The Bormann Brotherhood

by William Stevenson

  All these stories led to nothing. Bormann was reported by a man who “escaped with him from Berlin” to govern a self-contained Nazi colony in the land of the dictator he so admired, President Stroessner. It was hidden in one of the world’s great fortresses (of which Latin America is full), one kilometer west of the Paraná River and twenty-four kilometers north of the Brazil-Paraguay border. It was called Kolonie Waldner 555.

  Who could disprove the detailed story of Erich Karl Wiedwald? He claimed that as a noncommissioned officer in the Waffen SS he was a prisoner in a Russian military hospital the morning after Bormann vanished in Berlin. Wiedwald escaped in the company of six men, including Rolf Schwent and a stocky middle-aged officer who led them eventually north to Flensburg. At the Danish border, they broke up. Wiedwald felt safe enough to take a job (and this is certainly true) with the U.S. Military Police. There in the “Hungry Winter” of 1946 he met Schwent, who proposed taking the ODESSA route to Argentina. They followed what is now the well-known Brenner Pass road to a monastery in Rome. From there they were conducted to the freighter that took them across the South Atlantic. During the crossing, Schwent revealed that the middle-aged officer in their escape group was Bormann. Two years later, Wiedwald found safety in Kolonie Waldner 555, forty miles wide and a hundred miles long, protected down one side by the immense breadth of the Paraná’s muddy waters and on the other side by thick jungle. Yugoslav guards from the old pro-Nazi Croat army led a small force of tribal Indians. The colony was linked with fourteen similar fortresses in the area. If strangers tried to approach by river, they had to hire German pilots to negotiate the hazardous waters; only German riverboat pilots were available, and all were recruited by Bormann. If strangers tried to come by land, they fell into the hands of the guards. Stroessner’s air force kept an eye open for intruders in the sky. Bormann kept Piper Cub light planes. So said Wiedwald.

  It was in 1967 that Wiedwald decided to go back to Germany and tell the so-called facts. He reported that Bormann’s face was damaged by bad plastic surgery; that the Reich Minister drew the equivalent of $45,000 a month for expenses; that Kolonie Waldner 555 was a model state run on Nazi principles; that Dr. Mengele and other notorious war criminals lived in similar colonies; and that their “foreign policy” was to create impressive miniature states and then invite international commissions to come and see how harmless they all had become.

  Nobody discovered any evidence to support Erich Wiedwald’s story. The former Waffen SS corporal was dying of cancer when he related the details. He showed no interest in making money. He had used some known facts to produce a red herring. Nobody seemed to know why. But he had certainly caught the public imagination with a comic-strip tale that, like the two-dimensional figures of television, filtered out the nightmare realities of the past. It was a fine example of tendentious reportage: the details of the house in Berlin where they hid, which proved accurate; the crossing of the Danish border at Flensburg; the names of helpers along the ODESSA and Vatican lines; even the descriptions of the sea crossing and the journey into Paraguay.

  The central figure, Bormann, comes and goes like a piece of ectoplasm. If he was a wealthy man by the 1970’s, he could have escaped from the confines of jungle life. The world was full of strange men who could buy privacy.

  Interpol’s files are stuffed with reports tracing the movements of Nazi funds, and the business enterprises they are supposed to finance. But as a Paris investigator said to me: “I cannot march into a foreign country and arrest a man I know is the former Inspector General of Nazi death camps. He is no longer Herr Richard Gluecks, you see, but Senhor Something-or-Other, a citizen of that country and entitled to protection. Our only hope is publicity. And it is only in recent times that we have been able to get the information out of the secret-police files of the Latin-American countries that conceal these devils. They spent a lot of money buying citizenship. They spent a fortune corrupting their new governments. As they say in Bolivia, ‘this country cost us enough—we’ll kill anyone who tries to sell us out.’ ”

  There have been plots galore to trap Bormann. But Latin America covers more than eight million square miles. It stretches from Tierra del Fuego in the south to the Rio Grande, which in the north provides the line between an overindustrialized world and an almost totally undeveloped one. There are a million places to hide, and false trails at every turn.

