Hunting Hitler
Page 9
85 Ibid. All quotes from Hans Fegelein are from the same source.
86 Ibid.
87 John V. Lapurke, Special Agent, Counterintelligence Corps, 430 DET., US Forces, Oberoesterreich Section, APO 777, “SUBJECT: Possible location of ADOLF HITLER,” Sept. 25, 1945, found in Record Locator 319, NARA, loc.cit. Capitalization in original.
88 Federal Bureau of Investigation, FBI Records: “The Vault,” Adolf Hitler, http://vault.fbi.gov/adolf-hitler.
89 Letter from John Edgar Hoover, Director, Federal Bureau of Investigation, addressed to the American Embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina, “Subject: Hitler Hideout in Argentina,” dated Nov. 13, 1945, found in FBI Records: “The Vault,” Adolf Hitler, vault.fbi.gov/adolf-hitler, at http://vault.fbi.gov/adolf-hitler/adolf-hitler-part-01-of-04/view.
90 “Ike Believes Hitler Lives,” The Stars and Stripes, Oct. 8, 1945, p. 8.
91 H. R. Trevor-Roper, The Last Days of Hitler, op.cit., “Author’s Preface,” dated Christ Church, Oxford, Oct. 25, 1946.
92 Edward L. Saxe, Major, GSC, Chief, Operations Section, “SUBJECT: Circumstances Surrounding the Death of Adolf Hitler,” Oct. 9, 1945, found in Record Locator 319, NARA, loc.cit.
93 Dwight D. Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1948), p. 424.
94 Second Lieutenant QMC Lyons T. Carr, Allied Expiditionary Force, Military Government, Illertissen, Bavaria, “Subject: Hitler’s Death,” Sept. 10, 1945. Attached was a deposition in German, signed by Dr. Spaeth, “who was the doctor in attendance on Hitler when he died,” plus an English translation of the deposition.
95 Ibid. Bracket added for clarity.
96 Hugh Thomas, The Murder of Adolf Hitler, op.cit., p. 99.
97 Ibid., p. 100.
4
ALLEN DULLES, THE OSS, THE VATICAN, AND THE NAZI RATLINE
But the Nazis did not want to be annihilated or liquidated. They did not want to disappear. They wanted very much to go on, to go on …
—Curt Reiss, The Nazis Go Underground (1944)98
On the morning of November 9, 1942, Henrich Himmler, the Reichsführer of the Schutzstaffel, more commonly known as the SS, held a private meeting with Martin Bormann, the head of the Parteikanzlei (the Party Chancellery for the National Socialist German Workers’ party, more commonly known as Nazis) and the personal secretary to Adolf Hitler, at the Brown House in Munich. The day before, the Allies had launched Operation Torch, an amphibious landing in French North Africa, marking the beginning of the end of the Third Reich.
Curt Riess, a former Berlin journalist who escaped Nazi Germany in the 1930s as Hitler rose to power and became an American war correspondent, noted these two men symbolized the Nazi party better than any other two found within the party ranks. “Himmler symbolized the power of the party, Bormann the rank and file,” Riess wrote in his wartime book, The Nazis Go Underground, published in 1944. “Himmler represented the brains, Bormann the life blood of the party. Himmler knew what was necessary, Bormann knew what was possible.”99 Reiss observed that Bormann, “a stocky, bulky man, with brownish hair and without distinguishing features of any kind,”100 never let any detail escape his attention. Himmler, as the chief of the SS and the head of the Gestapo, the Nazi state police, was one of the most feared men in Europe. “While the secret police have, in the main, been interested only in what people do or intend to do, Bormann even knows what they are likely to think under given circumstances,” Reiss commented.
The reason Himmler and Bormann met on the morning of November 9, 1942, was because both knew key Nazi party members were beginning to doubt Germany would win the war. If Germany lost the war, top Nazis, including Himmler, Bormann, and possibly Hitler himself, would need a plan to escape to a safe refuge outside Germany if the Nazis were to have any chance of emerging in a Fourth Reich sometime and someplace in the future.
