The Bormann Brotherhood

PART ONE

THE PUZZLE

CHAPTER 1

The man in London’s Festival Hall coffee shop said: "Nobody wants to believe I shot Bormann."

Are you still certain it was he?

Absolutely.

A waitress banged past with a tray of rattling mugs.

Things don’t change much, do they? he said, glancing at the steaming urn. Just like an army canteen.

He was a big man. I could imagine the lightweight Sten gun between those thick hands.

You mean you’re absolutely certain it was Martin Bormann?

Do I look daft enough to say it was if it wasn’t?

No. I turned my head. The Thames glittered in the sunlight. Big red double-deck buses lumbered past London Bridge.

I mean, I’ve nothing to gain.

Nobody ever had. Thirty times some honest individual had come forward with enough evidence to warrant an investigation. Thirty different investigations leading nowhere.

You see, he said, "the real truth is, they don’t want to find him."

They?

The lot back in power in West Germany. The letter I got from the State Attorney’s office was written by an ex-Nazi. Found his name in the Brown Book.

More coffee, luv? asked the waitress, in that aggrieved voice of the Cockney who thinks you’ve had more than your tuppence’s worth already.

Yes, the large man said obstinately. We do want more coffee.

Orl right. Keep yer shirt on! She disappeared, a teaspoon hanging on a string from her waist like a jailer’s key.

It was eleven o’clock on the morning of June 19, 1972, and I was talking to Ronald Gray, former member of the British Army Intelligence Corps; trained gunman with the 33rd Armoured Brigade; mentioned in American dispatches for his counterintelligence work in Korea; Identity Card No. 001237, signed by U.S. General James Van Fleet; later served with Her Majesty’s Admiralty Criminal Investigation Department; now living at West Wickham in Kent and a regular traveler to Germany. I had done my homework.

What’s the Brown Book?

"A secret Russian book. Lists all the names of the Bonzen, the Nazi party bigwigs, Gestapo, SS, what war crimes they committed, and how they’re back in every key job in West Germany today."

It’s not secret, this book. You can buy all four hundred pages in East Berlin.

Oh. He looked down at his clasped hands. Well, it was secret when I saw it.

A stubborn man. Well dressed, without show. Conservative tie. Shoes polished with the dedication of a good soldier. When I came into the coffee shop, at the time he had designated, he was nowhere to be seen. I had never met him before and had no idea whom to look for. I slid into a booth by the windows and suddenly he was there. A fast man on his feet but slow and stubborn if he felt like it.

It could have been just another story. Except that Gray told it differently, not knowing that his observations were a curious confirmation of reports he could not possibly have seen. He was certain he had shot Bormann. I guessed that he was intended to believe he had witnessed the death of Adolf Hitler’s puppetmaster. There had been a gun battle and then, in the light of a winter’s moon, he thought he had seen Bormann’s body weighted and dropped into Flensborg Fjord.

The town of Flensburg is in the northernmost tip of Germany. Escaping criminals find it fairly easy to cross from there into Denmark and then to proceed across the narrow strait between Copenhagen and Malmö, in southern Sweden. It is also in that most authoritarian of all states, Schleswig-Holstein, full of gloomy castles and dark memories. Flensburg was the last refuge of the last government of the Third Reich under the weekend Führer, Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz. It was the last name on the map before German armies, pouring in in panic from the Russians, fell into the fjord. It was the northern retreat for escaping Nazis; an alternative exit to the Alpine Fortress, which covered the mountains that sprawled over three frontiers to the south.

In March 1946, when the picket fences of Germany were plastered with scraps of paper informing homeless citizens that this or that relative was in such a camp or such a hospital, Ronald Gray crossed the frontier near Flensburg on a regular British Army courier route. In his pocket he carried photographs of major Nazis wanted on charges of war crimes. The chief among these was Martin Bormann.

