The Bormann Brotherhood

by William Stevenson

  Greatly agitated, as he said later, Bauer proposed flying the Führer to Argentina. It could be done, he said, using a captured American Flying Fortress and traveling by way of Spain.

  Hitler agreed that escape was still possible. But he would be “just where I am now within a fortnight. The war is over now that Berlin is finished. I am putting an end to it. I know tomorrow millions of people will be cursing me….”

  The Führer referred to the Alpine Fortress, Bauer reported to his companions. It was quite obviously known by then to Hitler that many of his followers were heading there. That Argentina should have sprung at once to Bauer’s mind is equally significant. That neither of these two regions appeared to spring immediately to the minds of the Nazi-hunters, however, may not be quite as odd as first appears.

  * Ribbentrop told Schellenberg that the Duke of Windsor had been virtually a prisoner of the British secret service, and now that he was in the Iberian peninsula “Hitler thinks you should offer to deposit 50 million Swiss francs for his use if he will reject the British royal family.” If the British secret service blocked this approach, Schellenberg was to take other steps. The Nazi spy chief told British interrogators later that he was shocked and asked if Ribbentrop was in fact requiring that the Duke be kidnapped. “We are interpreting the Duke’s wishes,” Ribbentrop replied. “He may want it to look like a kidnapping.” This comic episode might have had tragic results. Schellenberg ended up hiring a gang to throw stones at the Duke’s villa in Lisbon so that he could report the Duke was under heavy guard when the villa’s occupants reacted. Finally, an elderly British police sergeant came out and told them to go away.

  * Countess Plettenberg and Erich Vermehren, the Abwehr pair, had been summoned by the Gestapo to come home. They sensed trouble and asked the British secret service to help. The price of their ticket to Cairo was the key to the Abwehr codes, which yielded or confirmed much of the information contained here.

  CHAPTER 22

  Police agencies can do only so much in dealing with international criminals. In the case of political gangsters, the limitations are made more difficult because of changes in the alliances between nations. There was evidence of several foreign agencies on the track of Bormann’s friends, each unwilling to take action for different reasons. Bormann was not actively hunted by the Israeli government, for instance, because he was not directly involved in the “final solution” in the way Adolf Eichmann had been. The Soviet Union’s agents in Latin America obviously would prefer to keep a Nazi Brotherhood under observation than destroy it for no visible advantage. The Communists in this period were likely to gain in the long run from the despotism of Nazi-minded regimes, and their arrogant disregard for local sensibilities in a part of the world awakening to social inequalities and injustice. Western Europe felt no compulsion to pursue the remnants of a nightmare. And if anyone was going to find Bormann in Argentia, say, it would be better from the viewpoint of Anglo-American business interests if the Argentinians did it themselves.

  This might seem a cynical theory. But students of Nazi Germany believed that it was typical of the leaders to live their own fantasies, and that this led to their undoing. Commercial enterprises that were financed with crooked Nazi funds would overreach themselves. Guilty men would in time feel a need to crawl into the sunlight and justify themselves. Something like this began to happen in the 1960’s. A libel action in London, which caused a great stir around the world at the time, involved a best-selling American writer and a German death-camp doctor. The significance of the case was missed because its background was unknown to most people. It illustrated the theory that guilty men hang themselves. They do it more quickly, though, if unnerved by a sense of being watched. This is the old policeman’s trick of letting a suspect know he is being shadowed. If he is a wrongdoer, he will make the false move that leads to his arrest.

  I knew from my own encounters with former SS mobsters and Gestapo-type bullies that they needed, more than anything, to prove their right-mindedness—not their innocence, for either they did not feel guilty, or else they refused to permit a sense of guilt to invade their conscious minds. They wanted to be accepted in what they regarded as polite society. They could not resist the impulse to prove themselves right.

