The Bormann Brotherhood

by William Stevenson

  He sat beside the grandfather clock, gold cuff links flashing, each link stamped with three tiny crowns in deference to his aristocratic connection, under a portrait of himself reviewing the poor doomed devils of the Russian “Liberation Army.”

  “I knew it was suicide to attack Bormann. It would have cost my life.”

  This was the reason for not exposing a man who was, according to Gehlen, in daily contact with the Kremlin, who reported daily the innermost secrets of the German high command locked in combat with Russia: there was too much danger to Gehlen himself.

  The difference between attacking Bormann and denouncing Dr. John, one had to conclude, was that Gehlen knew the first had the power to destroy him whereas the second was helpless.

  CHAPTER 18

  Dr. John married a Jewish girl. When all other reasons are given for the enmity between the two West German spy chiefs, that fact remains. Otto John went to London after the plot to kill Hitler and met the Jewish singer Lucie Manén, of Berlin. As his wife, she was just too much for the German generals to swallow. In my talks with General Gehlen and Dr. John, I was aware of so much that went unsaid. This is one of those occasions when the writer has an obligation to state that he disbelieved one and not the other. John was in spiritual agony. He spent many hours with Catholic intellectuals trying to comprehend what had happened to his own people. Gehlen seemed never to question the values of his society.

  There were other causes for jealousy, of course. John was determined to pull up every tiny Nazi weed when he took over the internal-security services in West Germany. He knew the Gehlen Org protected evildoers. He made several attempts to drag war criminals out of that shelter, and it was said by his enemies that he thought he was conducting a crusade of vengeance on behalf of the Jews. He never seemed, to me, to be anything more than a disarmingly honest man who found the realities of life almost too much to bear. He was accused of working far too closely with the British; and the Gehlen Org, despite all the nonsense about Bormann being a Russian spy, for a long time believed that John and his British friends knew where Bormann had gone and put agents on his trail.

  Gehlen’s men reported that Bormann was under observation from the time he crossed the frontier at Flensburg in the way described by Ronald Gray. The story of a body dropped into the fjord was either to discourage further inquiries, or Gray himself was not aware that other Allied intelligence men wished to see where Bormann would lead them, and staged the incident for his benefit.

  These Gehlen reports were meant for internal consumption alone. They were circulated among the inner circle of his chieftains, whose anti-Communist bravado covered their own need to survive. In time, inevitably, such reports reached men who became either disaffected by the Nazi mentality preserved within the Gehlen Org or defected for other reasons. They were responsible for the first leak of this quite different version of events.

  The theory was that Dr. John had proposed to the British secret service that it was worth letting Bormann escape. Support for this was provided by the strange way that Bormann’s old comrade Erich Koch escaped. After he failed to make the rendezvous with Bormann at Flensburg, he went into hiding as a refugee, calling himself Major Berger. Was he known all the time to the British directors of the camp where he stayed? His face was well known, for he was hunted as the hateful Gauleiter of East Prussia. Yet he made speeches in the British-run refugee camp proclaiming his belief that “Erich Koch drowned in the Baltic.” When he was finally denounced by another German officer, and taken away by the British, had the whole incident been prearranged? These were legitimate questions. Koch was handed over to the government of Poland under the agreements then in force among the Four Powers. He was not put on trial for eight more years. He was sentenced to death but there was never any evidence that the sentence was carried out. The Russians took no action against him either, although they had every reason to want him executed for his crimes in the Ukraine.

  John denied, naturally enough, that Koch was allowed a short period of freedom while he and Bormann were under observation; or that later, in return for Koch’s co-operation in disclosing Bormann’s plans, the former Gauleiter became a prisoner-adviser on postwar Nazis to the Communists.