Gray recalled that in those days nobody knew what had happened to Bormann. He was regarded as the evil genius. It was many years before he was recognized as a conspirator of even more grotesque size. He was hated by Hitler’s henchmen. He was also feared by them. He had been seen escaping from the Führer’s bunker in Berlin after the suicides of Hitler and of Bormann’s remaining enemy, Joseph Goebbels. Some thought Bormann had, all along, worked for Stalin. He had been the secret promoter, they said, of every move that guaranteed a Russian victory, so that, in the guise of rolling back the German armies, Stalin had seized half of Europe.

Others among Gray’s colleagues said Bormann was in Washington quietly dictating an account of how a civilized nation had gone berserk.

The Russians suspected that Bormann had always been working for the British. The British had a sinking feeling that they had depth-charged (accidentally, of course) a German submarine bearing Bormann to his Brotherhood abroad.

Gray was not bothered in those days by misgivings of this kind. He knew that among Flensburg’s attractions was the presence of U-boats whose commanders subscribed to Plan Regenbogen (Rainbow), which called for scuttling their vessels rather than surrendering—a plan that would, however, cover the escape of some. He knew, too, that Bormann was aware of the illegal traffic between these coastal waters and Sweden during the war; the scientists vital to developing Germany’s atomic bomb had been among those who slipped out in that fashion while the Nazis still controlled Fortress Europe.

Gray was trailing his coat in the hope of drawing out any members of the escape organizations, which the Nazis, ironically, based upon Allied spy routes. Allied soldiers with multiple re-entry passes had been approached with offers of money to help escapees. Gray traveled three times a week past British military police, German border guards, and Danish customs men. His face was familiar—familiar enough that an agent for the SS and Gestapo welfare organizations might try to bribe him.

At the end of Europe’s worst winter, Gray was approached by a young German girl, Ursula Schmidt. She had been asked to make contact with him, she said, by a group of refugees in a wooden barracks at Flensburg. For 30,000 Danish kroner, about $10,000, they wanted him to take someone across the border. Gray agreed. He told me that he borrowed the uniform of Captain Ronald Grundy to disguise the fugitive. On the night of the escape, he drove in a British Army truck to the Flensburg rendezvous and collected a thickset man muffled in castoff clothing.

The man struggled into Grundy’s uniform jacket, pulled the peaked cap over his eyes, and told Gray to drive on. It was nearly midnight. The border guards recognized Gray and the truck and waved them through. Gray drove another three miles. His passenger ordered him to stop. He got out and stuck black tape in a star over the nearside headlight. At that moment, said Gray, he recognized Bormann. He was, he told me, frightened. And added, revealingly: I saw this wasn’t going to be one of those thank-you-and-good-by jobs. I was supposed to be paid on delivery. I was going to be lucky to get away alive.

The passenger made Gray drive through the Danish village of Rinkenaes, and then ordered him to stop. His manner was curt now. To their left ran a railroad. On the right glimmered the waters of Flensborg Fjord. A flashlight winked in the light mist, reflecting on a thin layer of ice. Gray’s client got out onto the road, took off the British jacket and cap, and suddenly broke into a run.

Then I shot him, said Gray.

We were looking through the windows at the river boats. A pretty girl walked along the embankment, followed by a Thames Television van, a mobile camera, and about a dozen figures whose identities were concealed by long hair and sunglasses. A quiet summer’s day, Britain on the verge of going into the European Common Market, Willy Brandt about to take West Germany into a new relationship with the Communist East… and here was Bormann, back to haunt us. The skeleton in everybody’s cupboard.

You shot him?

I stood in the middle of the road with the Sten and got him on the run at a distance of about a hundred feet.

I did not doubt Gray’s honesty.

And then?

The rest of the gang fired back. I rolled into a ditch. They grabbed the body of Bormann and went on shooting.

What gang?

Well, we knew it as Die Spinne, the Spider.

You knew the name then? Or you read it since?

He shifted his large bulk. I knew the name. One of the escape organizations. The Americans and the British could never get the ringleaders.

He took up his story again. He had hidden in the ditch, afraid to move. He saw two men lift what he believed to be Bormann’s body and haul it to the bank of the fjord. He heard splashing noises and then a silence. He got up, walked to the edge of the water. There was a fitful moon, layers of mist, and lights glowing in the distance. Standing there, he saw a small rowboat silhouetted against the brighter northern sky. The boat rocked unsteadily. Two men stood upright, holding what he believed to be a weighted sack. The sack went overboard with a splash that Ronald Gray can hear to this day.

