The Bormann Brotherhood

by William Stevenson

  This young woman was another protégée of Martin Bormann. He knew most of the weaknesses of the leaders around Hitler, and he played on them. In the case of Schacht, it was vanity. Schacht had a passionate love of work. He would spend all night on a plan to default on transfer payments on American loans in order to finance the rearmament program. His first wife showed small regard for this dedication, little understanding of his brilliant solutions, and no patience with his egotism.

  The girl who now worshipped at the high-buttoned boots of Schacht had been purposely discovered by Bormann, who recognized in the financial wizard a likely rival. The banker showed unmistakable signs of wanting to make Hitler dance to his own tune and there was room for only one puppetmaster. Bormann pulled the strings with such self-effacing skill that, like others, Schacht never suspected that inarticulate flunky-like figure. Schacht suffered from the same intellectual arrogance, the same social snobbery, and the same disinterest in humbler mortals that afflicted so many of the men around Hitler. Bormann was at his most dangerous when he was still vulnerable, and he remained so deep in shadow that he was scarcely noticed.

  Bormann knew enough about higher finance to recognize Schacht’s enormous value. He learned enough to realize that you don’t have to be a financial expert to pile up a fortune, any more than you have to be qualified as a mechanic to drive a car. What mattered was who you knew.

  Immediately after Hitler became Chancellor, a meeting was called of twenty-five leaders of the Reich Association of German Industry. Krupp, the President, led the way in raising three million marks. It was intended to be split between the three parties in Hitler’s coalition government. Instead, it went to the man who handled all Nazi party matters, Reich Leader Bormann. The German People’s party and the German National People’s party never got a sniff of it. The money was delivered by the Reich Association’s treasurer, Schacht, to Bormann.

  These arrangements were tidier than what Gustav Krupp called “wild collection drives” by Nazi troopers. Krupp admired Hjalmar Schacht and listened to the banker’s advice that a “Hitler Donation” should be levied within the German trade associations. This should be, said Schacht, with infinite precision, 0.03 percent of salaries and wages. On paper it looked an infinitesimal figure. It could be explained in terms of a few pfennigs a month to those workers who got so far above their station as to ask questions about where it went. Other critics would be plainly identifiable as Communists if they dared keep up a protest against such a miserly sum. Actually, it produced a half-billion marks during the Nazi period, for Hitler to use in whatever way he liked. There was no need to account for it. Other members of the high command later received similar contributions. But not Bormann. He never asked because he never wanted to be in anyone’s pocket. They were all in his. All monies were handled only by him. He kept meticulous records of those who paid into the fund and those who received from it gifts which he distributed. Krupp always found Bormann most obliging in these delicate transactions. And the Krupp family learned, after Hitler died, that this obliging and humble manager had documented some embarrassing balance sheets. Krupp’s profits shot up, for instance, doubling themselves in the three years following Hitler’s rise to power. It was Bormann who kept the accounts.

  On January 30, 1937, Schacht received the Nazi Golden Badge of Honor. The following year, although he had resigned as Minister of Economics, he remained President of the Reichsbank and continued to make speeches abroad that were designed to quell fears and keep the business rolling in. After the Anschluss with Austria, he told a Viennese audience that Hitler’s hand was forced by the countless perfidies of other nations, and then called upon all present to swear allegiance to the Führer.

  Later, at the Nuremberg trials, Schacht said he broke with Hitler when it became evident Germany had gone too far economically in preparing for war. Documents and transcriptions of telephone and other conversations in Allied hands told another story.

  Schacht wanted to fashion the Nazi party in his own likeness. He did not fully understand, as Bormann did, the function served by Hitler, who could lead the generals and the people into any crusade. Schacht preferred to build an empire and win control over foreign economies by stealth and cunning. His talent for treachery was useful in the early days; and Bormann appreciated his skill with money and his way of enslaving individuals and whole communities by making them economically dependent upon Nazi leaders. The Schacht Plan, by which nations were obliged to have their raw materials processed in German factories through complex military and economic arrangements, became a model for twentieth-century imperialism, and was adopted by the Soviet Union within its own sphere. But Schacht was personally ambitious, as many of his contemporaries attested, and he began to poke into party affairs with a knowing finger. If anyone was equipped to recognize Bormann’s own plan for economic control of the party, it was this expert in financial manipulation.