Himmler and Bormann concluded that, in order to survive, the Nazi party had to go underground. “If Germany did not win the war, would not the Allies make good their promise and rid the world of the Nazis, or, as they were termed, the war criminals?” Reiss asked rhetorically, knowing how Himmler and Bormann would strategize their future together. “And even if they were not destroyed by the Allies, were these Nazis not threatened with annihilation at the hands of their own allies, the generals and industrialists who were eager to create alibis for themselves, even before this final defeat?”101 What Himmler and Bormann realized was that the new front was underground.
What did it mean that the Nazi party had to go underground in order to survive? “It means that a person or a number of persons, a unit, a force, an idea, a movement that had been visible before becomes invisible. It is no longer represented to the outside world. It has become anonymous. Its existence is known only by the effects of its actions.”102
Leaving that meeting, Himmler and Bormann began taking active steps starting in 1943 to prepare for life after Germany lost the war, even if that meant staging their own deaths, and possibly the death of Hitler, and fleeing Germany to avoid capture. But to be successful, going underground required finding and funding in advance a safe haven for post-war survival. The two best alternatives in 1942 for the post-war survival of the Nazi party rested with Argentina, and ironically, the United States of America.
Allen Dulles in Switzerland
In the 1930s, much of the financing for Hitler’s rise to power came from the United States. W. Averell Harriman, US ambassador to Russia from 1943-1946, President George Herbert Walker Bush, and the Dulles brothers (John Foster Dulles who served as Secretary of State under President Eisenhower, and Allen Dulles who served as head of the CIA under both President Eisenhower and President Kennedy) have family connections that trace back to their involvement financing the Nazis. Both Prescott Bush and George Herbert Walker, the father and grandfather of President George Herbert Walker Bush, were partners in the Wall Street investment bank, W. A. Harriman & Company. The Dulles brothers both worked as lawyers at the prominent New York law firm Sullivan & Cromwell. In the 1930s, the Harriman family ran Union Bank in the United States in conjunction with German steel baron Fritz Thyssen, who then was widely known as “Hitler’s banker.” President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered Union Bank closed only after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and the United States entered World War II. Sullivan & Cromwell did the US legal work for the German chemical firm I.G. Farben, the manufacturer of Zyklon-B, the poison gas the Nazis used to kill Jews in the concentration camps.
On November 11, 1942, two days after Himmler and Bormann met privately in Munich, Allen Dulles arrived in Berne, Switzerland, just before the Germans sealed the French borders in retaliation for what Hitler perceived as half-hearted resistance by the French in North Africa to the Allied invasion then underway. The website for the National Archives and Records Administrations posted an article noting that the then 49-year-old Allen Dulles was sent to Switzerland to head up the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS, the predecessor organization to today’s CIA.103 Originally, OSS Director William “Wild Bill” Donovan had asked Dulles to go to London, where he could more easily coordinate between US intelligence and British intelligence. Dulles, however, prevailed with the choice of Switzerland, arguing that Berne’s central position in Europe made it easier for him to gain information on the Nazis in Germany and the Fascist enemy in Italy. In Berne, Dulles set up residence at No. 23 Herrengasse and began his official appointment to serve as “Special Assistant to the American Minister.” In reality, Dulles, who spent the duration of World War II in Berne, served as the United States’ top spy in Europe.
On January 15, 1943, Dulles was visited in Berne by Prince Maximilian Egon zu Hohenlohe-Langenberg, whose Liechtenstein passport allowed him to travel Europe freely. The prince brought an offer from Himmler that proposed the SS would eliminate Hitler, to clear the way so Germany could join the United States and Britain to pursue the war against the Soviet Union and communism.104 Joining in this proposal was Admiral
Wilhelm Canaris, who headed Abwehr, the German intelligence organization, until February 1944. At that time, the Abwehr chief in Switzerland was Hans Bernd Gisevius, serving undercover as Vice-Counsel in the German Consulate General in Zurich. Before the outbreak of World War II, Canaris was active in the resistance to oppose and then overthrow Hitler, working with a group known to the SS as Schwarze Kappelle, or “Black Orchestra.”105 Canaris was executed for treason in 1944, after the role he played in various plots to assassinate Hitler was discovered. While Canaris never wavered in his opposition to Hitler, Himmler’s instincts were much more oriented toward self-survival. Himmler may have suggested to Dulles that with the assistance of the United States, Germany would oppose the Soviet Union once Hitler was eliminated. But in other plots against Hitler proposed during the war, Himmler was happy to scheme about how he could take Hitler’s position as leader of Germany if only the others would do the dirty work for him without Himmler having to be directly complicit in the plot to eliminate Hitler.