  In the twenty countries of Latin America, 125 million persons were living under military dictatorship within a decade of President Kennedy’s launching of the Alliance for Progress. Another 12 million lived under civilian dictatorships. About 104 million could be said to enjoy a comparatively democratic form of government. After Castro came to power in Cuba, it seemed to some observers that the real danger to individual freedom would be not Marxism so much as military technocracy. The talk, among young colonels overturning old regimes, centered upon what could be regarded as new versions of National Socialism.

  A strange combination of ideologies and forces had been observed. Like an echo from the days when Nasser drew his advisers from Nazis in Argentina, there were “Nasserite” combinations in which control of production and land by the state had been promoted in the name of the workers. There was a surrealistic quality to the promotion of Anwar Sadat from Nazi intelligence agent to President of Egypt. The international agency concerned with securing justice for political prisoners—Amnesty International—produced thick dossiers on torture and police brutality reminiscent of the Nazi era.

  No Brotherhood, no bands of decaying Nazis, no groups of political gangsters had brought about these circumstances. But the ghosts of the Brotherhood were forever whispering their echoes of the past. In Germany, it had been the absence of a large middle class that helped Hitler to terrorize the population and intimidate the public services, because the danger of losing one’s job was comparable to endangering one’s entire family. In Latin America a small middle class had formed in Argentina, Chile, Peru, Colombia, and Mexico, but this was a tiny proportion of the whole. And whereas the middle class in North America developed values and ideals of its own, this Latin middle class aspired only to become part of the small aristocracy which sent its children to Europe for education.

  The dangers made evident in the early days of World War II were still present, but this time without the urgency of some great political crisis. The large German communities that offended the sensibilities of Beata Klarsfeld were not really much concerned with ideology of the political right or left. In this respect they were moving into the same mental climate as that which had overtaken Germany. In the German Club at La Paz in Bolivia, the Gestapo killer wanted by the French government for atrocious wartime crimes, Klaus Barbie-Altmann, could draw himself up before the German Embassy’s chargé-d’affaires and accuse him of bringing a Jew into the club as his guest. The conversation, as reported by several observers, went like this:

  “Why do you bring a Jew here?”

  “My guest is cultural attaché to the U.S. Embassy.”

  “We shall never accept a dirty Jew in our club.”

  “I shall report this to my Ambassador.”

  “Nobody frightens me. I was an important Gestapo chief. One day the national party will revive and then you will settle accounts with me.”

  When the scene was over, people shrugged.

  A small delegation of Jewish businessmen, according to Simon Wiesenthal, the tenacious director of the Vienna Documentation Center, came to him from Paraguay with a request not to press for the punishment of Dr. Josef Mengele. They had been warned that if Mengele was kidnapped “not one Jew in Paraguay will survive.” They said an outsider would never understand the influence of the old Nazi German Sippenhaftung of racial discrimination. “The old ideology of 1933 is still very strong,” said their spokesman.

  They lived in a country ruled by the German brewer’s son, Stroessner, where the President could order the local television station to change a commercial in which appeared a clock that told th
e same time no matter what the hour. “I have to protect the people from being misled,” said the President.

  The same stories keep repeating themselves. Amnesty International’s investigations in Paraguay include a version of a report that has appeared in other bulletins published by the various documentation centers, the Catholic Information Agency among them. This one concerns six young men tortured to death by the secret police and then tossed into the Paraná River. Amnesty says they were killed because they were Communists. Another version claims they were young Israelis out to execute Dr. Mengele.

  The curtain rises on another act in the drama. It began almost half a century ago. Its real inspiration lies deeper in mankind’s past. Martin Bormann’s immediate purpose has been fulfilled. The Brotherhood, as he conceived it, is being transformed. But the dragon’s teeth are sown. Whether Bormann is alive or dead is almost irrelevant. It is the legend that is important now. It forces us to think again about man’s unthinkable depravity. What matters is that there are Beata Klarsfelds in our civilization who see a need to make our flesh crawl from time to time, to warn those who have had no direct experience of modern tyrannical insanity on the Hitlerian scale.

