The Bormann Brotherhood

by William Stevenson

  Memories were so alarmingly short that in the reborn West German republic Chancellor Adenauer and other prominent figures had been forgiven already the fact that they had employed slave workers in their homes and gardens. This was less worrying than the feeling that had grown among Communists that, on the whole, the Western Allies felt no particular outrage because the chief victims of the New Order had been mostly from the working class anyway. It was significant, for instance, that the Hangman of Lyon had received support in his dispatch of French resistance workers from the “cream of Lyon society,” led by the Count de Bernonville. Resistance fighters were mostly peasants or intellectuals with a strong left-wing bias.

  The persistent rumor among the skullduggery experts, who had often worked closely with Communist anti-Nazi groups in occupied Europe, was that there had been a Russian informer close to Hitler. At first, Martin Bormann was regarded as the likeliest candidate; and for a while this set a hare running which drew off the pack of hounds. Now it was accepted that Bormann, although an operator in ideological waters of the same type as Stalin, was committed to Nazi racial concepts, and furthermore was in charge of funds intended to keep alive the Nazi creed although they could be converted to his own use. He would have gone to ground almost anywhere but Russia.

  There was the proof, however, that the Russians knew much of Hitler’s most private affairs and also knew of the plans for escape. A former British agent in Berlin drew my attention to the fact that the name of the Gestapo chief, Heinrich Müller, had been taken off the list of officials with Hitler at the end. So the finger of suspicion pointed at Gestapo Müller once again. And another piece of the puzzle began to find its place.

  Bormann was scrupulous in detailing the trivia of each day. Nobody knows how accurate he was in reporting the Führer, when he was not stage-managing the jerky figure whose shrill and rasping voice had played on the emotions of great crowds. Hitler’s words in the privacy of the dining room were something else, known during the last thirty months of the war to the two men alone. What Bormann chose to make of the midnight monologues is something even Hitler, by then in a state of controlled hysteria, probably never knew.

  The little facts of life were set down with exactitude. Who came, at what hour, and why; appointments, books borrowed, movies projected in Hitler’s parlor; and always those meticulous lists of names. These were records whose accuracy can be relied upon.

  This made it all the stranger that Gestapo Müller’s name was taken off the final list of those who were with the Führer to the bitter end. The list was meant as a record, and it fell into Russian hands. It is conceivable that the Russians removed his name. If so, why? The matter escaped attention at the time. It seemed now to grow in significance as the final shape of the puzzle was vaguely perceived.

  Gestapo Müller was in and out of the Führer’s bunker all the time. He was the man most intimately engaged for legitimate reasons in all the affairs that went on around Hitler. It was his business to know all about everyone in the Third Reich. He disappeared with Bormann; and he might have had a great deal to do with the Soviet Union’s subsequent suspicions about the West.

  Bormann wrote for public consumption. Even his letters to Gerda reeked of sycophancy. He had to maintain to the end the pretense of being the Führer’s obedient servant. When he scribbled a curious note to Ernst Kaltenbrunner, telling the scarred veteran of the SS murder railroad that he must not stand in the way of Nazi leaders who made plans to escape, it was calculated to create a certain impression. The letter was dated April 4, 1945, when about seven hundred of Hitler’s staff crowded into the shelter in the Chancellery compound amidst arguments as to the wisdom of heading south to the Alpine Fortress. This, of course, was Bormann’s private objective. He had no wish to see Hitler move there and bring down the full weight of the Russian armies on the great complex of mountain tunnels and hideaways.

  Kaltenbrunner took the reprimand calmly. Before he was hanged, he told Allied interrogators that his escape plans were those of Bormann; and that the self-righteous note puzzled him only for a moment. Then he realized it had been dictated. It was intended to reinforce Bormann’s masquerade as the faithful dog who would remain with the master to the end.