  In the period between ex-Gauleiter Koch’s exposure and his surrender to Poland, the scene in Europe had changed dramatically. The Soviet Union was reinforcing its position in East Germany, and the West had to concentrate on defense. Already by the winter of 1948 detailed reports were streaming into the Gehlen Org of the covert rearming of East German forces by the Russians, who did not scruple themselves to make use of former professional German officers. The so-called “People’s Police” in the Soviet Zone was being built into a regular military machine of some dimensions. An exercise in military “extrapolation” was conducted in the best tradition of the German General Staff, which was the particular field in which General Gehlen excelled. By the end of 1949 Communist German forces were building toward the precise goal predicted by the Org. The search for Nazi fugitives seemed an eccentric pastime in the face of what was then considered to be a real and direct threat.

  This atmosphere made it necessary to play down any under-the-counter deals with the Soviets. This was the period of such tension and crisis that on the North American continent bomb shelters were being dug again.

  This would explain any secrecy about Allied use of Martin Bormann. It would explain any reluctance to talk about Bormann on the part of someone like Dr. John. The sharing of secrets was at an end.

  Back in London after seeing General Gehlen again, I read more files on Dr. Otto John. He had recoiled from one political pole only to be repelled by the other. Inside Russia he had been questioned closely on wartime attempts to construct an alliance of Germany and the Western Allies against the Soviets, and he had said truthfully and with all the authority of a man who had acted as liaison between anti-Hitler elements and the British that quite definitely neither they nor the Americans had contemplated anything of the kind. The fear of conspiracy still lingered, as if the Kremlin had caught crumbs of conversation from Hitler’s table. This feeling was strengthened by his encounter with Field Marshal Friedrich von Paulus, who was captured at the Battle of Stalingrad and became a kind of Communist showpiece. Although their meeting was engineered for the purposes of propaganda, John had been able to draw some conclusions.

  The German Field Marshal believed that Martin Bormann or someone with similar access to Hitler had reported to Moscow throughout the war. John did not himself believe Bormann could have been that man.

  An army commander beaten in the field is tempted to blame it on treachery or some other factor beyond his control. Paulus lost the entire Sixth Army in a trap which historians agree was most carefully baited and sprung at Stalingrad. He thought Stalin must have had some sinister influence in Berlin to persuade Hitler to pour his best troops into that trap against all the judgment of his military advisers; and that the Russians had been thus enabled to prepare and execute the lengthy and prodigious encircling movement that destroyed his forces.

  John listened to this theory, and after he had escaped back again to the West, he commented that Paulus “no longer even had the strength to play the puppet role assigned him by the Russians.”

  There were other matters of which John had peculiar knowledge. He was cleaning out Nazi-minded public servants in the new and supposedly purged republic of West Germany when he tumbled into the hands of the KGB. There were few men with such an extraordinary breadth of harsh experience. Diplomats seldom rub against the gritty realities of an unprivileged life abroad. Agents seldom enjoy the fellowship of wealthy intellectuals. John had traveled in all these worlds. He had reported upon high-ranking officers who fled to Latin America. He had investigated, as Bonn’s security chief, the case of the missing U-boats. He knew how Lufthansa might or might not have been utilized in Nazi times to run contraband and couriers into Spain and the Western Hemisphere, because he had been a key executive with the state-o
wned German airline. He had been a victim of betrayal in the treacherous arena of espionage and he had seen his own reports from inside the Nazi camp sidetracked by a traitor inside British intelligence.

  I talked with him again when he was in London visiting the widow of the first Baron Vansittart, who gave his name to the doctrine that the military policies of German leaders had the support of the German people ever since the Franco-Prussian wars; and that Germany must undergo a program of demilitarization and corrective education to stop it happening again.

  This time I was better briefed. The Public Record Office was a British institution that baffled me. But Ann Sharpley volunteered to help. As one of the most traveled foreign correspondents, she knew what to look for. Her account helps to explain why scholars take so long to produce their verdicts on recent history. She wrote in a memo:

  “The Public Record Office is in that part of London that the Victorians put up when they tried to reconstruct Camelot. Between the traffic and the newspaper offices of Fleet Street and the sleepy Georgian quiet of the Inns of Court where lawyers browse beside green lawns and beds of roses, several ambitious Gothic buildings were flung up in a pinnacled declaration of the timelessness of things British, most notably the Law Courts and the Public Record Office. Here are housed many millions of documents ‘relating to the actions of the central government and the courts of law of England and Wales from the 11-th Century.’

