The Bormann Brotherhood

by William Stevenson

  It has been argued that the Western Powers were fortunate in Gehlen’s inefficiency. The Russians knew everything about his activities. And knowing all, they built up their strength but found it unnecessary to strike. He was not worth a war.

  His Bormann story should have been discredited. But a study of his memos, reports, advice on formation of departments, and claims of intelligence coups around the world are couched in language that often does persuade other bureaucrats. He claimed, as a major accomplishment, the prediction by his Org of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war a few days before it began. Before the date of the Org’s proclaimed prediction, I (and probably other correspondents) had phoned from Tel Aviv to warn my own employers, giving the day and time. In his memoirs, Gehlen quoted example after example of his supposed scoops, in reality based upon reading good newspapers specializing in world news. His determination to make Bormann a Russian spy is therefore odd. He knew public opinion was against him.

  One explanation, given serious consideration by the investigating judge, was that Gray Fox had been asked to lend this story whatever prestige still remained to him. It would close the books on the Bormann case. It would discourage and perhaps even stop the hunt for Bormann in South America.

  But the former chief of the Gehlen Org later named Werner Naumann, Secretary of State in Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry, as one of the witnesses whose identity he had previously refused to divulge. The British secret service arrested Naumann in 1953 for allegedly trying to revive secret neo-Nazi groups. He told interrogators that he left the Führer’s bunker with Bormann, described the scene to which so many had already testified, but then added: “Bormann was rescued by the Russians. He was a Soviet spy and arranged where to meet the Red Army advance units…. Bormann now lives in Moscow.”

  The Naumann case arose because British intelligence believed it had proof of former Nazis conducting classes for youngsters. There was one eyewitness account of a Nazi youth camp addressed by Hans-Ulrich Rudel, a founder of the Brotherhood (or Kameradenwerk, as it is called in the British report). But for political reasons, the matter was brushed out of sight.

  These political reasons had much to do with the Cold War. The West German republic was to be granted sovereignty. Chancellor Konrad Adenauer asked the British to let the federal authorities handle what the British called “the most serious neo-Nazi threat yet to surface.”

  Then Adenauer let the matter drop.

  It was dropped on Gehlen’s advice. Veterans of the Org have testified that Gehlen, while in American employ, ordered a full investigation into Adenauer’s background. Then he committed himself. The man had served Hitler’s Germany with a proper sense of duty. A former SS man who resigned from the Org because it seemed to him to duplicate his career under the Nazis said: “The rigid anti-Communism, the whole Org mystique, was attractive to political forces which were deciding then which way the new German state would go. Adenauer saw in Gehlen the perfect ally.”

  In brief, “Old Fox” Adenauer saw in Gray Fox a direct channel to Americans who could influence policy in Washington through the short circuit of intelligence. Misgivings might be voiced by diplomats in the Western alliance about neo-Nazi revivals or other forms of right-wing extremism. That didn’t matter. The timid diplomats could be dismissed in private intelligence as crypto-Communists. It was still American military policy that prevailed.

  The most important pawn in Gehlen’s game was Adenauer’s own “Bormann,” the chief administrator, Dr. Hans Globke. He had been, as has been seen, the Nazi interpreter of anti-Jewish Nazi legislation, and one of Frick’s men.

  The Org became Globke’s foreign intelligence service. Meanwhile, its agents went around the country investigating individuals and reporting the utmost trivia to headquarters. By putting himself on the side of the Americans in a common front against the Bolsheviks, the Chancellor felt safe against domestic critics. His Christian-Democratic government was the state. Anyone opposing it was a Communist or a neutral in the great ideological struggle.

  A powerful opponent of that view was Dr. Otto John, who saw the whole story of Hitler and National Socialism unfolding again. He was sure Naumann was involved in neo-Nazi activities. He felt that Gray Fox encouraged the notion of Bormann’s escape to Russia in order to divert attention from the Brotherhood, which he, too, knew by the name “Kameradenwerk.”