A curious story. Gray was not acting with the knowledge of regular British military authorities, and yet he was never charged with breaking regulations. He said nothing publicly until 1965, when he was outraged by the prospect of an amnesty for German war criminals. He got in touch with West German judicial authorities. And after that, according to his version, he got the runaround.

Checking parts of his story was easy enough. Captain Grundy was now a Liverpool advertising man. Ursula Schmidt had married Robert Brookes, a Welshman, and now lived in Rhyl, although she frequently visited her family, who had moved from No. 41, Bismarckstrasse, Flensburg, to a new home in Bad Godesberg.

Did Gray run escapees across the border with tacit British Army approval in order to catch ringleaders? The War Office knew nothing of such a game. Then why was he not put on charges? No answer. His record since then made it clear that authority had every confidence in him: he was in Berlin in 1948, on a renewed British Army contract, engaged in intelligence work.

And the State Prosecutor in Frankfurt, where the main work was done for years to bring war criminals before West German courts? He was, at the time, Joachim Richter, according to Gray, who made several trips to the Frankfurt office. Gray claimed that his sworn testimony, his letters, and his later submissions were all lost. He had inquired into the background of the small staff. He believed that for many reasons none of them wished to pursue inquiries into Bormann’s fate.

"Your Bormann?"

"The man I saw dropped into the fjord. They could easily drag for the skeleton, even now. But any kind of Bormann. It’s possible I was meant to see a ‘dead body’ dropped into Flensborg Fjord that night. It’s possible I’ve been wrong. I don’t understand, though, why nobody wants to investigate my story!"

Gray had impeccable references. He was not a man obsessed. He was in his late forties, good-humored, physically very fit. He liked West Germans, had fought against Communist forces in Korea. He had suffered no personal losses from Nazi bestiality. He read Communist publications from East Germany with an open mind, but his adult life had been spent in a disciplined Western environment.

He was telling what he believed to be the truth.

The mystery of German official disinterest is a matter for conjecture. But it is a fact that the Cold War dampened interest in Nazi war criminals. There are qualified observers who say the Cold War was started deliberately by the only Nazi spy chief to be taken straight from Hitler’s side to ours; and these observers are far from being Communists.

Gray’s story happens to fit into a reconstruction of events following the night Martin Bormann slipped out of the Führer’s bunker in Berlin. The refusal to give it credence is understandable. In 1959 the West German government felt obliged, for reasons of diplomacy, to open an office that would co-ordinate investigations into crimes committed during World War II. Its title is Ludwigsburg Central Office for the Elucidation of National Socialist Crimes. It lacks any power to prosecute. Its job has been somewhat romanticized as being the pursuit of the guilty. Not all guilt, however. Not guilt involving torture. Only Nazi crimes of mass murder.

It was born late. It depended on the co-operation of the state authorities, most of whom ignored its representations. Its investigators were regarded with distaste by other police agencies. Its lawyers knew that the judicial system was infiltrated with former Nazis, and therefore their own careers were unlikely to prosper if they looked too closely into that can of worms. Five years after it opened, twenty years after Bormann disappeared, the man in charge of the Ludwigsburg Office was found to have been a member of the Nazi party, a storm trooper, and a judge in Hitler’s people’s courts.

As somebody pointed out to Gray, he was lucky to be alive. He was sticking his nose into a very strange business indeed.

Why, then, pursue it? I had asked that question a hundred times since the mystery of Martin Bormann first began to plague a world anxious to forget and perhaps afraid to look too deeply into a recent chapter in the history of that part of the human race which has prided itself upon being superior and civilized. I had asked the question, not because Bormann interested me, but because the mystery fascinated so many others. It was partly because Bormann represented secret power; and in our disheveled human condition today, we suspect that the trappings of democracy are more of a dangerous camouflage than before, that real power begins where secrecy begins.

Martin Bormann, we see now, possessed that secret power.