  This line of thought led later to the conclusion that Nazi exiles were never truly lost by Allied huntsmen. The suspicion that the British let Otto Skorzeny go in order to see where he went and what he did was not so outlandish. Bormann, too, might have been followed in the same way. These speculations began, for me, during the “euthanasia” trial of Hans Hevelmann in 1964. I had shortly before moved my family to London from Africa, where German business enterprise was flooding into areas vacated by “Anglo-American imperialism.” As editor of Independent Television News-film, I was despondent at watching the world at second hand. The job gave a sense of involvement without any of the discomfort, and this seemed dangerous. The feeling that our society was becoming too detached from reality, helped by television, came to a boil one night when the contents of a correspondent’s camera came into the studios.

  The film, taken from the camera of an old friend, George Clay, of the National Broadcasting Company, was shot while he was dying from bullets fired by armed Congolese. One of the editors commented that it was a pity the camera was shaking. It was an everyday piece of graveyard humor, but I had a sudden sense of anger. George was dead. He had always had a conscientious concern for honesty. People looked at television and had little time to read the background reports that tried to convey more than exploding pictures. George had suffered much agony because he understood black Africans too well and could not therefore simplify his material to satisfy the people back home. He could neither condemn nor condone the extremes of African political life. He was a white from South Africa, and it would have been easy to pose as a great liberal and deplore what happened in Johannesburg while applauding lunacy in Uganda. He could have withdrawn from Africa and put an end to his private torture. He stayed because he believed in what he was doing. He had a blind faith in some central intelligence that might make sense out of all the despair and stupidity. He thought, as I had when abroad, that somewhere at the top were wise men who evaluated reports from the field and did something about them. Now I was one of the men at the top. George had done his job and got killed for it. A film editor had dismissed the report, the film, and the correspondent in a single cynical sentence.

  Yet I let the matter pass. There wasn’t time. More fighting in the Congo was nothing compared with disasters nearer home. The report from the trial of Hans Hevelmann, former member of Hitler’s chancellery, passed notice in the same way. Civilization seemed to be going backward with the help of faster communications and new technology. A hundred years ago, a dispatch from the Congo sent by cleft stick and steam packet might not reach the outside world in time to change anything, but it would be studied with some reasonable care. Now, a war was dismissed in a flash; and twice as much time and money was spent on the commercials flanking it.

  The trial of Hans Hevelmann never got on television. It got a paragraph, perhaps, in one or two European newspapers. The West German press was almost alone in recognizing the importance of the surrounding circumstances.

  Two of the accused died mysteriously before the trial began, and our correspondent in Hamburg reported confidentially that ODESSA was blamed. Out of curiosity, I called State Prosecutor Karl-Heinz Zinnall, of the Hesse province prosecutor’s office. He said a third prominent West German, accused of war crimes, had died violently. He confirmed that the dead men included Professor Werner Heyde, in charge of “euthanasia” killings; and that the trial of doctors accused of similar activities had been put in doubt. He said: “There are people, I believe, who want to prevent the trial. There are doctors who do not want to hear their names mentioned, nor details of their work in the Nazi period.”

  The two others who had died were Dr. Friedrich Tillmann and Ewald Peters, the personal security chief to Chancellor L
udwig Erhard. Heyde was said to have committed suicide in his cell. Tillmann “fell to his death.” The security chief was said to have hanged himself after being arrested on charges that he had been an SS assassin.

  It was suggested that ODESSA protected those connected with the “euthanasia” killings. Heyde had been living and prospering under a false name after escaping from an American military truck in 1947 and going to ground in Schleswig-Holstein. He surfaced as Dr. Fritz Sawade, medical adviser for the state insurance administration and local courts, and in this capacity and under his new name he did rather well for himself, until the secret of his real identity became impossible to conceal. He was arrested. Then began the business of unraveling old evidence and investigating the new friends who had protected him.

  In the middle of this, the Minister of Education for Schleswig-Holstein, Edo Osterloh, vanished, and after a twenty-four-hour search was found “drowned” in three feet of water. Osterloh had been a figure of some controversy when he sprang to the defense of Dr. Werner Catel, who had been a member of the Reich Commission for Disposal of Children. This was part of a larger organization for dealing with racially unworthy and otherwise useless mouths, who were to be fed into a new disposal system.