  When Bormann’s position was threatened by someone who could conceivably exercise greater power, that was always the time when he resorted to playing the simple peasant, while whispering confidences into the willing ears of a court eager for gossip. Mrs. Göring has described how he set her husband against Schacht by his technique of speaking privately to one rival and then the other. He was never blamed by Schacht for the suicidal quarrel he engineered between the two men. It began with the appointment of Göring to the job of Commissioner of Foreign Exchange and Raw Materials, which brought him into head-on collision with the man whose expertise in this field had won him international renown, if not respect.

  Göring summed up his own idea of fiscal policy in these terms: “If the Führer says two and two make five, they make five.” It was not Schacht’s idea of arithmetic. Nor was it Schacht’s notion of utilizing human resources until they were exhausted of all convertible energy when Göring plunged headlong into extermination programs. Schacht wanted to close the ring cautiously around the Jews, and he was aware always of public opinion abroad and the harm it might do to German trade. Göring, as head of the Four-Year Plan, bluntly instructed security chief Reinhard Heydrich to accomplish “the desired final solution of the Jewish question.” If things had been left to Schacht, he would have disposed of Göring first, and all the crude leaders who failed to understand that a totalitarian state could achieve total domination by more subtle methods. He was offended by the clumsy investigative methods of the secret police, which Göring had founded: the Gestapo tapped his phone, opened his mail, and reported back to Göring without bothering to conceal their activities. Göring set up the first concentration camps in such a way that foreign newspapers reported their existence long before the war. Schacht was a National Socialist who took the whole thing seriously. He believed in Hitler, saw the necessity for secret police and death camps, had complete faith in the superiority of the Germanic race, and merely wished Hitler would submit to his advice.

  David Sarnoff, after that New York dinner, said to Schacht: “Doctor, you’ve been a very good sport.” It was the sort of thing that people say in decent society when they meet visitors who seem to share similar standards of behavior. It is hard to look into a manly face, return the steady gaze of frank blue eyes, relax in the company of a gentleman, and call him a liar. One is nervous of seeming a bigot. “There are always two sides,” one is told from childhood. However …

  One of his good friends who followed his example and sidestepped the Bormann hatchet was Konrad Adenauer. As Chancellor of West Germany from 1949 to 1963, he disarmed suspicious newsmen with the legend that he was an anti-Nazi resistance hero. In other words: “a good sport.”

  Just about the time it seemed that Schacht had meant no harm by his postwar travels to South America and the Mideast, Adenauer said in a Columbia Broadcasting System interview in February 1963: “I was always an opponent of the Nazis.” All the old misgivings flared up again. I remembered a letter published in East Germany, later authenticated by the Chancellor, and written originally on August 10, 1934. It wa
s a begging letter from Adenauer to the Prussian and Reich Minister of the Interior asking for payment of his pension as Lord Mayor of Cologne. The pension was restored, and it was still being paid him at war’s end (when he cultivated his own garden with French slave laborers). The ten-page letter was an attempt to prove that he had always been friendly to the Nazi party: “I have always treated [it] in an absolutely correct manner; in so doing, I found myself at loggerheads with ministerial directives…. For years, contrary to the decrees of the Prussian Ministry of the Interior I made available to the Party the municipal sports grounds and allowed the Party to hoist its swastika flag…. I urged that municipal advertising should be given to the [Nazi party newspaper in Cologne] Westdeutschen Beobachter.”

