The Bormann Brotherhood

by William Stevenson

  He said he would like the police to fly him back to Germany. The jungle was a lonely place. He would like to see what had happened to his own country. Let the police send him there for a holiday. He grinned, running his tongue along a toothless gum, glancing at the uniformed police lounging in the dusty street.

  That night the old man was taken back to his Indian community. He belonged to a sect, it was said, that refused to touch anything mechanical or metallic. They wore potato sacks because ordinary clothes were stitched by machine and they called themselves “costel-lados” after the word for a potato bag. They called the Devil “Camioneta” which meant literally “little truck,” That is what they thought of man-made things. The place where they lived was called “Hormiga” in honor of the ant. The symbol of their religion was a crooked cross, but they did not worship anything; neither spirits nor idols.

  Could we go to his village?

  No, said the local police chief. Not without permission. It would be necessary to go back to Bogota for the permission, and then how are you going to return? “The air service is for officials. You were lucky. Anyway, this place of the old man is in a protected area. And if you try to go by road, it is not easy. And the jungle is all around. You will have to sleep in hammocks and eat some kind of yuca made from cassava and bananas, which will only make your belly ache.”

  “Come and have some more beer,” said Eric. “On the house!”

  There was in fact a military air service—SATENA—to jungle communities within what the government called National Territories. The passenger depended on official good will. Flying back over that terrain, I was again astonished by the steep-sided mountains and deep valleys, the lush vegetation and the difficulty of travel on foot.

  “Made more difficult by certain police agencies,” said my Colombian companion. “The country is efficiently divided into squares, so far as policing goes. You cannot move without being observed.”

  “Forgive my saying so—”

  “But we don’t seem all that efficient?” He grinned. “We are not. The Germans taught us. A special mission from Madrid led by Hitler’s expert.” He snapped his fingers. “The man who rescued Mussolini and Franco’s brother-in-law during your big war … Otto Skorzeny.”

  “He was here? When?”

  My companion scratched his head. “Three years ago, the last time. But who knows how often? It is easy, when our national airline shoots the big shots from here to there like capsules. Skorzeny lives in Madrid, no?”

  Yes, indeed he did. I began to quote Skorzeny on the use of sealed airliners between countries where immigration could be bribed, and then I thought better of it. Three years ago … Out of idle curiosity, I checked the diplomatic list. The German Ambassador was Ernst Ludwig Ostermann von Roth, whose Nazi background was on record: joined the party in 1937, No. 3,810,743 … Nazi party representative with the German Army in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union….

  Official German disapproval of this latest “Bormann” story was soon made plain. Editorials and news “stories” reporting the indignation of local citizens appeared in several of the country’s newspapers at the same time. The phrases were almost identical. The war had been over and forgotten. Journalists who dug up dirt of this kind were helping the Communists.

  The German Embassy had first said Bormann’s fingerprints would arrive on the morning flight from Frankfurt via Madrid that Saturday. Now, two days later, the embassy said there were no fingerprints on file of Martin Bormann anywhere. In those days, thumb prints were taken. No, there was no plan to fly thumb prints over because none existed either. But of course there were criminal fingerprints made in the 1920’s when Bormann was involved in a murder—except that was in Leipzig, and of course that city was today under Communist control.

  I remarked on the coincidence of the press reactions, and it was pointed out that the German community advertised heavily in those papers. This observation came from a Colombian who made his living as a journalist, whose children went to a German school subsidized by the West German government, and were picked up by a German school bus at no cost. He was a cultured man, living in a modern apartment with well-mannered children and a fine wife. And he pointed out something else. There was no tradition of a free and balanced press. The editor who started the police investigation, José Pardo Lamas, was “removed” from his post on the weekly magazine Cromos a month later.

  The police Colonel in the headquarters of General Luis Ordonez Valderana said: “My colleague wrote to the suspect a letter of congratulation. He said: ‘Now you can dance through the streets of Colombia and tell everyone you are Martin Bormann and they will laugh and buy you a drink.’ ”

  General Ordonez, chief of DAS, had been very proud on discovering “Bormann.” Then the uniformed police, supervised by a different minister, took over the interrogation. Ordonez, known on the local board of German companies, changed his mind overnight. The suspect was to be released.