  Otto John was chief of the internal-security office. He was a lawyer who had been legal consultant to Lufthansa (and therefore knew a great deal about the traffic by commercial airliner in wanted men). He was a friend of Prince Louis Ferdinand, the head of the House of Hohenzollera, who for a short time had seemed a possible replacement for Hitler. By normal standards, John would have seemed the right man in the right job, if the Western Allies were really concerned to help build a democratic Germany. A few days after the plot to kill Hitler in 1944, he had escaped to Madrid in a Lufthansa plane, and from there he had gone to England.

  But Otto John had helped the Allies at the trial of a German field marshal. That was disloyalty. That was what Gehlen was trying to destroy, root and branch.

  Gray Fox was exceedingly industrious throughout his service. An inquiry into a private company’s affairs was conducted with tremendous energy, and every bit of tittle-tattle was duly filed away. All this in the sacred name of freedom. A vast amount of industrial and economic intelligence must have been accumulated this way. The reports that have been made available are masterpieces of trivia or involve denunciations typical of the Third Reich.

  At the same time, espionage was providing a means for groups of men to maintain contact. Gehlen’s own brotherhood consisted of brother officers and sixteen relatives in top Org jobs. (They could be trusted, was the explanation.) There were secret societies all over the place, with impressive titles that sometimes reduced to the comic. The military-security service rejoiced in an acronym valid for Germans but which had Americans doubled up with laughter: MAD. Besides the Org, there were the BfV, Anti-Humanity Combat Group V, Industrial Warning Service Against Activities Damaging to the Economy, and any number of refugee and information services selling “secrets,” so that at one stage in Berlin it was estimated that 47,000 adults made a full-time living as so-called spies. Many were middlemen selling to whatever side had the most to offer.

  The climate was dangerously attractive for major war criminals. Not far from Gehlen’s headquarters at the Org, and forty minutes’ drive from his villa at Starnberg, was the flourishing town of Gunzberg, whose labor force was mostly employed by the family business of Dr. Josef Mengele, known at Auschwitz as the “Angel of Death.” In 1959 he felt secure enough to fly from Argentina (where he was born and where the family has a large business) to visit the family and attend the funeral of his father. Gunzberg was dominated by the family enterprise: KARL MENGELE—MANUFACTURERS AND EXPORTERS OF FARM MACHINERY AND AGRICULTURAL IMPLEMENTS AND WITH SUBSIDIARIES IN SOUTH AMERICA: HEAD OFFICE/ARGENTINA.

  Not the sort of place a V-man could miss. But General Gehlen had never thought Mengele’s fate was any of his business, any more than the thought he had a duty, so he deposed to Judge Glasenapp, to convey information on Bormann to the Ludwigsburg Office, “in view of the fact I was not aware proceedings against Bormann were in progress.”

  His men saw no reason to pursue such figures, except under foreign pressure. The Gehlen Org took in the Hangman of Lyon, Klaus Barbie; SS Colonel-in-Chief Willy Krichbaum, former head of the Field Security Police, who put down the plotters against Hitler; SS Lieutenant Hans Sommer, who had planned in 1941 to blow up all the synagogues in Paris. The list goes on. After the treason trial of Felfe in 1963, there were public mutterings about the Org being too ready to hire “death’s-head unemployables.” The scandal led the Bonn government to retire Org agents with embarrassing histories.

  Once in a while, the German public glimpsed the muted violence. A gas pistol was fired into the face of a man who led an anti-Communist Ukrainian group in Munich. The five cubic centimeters
of hydrocyanic acid caused heart failure and left no trace. The gunman swallowed antipoison capsules for protection against the deadly vapor, which paralyzed the victim’s heart if squirted at the mouth and nostrils.

  The cause of death would not have been discovered if a Russian named Bogden Stashinsky had kept quiet. Instead, he told a West Berlin police officer that he had killed on orders from the KGB. Furthermore, he had murdered the leader of another anti-Communist Ukrainian group in the same way.

  Inquiries at Org headquarters were leaked to Moscow through Gehlen’s trusted aide Felfe. At once the Communists set up a counter-propaganda attack. They held a press conference in East Berlin and invited Western correspondents. There, a former Org man told, with a wealth of unsubstantiated detail, how he had been instructed by Gehlen to perform one of the killings now credited to Stashinsky. He had refused, and defected to the Communists.