  “Nazism is only one word for that kind of madness,” Beata Klarsfeld said that day we walked along the peaceful banks of the Seine. “It was a logical climax to centuries of racial intolerance. Because the Nazis are dying doesn’t surely mean that the human race has suddenly purged itself. On the contrary … Perhaps I do seem obsessed. I wish more people were. I was raised a Protestant, and all I remember, looking back, is my horrified recognition that in the churches were the monstrous ghosts. Nearly eight hundred years ago, the Fourth Lateran Council of the Catholic church directed Jews to wear yellow patches.

  “Does nobody see any connection between that horror and this recent holocaust? … Doesn’t anyone today care that these are the roots of that jungle shared by Hitler and Mussolini and Franco—and Stalin too? … Yet nothing is done to stop this attitude of mind, or to confront the realities of racialism. Perhaps the churches are only a manifestation. I cannot tell. To me, the inescapable fact is that mankind has within living memory done to death with careful calculation—not in the heat of war—millions who were guilty of being innocently, harmlessly different. It happened that the most identifiable, the most victimized, were Jews. Yet all they had was their law and their endless dialogue with God. They had lost all symbols of unity but these. But these set them apart….”

  We have traveled a long and tortuous path. My account is ended, although hardly complete. I regret that I could not supply the answer (or even an answer) to “the puzzle” and that there are so many missing pieces along the way. In the deepest sense, I regret most that the course of events in this most bloody of centuries has made the writing of this chronicle not merely possible, but necessary.

  Out of the infinite possibilities open to humankind in seeking a good life, it seems to me we have not often chosen wisely. How and why this condition has become so manifest in our time I must leave to the historian, the sociologist, the psychologist, and, perhaps finally, the psychiatrist. If, in their pursuit of cause, they can evolve some practical suggestions for saner human conduct, they will have indeed opened the gates to hope for this troubled planet. I bless their efforts although, in candid appraisal of what the senses and the mind can currently perceive, I do not envy them their task. It will, at the very least, take long.

  I have tried to record, interpret, and speculate upon some aspects of the most vicious and degrading period in the experience of any of us now alive. It can rival, indeed surpass, the depravity of any era in history. My account is a small part of a staggeringly huge and ghastly record. No one can sustain the effort to absorb all of it. Yet no one can afford to ignore its essence.

  I hope I will not be considered deceptive if I reveal at so late a place in this narrative that I intended more than a comment on a historical mystery; I mean this as a cautionary note to us and to our inheritors. The despicable forces loosed by the Third Reich are not expunged, although, like some virulent virus, they may have changed to other forms and be difficult to identify. They remain malignant and as potentially dangerous as before. If there is any value to the persistence of the Bormann puzzle, let it be to remind us of the darkest side of human nature that he and his brothers so monstrously exemplify.

  George Santayana, a contemporary American philosopher, made a statement in The Life of Reason that is profound and grimly applicable to the journey we’ve taken and to its point. He said: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

  Are we to be condemned? Must we be? I hope not. So I make this my valedictory:

  Remember.

  INDEX OF PEOPLE

  Adenauer, Konrad, 13, 164, 168, 176–79, 202, 243–44, 263, 264, 268, 268 n, 280

  Aeschbacher, Hernz, 276

  Alanbrooke, Viscount, 91

  Albarracin, Alberto, 405

  Alisax, Wendig, see Schwend, Frederic

  Ambros, Otto, 334

  Andreotti, Giulio, 301

  Axmann, Artur, 100, 139–42

  Barbie, Klaus (“Altmann,” “Mertens,” “Hangman of Lyon”), 23, 181, 186, 195–98, 200–01, 202, 228, 246, 276, 278, 287, 290, 346–47, 405, 410