  “Admission for more than one visit after a careful vetting by a clerk becomes of matter of giving references by ‘a person of recognized position—i.e., a Minister of Religion, Medical or Legal Practitioner.’ It is a place to make you weep for a computer. There is no comprehensive index so you make your way from clerk to clerk, from one scholarly, crammed, parchment-stuffed and paper-rustling room to another.

  “Those who wish to consult the Foreign Office files have an indistinct little map pressed into their hands and must make their way through Dickensian streets to another Gothic pile (red brick instead of dressed stone) where the same sense of timelessness prevails. You are not allowed to use ink or ballpoint pen (in case, one supposes, you should deface the documents although more likely they prefer a pencil because it is quieter). There are requests posted on the walls to speak in a low voice, if at all: and warnings that requests for documents handed in after 3:30 pm cannot be dealt with that day, while 3 documents a day is the limit. It is a place where a deliberate pace in scholarship is enshrined and maintained and such are the formidable lessons of history that can be learned from its files that a reflective mood would be arrived at in any case, if it were not already insisted upon BY ORDER.”

  It was a rotten trick to leave Ann ferreting through those files. I consoled my conscience with the thought that she had more patience. Just once, in those cloisters, I had been lucky. I had wandered into one of the many cubicles to find a clerk in a black cotton smock of European design. On learning that I wanted the newly declassified files covering the war, he said: “Ah, you’re after the Nazis who got away. Bormann and Company.” He had overheard an earlier conversation with his boss. He glanced around cautiously and shifted his elbow. Underneath was a pile of index sheets related to the subject.

  Dr. John had been kidnapped to take a Russian “cure” when he was still in charge of securing West Germany against Communists and neo-Nazis. Those who regarded him as a British agent claimed that by 1954 he was disgusted with the return to public life of the very Germans who kept Hitler in power. He had conspired against Hitler himself, and seen his comrades hanged or, like his own brother, denied even the dignity of a firing squad. Therefore, went the rumor, he had crossed to the Communist side in a mood of despair and embitterment. But veterans of British intelligence stated categorically that he had been abducted and placed under Russian pressure.

  “There was a treason trial when I got back,” John told me. “I was condemned by Nazi-minded judges who put me away for four years—when even the Prosecutor asked only for a two-year sentence.”

  He felt keenly the question of his own credibility. Yet he seemed philosophical and talked of the Dominican Father Laurentius Siemer, who during the war had helped the resistance against Hitler. He was not prepared to condemn the Vatican, although it was true that leading Nazis escaped along the route of monasteries. His own Evangelical church might have averted or at least delayed the Nazi terror back in the 1930’s if it had joined forces with the small Catholic opposition. Clearly, he despised the German generals who changed sides or pretended to be anti-Nazi when war ended. He spoke scathingly of the apathy in West Germany today, and the same lack of civil courage that permitted the growth of dictatorship.

  He seemed a man who had confronted situations that few of us can imagine, and who had emerged still clinging a little despairingly to some private belief. He was a German who had tried to fight those tendencies he regarded as dangerous within his own people, and now he was reviled by a great number of his countrymen from both camps. He reminded me of Beata Klarsfeld, who was disowned by her parents because she insisted on pursuing and exposing uncomfortable facts. Both of them had a certain serenity, as if there was nothing much left that their fellow humans could do to them or against them; and thus they were left with a private code of behavior.

  Otto John was first known to British intelligence when he traveled from Berlin at great personal risk to Madrid to confide to their agents the details of a conspiracy to overthrow Hitler.

  These contacts were one source of Russian concern, as he discovered during interrogation in 1955 by the KGB.