  The mood is perfectly captured by Hanna Reitsch, the girl who test-piloted a V-1 rocket in her fanatical determination to destroy London even while Berlin was being destroyed. In the end, she flew a small plane out of a burning Berlin street and described her feelings to General Karl Koller: “We should kneel in reverence and prayer to the altar of the Fatherland.” Asked what she meant, she looked surprised. “Why, the Führer’s bunker…”

  It was known as the “Führerhauptquartier.” It contained Hitler’s private suite, his bathroom, his dog’s quarters, his bedroom and Eva Braun’s dressing and dining rooms; servants’ quarters; a clinic and operating theater, Goebbels’s study; a telephone exchange, and a long central corridor. At the start of the Battle of Berlin, Bormann made a careful note of those in the bunker. His list was one of the few documents recovered when the Russians found the shelter, raising doubts as to its authenticity; for once again Bormann had been writing for the record. The list was used in the great manhunt that followed, and there were quarrels when the Russians accused the Western Allies of holding back information. Perhaps Bormann anticipated that his list would cause confusion. The thought is grimly diverting. On his list were: Eva Braun; Blondi, Hitler’s Alsatian bitch and four puppies; Dr. Stumpfegger, Hitler’s surgeon; Dr. Goebbels and his wife and six children; Fräulein Manzialy, the vegetarian cook; Heinz Lorenz of the Propaganda Ministry; Bormann’s deputy, Zander; Eva Braun’s brother-in-law, Herman Fegelein; Colonel Nicolaus von Below, Hitler’s liaison officer; Admiral Voss, liaison officer to Grand Admiral Doenitz; Ambassador Walther Hewel, Ribbentrop’s liaison officer; Major Willi Johannmeier, Hitler’s aide-de-camp; two pilots, Hans Bauer and George Beetz; Werner Naumann of the Propaganda Ministry; General Burgdorf and his aide, Lieutenant Colonel Weiss; General Hans Krebs, Chief of Staff; Major Bernd von Freytag-Loringhoven, Krebs’s aide; and an orderly officer who later described the last days, Captain Gerhard Boldt.

  Stumpfegger was reported to have been killed in the last-minute attempt to escape. Naumann surfaced again some years later, when he was accused of leading a neo-Nazi revival. George Beetz, Hitler’s own pilot, was killed; Major General Bauer was captured by the Russians. Few escaped from the Russians, in fact. One was Zander, who had been sent away after Hitler’s suicide with two other survivors: Lorenz and Johannmeier. They had to work their way through two and a half million Russian troops who covered the Berlin area. What happened to them was for a long time to puzzle the Russians, who thought the Western Allies had somehow grabbed them. In fact, Zander had turned himself into a Bavarian market gardener called Frederich-Wilhelm Paustin, and the other two passed themselves off as liberated slaves. They ultimately worked their way to the Bavarian hide-outs, carrying copies of Hitler’s last testament and other important documents, which were intended to provide a source of inspiration in the future.

  The Russians captured the chief of Hitler’s detective bodyguard, SS Brigadier General Johann Rattenhuber. His name was not on Bormann’s list.

  On July 17, 1945, Stalin told the U.S. Secretary of State, James Byrnes, that he believed Hitler was alive and probably in Argentina or in Spain.

  Obviously the Russians had got onto something. Their secret service had been functioning as if the Western Allies were enemies; and they had informers and agents everywhere, since much of the resistance against Hitler’s occupying armies came from Communists. Stalin had some of the facts, but not all. He knew that plans had existed for a long time to get prominent Nazis away to “neutral” pro-Nazi territory (Argentina’s entry into the war on the Allied side was expediently timed to precede the German surrender by a few days). Stalin was receiving reports of Nazi bigwigs whose safety had been guaranteed by Catholic churchmen anxious to salvage something from the wreckage. The Vat
ican Office of Stateless Persons had been issuing special identity cards, and Stalin evidently knew that his professional intelligence men had obtained the registration numbers of these cards and where and to whom they were issued.

  How much he knew in midsummer of 1945 is hard to say. Years later, when Nikita Khrushchev proposed to Western leaders that it would cut costs and simplify matters if everyone stopped using each other’s spies, he was not joking. By then, each side was disenchanted by the price of trading in the intelligence market. By then, the West knew just how thoroughly Stalin in his day was informed of certain events. He could not believe, perhaps, that we did not honestly know the whereabouts of some major war criminals.

