Killing the SS Read online

  Bormann’s group moves out shortly before midnight. He personally witnessed the last will and testament of Adolf Hitler, which gave him control of the Nazi Party after the Führer’s death.4 This effectively makes Bormann Germany’s head of state.

  The bunker staff has been underground night and day for weeks, so it is wrenching to arise and see their city in flames. After the tunnel escape, Bormann travels along the road known as Invalidenstrasse, heading toward the Stettiner Bahnhof, the main railway station.

  All around him, Russian soldiers prowl the streets, shooting both German soldiers and civilians on sight.

  A Russian antitank barrier blocks the road. Bormann and the rest of his group, which includes Hitler’s pilot, driver, and surgeon, wait for a small detachment of German panzers to move forward and lay siege to the obstacle. Bormann takes cover behind the first panzer, using it as a shield as it rolls powerfully toward the Russian blockade. Concentrated firepower destroys the barrier, but in the same instant a round from an antitank bazooka known as a Panzerfaust strikes the German tank. The massive explosion hurls Bormann through the air, slamming him hard into the ground. Others in the group are also injured, causing confusion to spread throughout their ranks.

  At this moment, in the dark of night, amid the chaos of Berlin’s fall, surrounded on all sides by the enemy, Martin Bormann vanishes. Artur Axmann, the thirty-two-year-old leader of the Hitler Youth movement, swears that he sees Bormann lying dead on the ground. Others in the group will state that they could not get close enough to where Bormann fell to confirm whether the Brown Eminence is alive or dead—they never see his body. Yet another member of the Waffen SS will tell of meeting Bormann later that night at a German field hospital in Königs Wursterhausen, twelve miles outside Berlin. The young sergeant will recognize Bormann, who is suffering from an injured foot, thanks to the explosion. The two men, along with Dr. Ludwig Stumpfegger—Hitler’s surgeon—join forces and plan to travel to a safe house belonging to the sergeant’s dead uncle. Another officer overhears their conversation. So it is that the four men travel to the address at Fontanestre 9, Berlin Dahlem, and let themselves into the unoccupied residence. Outside, Russian forces patrol the streets.

  “We stayed inside for the next three days. None of us dared to go outside,” the unnamed Waffen SS soldier will recount in interviews in 1971 and 1977. “After the third day, Reichsleiter Bormann, the officer who was his companion, and the third officer decided to leave. The third officer went one way. Bormann and his friend headed northwest into Mecklenburg, to a place where they said other clothing, some gold, and various currencies had been secreted for this escape.”

  The Soviet Union will also conduct their own two-year investigation. KGB major L. Besymenski will report to his superiors that Bormann made a “successful escape to South America.” And American journalist Paul Manning, who covered the war for CBS News with legendary broadcaster Edward R. Murrow, will also conduct a thorough search for Martin Bormann.

  “After countless interviews and laborious research in German and American archives for revealing documents of World War II, I knew that the Bormann saga of flight [money] and his escape to South America was really true,” Manning will conclude in a book he wrote about Martin Bormann.

  “It had been covered up by an unparalleled manipulation of public opinion and the media. The closer I got to the truth, the more quiet attention I received from the forces surrounding and protecting Martin Bormann, and also from those who had a direct interest in halting my investigation. I was the object of diligent observation by squads of Gestapo agents dispatched from South America by General [Heinrich] ‘Gestapo’ Mueller, who directs all security matters for Martin Bormann, Nazi in exile, and his organization, the most remarkable business group anywhere in the secret world of today.”

  Manning adds: “Martin Bormann was last seen for sure in a tank crossing the Weidendamm Bridge in Berlin, on the night of May 1, 1945. Then, for most of the world, he vanished.”

  Paul Manning subsequently went to his grave believing Martin Bormann escaped from Germany in the final days of the war. Shortly after the publication of his book Martin Bormann: Nazi in Exile in 1981, Manning’s publisher will have both his legs broken in a savage attack. More horrifying, the author’s son, Gerry, will be brutally murdered. On February 18, 1993, in the hallway of his second-floor apartment on Twenty-First Street in New York, the thirty-nine-year-old aspiring artist is shot dead during a robbery.