He possessed it to such a degree that he was able to escape the gallows.

The lady in Jacob’s Well Mews said: Don’t fall for the temptation of the treasure hunt.

I murmured something about being too old for treasure hunts.

She nodded. The treasure hunt is chasing up every story that Bormann’s alive.

I don’t collect such stories. I haven’t time, resources, or even the inclination to chase them.

She glanced down into the narrow lane behind Oxford Street where crumbling old gardeners’ cottages have been converted into smart but discreet offices or the kind of cozy mews flats occupied by actresses. Her whole professional life was concerned with democratic institutions in Germany. She betrayed no signs of damage, even though she had lost an uncountable number of relatives in the camps. She was surrounded by the records of torture, mass killings, and medical experiments on captive humans. She journeyed frequently to Germany and she was determined to believe the best: the West German schools were making a real effort to look at their own people’s recent past; the courts were doing their best to see that justice was done. She refused to lapse into the role of a mild but implacable Jewish monomaniac who would never rest until every German accused of genocide had been brought to justice.

All we know for certain is that there have been false trails without number because there is a sinister romance surrounding his name. Who has the slightest idea of what Bormann looks like? You may say there are photographs and descriptions. And I reply that these are the pictures and details that fit anybody and everyone. Come into the street, and I will point you out twenty Bormanns in the space of twenty minutes.

Out of the mews and across the street is London’s famous old Spanish Catholic Church. Farther along George Street is one of those unobtrusive London hotels that never have to advertise: Durrant’s. Here in wartime stayed the secret agents who had business with the Baker Street Irregulars (the British Special Operations Executive), just around the corner, before parachuting into Nazi territory. Here I met Dr. Otto John for the first of our discussions. He was one of those tortured Germans, or so it has always seemed to me, who are torn between their perception of what is right and their instinctive loyalty to their own people. He had twice been called a traitor by General Reinhard Gehlen, who tried in postwar West Germany to ease his rival out of the top job concerned with internal security. John had crossed into Communist East Germany, had been taken into the Russian interior by his opposite numbers in the Soviet secret service, and then had escaped back again into the West.

He smiled resignedly when I mentioned the analogy of the treasure hunt. You mean the lost Nazi treasures, the forged banknotes, the stolen art treasures, and Bormann’s hoard of gold coins?

I don’t mean anything. This is all incidental. Did you just get fed up with what you discovered as Bonn’s head of security? Is that why you crossed over to the Russians?

He shook his head. We were drinking gin-and-tonics in an elegant back-room bar. Let’s talk generalities, he said. The Nazi war criminals exist but who judges them? Certainly the Communists can get convictions. They drag these creatures into court when the case is already settled, and then shoot them. But in a free society? You need witnesses. Not silent witnesses. I mean men and women able to use the power of words still. There were few enough twenty years ago. Even then, those who could have said ‘I saw this,’ ‘I heard that’ were often unable to speak. What remains now? Files. Millions of words, and cellars filled with documents, and a few dedicated Germans honestly trying to secure justice. The German authorities know the identity of major war criminals, they know where they are, they know their abominable histories. But these days, the Bonn government would be wasting votes to go after them, even if it could. The public is not concerned any more. The few Germans who want justice done, they cannot get a legal grip upon the guilty, and the guilty know it. The guilty are beginning already to boast of their actions, and say they acted for the good of the nation. They cannot be brought to trial for lack of compelling evidence.

Dr. John was a German liberal who hated Nazism and was convinced that he must act against it. He conspired against the rule of Hitler and failed. His brother was shot in the aftermath of the July 1944 bomb plot. He spoke out against Konrad Adenauer’s regime after the war and failed again. He had been in prison or internment in Germany, in Portugal, in England, in Russia, and now in effect he was exiled from his homeland again. He had given information to the British secret service during the war before making the dangerous trip back to Berlin, where, since 1942, he had been in touch with men who wanted to destroy Hitler and all his works. His friends of the resistance—those who survived—helped him gain office as head of BfV Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, the Federal Office for Protection of the Constitution). The former opponents of Nazism were resolved to prevent this post from falling into the hands of ex-Nazis. And former Nazis were equally resolved to get John out. The most talented of the old Nazis was Gehlen, who, as head of the new German secret service, used his position to rescue old SS and other Nazi comrades.