  It turned out that Osterloh always knew the true identity of Dr. Sawade, now exposed as the notorious Dr. Heyde, who figured on all West German police “Wanted” lists, with the black triangle beside his name that means “Murderer.” The Minister had, nonetheless, assured parents that their children could be placed without fear in the hands of the doctor.

  The doctors’ trial was collapsing. Four important personages were dead. A fifth, Dr. Gerhard Bohne, escaped to Latin America when Heyde’s existence became known.

  I had no compelling reason to look deeper. Professionally, it was taking me far out of my way. I was writing an account of a Communist takeover in Zanzibar, where I had just been; my mood was not sympathetic to Communist sources of information. But this information was confirmed by West Germans, too. “Still, it’s none of my business …” I began to say to a Berlin colleague. And then I remembered the scorn we had for Germans who never resisted Hitler. The state became absolute and individual liberty was suppressed because the welfare of the family was given priority by the breadwinner. How charmingly old-fashioned that word sounded. Breadwinner? These days, with bread in abundant supply, had we all become overly concerned about losing the second car, or worse, lacking money for a vacation? It had been said about the Germans in Hitler’s early period that they could not resign or be discharged without subjecting their wives, their children, and themselves to misery and squalor.

  Mercy-killing arose in Nazi-dominated Europe from the least likable trait of citizens in the National Socialist state: their submissiveness and eager acceptance of institutional rules. It was left to the institutions to decide if a person was mentally defective or the bearer of an incurable disease. The language of the social-welfare worker, heard loud in the land to this day, glossed over all the atrocities.

  Martin Bormann delighted in the camouflage of nonsense talk. He was getting his own back at the intellectuals who held him in such contempt. He put his name to decrees such as this one: “The administration of justice can only make a small contribution to the extermination of members of these groups [Jews, gypsies, Russians, and non-Germanized Poles]. No useful purpose is served keeping such persons in German prisons even if, as is done today on a large scale, they are utilized as labor for war purposes.”

  What this meant, of course was that the procedures for administering justice were irrelevant. Inferior races were “unconditionally exterminable.” Bormann’s gobbledygook satisfied the legalminded citizens. It sounded authoritative. Its true purpose was sufficiently concealed that few Germans felt any prick of conscience. All they chose to read into it was that the normal court procedures were costly and time-consuming in cases where the judgment was already clear. Of course Jews and gypsies were unconditionally exterminable. It said so, right there, on an official order properly signed and sealed.

  Bormann’s method is recognizable today in a world that has refined the art of concealing ugly decisions within tortuous and high-minded phrases. Any citizen who felt like fighting a Bormann ordinance would feel, like many of us today, that he had neither time nor energy to flail through the flatulent phrases to get at the truth.

  The Bormann method enabled Leonardo Conti, Secretary of State for Public Health, to dispose of 50,000 “useless mouths” in the first six months of the war. The blue-eyed Swiss had Bormann’s ordinance as his authority to make his own decision on who was to be gassed and who was to get a lethal injection.

  To fight such decisions was also to be disloyal to the party and a traitor to the country. For instance, illness was, in effect, a crime among Nazis, with their morbid insistence upon youth and health. So it was easy to phrase a decision to liquidate an entire group in the language of this report to the security authorities on a Russian-Jewish settlement: “Contagious diseases having broken out, a second action consisted in applying special treatment to 812 men and women—all persons without interest from the racial and intellectual point of view.” In other words, 812 villagers were executed.

  There were few reliable statistics on the numbers killed during the “euthanasia” campaign between 1939 and 1941, based on Nazi theories about purity of race, in which the vanishing doctors and officials had been involved. Similar details, however, were emerging in a libel case being prepared in London against the author of Exodus, Leon Uris, on behalf of Dr. Wladislaw Dering, who then had a successful practice at Seven Sisters Road in the London suburb of Finsbury Park. Dering had performed experimental sexual surgery without benefit of anesthetic on prisoners at Auschwitz. The publicity which must inevitably follow the Dering case was anticipated with a good deal of nervous anxiety by others with guilty consciences.

