Martin Bormann

On 2 May 1945, the Battle in Berlin ended when General der Artillerie Helmuth Weidling, the commander of the Berlin Defence Area, unconditionally surrendered the city to General Vasily Chuikov, the commander of the Soviet 8th Guards Army. It is generally agreed that, by this day, Martin Bormann had left the Führerbunker. It has been claimed that he left with Ludwig Stumpfegger and Artur Axmann as part of a group attempting to break out of the city.

As World War II came to a close, Bormann had held out with Hitler in the Führerbunker in Berlin. On 30 April, just before committing suicide, Hitler signed the order to allow a breakout.

On 1 May, Reichskanzler Josef Göbbels sent German General Hans Krebs and Weidling's Chief-of-Staff, Theodor von Dufving, under a white flag to deliver a letter he had written talk with General Vasily Chuikov. Chuikov, as commander of the Soviet 8th Guards Army, commanded the Soviet forces in central Berlin. Krebs arrived shortly before 04:00, taking Chuikov by surprise. Krebs spoke Russian fluently and informed Chuikov that Hitler and Eva Braun, his wife, had killed themselves in the Führerbunker. Chuikov, who was not aware that there was a Bunker under the Reich Chancellery or that Hitler was married, calmly said that he already knew.

The letter which Göbbels gave Krebs to deliver to Chuikov contained surrender terms acceptable to Göbbels. However, Chuikov was not prepared to accept the terms proposed in Göbbels' letter, nor to negotiate with Krebs. The Soviets were unwilling to accept anything other than unconditional surrender, but Krebs was not authorized by Göbbels to agree to an unconditional surrender, and the meeting ended with no agreement. Both Göbbels and Krebs committed suicide shortly afterwards.

After supervising the corpse-disposal arrangements following on the suicide of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun on the afternoon 30 April 1945, and waiting in vain for a further twenty-four hours for a favourable reply from the Soviet commanders to the overtures made to them by Dr Josef Göbbels, Germany's new Chancellor-for-a-Day, Bormann and a group of Hitler's senior colleagues made a final breakout attempt from the Führerbunker late on 1 May.

They planned to follow tunnels from the Chancellery to the subway line, and then follow the line north, under the Friedrichstrasse, to the Friedrichstrasse station a few hundred yards south of the river Spree. At that point they would surface, link up with what was left of Brigadeführer Wilhelm Mohnke's battle group, and attempt to force their way across the Weidendammer Bridge. Then they would proceed north-west, through the Russian lines, and save themselves as best they could.

At 8:00 am on 30 April Hitler had dictated to Martin Bormann his last military commands. Orders were transmitted by Bormann to the Battle Group Mohnke to break out of the government district and join up out of Berlin with beleaguered troops which were trying to continue some struggle.

GRAND ADMIRAL DÖNITZ

Most secret -- urgent -- Officer only

The Führer died yesterday at 15:30 hours. Testament of April 29th appoints you as Reich President, Reich Minister Dr. Göbbels as Reich Chancellor, Reichsleiter Bormann as Party Minister, Reich Minister Seyss-Inquart as Foreign Minister. By order of the Führer, the Testament has been sent out of Berlin to you, to Field Marshal Schörner, and for preservation and publication. Reichsleiter Bormann intends to go to you today and to inform you of the situation. Time and form of announcement to the Press and to the troops is left to you.
Confirm receipt.

-- GÖBBELS

Telegram sent from the Führerbunker
15:15 on 1 May 1945

In mid-April 1945 peace feelers concerning the surrender of forces in northwest Europe were communicated to Eisenhower.

At this time, reports came from agents in Denmark that Generaloberst Georg Lindemann, German armed forces commander in Denmark [Wehrmachtbefehlshaber Dänemark], was willing to surrender the army there, but would not include SS and police units, Although Eisenhower authorized efforts through unofficial channels to get additional details of the proposal, he forbade Allied officers to be present at the conversations. In reporting this action to the Combined Chiefs of Staff, he suggested that the USSR be informed. Later information indicated that General Lindemann would continue fighting, but that commanders in Norway and in northern German cities such as Bremen would consider surrender. The Combined Chiefs of Staff, therefore, on 21 April informed the Soviet Government that unconditional surrender of large-scale enemy forces was a growing possibility and suggested that accredited representatives of all three Allies be made available to the headquarters on each front for the purpose of observing negotiations for surrender. The USSR was asked to designate such representatives both at SHAEF and at AFHQ. General Deane and Admiral Archer were authorized to represent the United States and Great Britain at Soviet headquarters.