Unofficially, Dulles entertained the prince’s proposal, but officially he made no commitment. What Dulles wanted to do was keep open a channel of communications with Himmler and the SS hierarchy. American intelligence officials were aware that top Nazis were preparing to go underground if Germany lost World War II, and it soon became obvious that going underground was not dependent upon a group of sensible Nazis getting rid of an irrational Führer. With or without Hitler, preserving the Nazi party remained the key goal. If Hitler survived the war, then a safe haven would be needed for him as well. The Nazi movement would not easily survive a captured Führer tried as a war criminal, even if enough money could be moved outside Germany to establish a safe haven abroad.
In one of the grandest larcenies in the history of the world, the Nazis had robbed private collections and museums in conquered territories, stolen gold from the national treasuries of defeated enemies, and robbed Jews of all valuable property down to the gold fillings in the teeth of concentration camp victims. This ill-gotten capital had been used to build Hitler’s criminal war machine. With the loss of the war beginning to loom on the horizon ahead, the Nazi goal shifted from accumulating all this loot to using the loot to create and fund productive businesses overseas that were capable of generating enough revenue to sustain the escaping Nazis in predetermined havens where it would be politically safe to live, grow old, and maybe even regroup. That task fell to Bormann, the gifted organizer in the partnership with Himmler.
Bormann’s empire
Beginning with the Nazi occupation of Vichy France in November 1942 and the subsequent closure of the French border, Nazi access to international art auctions held in Switzerland was cut off. Instead, Bormann established bogus art dealerships from Argentina through Latin America to Mexico in order to sell off plundered European art treasures. Bormann deposited the proceeds of these sales in two German-owned banks in Argentina: Banco Alemán Transatlántico and the Banco Germánico in Buenos Aires.106 Baron von Schröder, an SS brigadier, was on the board of directors of some thirty different German corporations, including ITT Germany. Schröder’s Bank of Hamburg was affiliated with the J. Henry Schröder & Co. of London. Also affiliated was the J. Schröder Banking Corporation of New York, for which Cromwell & Sullivan did the legal work with Allen Dulles as a director.107 Bormann acquired his own shipping lines, including the Spanish shipping company Compañia Naviera Levantina and the Italian Airline Linee Aeree Transcontinentali Italiane, or LATI. This gave Bormann his own independent pipeline to move people to Spain, and from Spain to Argentina, without having to use German Luftwaffe airplanes.108
Beginning in 1943, Bormann implemented an operation code-named Aktion Adlerflug, or Project Eagle Flight, with the goal of transferring German funds—whether counterfeit, stolen, or legitimate government funds—to safe havens abroad. Between 1943 and 1945, Bormann funded more than two hundred Germany companies in Argentina, with other investments in companies located in Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Turkey. Bormann is estimated to have created some 980 front companies outside Germany, with 770 in neutral countries, including 98 in Argentina alone. Additionally, he acquired shares of foreign companies, especially those listed on North American exchanges in Canada and the United States. These investments were designed to assist prominent Nazis fleeing Germany to resume economically productive lives elsewhere. When Israeli intelligence agents captured SS Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann, a major organizer of the Holocaust, in 1960, he was working under the assumed name of Riccardo Klement in the Mercedes-Benz factory established by a Bormann investment at González Catán in the suburbs of Buenos Aires.109
In the final days of World War II, Bormann was wrapped up in the dispersal of several billion dollars around the globe. “He dwelled on control of the 750 corporations [established as new German enterprises worldwide],” wrote celebrated CBS correspondent Paul Manning in his 1981 book, Martin Bormann: Nazi in Exile. “Bormann had utilized every known legal device to disguise their ownership and their patterns of operation: use of nominees, option agreements, poll agreements, endorsements in blank, escrow deposits, pledges, collateral loans, rights of first refusal, management contracts, service contracts, patent agreements, cartels, and withholding procedures.”110 Allen Dulles in Berne, Switzerland, had to be aware of Bormann’s efforts, as German firms in the flight capital program were using six different Swiss private banks.