John’s experience with double-dealing and betrayal was not likely, I thought, to make him talkative in this year when East Germany was finally recognized as a separate and independent nation. But there comes a time when a man no longer cares about consequences to himself and becomes wholly concerned with truth. That doesn’t make it any easier, of course. Who defines truth? For what the comment is worth, I felt that Dr. John’s struggle to keep life in focus had just begun in the autumn of 1972. The lady in Jacob’s Well Mews took a cold and intellectual view of events; perhaps because it was her only protection, her only way of remaining sane. John was, and probably always had been, an emotional person whose defection to Russia and back again seemed to be a consequence of his own horror at what his people had done and might be doing again.

Is it really so hard to get an extradition order against a notorious Nazi? I asked him.

Yes. I was—I am—a lawyer. I know.

It’s not enough to say ‘I accuse’?

That’s what the Nazis said.

Then Bormann has little to fear from the law?

Even Hitler would not be prosecuted in West Germany once the statute of limitations ran out. He glanced around the lounge: leather-upholstered chairs occupied by straight-backed tweedy Englishmen and frail ladies in floppy hats. Bormann could walk in here now and I wouldn’t be surprised. He could wear his name around his neck and offer evidence of his identity and I wouldn’t be surprised if he was asked politely to keep his voice down.

CHAPTER 2

In the latter half of 1972, certain European and American newspapers published a series of reports by a serious, respected writer who claimed to have discovered Martin Bormann alive in South America. Bormann, who leads all lists as the most wanted of the condemned but unexecuted Nazi war criminals, seems capable of provoking headlines at the drop of an allegation. Within weeks of those published reports, investigations by other journalists and authorities cast substantial doubts on the authenticity and value of the evidence supporting this discovery. This was not the first claim since his disappearance more than a quarter-century ago that Martin Bormann has been found alive. It will not likely be the last.

Hardly had the journalistic ripples of the 1972 live discovery of Bormann quieted down when the first of the 1973 dead theories surfaced, this one in a West German newspaper. A skeleton, one of two unearthed accidentally in West Berlin by a labor crew in December of 1972, was studied for more than a month by Dr. Heinz Spengler, Director of the Institute for Forensic Medicine. He based his conclusion, the story continued, on comparisons of the skull with photographs of Bormann, discovery of a mended collar bone break such as one Bormann had suffered, measurements of the skeleton, and correspondence of the skull’s dentures with a sketch of Bormann’s teeth made by his dentist. This would seem a reasonable scientific procedure conducted over a substantially long enough period to reach an authoritative finding. Or, on reflection, does it seem reasonable?

In all my searching I have been able to find no fully detailed physical description of Martin Bormann. Few photographs of the man exist. Such recollections of Bormann’s height as have been noted by those who knew him vary by as much as four to six inches. His actual dental records do not exist; the comparison made in this recent instance relies solely on the memory of a dentist who had not seen his patient for almost thirty years. Yet such evidence seems to have persuaded Dr. Spengler to venture the unqualified statement There is no longer any doubt. One of the skeletons is the remains of Bormann. That is not the first time skeletal fragments purporting to be the earthly remains of Martin Bormann have been discovered.

The puzzle of Bormann’s fate persists now as it has over the years, over the decades. Thousands of trained professionals—military and diplomatic intelligence agencies of at least ten nations—have attempted to pick up the trail that started in the flames of crumbling Berlin as the city fell to the Allies in May 1945. Independent investigators—journalists in search of history, unofficial groups in search of vengeance—have joined the strange, unending pursuit. Bormann’s whereabouts has been publicly reported, always without eventual confirmation, always without concrete proof, in places as distant from Berlin as mainland China and South America. Rumors and theories, perhaps feeding on one another, have sent him over the northern borders of defeated Germany into Scandinavia, or south into the lonely mountain passes of the Alpine Fortress. Tales, unsubstantiated, have him escaping by submarine, plane, boat, truck, or foot. The search for Martin Bormann has not yielded its quarry.