  Paul Manning believed that both of these attacks were attempts to make him halt further investigation into Martin Bormann’s location.5

  In 1945 one thing was certain: the Brown Eminence disappeared.

  * * *

  Three years later, on June 16, 1948, American president Harry S. Truman is drawn into the Bormann intrigue. It is an election year. Truman, who assumed the presidency following the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt just weeks before the end of World War II, is one of the most unpopular presidents in American history. Yet he has chosen to run for a full term.

  Truman loves traveling by train, and on this Wednesday he is returning from California in the presidential railcar known as the Ferdinand Magellan. Armor-plated, air-conditioned, and outfitted with bulletproof glass windows three inches thick, Magellan is considered by Truman to be the world’s finest method of travel.

  Unlike FDR, whose many physical maladies made high-speed rail journeys uncomfortable, Truman enjoys clickety-clacking across America at eighty miles an hour. As the president makes his way back to Washington, the Magellan will often stop at some city or small burg, whereupon Harry Truman will stand on the rear platform and make a speech to the waiting crowds. In all, he will travel almost ten thousand miles and deliver seventy-three speeches in eighteen states on this journey alone. In the fall, when his campaign becomes all-consuming, he will make the cross-country journey again—this time traveling thirty-one thousand miles and delivering more than two hundred speeches.

  The affairs of the world are ever present, as he deals with policy matters great and small while making his way across Kansas—stopping at Dodge City, Hutchinson, Newton, and Emporia within the span of five hours. For example, Israel has just declared itself an independent nation, and Truman is making plans to announce diplomatic ties with the new country upon his return to Washington.

  Then there is another matter, one that the president initially attempted to deflect. Even as Truman travels across America, Robert H. Jackson, the lead prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, is writing to the president, imploring him to intensify the search for Martin Bormann. The Nazi bureaucrat was tried and convicted in absentia at Nuremberg. Jackson would very much like to see justice served. Eyewitnesses state that Bormann is living in Argentina under the alias Don Fritz. He allegedly entered that country a few months earlier disguised as a Jesuit priest.

  Justice Jackson, a member of the United States Supreme Court, first learned of this one month ago. He presented his findings to Truman, only to have the president refuse to pursue the matter. But Jackson is persistent. To buttress his case, he has taken the unusual step of sharing the Bormann evidence with Federal Bureau of Investigation director J. Edgar Hoover.

  “My suggestion,” Jackson writes to Truman on this overcast June day, “is that the FBI be authorized to pursue thoroughly discreet inquiries of a preliminary nature in South America.

  “First, it is possible Bormann is there.

  “Second, even if he is not, publicity might be given to the fact that this information was laid before United States officials, who did nothing and therefore are charged to be, in effect, protecting him.

  “I have submitted this summary to Mr. Hoover and am authorized to say that it meets with his approval. You may inform him of your wishes directly or through me, as you prefer.”

  Harry Truman gets the message.

  When the president arrives in Washington on Friday, June 18, his face is flushed from sunburn, because of many hours outdoors giving speeches. But ra
ther than take the weekend off, he works Saturday and Sunday.

  It is Monday morning, June 21, when Harry Truman is presented with Justice Jackson’s letter. The wording appears friendly and official, but Truman knows a warning when he sees it. The slightest murmur that he is soft on a notorious Nazi war criminal could affect the election. The fact of the matter is that hundreds of SS officials are now in the United States, with some even working for the CIA. This is a truth that must never be revealed.

  On September 3, 1946, President Truman had signed a top-secret order permitting German scientists into America to help develop the nation’s new rocket program. Known as Operation Paperclip, this presidential decision would allow more than one thousand former Nazis and Nazi collaborators to work in the United States.