  Dr. Heyde, around whom the West German trial would have revolved had he not conveniently died five days before it was due to begin, was responsible for certifying that certain people were unfit to live when he began his official duties in 1939 in connection with the mercy-killing program. This was to dispose of people with alleged mental ailments, or misshapen and imbecile children. They were, when properly registered and certified, sent to one of five gassing stations. The gassing in those days was clumsily done. Relatives of the victims were told nothing until it was completed, when notices were sent out regretting “unsuccessful appendix operations” and other sudden illnesses. The selection of mentally retarded was based upon a questionnaire, and in two weeks before Christmas 1940, Heyde received 2,209 of these questionnaires for certification. The forms explained that all patients must be reported who suffered from “weak-mindedness” or senile illnesses, and who did not have German citizenship or were not of German or related blood. There were other stipulations, of course, and footnotes gave a handy guide to the methods by which the question of race could be answered. There was no written suggestion at first that “Jewish half-breeds of 1st or 2nd degree, Negro half-breeds, Gypsies” should be automatically gassed for being half-witted. That is how, in the end, the system worked, however. It became known in the concentration camps as “Operation Heyde,” and various postwar witnesses testified at the Nuremberg trials that a commission led by Heyde visited the camps and quickly separated prisoners who were unfit for hard work, certifying them “incurably insane.” The commission was made up of psychiatrists, and the statistics of those inmates sent to Mauthausen for gassing make it clear that the commission had less than five minutes to conduct the medical examination of each prisoner.

  After the war, when Heyde had escaped from American captivity and adopted the name of Sawade, he was recognized in 1954 by a fellow psychiatrist, Dr. Creutzfeldt, who reported what he knew to the Flensburg Public Prosecutor, Bruno Bourwieg. The advice given to Creutzfeldt was that he should forget the whole matter. This advice came from Judge Buresch, who had shared with Heyde a room in a British internment camp i
n 1945. A conspiracy of silence then engulfed leaders of the North German community. The general view was expressed by Dr. Dering: these wartime actions were justified by the conditions that prevailed at the time.

  On February 13, 1964, having been arrested as the result of more protest from West Germans with a stronger sense of justice, Dr. Heyde was said to have hanged himself, although he was held in a maximum-security cell.

  Further inquiry established that much earlier he had been helped, while in detention, to make an attempt to escape. The view was held among West German police at Frankfurt (where he was first arrested) that he had been for many years under special protection by ODESSA men. His false papers were professionally executed. He had been warned to go underground again, just before his arrest, and disappeared only to be caught while attempting to leave the country. Only one of the accused doctors appeared at the preliminary hearing: Dr. Hans Hevelmann. As Bohne was to say later, when detained in Buenos Aires: “Our brothers did their best. Hevelmann was the least dangerous to the rest of us.” And Heyde, it would appear, knew too much to be trusted to protect his brothers if he should ever be confronted by a public prosecutor before a public tribunal.

  Meanwhile, the libel action brought by Dr. Dering against Leon Uris was getting under way in London. The big question was why Dering had brought an action for damages against the author and publisher of Exodus, in which appeared a paragraph concerned with experiments having as their objective the sterilization en masse of people of Jewish blood—the genocidal Nazi “final solution.” The plaintiff alleged that he had been libeled because he was featured in the novel as “Dr. Dehring.” Was Dering backed by his old colleagues in attempting, by this voluntary step on his part, to prove that experiments on prisoners at Auschwitz and other camps were not crimes against humanity? Dering had a flourishing practice in a respectable London neighborhood and he could gain nothing from this action except unwelcome publicity. (In fact, he was awarded the traditional “one ha’penny” damages, which meant that although the jury had found for him, it was a technical decision based on the fact that few eyewitnesses were likely to be available in a case involving mass murder. The innocent were dead. The guilty were hardly likely to come forward and give evidence. The ha’penny was worth a fraction of a cent. Dering died soon afterward, in disgrace.) Who paid the heavy legal costs involved? Who or what prompted him? These legitimate questions have never been properly answered, but in 1964 there were many West Germans who believed that the Brotherhood, as well as ODESSA, hoped the London libel action would provide a public platform on which Dering could make the case for Nazi actions.