The Bormann Brotherhood

by William Stevenson

  The continuing bias was commented upon in 1952 when Pius XII tried to impose on the Italian Prime Minister an alliance between his party and a neo-fascist group in local elections. This would have avoided the appointment of a Communist mayor. A full account by the Defense Minister of the time, Giulio Andreotti, described the Pope’s confidence that the big battalions of Catholic Action would tip the balance. A Jesuit called on the Prime Minister’s wife to persuade her to influence her husband, who resisted the plan because it made nonsense of national policy. The wife said: “We don’t want Mussolini back.” She quoted the priest’s reply: “Better Mussolini than Stalin.”

  The story not only in itself is significant. The fact that it is accepted as true by Catholic laymen is also significant. It has never been denied. The American Jesuit scholar Father Robert Graham wrote that when there were denials by Vatican spokesmen, they created a complication for historians: “These denials are sometimes diplomatic in nature….” This is a diplomatic way of saying that the Vatican has its own version of what is truth.

  This is why any documentary proof of what passed between Pius XII and the Nazi party was likely to be regarded as important. If anything of potential embarrassment was to be conveyed by word of mouth, emissaries from Hitler were received in one of a series of waiting rooms, furnished and decorated in a combination of gloom and heavy sentimentality. “Dark walls covered with damask, chairs supplied with coverlets of lace made by devoted nuns, pictures of a maudlin sort with a rainbow over St. Peter’s and the world around lashed by storms,” reported SS General Karl Wolff, who late in the day tried to negotiate separately with the Americans. Like many high-ranking Germans, he kept open a prudent line to God and paid regular visits to the Cardinal Secretary, the Pope’s chief minister, with confidential reports of plans to salvage something from the ruins of the Third Reich.

  Documents of consequence were handled by the Chancellor for Apostolic Briefs, housed on the third floor of the Apostolic Palace. The location was a guarantee of privacy, and there is no record of Allied agents penetrating either the labyrinthian corridors or the bureaucratic mysteries of Pius XII, who managed administrative affairs for himself. The Pope was well known for his liking in general for the Germans and his feeling that the church was not directly persecuted by Hitler. The papacy had always been a completely autocratic body, with no pretensions to democracy, and its foreign policy was to seek to promote by diplomatic means a condition where souls might be saved. (Nevertheless, the Hungarian revolt in 1956 brought from the same wartime Pope, Pius XII, three encyclicals in three days—something no other pope had ever done—condemning the Russian action.) A franker statement of its policy would be that the church has sought always to follow, in relations with governments, a policy of the greatest advantage to its own survival. And of course this is implicit in Catholic theology.

  Escaping Germans were given sanctuary on the assumption that they were returning to the fold or were prepared to be converted. Georg von Konrat, a Nazi intelligence agent on Russian affairs, described later how he was helped along the “monastery chain” to Rome, where he became a postgraduate civil engineering student, assisted by the Teutonic College, where Bishop Hudal held office. Konrat testified that he crossed into Italy with Martin Bormann in 1947,* after Bormann felt he could risk traveling from the refugee camp and, later, the Danish SS hospital where he had gone underground.

  Bormann with his bundles of papers had a claim on papal protection; and his character was such that he would be quite ready, for the sake of survival, to kiss a cardinal’s ring or go through any other rituals that might convince the church of his readiness to be saved. His lackey Kaltenbrunner had sent his mistress, the Catholic Countess Gisela von Westrop, to Switzerland with the bulk of the documents. When she was stopped that one time by American counterintelligence, she was on a final errand with convertible jewelry.

  The traffic into Switzerland reached astonishing proportions, as Schellenberg made clear during his most productive period of detention, in the debriefing center on the estate of the Duke of Bedford. By 1944, said Schellenberg, the Swiss traffic was worth already the equivalent of $600 million in stolen gold alone.

