The Bormann Brotherhood

by William Stevenson

  His son-in-law was in Spain. Skorzeny himself described one of his lines of business, ADSAP (A Directorship of Strategic Assault Personnel), thus: “Terms of reference would enable it to straddle the watershed between paramilitary operations carried out by troops in uniform and the political warfare which is conducted by civilian agents. It would be the primary task of the Director to plan operations within the widest scope of the highly diversified force at his disposal. In this planning the Director should make full use of all current military and political intelligence for the selection of targets and the assessment of priority. Some of these targets might change from time to time following realignment of policy. Others would retain their importance. The methods of attack would be constantly under review. A large part of this force must be in a state of readiness day by day for specific tasks.”

  And Schacht? The old man’s business was not all that different.

  CHAPTER 13

  “Horace Greeley and the Brotherhood getting up to mischief in our backyard,” said a cable I received in Saigon in 1951. “If you have time between wars, wouldst intercept our Horace in Djakarta?”

  Horace Greeley was part of the name given Hitler’s banker by his father, who had emigrated from Schleswig-Holstein to America and then gone home again.

  The note came from Black Hole Hollow Farm, near Saratoga, New York, where Ian Fleming was staying with Ivan Bryce. He was still managing Mercury’s foreign-news service, but he was also talking business with the North American Newspaper Alliance and, in particular, with one of the important figures behind the wartime scene in Washington: Ernest Cuneo, an international lawyer with special interests in the Latin countries. They were all former colleagues of Donovan and Stephenson.

  Doctor Horace Greeley Hjalmar Schacht had flown to Indonesia at a time when the victors over Nazi Germany were diverted to fight in Asia. His timing was good. His old enemies were in no shape to worry about the new republic of Indonesia, the wealthiest underdeveloped country in the world, at that time happily kicking out Germany’s competitors. The new revolutionary leader was Sukarno. He drew toward him opportunistic Germans, as did other demagogues rising to power on a wave of anticolonial sentiment. The British were fighting terrorism in Malaya and they had land, sea, and air forces engaged in Korea. The Americans were carrying the burden of the Korean war, and took the full impact of Red Chinese armies crossing the Yalu River there. The French were trapped in Indochina. The Western alliance with Russia had foundered in the conflict between Communism and Western interests.

  Schacht thought that conditions were ripe for a German return to the Afro-Asian world. Moreover, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer wanted to utilize what few years remained to Schacht. Men of similar backgrounds, regarded as war criminals by the Allies in 1945 and still wanted in some cases by German courts or different governments in Europe, were earmarked for a great revival in German capitalistic enterprise. The groundwork had to be laid, however, outside the purview of the Allies or the Russians.

  This was the larger role the Brotherhood was called upon to play. It gave the fugitives a vital sense of righteous anger against their “persecutors,” similar to Hitler blaming the Versailles “betrayal” for his aggressive policies. As time passed, notorious figures appeared within the inner councils of a new crop of dictators created by the withdrawal of traditional Western influence from the Third World. One of the brashest of the Brotherhood was to help the former Gold Coast colony, Ghana, collapse into financial ruin. In 1951, it was Sukarno who was courted with the seductive idea that his Moslems should look to German “experts” for help in creating a vast Islamic crescent from Australasia to the Arab nations of the Mideast. Gehlen credited his West German intelligence agency with predicting Sukarno’s later downfall (promptly followed by the appointment of a former Nazi storm trooper as Bonn’s Ambassador to Djakarta: Dr. Hilmar Bassler, who had been responsible for propaganda to East Asia as a member of Hitler’s Foreign Ministry, and who worked with Japanese forces occupying Indonesia).

  Djakarta was in utter chaos when the fastidious figure of Dr. Schacht appeared on the scene. The economy suffered from galloping inflation, which reminded him of 1923, when he became President of the Reichsbank and stopped the catastrophic inflation that followed World War I. His remedies were less easily applied to Indonesia. Indeed, knowing and appreciating Indonesian lack of precision, I wondered how Schacht could survive five minutes of discussion with Sukarno. They were totally different. Sukarno was a sex symbol to millions of followers. He did everything on impulse. Schacht was a frosty old man who had always looked at life through spectacles he adjusted to reflect the light back into the eyes of his interlocutors.