Ronald Gray’s brief crossing of the uncertain path has provided him with a bizarre, frightening memory and a gnawing question that evades an answer. Bewilderment.

One professional investigator, hardened by hard fact of a hideous, endless variety, warns against getting caught up in a single foolhardy obsession. Cool logic, cold comfort.

And one soul, a benevolent spy, bent by the weight of spent idealism, self-doubt, guilt, and the realization of the human capacity for deceit, muses on whether civilized society can be long spared its blind, mannered suicide. Skepticism forged into cynicism.

Is that where the puzzle of Martin Bormann leads—to some miserable way station on the road from confusion to despair? Is it the stuff of sporadic news stories, the framework for occasional retrospective articles, the germ for novelists of international intrigues? Yes, it is surely all of that. But it is more, much more. This is a puzzle that, in its way, is a mirror to the darkest reaches of the mind of modern man.

Gray was one of many men drawn unwillingly into the mystery. I was another. Martin Bormann crossed my path near the end of World War II and has kept crossing it year after year. He was like some ghost plucking at my sleeve until I would hear what he had to say. Vanity might lead me to say I recognized, even in the last days of the war, something of its grim importance. I did not. It was easy to hunt for a single man, far easier than to see the significance of the terrors he wrought and the insidious hold he had on the future.

Martin Bormann vanished when he was forty-five years old. That is a simple statement. Other guilty men vanished with him. That is also a simple statement. Did they escape because most of humanity was too stunned by the enormity of their crimes, because it was assumed that nobody would conceal such monsters? As the years passed, it became apparent that they escaped because there were carefully laid plans, brilliantly conceived to give them immediate sanctuary and eventual survival. What seemed so simple when Ronald Gray had his strange encounter at Flensburg had now become complex beyond words. The puzzle broke into fragments, and these in turn broke into smaller pieces. And there was outwardly no visible shape to it.

This must sound, at this stage, a generalization, an oversimplification. Nothing about Bormann will prove to be simple in the end. Each piece in the puzzle, regardless of how it is expanded, explained, rationalized, provokes new questions, deeper profundities. This is the way Bormann cast his shadow during my years of travel with British naval intelligence, as a writer and a foreign correspondent, and as a producer of television documentaries. These activities gave me the opportunity to look and listen and ask questions in distant parts of the world, in Communist as well as Western societies. Others would have done as I did given such opportunities to search and to find. There was never any special merit in this. I had the opportunities. I do not know just when opportunity turned into obligation. This is not, then, a book I chose to write; it had to be written.

I have tried to separate fact from comment. I have sometimes found my journey to be among liars and cheats, where facts could be bought by the gross. But there were also documents and authorities whose testimony could be trusted. There were documents available by 1972 to prove just how successfully the Bormann plan for the future infiltrated our lives. In London there were files that should have stayed secret under a thirty-year rule. These were opened by the British Foreign Office so that historians could catch some of the sweep of the Nazi period of open oppression. In the Public Record Office in London it was possible for scholars to look at the 1939-1945 war in its entirety. (The situation was different in Washington, where I was told intelligence material had never been declassified and was not likely to be.)

The declassification of British documents made it possible for many men of authority to speak. I was surprised by the number of Americans and Europeans who had honored their promises to British security to keep their knowledge of Nazi operations secret. Some were willing and eager to talk now, because they believed that even honest documents can lie.

One Englishwoman was the only survivor of six girls parachuted into Nazi-occupied France. The other five girls were tortured to death. The survivor traced their stories through interviews. She discovered that the girls, all former classmates of hers, were sacrificed deliberately in order to maintain the credibility of other Allied agents, of greater consequence to London. She found that the official documents in the case told a more palatable story. They disassociated the British government from a coldly calculated plan. The girls had been provided with information that it was intended the Nazis would extract from them on the rack. Perhaps the stakes were so high, the consequences so grave, the necessity so clear that this horror had to be employed to counter the known viciousness of the enemy. Does the designer of this scheme, a blurred footnote in the history of British espionage, sleep with nightmares?