  The Swiss demonstrated, at least for Schellenberg, that the double standards applied to Nazi victims were far from peculiar to Rome. He told the British: “The Swiss sacrificed thousands of human lives as their part in your victory. Not their lives. The lives of perhaps 100,000 Jews who made their way to the frontiers and were turned back—thrown back in our hands.” The Swiss Federal Council commissioned a postwar report which showed that Jewish refugees were either pushed back or handed over to the German police. The author of this official report, Professor Karl Ludwig, wrote: “Some committed suicide at the feet of Swiss guards rather than fall into German hands.”

  The movement of looted Nazi treasure was on a large scale even by late 1942. Yet in October, said Schellenberg, he was astonished to hear through his agents that Switzerland had ordered the First and Fourth Army Corps to reinforce the frontiers and seal certain zones with a no man’s land between. His Swiss intelligence contacts explained: “This is to prevent the Jews entering our country.” The fear of reprisal was universal. In the Vatican, the rationalization was that if the Pope spoke on behalf of non-Catholics, it would be the Catholics who would go to the death camps instead.

  The Swiss government, at least, was prepared to examine its own conscience in public. The federal report on wartime rejection of refugees also commented upon the readiness to place Swiss banking institutions, notorious for their secrecy, at Nazi disposal. Great quantities of documentary material were moved into Swiss vaults, including duplicate prints of most Nazi war films and the footage of executions, which officials thought would be of future marketable value. At war’s end, papers marked with the special secrecy stamp used by Bormann’s party chancellery began to arrive. These included negotiable bonds and mortgages raised on property which everyone (including Hitler) thought belonged to the Führer. The Swiss, with their elaborate and salable respect for privacy even in criminal matters, were not prepared to disclose more information. But Schellenberg, who worked closely with Swiss intelligence for the last three years of the war, was less reticent. Before he left the debriefing center, he mentioned that among Bormann’s papers were the plans put forward at Hitler’s insistence to kidnap the Pope. He thought that if anything had made Bormann acceptable to Rome, it was his thwarting of those plans.

  * He mentioned this encounter again, almost in passing, in a personal account of political and racial oppression in South West Africa: Passport to Truth, published in 1972.

  CHAPTER 21

  The plot to kidnap the Pope was on a par with other wild-eyed conspiracies, but it was not likely to amuse the Holy See, which had knowledge enough of Hitler’s increasingly monstrous adventures. He had sent his best agents to Lisbon when the Duke of Windsor was visiting that neutral territory in 1940; and Schellenberg described later the ludicrous preparations they made to capture the former King of England.* On that occasion, the British secret service did not take the matter lightly either.

  A warning that the Vatican risked invasion by “Skorzeny’s gangsters” was sent through devious channels by Martin Bormann. Thus he rendered a redeeming service to the church of which he had been the most dedicated persecutor. His action, though it cost him little and indeed saved him a lot, would certainly have helped his journey, to which so many apparently honest eyewitnesses have testified.

  His quixotic deed was intensely practical when examined closely. Bormann had been a lifelong and fanatical anti-Christian. Hitler, on the other hand, remained a Catholic.

  The plan to remove Pope Pius XII to somewhere in occupied France was proposed in late 1943. “Under the influence of Goebbels, the Führer was seriously considering the deportation of the Pope into a kind of exile at Avignon,” Schellenberg reported after the war. He was himself, even at this early stage, preparing escape routes and had been in secret conta
ct with an American, Abraham Stevens Hewitt, in Stockholm, whom the Nazi spy chief believed to be a special representative of President Roosevelt.

  Kidnapping the Pope was not likely to advance the interests of those Germans hoping to either change sides or get a peace settlement that would leave them some measure of power. Schellenberg was worried. He talked to Bormann, arguing with considerable force that Hitler had avoided a direct confrontation with the church and that this had proved to be good strategy. So long as church leaders felt there was a prospect of preserving some foothold within the Third Reich they kept out of politics and pacified their congregations.