  “Why was there this obsession?”

  “Stalin was always afraid Germany would join the Western Allies against Russia.” John paused, knitting his bushy eyebrows, bright-blue eyes fixed on me. “He was getting information all the time from Hitler’s immediate circle. Someone must have told him, for example, that the flight of Deputy Führer Hess was part of such a plot. Someone who really believed this. In other words, an agent for Stalin who was not clever at interpreting political events but who did know a great deal in detail about most of Hitler’s activities.”

  Bormann?

  John looked away.

  “Bormann was one of your problems …” I said.

  “Bormann was one of the tough Nazis whose indoctrination would never be undone,” he said after a pause.

  “Was Bormann used in some way, after the war?”

  “History may tell us that some day.”

  “Who was reporting to Stalin?”

  “Someone close to Hitler. You know, after I was kidnapped, the Russians brought me to Paulus, who had lost his entire army at Stalingrad. I had seen him last when he was a witness for the Soviet prosecution at Nuremberg. He knew, of course, that he had lost some of Germany’s best troops because of a trap. We talked about that, when I met him under Soviet supervision. We were both natives of Hesse and we could talk in a manner that was not embarrassing to him in front of his Communist controllers. Paulus thought all along there had been a leakage of top-level secrets from Hitler’s circle.”

  I tried again to draw him on the subject of Bormann. It was obvious that he knew more than he wished, or perhaps was allowed, to say. Did the Russians know something about John himself that might have originated from their source in Hitler’s court?

  “They knew certainly from Kim, Philby [the Soviet agent inside the British secret service]. Long after I escaped from Russian hands again, when I was back in London in 1967, I saw the proof that the Russians knew about secret contacts between myself and Philby during the war. This was why they kidnapped me. You see, in the war, I conveyed to London certain information about German resistance to Hitler. At the time, Kim Philby was the senior secret-service officer in charge of the Iberian desk, and my contacts were in Spain and Portugal, so of course he got my reports—and he stopped them right there. He refused to send them to higher authority and said they were nonsense. Philby could serve his Russian masters by stopping any attempt by the German resistance to use t
he British in a pact directed against Russia. During this period, Trevor-Roper, the historian, worked with Philby in SIS [Secret Intelligence Service], and he has written how my reports detailed the moves against Hitler, and how Philby stopped the reports going further. Trevor-Roper said the whole thing was inexplicable to him at the time. And now, in the light of what we know, I can see why the KGB abducted me and questioned me about my connections with the British secret service. They were checking on Philby, who might be a double agent. And they were checking again the possibility that Britain secretly talked peace behind Stalin’s back.”

  I asked John if, as legal adviser to Lufthansa before and during the war, he thought the airline had been used to move Nazi loot. He quoted the standing orders of the air transport command that the crews must not engage in espionage. But it was also true that during one of his wartime missions to Madrid, another German suspected of disloyalty to Hitler had been shipped back in a trunk.

  He had been Director of Studies in the German Civil Airline Pilots’ School in 1938 and was prepared to migrate to Ecuador, where Lufthansa had a subsidiary: SEDTA. But already the small group of resisters to Hitler was busy. “I decided I should stay and fight things out, but I refused to become involved with the military.” He was in Berlin when Count Klaus Schenck von Stauffenberg tried to seize power, believing Hitler had been killed. In the blood bath that followed, he escaped and made his way to Lisbon. There, too, a suspected German officer was killed by SS agents and airfreighted home by Lufthansa.

  The legend that Dr. John was always a British spy had been reinvigorated by his service toward the end of the war to the Allies. He advised on broadcasts to Germans, hoping to get some response from those who secretly hated what Hitler had accomplished. He screened German prisoners in the hope of finding genuine opponents of Nazism. He was the legal trustee of files on the German Eleventh Army, whose commander in Russia had been Field Marshal Fritz Erich von Manstein, and thus he attended Manstein’s trial by a British military court.