Another girl, a German, helped put together pieces of the puzzle. She was a child when Bormann disappeared. She grew up with a sense of horror about her own people. She searched for documents, and concluded that society had perfected a method of piling fact upon fact to produce distortion. She went after other escaped war criminals. She convinced me, without herself once expressing the thought, that a woman’s intuition could be more dependable when it comes to separating truth from falsehood. Her name was Beata Klarsfeld, and each time I crossed her trail, she lightened my gloom.

But the gloom was inevitable. The story was complicated by a personal desire to get away from it. Why should we be forced to rake through this bloody garbage? None of it made sense. Most of it made Western civilization look like a deepening nightmare. And there was so much of it. The persecution of the weak and the helpless was preserved in permanent records. Yet there is too much to grasp; from this overflowing fountain of misery, how can one continue to drink and remain sane?

The files on the German SS filled six freight cars for the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. Five million pages of typewritten records were produced by the prosecution hearings against twelve major war criminals alone. In twelve subsequent American trials at Nuremberg, another 24,000 pages were made public and a further quarter-million pages were left unpublished. The story they told should have shocked us out of a complacent belief in our Western civilization. They told of the great nation called Germany which had contributed so much for so long to culture and scientific progress and how it brought back slavery on an unprecedented scale; planned the mass murder of entire populations of children, old people, the sick and infirm, Jews, Gypsies, and Slavs; plundered Europe from one end to the other with careful calculation; and trained in schools, with chalk and blackboard, the men and women whose specialty in the middle of the twentieth century was to be the brisk disposal of millions of human lives.

There were documents in plenty and yet somehow they must have overwhelmed us. The documents set forth, beyond all possible contradiction, the behavior of the German people once they became members of their own totalitarian state.

Yes, there were documents all right. Hans Frank kept thirty-eight volumes of his diary while he was Governor General of Poland and using that position to kill and loot wherever he went. He recorded everything. His house was crammed with art treasures, from landscapes by Rembrandt to gilded chalices. His German troops were authorized to kill any non-German who showed hostility. Frank kept detailed notes of events that were regarded by his fellow proconsuls as routine: children scattered the ashes of the cremated on the death-camp roads to make them less slippery; Greek boys were freighted to Silesia for experimental castration; girls were sewn together to make Siamese twins; slave workers had their testicles exposed to X rays, which burned and mutilated them; prisoners of war, soldiers and civilians, captured in the barbarian territories of Russia and East Europe were shipped by numbers to labor camps where SS doctors performed experiments under what they called controlled conditions.

The whole effect was surrealistic. The documents sent ten men to the gallows on October 15, 1945. The relatively modest series of executions horrified many civilized observers. It came as a purge for Western society. Hitler was dead. Ten of his henchmen had been executed. Now, surely, the night had passed.

Two men condemned by the International Military Tribunal were Göring and Bormann. Field Marshal Hermann Göring crushed and swallowed a phial of potassium cyanide two hours before he was due to hang. Bormann not only cheated the gallows; he also contrived to miss his own trial. He was the only defendant whose case was heard in absentia and who was sentenced in absentia. In retrospect, this was entirely in keeping with the mystery that surrounds the man. Nazism never died on the gallows. Bormann and his companions never intended to see their life’s work destroyed.

The German Brotherhood (Die deutsche Gemeinschaft) was explained to me first by one of the Latin-American intelligence agents managed by Sir William Stephenson, Winston Churchill’s personal representative in charge of secret operations during World War II. In putting together the pieces of the Bormann puzzle, I received enormous help and encouragement from Little Bill, as he was called, and his American associates. His great comrade in wartime was General William J. Donovan, chief of the Office of Strategic Services. Stephenson said, when I went to him with my last bits of the puzzle in 1972: Nothing deceives like a document.

His man in Latin America repeated the warning. The spirit of Nazism binds groups of men who keep no membership lists, who seldom refer to each other by their real names, and who manipulate and operate like the old German Brotherhood which gave Bormann a stranglehold on Hitler. There’s no documentation for those sort of people.