  Otto Skorzeny was called in. He was already planning the aerial rescue of Mussolini, held captive after the overthrow of his fascist regime in July. Skorzeny was aghast at the prospect of storming the Vatican, not because he thought it was militarily impossible, but because even he could foresee the repercussions. Nevertheless, a plan was drawn up, based upon a precise knowledge of the layout of Vatican City and the Pope’s routine.

  If that scheme seemed insane, there was more to come. Ribbentrop now revealed his project to send a large number of special agents by U-boat to the American coast. They would coordinate their distribution of propaganda with a great radio campaign directed toward “hyphenated Americans” of European origin to create opposition to Roosevelt’s re-election. At once orders were sent out requiring an immediate estimate of the long-range submarines available for this enterprise.

  “Then,” said Schellenberg, “came the most astonishing suggestion. Ribbentrop stood up and said he had a matter of considerable gravity. The utmost secrecy was essential.”

  Stalin was to be assassinated. Only Hitler and Bormann knew the details. A conference would be arranged so that Ribbentrop himself could come face to face with the Russian leader: “The Führer said one man cannot do it alone. An accomplice is necessary.” Schellenberg, in considerable apprehension as to who that accomplice was likely to be, trotted off to see if his technical experts could produce a tiny revolver that would look like a fountain pen. It had to be capable of firing a heavy-caliber bullet with reasonable accuracy at a range of between eighteen and twenty-five feet.

  Schellenberg thought they were all mad. Bormann did not agree with him in specific terms. “But Bormann never did commit himself in such delicate matters. He told me, however, that the proposal to kidnap the Pope would be sidetracked.”

  The attempt on Stalin’s life did go forward, according to Schellenberg, but not along the lines of Ribbentrop’s suicidal suggestion. That one was eased out of Hitler’s mind by Bormann, using the standard procedure he had long ago explained to Skorzeny: “Agree! Report progress! Let time pass, and then gradually introduce obstacles….”

  Two agents were selected to place an adhesive charge of explosives on Stalin’s car. “It was about the size of a fist and looked like a lump of mud,” Schellenberg recalled later. “The fuse was controlled by short-wave radio, and the transmitter which automatically set it off was the size of a cigarette box and had a range of seven miles. We had two Red Army deserters, one of them friendly with mechanics in the Kremlin garage, or so he said. They were flown to the region where Stalin had his headquarters and there they parachuted down and were never heard from again.”

  All these insanities were duly noted on Bormann’s small squares of cardboard, while he continued with his usual energy to build up his future contacts. One of these was Paul Leverkühn, of Admiral Canaris’s Mideast intelligence section. He was chief of the central station at Istanbul, where the Papal Nuncio was Cardinal Roncalli. Leverkühn had been recalled briefly to discuss the desertions by German intelligence officers, which had already begun. The worst case was that of the Abwehr workers in Istanbul. They deserted to the British, who had them flown to Cairo.*

  The Istanbul station spymaster, having explained privately to Bormann the general chaos that had overtaken all Mideast operations, was requested, upon his return, to give the Papal Nuncio a packet. It contained the detailed plan for removing the Pope from Rome to Avignon, together with Martin Bormann’s assurance that the plan was not going to be executed. What he had in mind may never be known. On past performance, he was making sure that the Vatican escape hatch stayed open. Leverkühn, who lived after the war to tell the tale, returned at once and faithfully delivered the package.

  In this strange way, Martin Bormann made Cardinal Roncalli, the gentle old man who eventually succeeded Pius XII, the channel for odd news. The Cardinal at once informed the Pope. He did more. He got in touch with Archbishop Francis Spellman, in New York. They had been corresponding for some time, and Spellman had reported to Roosevelt upon the Papal Nuncio’s friendly and personal letters. Roosevelt, in turn, informed the British, through an apartment suite at the top of the Hotel Dorset, on New York’s West 54th Street. Here Churchill’s personal intelligence chief, William Stephenson, lived in quiet obscurity when he was not directing the large and well-camouflaged establishment around the corner known as British Security Co-ordination.