  The banker was reluctant to be seen at all by a reporter. On the other hand, he was not long out of his last prison, and, like all the others I met in this period who had the same background, he was not anxious to provoke hostility. Also he may have had some impression that I was on good terms with the new Indonesian leaders. From West Germans at the time you could get the most embarrassingly effusive co-operation. Kurt (“Panzer”) Meyer, the general who led the Hitler Youth SS Tank Division, had first given me the introductions to Skorzeny, which led to this meeting. He had been under sentence of death for the massacre of Canadian prisoners of war and he was eager to oblige.

  I met Schacht at the Hotel Capitol, overlooking the filthiest of Djakarta’s canals. There was no protection from swarms of malarial mosquitoes and the stench of sluggish chocolate-brown waters sprinkled with garbage and human excrement. His narrow head balanced on a scrawny neck, his thin mouth pulled down at the corners, he regarded me warily. Below the open-sided hotel restaurant, women loosened their batik sarongs and splashed their firm breasts in gestures that deepened his expression of disapproval. Further along the banks, men and boys urinated in graceful arcs. The air was heavy. The overhead fans crackled, and sparks of electricity showered down. I quoted an Indonesian saying that applied to the clogged canal: “Good germs eat up bad germs if you just leave things alone.” He smiled faintly.

  There seemed no point beating around the bush. What, I asked, did he know about a so-called Brotherhood?

  He looked startled. I said quickly there was no intention of publishing his replies. There had been a continuing interest in such groups, I said; the Circle of Friends, for instance.

  He stiffened at this mention of Martin Bormann’s source of additional funds, created by Schacht’s successor and chief architect of his downfall: Walther Emanuel Funk.

  I said: “Funk has told interrogators that the Circle of Friends broke up automatically, but the Brotherhood functions now to support Bormann.”

  His blue eyes, shaded by beetling brows, shifted behind the rimless glasses. A trickle of sweat ran down his gaunt chin. I had been sweating all morning in the tropical heat, but Schacht, dressed like a Dutch colonizer in open shirt and shorts, white and starched, had shown no previous sign of discomfort.

  “Funk said that?”

  “So it is reported.”

  “Funk always was a fool.” He drew back. “The Circle of Friends was a source of money, no thanks to Funk.”

  “And the Brotherhood?”

  “Die deutsche Gemeinschaft. I know nothing. I am here on business. The war is past.”

  “Funk is still in Spandau Prison.”

  “And I was in Ravensbrück, Flossenburg, and Dachau,” he snapped, naming the three concentration camps where Hitler had once held him.

  “Funk was sentenced to life imprisonment at Nuremberg.” I stopped. Funk had escaped the hangman because of a strong feeling among the Allies that the real guilt lay with Schacht.

  He looked away. “There was only one Brotherhood. In Vienna. It had no membership lists and nobody was known by his real name.”

  “Your son-in-law was a member.”

  “Did he tell you that?”

  “No, but he was part of that crowd. Their aim was to liberate the German people from Jewish influence.”

&
nbsp; “I had nothing against the Jews.” Yet it was only sixteen years ago that this man had warned in a 1935 speech: “The Jew can become neither a citizen nor a fellow German.” Now, he cocked his head like an intelligent secretary bird. “Are you Jewish?”

  “No. Nor married to a Jewess,” I added, reminding him of another Brotherhood prohibition.

  “What is your purpose?” he asked stiffly.

  “Your son-in-law says Russia can be beaten. Communism in China or Russia can be beaten if we learn from the last war.”

  “Ah. You think Indonesia will go Communist?”

  “Yes. In its own peculiar way.”

  “Perhaps this can be stopped?”

  “In the same manner as in Africa or, shall we say, South America?”

  “I go there from here. Conditions are better now, is it not true?”

  “Better for what?”

  “Free enterprise.”