  Perhaps to remind us that they held some cards, too, the Russians issued a statement in September: “No trace of the bodies of Hitler or Eva Braun has been discovered…. It is established that Hitler, by means of false testimony, sought to hide his traces. Irrefutable proof exists that a small airplane left the Tiergarten at dawn on April 30 flying in the direction of Hamburg. Three men and a woman are known to have been on board. It has also been established that a large submarine left Hamburg before the arrival of the British forces. Mysterious persons were on board the submarine, among them a woman.”

  The mysterious submarine caused the British endless difficulties because the Hamburg-Kiel area of north Germany was a British responsibility. It caused the Canadians a problem, too. The Canadian Army wanted badly to get its hands on SS General Mohnke, who was charged with executing prisoners of war on the spot. He was in Russian hands. But the Russians became uncooperative, reinforcing their demands that Western intelligence be more forthcoming about the missing Nazis.

  Drawn into the controversy was a Canadian intelligence expert on Latin America who was thought to have special knowledge of U-boat traffic to the region. His name was Peter Dwyer. He had been Stephenson’s man in Latin America before he moved to Washington to represent the British secret service there.

  Stephenson had already provided advance warning of the new Walther-type U-boats, and this was passed along to Stalin at Yalta. There, Churchill told the Russian leader: “It will be difficult for us to combat these new submarines, which have high underwater speed and new devices.” Stalin was told that thirty percent of these new U-boats were being constructed at Danzig. He was urged to have Marshal Konstantin Rokossovski capture the base. The following month, in early March, the Second White Russian front accordingly swung in an arc that prevented escape from Danzig except by sea. Clearly, Stalin understood the implications of fast long-range submarines, even two months before the war’s end. Dwyer believed Stalin had based his reference to the “large submarine” on similar information given to his security people by Allied sources which then neglected to release the information to the public. This fed Stalin’s mounting fears of secret arrangements between the Western Allies and selected Nazis. Yet the silence with regard to an escaping submarine would have been understandable in the circumstances of the time. Major war criminals were at large. Some were thought to have arranged escape by submarine. An Allied announcement that one had got away would tip off the organizers of the escape routes. Publication of any information at this juncture would help fugitives who had missed their rendezvous or lost contact.

  What was happening was that the Russians, retaliating against what they thought was Western perfidy, held back on what they knew about missing Nazis. The Cold War was already freezing the exchange of information. Stalin had received frank advice from Roosevelt and Churchill on the U-boat situation in particular, and now he was confronted by what he thought was a sinister silence. He told Harry Hopkins in Moscow that he believed Bormann had escaped. Now he went further, and said it was Bormann who got away in the fleeing U-boat. More than that Stalin refused to disclose. Quite soon, any exchange of information between the two sides became a matter involving official secrets and verging on treachery. Even at the height of the war, survivors of the Murmansk supply convoys had been treated as if they were hostile neutrals, if not outright enemies of Russia. So the fault for the breakdown in trust cannot be laid at any one door.

  Dwyer remembered, after he left Washington to resume a normal career with the Canadian National Research Council, that he was told offhandedly one day by a visiting Russian academic that Hitler had died in Berlin, and that Stalin now accepted this but could not bring himself to say so publicly. “The three men and the woman are known to us,” said the Russian. “Bormann and Erich Koch [whom Rokossovski’s army had hoped to catch in Danzig] missed the boat.”

  The Russian was not joking. He said, correctly as it turned out, that Koch adopted the identity of a Major Berger and was in the British Zone around Hamburg still. Bormann had been reported in the same area, near Lüneburger. He had then left, heading south. Dwyer had the impression that the Russians knew where Bormann had been going.

  The Russian pursuit of Bormann was certainly hastened by their capture of SS Major General Wilhelm Mohnke, who was commander of the Führer’s bodyguard. Just how Mohnke explained his failure to preserve Hitler is not recorded.