  Just before the suspect was brought into Pasto, the town was flooded with an unaccustomed number of steel-helmeted and armed regular police. I commented on their numbers and received surprised looks, as if I had shown naïveté, which indeed I had. The police were there to intimidate strangers. But individually they were open to negotiation. “We have tough currency restrictions; all in the name of socialism but, in reality, to give a few families the monopoly on our trade.” “Here is documentation of higher authorities who have directorships on German companies, por favor. Of course I can make you a copy. I can even make an original.”

  With documents so easy to come by, why did the old man have nothing to cover the years between 1926 and 1952? Well, they said at police headquarters, the papers for 1926 were issued in Ecuador, and the old man’s canoe had capsized crossing the river and all the papers between got lost. A bewildering explanation.

  A bewildering city. The way to get around it was by colectivo, a small Volkswagen bus, if you could find one. The business center reminded me of those grandiose plans Albert Speer used to draw up, showing Berlin as the heart of an empire. Walking past the cemetery, I came to the sudden end of tarmac. There flashed into my mind the vast highway Mussolini started in the Horn of Africa, and the time I drove two miles along it, past triumphal columns, into the desert, where it expired, like another dusty dream of glory.

  The police changed their minds about Ehrmann-Hartmann. After I had left, along with an odd collection of investigators, he disappeared back into the jungle. The Viennese hunter of war criminals Simon Wiesenthal said he was the dupe of the Brotherhood’s deception agency. He had been catapulted into prominence to distract attention from Bormann’s real hideout in Paraguay. This did not explain the anxiety of the large German community to discourage further questions. It did not explain the police medical report, which claimed that the old man was not only scarred in places where prints or tattoo marks might have been found, but that a clumsy and undoubtedly painful attempt had been made late in his life to remove his foreskin in a belated circumcision. He was not, as he had said, Jewish.

  If the old man was a pawn in some deception plan, certainly his papers could have been put into better order. There were SS experts who surprised their own leaders by their skill at this. Walter Schellenberg described, after the war, how American interrogators were convinced by a fake passport that he had visited the United States. He was annoyed at the charge that he, an SS general, chief of foreign intelligence, skulked through America in the middle of the war. The Americans then produced the passport made out in Schellenberg’s name. It was an American passport, and it had all the relevant embarkation and debarkation stamps, a photograph of Schellenberg overprinted by U.S. immigration in New York. The fake passport had been found among Schellenberg’s papers. Then finally he had recognized it as a small joke produced for his birthday in 1943 by the SS technicians in the department of forged documents.

  That department continued to forge documents after the war. Schellenberg, reduced to a spiteful e
xile in the shabby gentility of his Swiss retreat, described how Klaus Barbie had escaped French retribution for Gestapo crimes and took the name of “Mertens” before joining ODESSA, which was operating in an Augsburg POW camp a large-scale counterfeiting agency. “They went across the Atlantic to teach those Latin-American natives to be good anti-Communists,” Schellenberg said maliciously. “After all, I know enough about that. There is a region where you could create your own Nazi state and never be noticed. Of course this has its disadvantages. The purpose of reviving Nazism is to spread the gospel, and there is no purpose hiding a fine Fourth Reich in the jungle. Yet it would make a start,” he added pedantically. “Latin America is a sixth of the world’s land surface. How often I studied it!”

  A secret German U-boat refueling base, tolerated during the war by Colombia, was a small island in the Caribbean within striking distance of vital Allied shipping routes. This island, San Andrés, is reached these days from Miami by the West German subsidiary of Lufthansa, Condor Flugdienst GmbH. I took another look at it on the way to discuss this latest Bormann manifestation with friends in Allied intelligence and with Sir William Stephenson, in Bermuda, nearby. It was useful to remind oneself that the Germans had an intimate knowledge of these waters, which did not end abruptly with the war.