  Then came a cringing explanation of how the party might have got the mistaken impression that he was hostile. He described an incident that resulted in the Nazis removing him from his post, “from which it is extremely painful to be dismissed on the grounds that I am ‘nationally unreliable.’” Conjuring up a picture of his wife and seven children, he wrote that owing to a misunderstanding about municipal regulations, the Nazis’ swastika flags had been flown on Cologne’s suspension bridge. All he had done was express his willingness to have the flags hoisted outside the party meeting (the Nazis had accused him of having the flags torn down). The full letter has to be read to get the flavor. Its tortuous pleading is caught in this sentence: “Something which happened on one of the last Sindays before the Reichstag election aroused the impression that I was handling the NSDAP [Nazi] Party in a hostile manner amongst a certain part of the Cologne NSDAP which did not know the full facts.” And, later: “… at these meetings I stated specifically that I thought that such a large party as the NSDAP must undoubtedly be represented in a leading capacity in the Government.”

  Konrad Adenauer became Chancellor shortly after Hjalmar Schacht was let go by the West German courts and his son-in-law, Skorzeny, escaped. Most of Schacht’s subsequent travels abroad and Skorzeny’s establishment of an agency in Madrid were made with the active support of Adenauer and the West German spy chief, General Gehlen. He had a separate arrangement with the new Circle of Friends, formed by industrialists who supported neo-Nazi political groups.

  Schacht’s movements were never easy to follow. If he wanted to fly to South America to give advice on expanding German business interlocked with the trading agencies financed through Brotherhood funds, the most discreet route was through Madrid and a direct flight to Buenos Aires and onward. He was well aware of the systematic interception of Nazis and their mail before and during World War II, but modern jet travel made this impossible, even if there had been any desire on the part of foreign governments to continue surveillance. Skorzeny commuted from Madrid to Cairo and to South America in complete security. As he said: “A jet is a sealed container flung across oceans, perhaps the most efficient method yet devised for moving men and objects in legitimate secrecy. The weakness in the system is only at exit and entry points. Therefore we need to have our comrades develop close and friendly relations with immigration and customs police in each locality.”

  Moreover, with Skorzeny’s business office in Madrid, a house there and a farm estate in the republic of Eire, there were ways to avoid public attention. Friendly relations with Eire did not last long, however. The Irish, quixotic as ever, disliked Skorzeny’s indiscreet tirades against England. He had expected a demand for his services as a guerrilla expert. Instead, he found the Irish farm workers on his land started a resistance movement of their own—against Skorzeny.

  Schacht never could understand that the Hitler period was remembered still. His precautions became slacker as he grew older. While Adenauer held office, he knew he could count on discretion among officials. He disliked wasting time with detours between the Düsseldorf bank and the new financial and industrial web that he wanted to weave before he died.

  He had influential friends, just as in the old days. The second most influential man after the Chancellor was Adenauer’s State Secretary, Dr. Hans Globke. His job was reminiscent of Bormann’s as Secretary to the Führer. And it was to Bormann that Globke had addressed a draft of the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, which provided the basis for liquidating the Jews. These racialist decrees were promulgated by Hitler at the Nazi party convention in Nuremberg. Thus, since the Jews were being massacred in accordance with German law, intervention on behalf of the victims was not legal.

  Hans Globke was startled when, some twenty-five years later, his record was dragged out from the personal and confidential files of the old Reich Ministry of the Interior.

  Globke had taken refuge in a Catholic monastery in 1945 after his chief, Heinrich Himmler, failed to win acceptance from General Eisenhower. Then he sought his own freedom by giving evidence at the Nuremberg trials against his former superior, Wilhelm Stuckart. He slipped back into civilian life and was brought to Bonn by Adenauer, for whom he worked thirteen years. In July 1963 the Supreme Court of East Germany found him guilty in absentia of crimes against humanity and sentenced him to life imprisonment. Globke resigned.

  Did Globke help Bormann’s friends? He certainly made life easier for Schacht. His resignation under Communist pressure was window-dressing to quell the anger of Western liberals. Five years later, in September 1968, a dinner was given in his honor by President Heinrich Lübke, accompanied by Chancellor Kurt Kiesinger.

  The President, the Chancellor, and the former State Secretary thus publicly thumbed their noses at the verdict of history. In the old days, Lübke approved the blueprints for death camps; Kiesinger supervised Nazi radio propaganda. And Globke wrote, in an official commentary upon the Nuremberg Laws: “The two Nuremberg Laws together with the regulations based upon them contain the basic solution for this racial problem…. The Jewish problem is not just a racial-biological problem. It must be solved for centuries to come.”