  This public confession was made by Stefan Lippolz. He claimed that as an agent with the Gehlen Org, he was frightened. He could not perform the murder, which, he said, was required because the Org wished to foil British secret-service plans to train Ukrainians for espionage in the Soviet Union.

  The bizarre story became too tangled for newsmen. One part of it did stick, however. Lippolz described the forged passports that were available for his escape. After deciding not to carry out the murder, he traveled along well-established spy routes through the Bavarian Alps, into Austria and north Italy, routes based upon the old escape lines winding through mountain valleys. Then he became frightened again, and made his way, by another of the routes familiar to Org men, to Norway.

  A curious habit of General Gehlen, I noticed, was that he copied one’s gestures. It was unnerving at first. And then perhaps revealing. I would lean to one side of the chair and fold my arms, and so would he. If, in talking, I lifted a hand to make a point, his hand went up in response.

  He was, it seemed, fit as a fiddle. Not uneasy. Not uncomfortable, as elderly people sometimes are, because they try to cover up some infirmity. Pouring a drink, his hand was steady, so it was just a curious habit—his hand twitching his ear when my hand twitched mine.

  That first evening, I walked through the dimly lit streets, and then along the Seepromenade. The great white swans floated serenely on the dark waters. Strings of colored lights swung in a light summer’s breeze above diners and dancers. I tried to analyze my own sense of anger. I had felt hostility toward the Germans, certainly, when my father was missing among the secret armies of Nazi-occupied Europe. I had felt hostile when, still a schoolboy and acting as head of a large family in my father’s absence, I saw one side of our small street destroyed by German bombs. But when it came my turn to fight, I had refused the alternative to becoming a combat pilot because I had no desire to bomb German civilians.

  What I resented now was that once again, all these years later, I felt myself obliged to swallow my own rage. I did not want to hate these people. I did not want to believe that a group of human beings could arouse this hostility again.

  It would be so much easier, more convenient, less troubling to the soul, to believe that a nation had reformed itself. I had been raised in the tradition that says the best way to heal is to forget. But how could one forget past evils perpetrated by a nation which so resolutely refused to examine its own conscience and which had never made a true confession of national error? The men hanged at Nuremberg had made it altogether too easy for Germany, East and West. All the wickedness could be blamed upon them. All the accomplishments so many Germans now claimed for the Nazi era—the discipline, industrial progress, great military victories—these were boasted about. How many times had I heard educated Germans, professional men and women, intellectuals, echo the same words: “If we had won the war, we would have been regarded as a great people. It’s only because we lost that we’re cast in the role of villains.”

  A friend from Munich met me, a professor who dabbles in journalism; not at all a young man, but much aware of trends. I find myself hesitant to give his name or even a clue to his identity. Why? Is it because he is a known protester against the reappearance of Nazis, even though they have grown old? He was a soldier at Stalingrad—a good soldier, I would think. There were 3,000 generals in Germany at the time of Stalingrad, and another 320,000 military officers. My friend was an ordinary soldier. That, for me, says a lot about him. He was one of the few thousand to survive captivity in Russia. He has no illusions.

  “You look depressed,” he said. I agreed that I was. This, in essence, is what he suggested was the cause: “You find it difficult to believe times haven’t changed. You’re also sensible enough to understand that the United States had no information on the Soviet Union when Gehlen came along with tons of material. He alone had the facilities to question prisoners—returning men like me. You know that he predicted the planning goals set for the East German Army, which wasn’t picky about Nazis either. He reported there would be twenty-four regiments of infantry, seven artillery regiments, three tank regiments, and so on, to a total strength of 48,750 bodies. He was short by 103. That kind of precision cost you, cost the Western alliance, a lot. It also cost mistakes later. The Org made ghastly mistakes. It made those mistakes because secrecy protects men like Gehlen from the stimulus of criticism, and secrecy cuts them off from reality in the end, too. Reality is not in documents and reports and informers’ tittle-tattle; it’s in what people say to you over a drink or on the street. Gehlen’s reality is a depressing return to the old obsessions, and the new German youth is looking back to his generation. They reject Nazism but they don’t reject what led to the Nazis.”