  Farther north, the small island of Bermuda had been shared by the British with American naval intelligence, and all their vast resources made it possible to oversee Nazi operations on a scale that, in those days, was remarkable for its global dimensions. Here, once again, I paused. It was like old times. Years earlier, Stephenson’s man in charge of Latin America, Peter Dwyer, had helped me to reach the killer of Stalin’s archenemy, Trotsky. This episode was not irrelevant to events today. The same questions had come up about documents, methods of getting into Latin America, the purposeful hunting down of a rival leader in a movement that had the same ideological and international pretensions as the National Socialists. (It was Goebbels who was quoted once as saying he had spun a coin as a young man: heads he would be a Nazi, tails a Communist.) There had been the same problem faced by police organizations: in the case of Trotsky’s killer, a forged Canadian passport like the one used by the pro-Nazi fugitive the Count de Bernonville. The source of the forgeries was known, and Canadian passports were the favorite choice of international assassins; but the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had been hamstrung by consideration for national sovereignty—not a consideration that handicapped the forgers, working on passports taken from Canadians killed in the Spanish Civil War. I remembered that it had been necessary to bribe a distinguished member of the Mexican Cabinet to get proof of the true identity of Trotsky’s killer; and then we were obliged to check every word of the documents. The story is a complete case history of the silent work of Russian agents in Latin America. After that case, nothing would seem too fantastic. This explains my mood of ambivalence after seeing Ehrmann-Hartmann in Colombia. The long trail ahead was daunting. Nothing would be what it seemed.

  Stephenson and CIA men who had been on the alert at all the Latin-American stations for Bormann thought the Brotherhood had certainly broken up into squabbling groups. The fascination lay in the way the man himself stirred primeval feelings.

  This was the man’s power, even now. The rest was an adventure story. But the man moved among us at different levels. There was the comic-strip character who knew, long before these things became commonplace news reports, about shipping dead agents in the cargo holds of aircraft. In the center of his web, from Berlin he dispatched an admiral to Japan by submarine. He trained in war the men who would operate Die Spinne with money drawn from numbered accounts in Swiss banks. He had cave-dwelling artists produce superb examples of counterfeit money. In the early 1940’s, his couriers were capable of reaching Buenos Aires from his headquarters more speedily than our own men from Washington. At his disposal was the financial wizard Schacht, who looked down upon the world as if from a satellite and viewed it in blobs of color that represented not continents but concentrations of capital.

  His greatest strength was his bovine air of peasant dim-wittedness. His greatest upset would be the way the Irish farm workers forced Scarface Skorzeny to sell his estate near Cork. That was hard to take. Bormann considered himself a peasant. If newcomers to the Brotherhood seized control and forced him to give up his wealth, or if foreign agents broke down his morale so that he ceased to move in large centers of population, he would be perfectly capable of returning to the simple life of a peasant.

  Comic-strip figures reflect, after all, a kind of reality. This superman held attention because he had this underlying toughness of the soil. Ehrmann-Hartmann could be Bormann for reasons that were disturbing.

  The gnarled old man in the jungle had left me with a sense of his infinite cunning. Months after the fuss died away, he dematerialized like a piece of ectoplasm. He vanished.

  Stephenson, noting this, insisted that it was folly to suppose this was the end. His professional colleagues in Washington and London agreed, for philosophical reasons. They recalled that during the trial of Nazi leaders after the war, U.S. Prosecutor Robert E. Jackson rejected the plea that they were innocent because they followed orders: “We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow.”

  Tomorrow had become today, and the British judge at the trial, Sir Hartley Shawcross, might have been commenting upon the great crises of our own times when he said: “Political loyalty and military obedience are excellent things but they neither require nor do they justify the commission of patently wicked acts. There comes a point where a man must answer his leader if he is also to answer to his conscience.”

