The Bormann Brotherhood

by William Stevenson

  Bormann’s declared intention was to crush the churches. Yet his children were placed in the church’s care.

  Bishop Alois Hudal, tutor of his oldest son, was a chief agent in escape organizations. When Adolf Eichmann, the stealthy butcher of millions, said he had escaped to South America with the Bishop’s help, Hudal stated publicly: “It was my Christian duty to help all who were in need and danger.” The agency, whose activities came under a Vatican refugee organization, seems to have limited itself to ex-fascists. The Vatican, for that matter, issued passports only to self-avowed Catholics.

  Hudal’s name cropped up in statements made by a number of captured war criminals. Dr. Gerhard Bohne, charged with 15,000 “euthanasia” killings, escaped to Argentina, and when arrested in Buenos Aires, in March 1964, said that he had got away through “the charitable help extended to many fugitives.” Bishop Hudal died in 1966, and it may have been convenient to credit him with several escapes that were in fact the work of ODESSA, in this period held responsible for Operation Silence. This involved a series of killings, some described as suicides, among personalities thought to have too much knowledge of ODESSA’S operations.

  Bishop Hudal voiced his views on Nazism at an early stage in the movement, and a book of his, The Groundwork of National Socialism, published in 1937 in Leipzig and Vienna, was greeted with enthusiasm by the Nazi press. He was, he wrote, in full agreeement with Nazi “defensive actions.” He justified the Nazi movement as one that displayed a powerful Christian culture despite appearances to the contrary. It could be argued that in the 1930’s he might have been unaware of the pagan nationalism of the leaders, or the wild tribal theories of lapsed Catholics who had reached positions of eminence within the party. Unhappily, one is forced to conclude from his writings that he was obsessed with the anti-Christ nature of Communism. What concerned him, beyond anything, was the destruction of the Bolshevik Devil. He sought an accommodation between the church and the Nazis, who were, he wrote, “on the right track.” In the predominantly Catholic city of Cologne, the local Nazi party newspaper, Westdeutscher Beobachter, on October 17, 1936 gave Hudal’s ideas front-page attention. How many Germans were thus encouraged to close eyes and ears to the growing evidence of what happened in their own concentration camps? How many buttered their consciences just when they were preparing to question the Draconian laws springing up around them like a forest? How many, given different guidance, might have resisted the Nazis? For in 1936 it was impossible for any intelligent German—and many Catholic Germans tended to be intellectuals—to remain ignorant of what Hitler planned to do.

  All Catholic diocesan publications, with the notable exception of the Berlin See, carried the anti-Semitic propaganda churned out by Goebbels and his “expert” in Jewish affairs, Johann von Leers. In the conferences leading to the concordat between the Vatican and Germany, reference was made consistently and ad nauseam to the Jews and lesser breeds as evildoers. “I am only doing what the church has been doing for fifteen hundred years,” Hitler told Bishop Wilhelm Berning on April 26, 1933. The Protestant clergy were no less informed; they adopted as church leader Chaplain Ludwig Müller, the Führer’s confidant. On Hitler’s fiftieth birthday in 1939, Protestant and Catholic bishops, with the exception of those in two dioceses, urged the following prayer upon all Germans: “Remember O Lord our Führer whose secret wishes Thou knowest.” By then, his secret wishes were perfectly well known to all and expressed in the Nuremberg Laws, which Bishop Hudal described as “unavoidable countermeasures against alien elements.”

  Bishop Hudal kept open the line between Hitler’s court and the Vatican. It may have been unofficial, in the sense that nothing has been published yet to reinforce the many verbal statements that the Third Reich, on the eve of launching a full program to liquidate the Jews, was assured that the Pope would say nothing to provoke any outcry among German Catholics. The fact remains that he was trusted in the Führer’s court because of his strong endorsement earlier of the Nazi creed. Therefore it would make practical sense to use him as a messenger on the Pope’s behalf. Shortly after the start of World War II with the cold-blooded invasion of Catholic Poland in September 1939, the new Pope, Pius XII, issued an encyclical which avoided all the main issues raised by Nazi aggression. Instead, there was reference to “misguided souls, whether of the Jewish people or of other origin [who] ally themselves or actively promote revolutionary movements.” This referred to Bolshevism, and encouraged Nazi ideologues who hammered at the theme of a sinister conspiracy between Jews and Communists. As Gordon Zahn, author of German Catholics & Hitler’s Wars, observed in the National Catholic Reporter of December 15, 1972: “It was not just Pius XII’s failure to protest the systematic elimination of the Jews but, rather, his apparent refusal to go along with the intention of his revered predecessor,” Pius XI, who had shown a readiness to denounce racism and terror bombing.