  If word leaks about America’s apathetic stance on Nazi war criminals, it would not just derail the Truman presidency but would also create the unthinkable situation of giving the Soviet Union the high moral ground on this very emotional matter.

  Thus, President Harry Truman authorizes the FBI to hunt for Martin Bormann.

  8

  DECEMBER 24, 1959

  COLOGNE, GERMANY

  DAWN

  Nazi terror is back!

  Bright red paint drips down the Gothic brownstone exterior of the Roonstrasse Synagogue. A monument to those who lost their lives in the Holocaust is also defaced. It has been just two months since the Jewish place of worship was reopened to the public, twenty years after it was burned to the ground by rampaging fanatics of the Third Reich. A swastika the color of blood and the hateful words Juden Raus—“Jews out”—now defames the stately structure. Cologne police are already looking for the suspects, but the damage is done. This city that has been home to Jews longer than any place in Germany is once again rife with mistrust. It is a horrifying reminder that Adolf Hitler’s pledge to “exterminate” the Jewish race and “root it out, branch by branch,” is still followed by some German citizens.

  The problem of anti-Semitism is not unique to Germany. It has existed since the ancient days of the Greeks and Romans, was nurtured during the early times of the Christian Church, and has been a continuous presence throughout Europe for the past several centuries. Even in the United States, there is a growing prejudice against the Jews. This powerful hatred has ethnic, religious, and economic roots. Among some people there is great resentment over what many perceive to be Jewish control of the financial world.

  During his rise to power, Hitler stoked these suspicions, blaming Germany’s World War I loss on Jewish financial treachery. All of that seemed to have diminished with Germany’s defeat in the Second World War. Those Jews who chose not to immigrate to Israel resumed their lives in Germany. Synagogues have been rebuilt, and Jewish families no longer live in fear. But as the sun rises over the nearby Rhine River on this crisp winter morning, wounds have been reopened.

  The older Jews of Cologne are wary. They recall that horrible night before the war, when the Roonstrasse Synagogue was defiled for the first time. It was the evening of November 9, 1938. In a wave of unprecedented destruction and terror that went well into the next morning, Hitler and his associates put the German Jews on notice.

  Coincidentally, November 9 is the fifteenth anniversary of Hitler’s famous “Beer Hall Putsch,” in which the Nazis staged a failed takeover of the Bavarian government.1 Hitler was subsequently convicted of treason and sentenced to five years in Landsberg Prison, where he famously wrote his manifesto, Mein Kampf.

  Kristallnacht: Jewish homes, businesses, and places of worship throughout Germany were destroyed. Many, such as the Roonstrasse Synagogue, one of six Jewish holy places in Cologne, were burned to the ground. Hundreds of Jews died, while an estimated thirty thousand more were taken into custody—eventually sent to concentration camps. The German police did nothing as torch-bearing SS mobs sought anything Jewish to burn and shattered shop windows. When arrests were finally made, it was not the SS or those doing the destruction who were taken into custody but rather Jews who tried to fight back.

  Most calamities begin with a minor incident, this the Jews of Cologne know all too well. What started as Adolf Hitler blaming Jewish politicians for the loss of World War I spread into the vandalism of Kristallnacht, then later became the unrestrained brutality of the Nazi death camps. Innocent children even became the subject of vile medical experiments conducted by Nazi doctors. As one seventeen-count indictment against a Nazi physician specified, the doctor was charged with “killing numerous people with phenol, benzene, and/or air injections; killing numerous prisoners in the gas chambers; killing one fourteen-year-old girl by splitting her head with a dagger … injecting dye into the eyes of women and children, which killed them, and ordering that a number of prisoners be shot because they would not write to their loved ones saying they were being well treated.”

  Despite that gruesome document, filed against one Dr. Josef Mengele, some Germans still refuse to condemn anti-Semitic behavior. Behind the curtain, known Nazis are being aided and abetted.

  The notorious Mengele is one of them.