  Were memories so short?

  A young German girl thought not. Beata Klarsfeld was the daughter of a soldier who came back from the Russian front. He was broken in health but unshakable in his conviction that he had only done his duty. When she asked him why he did as Hitler ordered, he replied: “Because everyone else did.” Her father had not been a member of the Nazi party, however, and his reward was not public dinners and honors but the pushing of a pen in the Ministry of Justice. He did not share the guilty knowledge and the fear of betrayal that seemed, to his impulsive daughter, the common bond that purchased power and position in the rich new Germany.

  In outrage, she stood up in the Bundestag at Bonn and cried: “Kiesinger, Nazi!” It was her first protest.

  * The Circle of Friends later came into the open in its new form. By 1970, it issued regular bulletins in support of Franz Josef Strauss, of the Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU). An example from a bulletin issued in Cologne, October 1970: “We have appealed to all who sympathize with the National Democrats [the most prominent of neo-Nazi groups] to vote to strengthen the position of Franz Josef Strauss. He is the coming man. He does not succeed nor replace Adolf Hitler but he has the leadership qualities. The German Army’s officer corps awaits the strong man: Strauss. German youth needs strong and stern leadership…. The press must be strictly curbed…. We must seize power in one way or another—even if the elections are not in our favor. Germany is at stake.”

  CHAPTER 14

  Hitler’s burning corpse shared the rubble of Berlin with a six-year-old girl who was to haunt the Brotherhood, and especially three men who were escaping with loot that would establish prosperous trade in South America.

  Beata Klarsfeld was an attractive redhead, a vital and good-humored young woman when she smoked out a former Gestapo killer in Bolivia early in 1972. I talked to her while she was in the process of being ushered out of Peru, but not before she forced the police to jail a former Nazi counterfeiter whose defense was that he acted under orders to produce the biggest bundle of forged banknotes in history.

  Back in Paris, a few months late
r, she showed me what remained of a parcel-bomb addressed to her apartment. The label carried a symbol which she took to be the Brotherhood’s trademark. The parcel was mailed from Lyons, scene of “punitive expeditions” conducted by SS Colonel Klaus Barbie, Gestapo chief who tortured to death one of the greatest French resistance heroes. Barbie was a man who reported proudly that he had arrested and deported all the children in the Jewish orphanage at Lyon. He was a man adroit enough to get on the American payroll of the West German intelligence agency when it was run by General Gehlen. And until Beata Klarsfeld arrived, he had turned himself into Señor Altmann, a respectable fifty-eight-year-old businessman of La Paz, Bolivia.

  Beata Klarsfeld accused the German authorities, East and West, of tolerating former Nazis in high places and of doing little to remove from public life a mentality that seeks to conceal the past and refuses to draw any lessons. She had an annoying habit of being right. After West German officials had told her she was mad, she persisted in the case of Señor Altmann until he had to confess his real identity.

  She also persisted in the case of another war criminal, known as Wenceslas Turi alias Wendig Alisax of Lima, Peru. Again, irritated German officials said she was crazy. Bonn’s Ambassador to Peru, Robert von Förster, had been a jurist in the Nazi courts; and his colleague in Bolivia, Georg Graf zu Pappenheim, had been in the Nazi diplomatic service and held Nazi party membership No. 3,733,418. Both made it clear to the local authorities that the lady was an unmitigated nuisance.

  The police in Peru looked harder at Turi/Alisax and charged him with smuggling fountain pens. They listed him correctly on the charge sheet as Frederic Schwend. He had done rather better than pens. He had helped float phony banknotes with a face value of $500 million, which, at the time Beata Klarsfeld was in kindergarten, had a purchasing power many times higher. His partner in turning out fake notes in a Nazi concentration camp was SS Major Bernhard Krüger. Now it also turned out that Krüger was on the managerial staff of Standard Electric AG, a subsidiary of International Telephone and Telegraph, the American company that had been caught in a scandal concerning an alleged attempt to sabotage a socialist government in Chile.