyanide.”

  The Nazi spy chief’s filing system was a masterpiece of intricacy and detail, and set the Gehlen Org a very high standard. There were background notes on the psychology and mannerisms, the friendships and family origins, of every Allied personality whose name appeared in field reports or foreign intelligence summaries. “We had files on every agent, co-worker, member of the staff and motives for collaboration,” said Schellenberg. “We could pick out a name in Istanbul and in a moment produce, by cross-indexing, all his contacts and all his human failings.” He described, in his Swiss exile, a complex rotating chain of index files which brought to any researcher in a moment all the information relevant to a problem.

  This system, crude by today’s computerized credit-rating banks, nevertheless was taken over by Gehlen. And the contents were ransacked before the war’s end by ODESSA. Obviously, the lucky ones were already in Schellenberg’s employ. They had access to gadgets that, for those days, were highly sophisticated.

  When Schellenberg realized that his archrival, Gehlen, had no plan to bring him into the new American-German secret service, he talked more freely to his British captors. He told them a great deal about the facilities and gadgets available. They included a radio transmitter about the size of a cigar box with a small telephone-type dial with three buttons. The agent turned the first button and dialed his message in code, which was automatically transferred to magnetized tape inside the box. Then a second button was turned; a light glowed; and when it was brightest, the sender knew he was beamed directly to the contact receiver. The third button activated the high-speed transmission of the wire tape, which Schellenberg claimed took three-fifths of a second to complete, too fast for any direction finder to lock onto it.

  Such gadgets were useful for escapees moving through enemy-occupied Europe. The files gave the names and addresses of “friends” in neutral areas.

  CHAPTER 11

  Bormann at one time asked Walter Schellenberg “to prepare a special brief on the administrative structure of the Roman Catholic Church,” and especially “its policy in South America.”

  His curiosity about networks in Latin America was no greater than that of Washington. Nazi maps of a Greater German Empire in that region, to be shared with colonizers from Franco Spain, had been studied since the first threats were made that bombs could be dropped on American cities from bases to the south. Diplomatic and economic pressures were applied on Nazi-minded governments. The movement of Nazi funds was interrupted wherever possible, and when financial transactions we
re conducted through American institutions, J. Edgar Hoover was able to get action through Treasury and Federal Bureau of Investigation agents. But the end of the war in Europe resulted in a dismantling of intelligence agencies, or, at best, their struggle to survive.

  Anything to thwart Nazi fugitives was done on the same informal basis that characterized the early days when New York lawyer William J. Donovan and the Canadian chief of British intelligence, William Stephenson, worked together to build up a wartime alliance directly responsible to Roosevelt and Churchill. Now Donovan was fighting to have his OSS transformed into a peacetime intelligence organization. Stephenson was closing down Latin-American operations from the regional office in New York’s Rockefeller Center. He was diverted briefly to rescue the defecting Russian cipher clerk Igor Gouzenko, who brought with him a full disclosure of the Communist spy rings extracting the secrets of America’s atomic bomb. Attention was thus drawn away from the remnants of Hitler’s successors.

  Yet what frustrated Donovan and Stephenson was that they knew the German networks as well as the Nazis’ own spy chief, Schellenberg. They had been warned that “we’ll set up bases in Mexico, Argentina, Brazil … and in French Canada,” by Admiral Canaris.

  Canaris, for his own reasons, had leaked information to the Western Allies. But he was hanged as a traitor by Hitler, and his warnings vanished under more urgent files.

  After Stephenson withdrew to Bermuda, which had been his spyglass on Latin America, he discussed again, with me, the recurrent nightmare of Bormann. Stephenson’s network of communications, which at one time employed 3,000 cipher clerks in the cavernous basement of the Princess Hotel, was much reduced. He was in touch with the international police agency, Interpol, and recognized that it labored under severe restrictions so far as war criminals were concerned. He raised the question of who would have provided Bormann with the specialists in unconventional warfare needed to guard his person. There was only one such German specialist of any note, and that was Scarface Skorzeny. The SS escape organizations had their trained men, of course. The Nazi political theorists, the guardians of the flame, required a military arm. This was in keeping with the traditional Freikorps, and students of German history were sure that the 1945 defeat had not eliminated this instinct to form armed mutual-aid groups.

  During Christmastime in 1945, “the most dangerous man in Europe,” as the Americans had once called him, SS Major Otto (“Scarface”) Skorzeny, was allowed out of prison camp to visit his family in Munich. He was followed by Allied agents, who thought he might get in contact with Bormann. Nothing happened.

  Skorzeny was a giant of a man with a chalk-line scar scribbled from the left temple to the corner of his mouth, above a massive chin. He had slate-gray eyes and dark springy hair. This was the man then already suspected of being director of an escape agency, Die Spinne (the Spider).

  He saw himself, as he said after he did finally escape to Spain, as the counterpart of the OSS’s Donovan. “I was interrogated by the General, and in this way I met the American who performed the same function in his army as I did in mine.”

  This disarming attempt to equate the job of Hitler’s secret and personal supercommando with that of Donovan did nothing to soften OSS feelings toward him. It was typical of the man’s insensitivity. But Donovan had no illusions.

  In this role, Skorzeny had talked privately and frequently with Bormann. The chief of Hitler’s special forces found himself “in control for forty-eight hours of all German forces at home and in occupied Europe.” The confusion following the plot against Hitler in July 1944, he said, “made me realize what can be done to seize power by a resourceful individual.”