  He slapped at a mosquito. Around us, Dutch traders leaned on folded arms over the small round tables, or lifted mugs of beer to perspiring faces. Soon most of them would be deported, their commercial operations taken over, their assets seized, their families moved into camps. The words “free enterprise” echoed dismally in the moist air. Schacht had financed the rearming of Hitler’s Germany in ways that were illegal under the statutes of the time. He had been deeply involved with a complicated arrangement by which the Soviet Union helped Germany to get around limits on the production of weapons. It seemed to me that his career was based upon exploitation of other people’s free-enterprise systems. In the United States he had been partly successful in the early 1930’s in reassuring American Jews that their coreligionists had nothing to fear from Hitler. Now it was convenient for him to forget his undercover campaign to drive Jews from German life, forget the big trade deals with Stalin and the “New Plan” to control everything the Reich bought abroad.

  “Chancellor Adenauer says your experience in South America can be applied here.”

  Schacht nodded. “It could be done. Only here we must watch out for the Russians.”

  “And in Argentina?”

  “The Catholic church is too strong to permit Communism. We have good relations there. In Bolivia also. So much in Latin America is badly developed….” He began to talk about the bilateral barter agreements through which more than half of Nazi Germany’s trade had been channeled. If things had worked out differently, Argentina and her neighbors would have been prosperous partners today, under a Nazi heaven.

  “Perhaps this is still possible?”

  “Not yet.” He shrugged. Some of his earlier animosity began to melt in this unreal atmosphere. A cool breeze had sprung up, bringing a cleaner perfume of frangipani and spices. Schacht cocked his head. “You mentioned the Circle of Friends?”

  “Yes.”

  “A foolish group of men. They can only do harm.”

  I realized suddenly that he was talking in the present tense.*

  “These are the people who got the Nazis a bad name,” he went on. “They lack the sense to keep out of the public eye. Strauss makes too much noise and gives propaganda material for the Communists. They talk about neo-Nazism and then the young students and the dupes of Communism take up the cry. We should move more slowly. Too many foreigners blame us for Hitler.”

  “But you had a great regard for Hitler.”

  “His ideas were good at the start. He was led astray.”

  “By whom? Göring? Bormann…?”

  “Not Bormann,” he said quickly, and then compressed his lips.

  An old newsreel gives a flashback to Schacht in the mid-1930’s. It is the year when he boasted to German industrialists: “I have Hitler by the throat.” The old film shows him walking alongside the Führer with a proprietorial air. He wears a black banker’s suit, the three-buttoned jacket tight around his waistcoat, a conservative tie knotted carefully but scarcely visible within the confines of a three-inch-wide stiff collar. His eyes are narrow slits, and he balances a large monocle in one of them. His silver hair is parted straight down the middle. His arms hang stiff at his sides. Slightly in front of him, a little to his right, prances Hitler, with one arm stretched rigidly at the horizontal. They march among crowds kept at a safe distance by troops in jack boots. Schacht’s eyes swivel in Hitler’s direction, and one imagines him saying, as indeed he wrote at this period: “Eating keeps body and soul together, drinking separates them. A clean body means a clean mind. A man’s character can be judged by the way he cleans his shoes.”

  It is the year 1933. Hitler has become Reich Chancellor at the age of forty-four. Schacht is Minister of Economics at fifty-five, with special responsibility for rearming Germany. He certainly should feel as if he has a collar around Hitler’s throat, and a chain.

  Behind him, however, is the ponderous Martin Bormann. This is one of the rare occasions when Bormann does not sidestep behind someone else to dodge a camera. Schacht struts. Bormann plods.

  Bormann is in fact Hitler’s personal banker, not Schacht. The royalty income from Mein Kampf is $300,000 for 1933, at that time an incredible fortune for any book. Millions of marks are rolling into the industrialists’ secret Hitler fund. There are the salaries of Hitler’s state offices, and his income from various business and party enterprises.