  The Vatican’s policy has been a source of controversy ever since. Anyone who followed it was aware that many embarrassing documents relevant to Pius XII’s relations with fascist governments were buried away after the war. The story is a book in itself. The facts are clear enough that the Vatican’s many institutions, as a matter of deliberate policy or in the manner of absent-minded medieval monks, left undisturbed in basements and archives those papers that confirmed an unhealthy papal tolerance of Nazi actions.

  Similar documents may have found their way into Bormann’s hands. This cannot for the present be proved. As Secretary to the Führer he was responsible for correspondence with the Vatican, and some of this has been recovered, either in the original or in duplicate. He kept careful notes of conversations with Vatican emissaries, as he kept records of all potentially useful meetings. His collection of bits of paper earned him the title of “Herr Paper Picker,” and his use of the party’s teletype communications center made him notorious as the dispatcher of messages. The messages and the bits of paper always had a purpose, usually the undermining of a rival or the overthrow of an easy victim. His use of incriminating papers as a means of blackmail has been described by members of the court. What he kept on file cost jobs, lives, prestige. His love of power over individuals was explored in the Bormann Life, and the power was exercised in the bureaucratic style he knew best.

  The Vatican viewed him with thoughtful caution. He certainly knew enough to be able to make demands later for papal protection, and there were many practical reasons why, as a fugitive, he might call on the church for help.

  One reason, reliably documented, involved men of the caliber of the head of the House of Hohenzollern, Prince Louis Ferdinand, and prominent Allied dignitaries. This was in the so-called X Report, which appeared in American and British intelligence archives under that title. The report professed to be a Vatican assessment that said that Britain was ready to negotiate peace. German peace feelers were put out, to give the Nazi war machine the freedom to focus upon Russia. But the report contradicted Winston Churchill’s minute of June 28, 1940 to Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden: “We do not desire to make any enquiries as to terms of peace with Hitler … all our Agents are strictly forbidden to entertain any such suggestion.”

  Any misjudgment of British resolve at this time would have been disastrous. Britain was braced against aerial bombardment, and soldiers were training with broomsticks. In America there was a campaign, assisted by members of the German friendship and culture groups, to convince President Roosevelt that Britain was finished. The campaign was aimed not just at keeping the United States out of the war, but also to stop any supply of urgently needed arms. The X Report might have convinced all who saw it that the British were wavering. It ascribed a willingness to negotiate on the part of the very “Agents” Churchill had in mind, so that Hitler could safely overrun the rest of Western Europe before turning his full attention against the Soviets.

  The X Report was an account of the Pope’s talks with secret German contacts after the invasion of Poland. The papers were placed in Bormann’s private
files and contributed to the widely held belief that Pius XII, fearful of Communism and sympathetic to autocratic regimes that proclaimed their vision of Russia as the Devil incarnate, could live with National Socialism.

  The report arose after an anti-Nazi group in Germany asked what terms the British would consider if Hitler was overthrown. The reply, as conveyed from the Vatican, was that if a trustworthy Reich government replaced the Nazi regime, and if no hostilities had broken out on the Western front, the British would consider talking about the “Eastern frontiers.” However, the report injected an interpretation that the British regarded, when they found out, as dangerously misleading. The Pope said the British would negotiate in a spirit favorable to German interests. The conquest of Poland, the enlargement of German territory along disputed eastern borders, and what was regarded as an occupation of Austria and part of Czechoslovakia would be left unchallenged.