  There seems a certain irony in this last glimpse of Mohnke. He ran off with an escape group, hid in a cellar in Schönhauser Allee, and was caught there by a Red Army detachment. He was identified as the commander of what had become known derisively as the “Ersatztruppen,” an SS battalion defending Berlin. Later questioning made it clear that he spent more time inside the bunker with the Führer than outside with his self-styled battle group protecting the series of bomb shelters underneath the Old and New Reich Chancelleries, known collectively as the “Citadel.”

  Mohnke helped the Russians locate the remains of the Führer’s bunker. He talked readily about the last few days, named the major figures among the seven hundred clerks, secretaries, drivers, orderlies, servants, and SS men who had surrounded Hitler, and was hauled away, still chattering.

  What he said must have riveted Stalin’s attention. Mohnke was not cut from some heroic mold, any more than the SS leaders falling into Allied hands. He knew the Canadians were demanding that he be handed over to them for trial, because the Russians took good care to tell him so. He volunteered all the information he could, and made up what he did not know. Stalin, after the flight of Hess to Britain, had been more deeply suspicious than ever of an alliance between the Anglo-American forces and the Germans against the Soviet Union. Mohnke fed his suspicions with an account of the secret communications during the previous months between Nazi leaders and the West.

  He told Russian interrogators of plans for the escape of Nazis who might have to face war-crimes trials. He described the hideouts in the Bavarian Alps; the transfer of money and gold to neutral countries; the concealment of treasures, including a great deal of looted art from Russia; and the promises of help conveyed secretly by the Rector of Rome’s Pontifical Teutonic College, Bishop Alois Hudal, whose name cropped up frequently in the years following.

  He talked of the Brotherhood.

  Mohnke’s disclosures trickled to the West through Soviet intelligence leaks, but the Russians would not admit they had him. It seemed likely that he was proving invaluable as a way to check the accuracy of what few disclosures were being made by the Western Allies. An intelligence game had started that later brought the great powers to the verge of another war.

  The difficulties sharpened on May 19, 1945 when the Russian commission at Flensburg demanded to see the German intelligence files on Russia. It was told that the only man who would have much knowledge of German intelligence on the Red Army was General Gehlen.

  At this time, the U.S. Army’s Counter-intelligence Corps, which had only seven experts on Russian and East European affairs, was concentrating on hunting Nazi war criminals. It now decided to look for Gehlen. He was located in a special prison camp, and was questioned by Brigadier General Edwin L. Sibert, the American intelligence officer who had been reprimanded earlier for underestimating German fighting morale. Sibert reported at once to Allen Dulles t
he substance of Gehlen’s boastful description of his spy network and his spine-tingling account of Russia’s territorial ambitions. In August 1945, Gehlen and his experts were flown to Washington.

  On August 31, the Soviet-controlled radio in Berlin announced: “Bormann is in Allied hands.” A living Bormann must have seemed to Stalin, as indeed he did to the West, as potentially the Führer of a Fourth Reich. The legalities had been attended to; and none knew better than the Russians how the German invaders had invoked the rules and regulations to justify their brutality. Bormann was the executor of Hitler’s will and the leader of the Nazi party.

  The Russians knew by then that Gehlen, the man recommended to them, was Hitler’s spy chief dealing with Soviet military affairs. They knew through their own wartime intelligence sources, and through captured leaders like Mohnke, that it was part of the Nazi plan for survival to convince the Western Allies that Hitler had been wrong only in the way he ran the war, but not in his identification of the real enemy of all humanity: the Soviet Union. Enough German Army generals had been talking of the need to fight Russia with Anglo-American help; and there was enough on the Nazi record to justify Stalin’s suspicion that the West might yet fall for this gambit. Nor had the Russians forgotten the strange case of Hess, whose unfortunate aide, Captain Karlheinz Pintsch, was in their hands. It had seemed to Stalin that Hess must have discussed a possible alliance against Russia; and his aide was interrogated and tortured.* It happened that Pintsch was, after Hess’s flight to England, arrested by Martin Bormann and his brother Albert, so that he was doubly unlucky. Whatever he told the Russians, it must have seemed to justify their glowering mistrust, which was intensified when Gehlen was whisked away.