  Stephenson flew regularly by bomber across the Atlantic. He checked with Cairo and obtained the required collateral. Intercepts of Abwehr messages confirmed that the Pope had been warned of what was in Hitler’s mind and in what manner Bormann had temporarily, at least, distracted the Führer. A description of Hitler’s condition at this time further established the general suspicion that Bormann was the real man in command, a fact not appreciated before and that even at this time was recognized by a tragically small number of Allied strategists. “Hitler’s appearance was alarming,” a confidential report from Canaris stated. “His left arm trembled with such violence he had to hold it down with his right hand, so that one had the impression of a puppet whose strings were being misused by its master, the left hand jerking up and the right hand pushing it back down. His manner of walking was jerky too. His eyes, which I remembered always as hypnotic and dominating, had lost any spark of life. It really seemed as if this was a walking doll out of which emerged another voice that remained as strong and clear as before. But even here, the sentences were now short and staccato. This mansize puppet was wearing out, and whoever crouched inside it with more messages still to deliver must have been preparing to leave.”

  Bormann, the man crouching inside, was preparing to leave. Stephenson had more urgent matters on his mind, for the death of the Third Reich was far from sure. Nevertheless, he and General William Donovan, of OSS, had their experts prepare an analysis of what might happen, partly in order to encourage more defections from German intelligence stations abroad. These defections were producing invaluable intelligence, which would be vital to the success of D-Day and the final onslaught of Allied invasion armies.

  It seemed to the experts assigned the task of predicting the movements of escaping Nazis once the war was won that Latin America was still the logical place of refuge. With uncanny foresight, they suggested that leading Nazis would make use of established escape routes through the Bavarian Alps and Italy, following a chain of monasteries. Others would attempt to leave by air through Spain and by submarine from the Hamburg area. Special attention would have to be given to coded messages transmitted from short-wave stations operating in Spain and Lisbon with substations in North and South Africa; all were vital to German air and undersea operations and could be expected to have a role in any subsequent escape plans.

  Thus a great many eyes and ears were open and listening by the time the Nazis began to leave their sinking ship. Perhaps the watches were prepared too soon. At all events, by the middle of 1945 there were few among the Western Allies who took action on the prediction that the movement to Latin America would become a flood once the war ended.

  The service Bormann rendered the Vatican was repaid with mathematical precision, according to Franz Stangl and other fugitives, captured later. They claim Bormann made at least one visit to his dying wife. She had settled the children in the villa at Wolkenstein in the Grödnertal of the Austrian Tyrol, a place best re
ached by muleback because it was so remote. General George Patton had been informed of her whereabouts through Alexander Raskin, who, with extraordinary compassion in view of his own wartime sufferings, reported that the local doctor told him Mrs. Bormann was fatally ill with cancer. Patton then instructed counterintelligence agents to “let the poor woman die in peace.” As a result, security around the villa was relaxed.

  However, a woman, whose credibility was attested by British investigators, reported seeing Bormann on the Italian side of the border in September 1945. Her evidence came too late, for by then Bormann had vanished again. Her name was Hannelore Thalheimer, and she said she had known Bormann in Munich and could not be mistaken. She had come face to face with him on the main street in Bolzano, about twelve miles from where Gerda Bormann had been moved into a small hospital run by Americans for prisoners of war.

  A balancing of accounts must have taken place between Bormann and the church if these reports, which fit remarkably well together, are true. Gerda knew her husband would surely hang if caught. She was also under the shadow of death. Her published letters indicate that the collapse of one god, Hitler, left her, but not Bormann, in need of spiritual sustenance. She doted on the children, and in her last months must have been comforted by the thought of some other institution taking care of them. She talked a great deal to a visiting priest, according to neighbors at the villa and the Americans working in the hospital. So she might also have asked the church’s help for her husband.

  Before he committed suicide, Hitler called in his private pilot, Major General Hans Bauer, and said: “I would like to take my leave of you.”