  When the X Report reached Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, the German Army Commander in Chief, he said the suggestion that an anti-Nazi government could negotiate with Britain struck him as treason.

  But which interpretation of British proposals did he receive? All these years later, British intelligence records show that London’s terms were inflexible: restoration of Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland to their former status, and the renunciation of Germany’s economic policies which hurt all other trading nations. These terms were dependent, of course, upon Hitler and the Nazis being tossed out of office, preferably on the end of a rope.

  There is a considerable difference here between official British terms and the reports relayed from the Vatican to Berlin. In the hands of the Brotherhood, or anyone who wished to stir controversy and anger against the Vatican, a copy of the report could be damaging. It was in the same category as the informal communications between Pius XII and Hitler’s contacts at the Vatican, in which the Nazis were encouraged to feel they could go forward with “administrative measures” in regard to the problem of the Jews. Indirect language, and the veiling of the real meaning of Hitler’s proposals to liquidate all subhumans, made it possible for Pius XII to throw up a mental barrier against the reality.

  The X Report was discovered by Gestapo Müller in 1940, whose own informer was a Benedictine monk, Father Keller. The report then went to Bormann. It recorded the Pope’s concern to protect the German church, and it stated that the British would be reasonable about the Eastern territories. We know now that the Pope was deeply concerned about a Russian takeover in East Europe and possibly farther afield. He was anxious to bring about an accommodation that would result in a common Anglo-German front against Communism.

  The British terms were delivered directly by another channel, however: the two British agents known as “Captain S. Payne Best” and “Major R. H. Stevens.” They met the Nazi intelligence chief, Walter Schellenberg, in Holland. Schellenberg was disguised as “Hauptmann Schaemmel” of the military transport department, and his job was to persuade British intelligence of an anti-Hitler movement within the army. He was, in other words, an agent provocateur. He was also fishing on Hitler’s behalf for evidence of some weakness in British resolve. The war with Britain was only a few weeks old.

  The first contacts were made in October 1939, and conversations took place before Hitler’s invasion of France and its neighbors. The talks began in a car driving along the German-Dutch border. The British agents were taking grave risks. They had heard Hitler’s broadcasts calling on Britain to recognize his conquests in Poland and Czechoslovakia. They knew the likelihood of a lightning strike by German forces south. They could only repeat that Britain under no circumstances would accept Hitler’s expanded empire. Their last major discussion took place in the offices of a company called N. V. Handels Dienst Veer Her Continent, Nieuwe Uitleg No. 15, in The Hague. This was a cover operation for British intelligence. Schellenberg was given a British radio transmitter and receiver, the call number 0N4, and a secret phone number: 556/331. He was also given yet again a firm statement contradicting the X Report on British flexibility. There would be no appeasement, even if Hitler flew into another rage and invaded south.

  In November a meeting was arranged by Schellenberg in a Dutch border restaurant. The day coincided with the anniversary of the Munich Putsch of 1923, and Hitler was in the beer cellar for the usual celebration. A bomb exploded shortly after he left; several senior Nazis were killed. Orders were issued at once to Schellenberg to stop his charade as an anti-Nazi German and to take the British agents prisoner. His special SS detachments, waiting near the border, promptly kidnapped Stevens and Best. In the gunfight, a third secret-service man, known as “Lieutenant Coppens” but in reality an officer of the Dutch General Staff, was badly wounded and died soon after.

  Hitler claimed the British agents were responsible for the cellar bomb. Despite all evidence to the contrary produced by Schellenberg, he persisted in this belief and was encouraged in it by Gestapo Müller. But the agents’ refusal under torture to confirm the X Report claim of British readiness to negotiate was enough to counterbalance the Vatican’s dangerous interference.

  Even at a later date, the full text of the report stirred up old feelings of bitterness. According to Otto John, all copies of the report in resistance hands were destroyed. Bormann’s copy was among the tons of material trucked out of Berlin and still not accounted for.