  I peered gloomily into my beer.

  “When I was a soldier,” he said, “they discovered I was also a scholar. So they made me count bodies. That was called intelligence. I did it when I wasn’t using a gun, hnnn? This makes me a member of an old boys’ association of military intelligence….”

  And he told me about Gerolstrasse No. 39, in Munich. This was the office of AGEA—the Working Group of Former Abwehr Members. The name on the Director’s door was Franz Seubert. He had been a Colonel in Hitler’s military intelligence service. Then he worked for the Gehlen Org. AGEA published a magazine: Rearguard. It was distributed on a confidential basis.

  A reunion of members took place at the residence of the Bishop of Würzburg. My friend’s description of this gathering, which brought former agents from as far afield as the Tyrol and Italy, sounded like those Order of the Death’s Head conspiratorial meetings under Himmler. My friend was not given to dramatics, however. He said they were addressed by a former general who had been in charge of a Nazi intelligence group: Gerhard Henke, chairman of AGEA. A record of the speech had been made and circulated. He said General Gehlen naturally could not allow official links with AGEA. But Gerhard Wessel, the successor of Gehlen, had received the AGEA managing committee for confidential talks. Wessel had been in Hitler’s intelligence service and after the war carried on with the same work under American and then Bonn’s orders. Before he succeeded Gehlen, he had been the permanent West German representative on the NATO military committee in Washington.

  “In short,” said my friend, “the price paid for highly questionable achievements over the long haul has been the Gehlen Org’s cover for unsavory characters.”

  “That’s a hard thing to say.”

  “Because you naturally counterbalance it with the thought of what They Do on the Other Side.” He could speak at times in capitals, the way Germans do.

  He got up. “But forget about the Communists. What have we been doing to ourselves?”

  General Wessel had listened to the AGEA representations, as my friend had said. But the man who took over from Gehlen was more sure-footed. When Willy Brandt was Burgomaster of Berlin, every glass of whisky he drank had been reported to the Org’s successor, the BND. But when Brandt became Chancellor, he was determined to get accurate information, not the kind of stuff dished up by the “froth-blowers” and “hydrocephalics
” stuffing the ranks of his secret service.

  Discontented veterans and aging officers talked freely about office secrets, hoping perhaps to change the situation. Their revelations confirmed the fears that Gehlen did in fact recruit Nazis; that his first ventures into the foreign field were in South America, where the best-informed men might be found. “He lived on the cold war,” wrote Trevor-Roper, “and on the favor of those American and German governments which believed in the primacy of the cold war.”

  Gehlen’s real criticism of Hitler was that he lost the war because he ignored professional advice. Gehlen remained philosophically a Nazi, though, like all army officers, he did not join the Nazi party. The Russians seized upon the Nazi backgrounds of his men, exploiting the doubts of Western moralists, who, voicing anxiety about a return to German authoritarianism, could not avoid feeding Communist propaganda mills, too.

  This is what happened to Otto John. He was destroyed by Gehlen, ruthlessly. Gehlen used the secret files for a political purpose. He said about John’s past: “He fled from Germany when the bomb plot failed and worked there for our enemies. He broadcast hate propaganda against our troops. Wearing German uniform, he interrogated many prominent German officers as prisoners, including many who later served under me in the Org. I said: ‘Once a traitor, always a traitor.’ ”

  If Gehlen felt so strongly about John, whose brother had been killed in the aftermath of their part in the attempt to kill Hitler, if “once a traitor, always a traitor” justified Gehlen’s destruction of his rival, why did he tolerate the presence of Martin Bormann, the Russian spy, at the height of Germany’s death struggle with Russia?

  His answer was delivered in that calm and uncomprehending way I had learned to fear, because I knew now why Gehlen disturbed me and aroused the most profound sense of outrage. He had never fired a gun in anger but his room was hung with photographs of himself on the firing range, arm outstretched with pistol cocked, the stereotype of the figures one associates with the Nazi period, in ankle-length leather coat of black and black peaked cap.