  * * *

  As the people of Cologne wake up to the vandalism of the Roonstrasse Synagogue, 250 miles south in Bavaria, citizens of the small farm town of Günzburg remain silent about a Nazi sighting in their midst.

  The Bavarian hamlet was once accustomed to the presence of the SS—so much so that the United States made it the subject of special postwar scrutiny. The local Nazi Party Kreiswirtschaftsberater—economic adviser—was arrested and interrogated twice. The elderly gentleman was a World War I veteran whose farm equipment company had benefited greatly through his membership in the National Socialist Party. More than a thousand residents of Günzburg worked in his factories, building threshing machines and manure spreaders. The local titan was known to be a cold, hardworking man whose wife was equally distant and industrious. Together, they raised three boys, though one has died since the war ended—and another has vanished.

  Josef Mengele, the infamous Angel of Death, shown here in a passport photo from 1956

  The Americans care little about the German businessman, but they would very much like to talk with his missing son, Josef—the same Josef Mengele who was called the Angel of Death at Auschwitz. But Mengele was spirited out of Germany a decade ago. At first his father swore his son was missing in action. Later, he lied that Josef was dead. Eventually the American investigators got tired of looking.

  Had they investigated further, U.S. authorities might have found that Karl Mengele knew that his fugitive son was living in South America. The elder Mengele not only funded his son’s escape to exile but has financed Josef’s life since then. His devotion is so unwavering that the widow of Karl’s deceased younger son was actually sent by the father to Argentina to marry Josef. Martha Mengele and her son from that first marriage, Karl-Heinz, arrived in Buenos Aires in 1956.

  But now that arrangement has been fractured. Martha and the boy remain in Buenos Aires while Josef has fled to Paraguay, the poorest country in South America. The reason he left his family was a gut belief that Nazi hunters were closing in—in that, Josef Mengele was correct.

  At the same time Isser Harel and the Mossad were tracking Adolf Eichmann closely, they were also zeroing in on Mengele. But he eluded them. And now his new hiding place is unknown to anyone but his family.

  Physically, Mengele is almost unchanged. He is approaching fifty, but his hair is still dark brown with few signs of going gray. The gap-toothed smile that even some Auschwitz prisoners amazingly called “charming” still comes easily, although it is now hidden beneath a bushy mustache. He still whistles to himself. Mengele’s hobbies, if they can be described as such, are reading medical books and acting as a physician whenever he can. Indeed, Argentinean authorities arrested him a year ago for performing illegal abortions and otherwise practicing medicine without a license. Until the arrest, Mengele had believed himself completely safe in Argentina. His wife had openly taken his last name,
and Mengele had begun telling friends his true identity. But even though the charges against Mengele were quickly dropped for lack of evidence, the arrest troubled him deeply. Weary lines now form around his brown eyes as he finds himself unable to sleep at night. Friends note that he is easily agitated and often nods off during the day.

  Under normal conditions, an individual must live in Paraguay at least five years to be granted citizenship, but because of a pro-Nazi government and perhaps hefty bribes, Josef Mengele has become a Paraguayan national in just six months. His passport number is 293,348. “Jose” Mengele, as his identity card now calls him, even lives in a heavily anti-Semitic German-speaking region of southeastern Paraguay known as Nuevo Germania—New Germany. The vegetation is tropical: palm trees, jungle, and dirt roads. The homes, however, are Southern German to the core, designed to look and feel just like the Fatherland. Swastikas sometimes decorate local restaurants, and framed photographs of Adolf Hitler are occasionally seen.

  The year 1959 has been uncomfortable for the Angel of Death. On June 5, just one month after his hasty flight from Argentina, West German authorities issued a worldwide warrant for Mengele’s arrest.

  But that did not prevent Paraguay from granting Mengele a passport and citizenship. When West German agents proceeded to the capital city of Asunción with orders to review all files on Josef Mengele, the Paraguayan authorities sanitized the paperwork, rendering the investigation useless.