As Paul Manning pointed out, “all major Swiss banks were serving the Germans in the massive movement of funds,” as Swiss financial agents and Swiss banks were particularly helpful to Bormann in his massive effort to diversify German capital investments outside Germany, anticipating the war would not come to a favorable end for the Nazis and Hitler’s Germany.111 Manning further commented that German economic specialists had successfully penetrated eleven nations and had the economies of each under control; Bormann cultivated a base of several hundred thousand business relationships outside Germany with companies that felt comfortable working with German economic leadership because it was always profitable. Ultimately, Bormann’s web stretched across France, Belgium, Holland, Norway, Yugoslavia, Austria, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Portugal, Finland, Bulgaria, and Romania, and “reached out to such South American countries as Argentina, among others, that preferred an association with Germany to one with Britain and the United States.”112
Even though Washington and London were aware that Bormann was shifting German capital overseas, the US Treasury was unable to successfully intervene to block Bormann’s efforts. In New York, Bormann used foreign exchange funds from Swiss banks to make large demand deposits in major money center banks, including National City (now Citibank) and Chase (now J. P. Morgan Chase), and several others now defunct such as the Manufacturers and Hanover (known as Manufacturers Hanover Trust before being reorganized out of existence). In return, Manning noted, the New York money center banks provided services such as the purchases of stocks and transfer or payment of money on demand by customers of Deutsch Bank, including representatives of the Bormann business organizations and Bormann himself, who ended up with demand accounts in three different New York City banks.113
In developing a plan to escape to Argentina, Bormann studied up on Canaris, who as a young navy officer in World War I had been captured after the Battle of the Falkland Islands in December 1914. Canaris was held captive in Chile until he escaped in August 1915 and managed to return to Germany via Patagonia in Argentina’s southern tip with the aid of some German merchants operating in Latin America. Reading a file Canaris had prepared documenting his 1915 escape, Bormann became aware of the large German communities in sparsely populated sections of Chile and Argentina across from Antarctica. With Germany stripped of its colonies as part of the Versailles Treaty, the expatriate German communities that had thrived in South America since World War I created a perfect landing place for Nazis wishing to go underground after the defeat of Germany that Himmler and Bormann began anticipating as early as Novembe
r 1942.
Then, in June 1943, a coup d’etat in Buenos Aries brought to power a regime sympathetic to Nazi Germany, with Argentinian military officer Colonel Juan Domingo Perón, who at the time of the coup had been a paid agent of German intelligence for two years. Seizing the opportunity, Bormann implemented another scheme code-named Aktion Feuerland, Project Land of Fire, in reference to the Tierra del Fuego (Spanish for “Land of Fire”) at Patagonia’s southernmost point.114 “The plan’s objective was to create a secret, self-contained refuge for Hitler in the heart of a sympathetic German community, at a chosen site near the town of San Carlos de Bariloche in the far west of Argentina’s Rio Negro province,” wrote Simon Dunstan and Gerrard Williams in their 2011 book, Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler—the Case Presented. “Here the Führer could be provided with complete protection from outsiders.”
Beginning in mid-1943, Bormann’s plan for Hitler’s escape to Argentina was implemented by banking millionaire Ludwig Freude, Bormann’s chief agent in Buenos Aires. Freude’s wealth derived from the construction company he opened after he had gone to Argentina from Germany in 1913. Freude reported directly to Bormann; by summer 1941, both Perón and his friend Eva Duarté, then a 22-year-old actress who was becoming popular on Argentinian radio, were both on Bormann’s payroll.115 Beginning in August 1942, U-boats from Germany began a run to Buenos Aries, arriving at six- to eight-week intervals in 1943 and 1944.116 The submarines carried loot to Nazi Argentina, including gold bullion and art treasures that could not be moved via bank transfers. Estimates range as high as $50 billion in today’s values for the value of the gold bullion alone that Bormann transferred to Buenos Aires via submarine, before adding in the value of the platinum, precious jewels, rare coinage, and art treasures, as well as stocks, bonds, and bearer certificates Bormann squirreled away in Aktion Feuerland.117