  His communications on behalf of the Führer with the Vatican were couched in language that must have satisfied both sides, and knowing Bormann’s ability to summarize and to use plain words that cut to the bone, one must assume that whenever he took refuge in oblique or fat phrases, it was to save the Pope embarrassment. Certainly the Nazis had nothing to gain from launching the “final solution to the Jewish problem” with a statement disguising the true nature of what was planned. Bormann phrased it deliberately to meet the Vatican’s desire not to be forced to take note of genocide. “It lies in the very nature of the matter that these problems which in part are very difficult can be solved only with ruthless severity in the interest of the final security of the people.” The Nazis themselves knew well what that meant. It meant the Jews of Poland, the Baltic states, and occupied Russia, the heart of the prewar Jewish communities in Europe. There were more than three million Jews in Poland and one and a quarter million in occupied Russia. It meant their destruction.

  It must have meant as much to Pius XII. His concerns about events inside Russia, so far as they hurt the church, were widely broadcast. He cannot have been knowledgeable in one area and totally blind and deaf to the new technique just introduced into Russia. There the invading Nazis arranged that the doomed civilians were to be gassed on their way to the burial pits in vans whose exhaust fumes were fed back ingeniously into the passenger compartments. The gassing was no secret. The Nazis were proud of the efficiency involved. The prisoners were herded into the vans and were liquidated along the road to the trenches. It was a technical accomplishment of which the designers and manufacturers boasted.

  The orders were simple enough when conveyed to the death squads. And a simple statement from the Vatican could have stopped those orders.

  Beata Klarsfeld had said to me: “If only the Pope had come to Berlin in 1933 and told the Nazis ‘Ich bin ein Jud,’ millions might have been spared. Instead, it was a Catholic President [John F. Kennedy] who told the Communists he was a Berliner.”

  Any beginnings of Catholic opposition to Hitler were blunted in that year of 1933 by the German-Vatican Concordat. It was the first official recognition given the Hitler regime by a foreign power. It regulated the relationship between the Catholic church and the new Germany, and thenceforward the German church did little to obstruct the Nazis.

  Franz von Papen, found guilty by a postwar denazification court of being “a major offender,” had negotiated the concordat and declared: “The Third Reich under the leadership of Adolf Hitler is the first state in the world in which the higher principles of the Pope are not only recognized but carried out in prac
tice.” Papen was a devout Catholic, and possibly he serves as well as any figure to illustrate a certain lack of balance that numbed Catholic sensitivities to one form of inhumanity while acutely responsive to Communist oppression.

  Four years after the concordat with Germany, Pope Pius XI delivered the encyclical Divini Redemptoris. It was a papal denunciation of atheistic Communism, which was described as intrinsically wrong. “No one who would save Christian civilization may collaborate with it in any field whatsoever.”

  At the same time, however, the proposed encyclical attacking racism and anti-Semitism never got far. It was drafted by the late American Jesuit scholar Father John La Farge and was entitled “The Unity of the Human Race.” In a memo dated July 1938, Father La Farge wrote that the Pontiff told him: “Say what you would say if you were Pope.” He worked in Rome on the draft with a German Jesuit scholar, Father Gustav Gundlach. It has been generally supposed that the draft never reached Pius XI because the Superior General stopped La Farge’s work from going beyond his own desk.

  The aborted encyclical was ready fifteen months before war broke out. But the Vatican was absorbed in its battle with the Soviet Union, where Catholic priests were being denounced as spies. Foreign Affairs Commissar Vyacheslav Molotov had accused the Vatican of meddling in world affairs on the side of capitalist imperialism and “the incendiaries of war.”

  Stalin had spoken of “a clerical crusade led by the Pope” against the Soviet Union. When Pius XII was elected in the year war broke out, his rejection of Communism seemed to some observers to come very close to that crusade. He refused to condemn Nazi atrocities. He had inherited a pact with Mussolini, a policy of favor toward Franco, and a hierarchy sympathetic to fascism.

  Attacks on Pius XII for his silence on Nazi atrocities and his general attitude did prompt the Vatican to publish two volumes of selected documents from its own archives in 1966 to support the Pope. These left unanswered the question of why Pius XII did not remain silent on the subject of Communism. And there was no way, of course, to judge just how selectively the documents were retrieved. Nobody outside the secret could know what had been omitted.