There is, instead, this man Bormann, who covertly governed the Third Reich. For more than twenty years, this stocky peasant with the pug nose and the obsequious habits of a butler brought together into his misleadingly soft and plump hands the strings that manipulated the Führer. Long after Hitler was dead, historians continued to misinterpret his role and his character. This is the measure of the man. He never cared for the visible trappings of power. He wanted the reality of it. He moved in Hitler’s court, a shrewd and unobtrusive figure who was looked down upon by the thin-lipped generals with their bogus tradition of aristocracy. Foolish men like Joachim von Ribbentrop, hungry for titles and honors, disregarded him. Intellectual snobs like Albert Speer continued into the 1970’s to speak of Bormann as a crude and vulgar peasant. Crazed ideologists like Alfred Rosenberg, apostle for a Nazi religion, said he was illiterate.

Nazi strategists had plotted for many years to set the West against Russia. They continued with that plan after the war ended. Members of the Bormann Brotherhood became hired agents of Western intelligence. How that came about is one of the pieces in the puzzle. Each piece seems outrageous enough. The cumulative effect becomes as difficult to grasp as the Third Reich itself. The Nazi experiment to produce a master race in Germany had failed, and so the Germans had proved themselves unworthy. The experiment must be resumed elsewhere. Farsighted Nazis had prepared for this, but they were also concerned about the legalities.

At the time of the Nuremberg trials, a great new sense of moral purpose had started to sweep the Western part of the world. The Cold War required some temporary expediencies, however. We told ourselves that the means justified the ends. The Soviets told themselves the same comforting story. And both sides plunged into a wild competition to buy Nazis with professional experience in war and military science. So, little by little, we drifted into that very climate of opinion upon which Bormann and his brothers counted. They began to come out into the open, so quietly that few of us noticed.

Bormann himself became an inconvenient symbol. He was a reminder of the past, whereas the West had accepted the small compromises: the fact, for instance, that by 1970 there were 176 German generals in a revived West German Army, and that every single one of them had served under Hitler as a senior officer. By the 1970’s it was possible to buy the memoirs of the Hangman of Lyons, who had taken refuge in Latin America. He was a member of the Brotherhood and he felt safe enough to tell the world that he did nothing more than his duty as a Gestapo chief when he sent orphaned children to the gas chambers.

A chronological account would fail to give cohesion and understanding to so complex a narrative. So I have felt free to rove in time and place. My purpose is to move back and forth and to fill in as many elements of fact and motivations as can provide a balanced view of an unbalanced world, a panorama of mania that defies the imagination of a reasonable individual. And I have tried to put the pieces together as best I can, but without pretense that I would solve the puzzle.

Before I set forth the pieces, there is one more thing to be said. Martin Bormann kept careful note of everything, and when he left the burning corpse of Hitler, he took with him more than a thousand typed pages, headed Notes of fundamental interest for the future: To be preserved with the greatest care. This is the real dimension of the puzzle. This is the measure of its meaning.

PART TWO

THE PIECES

CHAPTER 3

There was never an exact description of Martin Bormann.

The most detailed was given me by the late Walter Schellenberg, former chief of the Nazi foreign intelligence service: Scar on left cheek, thin strands of hair, balding, between five feet three inches tall and five feet seven inches.

The discrepancy of four inches seemed extravagant. Schellenberg shrugged. Everything about him was inexact. Some say there are thumbprints in police records from when he was jailed for murder, but I say the records are in Communist hands. Some say there are SS tattoo marks giving his blood group under one arm. I say he never went through that procedure because he was given purely an honorary SS membership and rank by Himmler, who wanted to curry favor.

This exchange took place in Switzerland just after Hitler’s former spy chief had conferred in Spain with Hitler’s former SS commando chief, Otto (Scarface) Skorzeny. It was the year 1951, at Pallanza, on the shores of Lake Maggiore. There was nothing about Schellenberg to provoke any feelings one way or another. He had contributed to the British study of Bormann at a peculiar stage in his career; and now he was eager to prove that he had never served Hitler, only Germany. He offered more of his personal impressions of Bormann; and these, too, were much the same