  He was the ideal man to prepare for the survival of Bormann’s chosen few. He talked about the “Skorzeny Concept” of air-borne privateers, hit-and-run raids, and unconventional methods of controlling nations by using a few toughs to grab the levers of power. He had plans to bombard New York with rockets fired from U-boats, and he persuaded rocket engineer Wernher von Braun to let Hanna Reitsch try riding a V-1 rocket as a preliminary to striking London with human bombs. He wanted to kidnap the King of Italy during a political crisis. His actual wartime exploits fell short of his promises. Nonetheless, he did hoist Mussolini out of a supposedly impregnable mountain position, where the dictator was held prisoner after Italy capitulated. (As late as November 1972 he was still displaying, this time to admiring South African colonels, a gold wristwatch inscribed with Mussolini’s “M” and the date of the rescue: “12.9.1943.”)

  He was provided with the means to prepare SS escape routes by an order drafted by Bormann in July 1944. This called upon “all personnel, military and civil,” to help Skorzeny in any way and with anything he wanted. It was signed by Hitler and stated that “Skorzeny has been directly charged with secret and personal orders of utmost importance.”

  The fullest use of this order was made by General Gehlen, then of Foreign Armies East, who was preparing already for the mass transfer of his intelligence files on Russia. He had used Skorzeny a great deal in the last few months to build up a picture of secret operations behind Russian lines. And he could use him to buy freedom when the Third Reich fell. Scarface Skorzeny was a means to survive, and more.

  There were many things about Skorzeny that made him attractive. He would be bait for the Americans when the time came for Gehlen and the rest to switch sides on the grounds that they had always been fighting Communism. Skorzeny had strong views about the Bolsheviks and the Russians: “All of them, from the Arctic to the Black Sea, have been tarred with the same racial brush. They are just orientals with a callous fatalism,” he wrote after the war was long finished. From ODESSA’s point of view, he was useful because he had tested escape routes through Italy, and had set up training programs in which each of his commandos became proficient in a variety of skills. They could drive locomotives or steam rollers and could repair anything that moved, including the one-man torpedo. He had Bormann’s license to plunder every arsenal and supply depot. He stole weapons for his special forces and made each man expert as an industrial saboteur, parachutist, underwater swimmer, and escape artist. His glider troops for the rescue of Mussolini were provided with maps pinpointing the Catholic havens where they could hide if they were forced to return overland; their disguise was to be the familiar robes of the priesthood.

  In November 1944, when secret contacts were being developed between German agents and the West with an eye to escaping postwar retribution, Skorzeny got an assignment that would insure him a friendly reception in Franco Spain, the most promising territory from which the postwar traffic could be directed. He was told to set up a resistance organization behind the Russian lines and to make contact with anti-Communist partisans. The groundwork had been laid two years earlier, in Operation Zeppelin, in which Soviet prisoners were trained to become saboteurs behind their own lines. Now Gehlen envisaged a new non-German intelligence network: the Secret League of Green Partisans.

  In all these enterprises, it was the form that mattered and not the content. Scarface Skorzeny got little from this period on the Eastern front except dysentery and bladder trouble. Yet, like Gehlen, he made it all sound impressive later. The “hoop of steel” which he was to throw around Hitler and the Alpine Fortress never proved more than a pipe dream, though it sounded frightening enough that urgent cables flew among the Allies about this last desperate stand. At war’s end, Skorzeny and a few SS officers did retire into the region near the Austro-German border. But there was no mountain fortress, none of the thirty divisions of crack troops, no stocks of food and ammunition to supply the “defenders of the Alps.”

  Instead, there were “incredibly important party documents” to be hidden from the enemy. The President of the Reichsbank and Minister of Economics, Walther Funk, wanted protection there for himself and all the state treasures. Adolf Eichmann was to rendezvous there on the first stage of his long journey through the Argentine to a gallows in Israel. Skorzeny himself had been told
to surrender to American troops. This would be safer than risking death as a scarfaced giant of a fugitive in a manhunt. And he could count upon early release.

  This in fact happened. First, his old friend and admirer General Gehlen made his deal with American intelligence. Then Skorzeny went through a brief trial for war crimes, from which he was acquitted (largely with the help of testimony by a British secret-service agent), though he was still wanted in Denmark and Czechoslovakia. He remained in Allied hands until he was advised of the time to escape. On July 27, 1948 he walked to a railroad stop, took a train to Stuttgart, and next day was back in the vicinity of Eagle’s Nest, where his daughter had been brought secretly to meet him. He spent months “climbing, felling trees and getting back into condition.” Then he rejoined his wife, the daughter of Hjalmar Schacht, Hitler’s former financial genius. By then, Schacht had been freed by the Nuremberg court, although the Russians voted for finding him guilty.

  Why had the British intervened in Skorzeny’s case? Why, for that matter, was Schacht afforded British protection from any reversal of a West German denazification court’s decision to free him soon after Skorzeny’s escape? Schacht, though cleared of the Nuremberg charges, had been classified “a major Nazi offender” and sentenced to eight years in jail. He was released in 1948, however. Before the court, which was in the French Zone, could change its mind, Schacht was in the British Zone, where the legalities were observed in a more accommodating way.

  There were other odd circumstances, as Schacht himself told me in Indonesia three years later. When he left prison, he had only two marks and fifty pfennigs in his pocket. Almost overnight, he was directing a major West German bank, of which he soon became President. By the age of seventy-four, he was masterminding a resurgence of foreign trade through private channels.