  CHAPTER 24

  Hitler’s death at the climax of the war could establish a legend in the minds of later generations of Germans that would take a dangerously long time to eradicate. This was evident to his only close companion in the final years, Bormann. It was also evident to pioneers in a method which brought together Allied historians and psychologists in analytical studies of human reactions under stress. The method, though of course it has its pitfalls, is now commonly used. It played a role in changing Western policies toward Chairman Mao, and a similar prosopographic technique is employed by the Russians in responding to the West’s leaders.

  Martin Bormann was one of those men who are uncannily sensitive to all the factors at work in a political situation. He knew Hitler’s ability to play on unconscious tendencies of the German people; to speak for their unexpressed desires; to paralyze the critical functions of individual Germans and take over himself the making of decisions. He knew Hitler could do this in communion with the masses.

  Hitler was not unique. The German people were not peculiarly susceptible. The interplay between them is in some ways more easily duplicated today than it was then. The frustrated hopes of millions in Latin America have not found expression through Martin Bormann, but this does not mean that nations will not rebel again, as Germany did, against all the rules by which civilized society is supposed to live.

  Hitler’s suicide was foreseen as a dangerous basis for a new mythology during the pioneer work of the psychoanalyst Dr. Walter Langer. This work was reinforced by Oxford dons and such disparate characters as Ivonne Kirkpatrick and Lord Beaverbrook, who had questioned Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess.

  All the elements come together in the puzzle Bormann presents by the very persistence of his own odd legend. Hitler destroyed himself and tried to destroy the world he secretly hated, but so far none of this has woven itself into a new mythology. Instead, the old Nazi diehards promote a view that is agreeable to many Germans: the political philosophy was good, the leader bad. It is Bormann who became the legend.

  Bormann showed every intention of wishing to lead a Nazi revival. The studies conducted by Anglo-American teams reveal this. What about the Russians? There is evidence they have made similar deductions: that Bormann was more useful alive but unaware of being under
observation. He could be driven into moral collapse later if necessary. The Russians had a long history of close practical collaboration with Germany in Hitler’s early days. This tends to be forgotten because of the later gargantuan battles between Nazi and Soviet forces. This influenced Bormann’s career, of course. Both the Russians and the West, I now believe, regard Bormann as the type of man who would do anything to exercise power; who would acquire personal wealth to satisfy a deep peasant urge for possession of land; who was nevertheless not dependent upon luxuries, and because of this ability to live simply and even in discomfort would always be, as Albert Speer said, “a born survivor.” He loved possessing people rather than things. He ruled by terror. His strength lay in secrecy, and also in his administrative talents, his knowledge of how to make a system work to his advantage, his control over men like Hitler.

  His postwar career was therefore likely to be a disposition of his forces. Intelligence research-and-analysis teams submitted the idea that Bormann was even perhaps worth leaving alive and licensed to roam. He was more interesting for what he would do than for what he had done already. The past could not be changed. The future might be improved if more was known about this kind of man, and the men attracted to him even while they feared him.

  These were not sickly preoccupations. The men who studied Bormann felt that he might explain a lot about human behavior. If he got away, and they followed his tracks, he would be more likely to lead them toward solutions to problems of men’s behavior than he was likely to lead to a Fourth Reich.

  A proposal to let Bormann run free would not be some irresponsible caper. His actions could be projected with fair accuracy. If anything went wrong with the project, it was more likely to be the result of indifference on the part of government agencies. The British were retreating into their own national self-interests. Americans were preoccupied with rebuilding Europe and large parts of Asia. Only the Russians, probably, had time to spare for single-minded pursuit of one man, which would require a considerable number of experts. Hitler had demonstrated the validity of proso profiles. His revenge fantasies were described in details that were confirmed after the war by those who worked close to him. The peculiarities of his conduct had a direct bearing upon Martin Bormann; and it was encouraging for professional analysts of war information to find that Hitler’s sexual malformation had been accurately foreshadowed long before a physical examination proved its existence. His erotic and megalomaniac daydreams were deduced only on the basis of careful intelligence studies. They turned out to be symptoms of a certain kind of man whose early childhood approximated that of Hitler, combined with the psychological effects of genital inadequacy.