  Barbie, Ute, 196

  Bassler, Hilmar, 164

  Bauch, Gerhard, 161

  Bauer, Fritz, 274

  Bauer, Hans, 205, 312–13

  Baun, Hermann, 233, 264–65

  Beaverbrook, Lord, 55, 68, 69, 156, 241, 351, 373

  Becher, Walter, 398

  Bedford, Duke of, 303

  Beetz, George, 205

  Behrens, Manja (“M”), 49–53, 54

  Below, Nicolaus von, 205

  Berger, Gottlob, 212, 381–82

  Bernadotte, Folke, 91, 191

  Berning, Wilhelm, 293

  Bernonville, Jacques Charles Noel Duge de, 200–01, 202, 348

  “Best, S. Payne,” 297–98

  Best, Werner, 402–03

  Bezymenski, Lev, 214, 218, 219, 224, 364

  Blankenburg, Werner, 323

  Bohne, Gerhard, 292, 318, 322

  Bohr, Niels, xii

  Boldt, Gerhard, 95, 96–97, 205

  Bormann, Adolf Martin (Martin, Jr.), 34, 52, 125, 213, 277, 355

  Bormann, Albert, 67, 68, 98, 99, 211

  Bormann, Gerda Buch (Mrs. Martin Bormann), 34, 51, 52, 53, 54, 96, 97, 110, 125, 215–16, 227, 291, 311–12, 354–55, 358

  Bormann, Martin, ix, x, xi, xiii, xix, xx, 3, 4–10, 11, 12, 14, 15–18, 19, 21–23, 27–35, 36–41, 42, 43–44, 45, 46, 47–48, 49–52, 53, 54, 55–61, 59 n, 62, 64, 65, 67, 68–69, 70–74, 75–80, 81–83, 84, 86–87, 89–90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95–96, 97–98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 113, 114, 116–17, 120, 121, 122–23, 124, 125, 127, 129, 130, 133, 134, 135, 136–37, 138–39, 140–41, 142, 146, 147, 148, 149, 161, 166, 169–71, 172–75, 183–84, 186, 189, 190, 191, 198, 200, 202–04, 205, 208, 209, 211, 212, 213, 214–17, 218–20, 221–22, 223–24, 230, 231–34, 236–37, 240–41, 242, 243, 244, 251, 253–54, 255, 256, 258, 260, 271–72, 273, 274–76, 277–78, 279, 281, 282, 283, 284, 287, 290–91, 294, 295, 297, 298–99, 303, 304, 305, 306–07, 308, 309, 310, 311–12, 314, 315, 319, 333, 337, 338–39, 342, 346, 348–49, 350–52, 353–56, 357, 358–61, 362–63, 364–65, 366, 367, 368, 369–70, 372, 373–74, 378, 380–81, 388, 390, 391, 392, 397–98, 400, 401, 404, 406–08, 409, 411, 413

  Bose, S. Chandra, 92

  Boulay, Paul Wilhelm Felix, 398

  Bourwieg, Bruno, 321

  Bradley, Omar, 136

  Brandt, Willy, 7, 183, 237–38, 239, 250

  Brauchitsch, Walther von, 296

  Braun, Eva, 47–48, 50, 97–98, 99, 103, 138, 205, 207

  Braun, Wernher von, 148

  Bridgeman, Viscount, 199

  Brookes, Robert, 8

  Brunner, Alois (“George Fisher,” “Georg Fischer”), 161, 285

&
nbsp; Brunner, Anton Alois, 285

  Bryce, Ivan, 163

  Buch, Walter, 34, 57

  Bucher, Ewald, 325, 327

  Bütefisch, Heinrich, 334

  Bünsch, Franz, 156, 160

  Buresch, Judge, 321

  Burgdorf, Wilhelm, 95, 96, 98, 205

  Burgess, Guy, xiii

  Busch, Germán, 57

  Byrnes, James F., 206, 369

  Canaris, Wilhelm Franz, xiii, xviii, 73, 102 n, 137–38, 147, 234, 240–41, 309, 310, 380–81, 391–92

  Castro, Fidel, 409

  Catel, Werner, 318

  Chuikov, Vassili, 380

  Churchill, Peter, 392

  Churchill, Winston, 21, 55, 68, 94, 101, 116, 120, 126, 135, 146, 171, 207, 208, 295, 310, 376

  Chutburn, S., 187, 193

  “Cicero,” 189

  Clark, Norman, 70

  Clay, George, 315–16

  Clemens, Hans, 382

  Conti, Leonardo, 319

  “Coppens, Lieutenant,” 298

  Córdoba, Concha, 341

  Coward, Noel, 271, 273

  Creasy, George, 119

  Creutzfeldt, Dr., 321

  Cuneo, Ernest, 163, 193, 194

  Cyrankiewicz, Jozef, 373

  Dahl, Roald, 271

  Darwin, Charles, 30

  Degrelle, Léon, 117, 128–29, 279