  Schacht, on the other hand, is thinking in terms of billions: how to control national economies in faraway places; how to tax Jewish emigrants and force their settlements to take German products; how to finance the munitions makers with the blocked assets of political enemies abroad; how to pay for raw materials in the local currencies of countries like Argentina. All the old arrogance, for which he was notorious during the German occupation of Belgium in World War I, all the smug superiority, is back. He cannot help but strut.

  Bormann is in nondescript uniform, somewhere between the world financier and the party thugs. The others walk with the jerky motion that is characteristic of old newsreels, yet Bormann seems to have overcome even the technical obstacle of clumsy cameras. The son of a post-office clerk has become a Reich Leader. He was an ordinary gunner at the time Schacht was using military force to squeeze the Belgian industrial lemons. He was a convict while Schacht composed pretentious maxims in his presidential office at the Reichsbank. He did the accounts on a farm while Schacht was hobnobbing with the Governor of the Bank of England.

  There is another newsreel of about the same period in which Schacht trips and performs a quickstep before regaining his balance. Bormann’s face loses its impassive expression. Unholy joy illuminates those porcine features and then vanishes.

  Bormann was then Chief of Staff to the Deputy Führer, Rudolf Hess. There were ambitious young men on all sides, and vain old men like Schacht in front. All of them aimed their efforts at Hitler, whose personal favors seemed the best and quickest route to promotion. The working parts of the state machine were, however, in the Office of the Deputy Führer, where Bormann worked his quiet little intrigues. He made himself indispensable to Hess, and also to the lesser party members who called Hess “Fräulein Anna” because of his homosexual tendencies. There were some favors Bormann was not prepared to grant up-and-coming young Nazis; but if those favors were to have a cumulative value (like interest on a bank deposit), he was ready to bring Fräulein Anna and the aspirants together.

  His hold over Schacht was partly that of a younger man handling funds acquired by a stiff-necked and unimaginative banker twenty-three years his senior. In a study of Germany’s rearmament, made for Churchill on a personal and highly confidential basis by William Stephenson, who was in the Ruhr constantly during this period, the point is made that Schacht rather late in life was suddenly gripped by Hitler’s message. Convinced by Mein Kampf, he traveled abroad to tell the financial world of the political and economic brilliance of National Socialist theories. At a dinner given by David Sarnoff, of the Radio Corporation of America, in New York in 1933, ten of the dozen guests were Jews from what Schacht called “influential circles.” He tol
d them that he did not take Adolf Hitler too seriously; the Jews in Germany had nothing to fear. Bent upon raising money for the Nazi party, he adjusted his words to suit the audience. He told Roosevelt that without the discipline and nationalism of the party, Germany would fall to Communism. He stood before the United States as a banker, and therefore a man of probity, and spoke over a nationwide radio hook-up and addressed some forty audiences in different American cities, repeating his message that there was a close similarity between Roosevelt and Hitler, and it should be easy for their governments to collaborate.

  Back home, he told a women’s club in Berlin about the historical justification for exterminating Jewish influence. The problem was nothing new. Jews had been out of place in German society for many centuries. There was a “folkish incompatibility.” Meanwhile, he was being described in the New York Times as “humane and courageous” for a speech in New York and articles that painted quite a different picture of Hitler and Nazi aims. In the presence of this elegant and persuasive snob, some U.S. editors gave him a good press at a time when American newsmen in Germany were trying to convince their editors that concentration camps did exist, and that Jews were already persecuted and officially slated for extermination.

  Bormann saw in him just the right man to come to the financial rescue, and to delude the frock-coated gentlemen of the Bourse, the City of London, and Wall Street: a man who would never endanger his family for the sake of a principle. His wife at that time was a formidable lady, frantic to whip up support among the women for the Führer. She carried a picture of Hitler dressed as a Knight of the Holy Grail, and she placed over her bed a portrait of him surrounded by a shining halo of tiny Christs. Later, when Schacht, in his arrogance, failed to make Hitler do things his own way, he resigned as Minister of Economics and Plenipotentiary for War. It was not because he had lost enthusiasm for National Socialism, he said. He was tired of “going to bed with Hitler.” His marriage broke up at the same time, and he took for his new wife a girl thirty years his junior.