Himmler on the evening of 23 April in a conference, arranged by Walter Schellenberg with Count Folke Bernadotte, head of the Swedish Red Cross, at the Swedish consulate in Lübeck, began the conference by saying that the Germans were defeated, that Hitler would soon be dead, and that he [Himmler] was ready to order a capitulation on the Western Front. Count Bernadotte doubted that an offer to surrender on one front only would be acceptable to the Allies, but he agreed to forward the proposal if Himmler would promise to surrender forces in Denmark and Norway. The SS leader approved this suggestion and wrote the Swedish Foreign Minister that he wished to act through the count. The Swedish Foreign Minister, who shared his fellow countryman's skepticism concerning the acceptability of a surrender on the Western Front alone, nonetheless arranged a meeting between Bernadotte and the British and U.S. ministers in Sweden, Sir Victor Mallet and Mr. Herschel Johnson, who dispatched Himmler's offer to their governments. Mr. Churchill relayed the information by transatlantic telephone to President Truman and the U.S. Chiefs of Staff on the afternoon of 25 April, the day that Soviet and U.S. patrols met near Torgau. The President, while emphasizing his desire to end the war quickly, declared he could accept only an unconditional surrender on all fronts and one made in agreement with the Soviet Union and Great Britain. This information was relayed to Marshal Stalin. General Eisenhower expressed his satisfaction with the reply and informed General George Marshall that the Prime Minister had agreed that the peace overture was an attempt by the enemy to create a schism between the Allies. "In every move we make these days, we are trying to be meticulously careful in these regards".

During the discussion of Himmler's offer, reports of the possibility of a separate surrender in Norway and Denmark continued to be received in Supreme Headquarters, and an arrangement was discussed in Sweden for removing German soldiers to that country where they could be held for the Allies until the end of the war. SHAEF informed army group commanders that they could receive surrenders of forces facing their fronts but that anything more extensive had to be submitted to the Supreme Commander.

Admiral Dönitz and his advisers canvassed the German position completely on 2 May. Agreeing that the military situation was hopeless, they decided that their main effort should be to save as many Germans as possible from the Red armies. They said they would continue to fight on against the British and U.S. forces only to the extent that they interfered with German efforts to elude the Soviets. Otherwise, the German armies would attempt to avoid combat on the Western Front and strive to escape further bombing attacks. It was recognized that the goal of capitulation on one front only was difficult to achieve at the highest levels because of agreements which existed between the Western powers and the USSR, but efforts were to be made to arrange surrender at army group levels and below.

The German military situation in the north was worsened on 2 May by the break-through of the British from Lauenburg to Lübeck and of the U.S. forces to Wismar. These actions closed "the last gate" through which the Germans could be brought back from the Mecklenburg-Pomerania area. Dönitz held that further fighting in northwest Europe against the Allied powers had now lost its purpose. Making use of a British offer to spare Hamburg as an opening for negotiations, he announced that the city would not be defended.

On the evening of 2 May, Dönitz moved his headquarters from Plön to Flensburg, just south of the Danish border.

On 4 May 1945, British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery took the unconditional military surrender at Lüneburg from Generaladmiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg, who had succeeded Dönitz as head of the Navy, and General Eberhard Kinzel, chief of staff to Generalfeldmarschall Ernst Busch, Commander in Chief Northwest, of all German forces "in Holland [sic], in northwest Germany including the Frisian Islands and Heligoland and all other islands, in Schleswig-Holstein, and in Denmark… includ[ing] all naval ships in these areas", at the Timeloberg on Lüneburg Heath; an area between the cities of Hamburg, Hanover and Bremen. The number of German land, sea and air forces involved in this surrender amounted to 1,000,000 men. Dönitz ordered all U-Boats to cease offensive operations and return to their bases.

At 16:00, General Johannes Blaskowitz, the German commander-in-chief in the Netherlands, surrendered to Canadian General Charles Foulkes in the Dutch town of Wageningen in the presence of Prince Bernhard [acting as commander-in-chief of the Dutch Interior Forces].

On the evening of 2 May, Dönitz moved his headquarters from Plön to Flensburg, just south of the Danish border.

Since Mohnke's fighting force was located at the nerve center of the German Third Reich it fell under the heaviest artillery bombardment of the war, which began as a birthday present to Hitler on 20 April 1945 and lasted to the end of hostilities on 8 May 1945. Under pressure from the most intense shelling, Mohnke and his SS troops put up stiff resistance against impossible odds. The Red Army race to take the Reichstag and Reich Chancellery condemned the SS troops to bitter and bloody street fighting. Completely encircled and cut off from reinforcements, without hope of relief or withdrawal, his Kampfgruppe fought off Russian advances, inflicting heavy and costly casualties.

On 30 April, Unterscharführer Georg Diers and his crew of tank 314, were ordered to take up a defensive position at the Reichstag buildings. This was one of only two remaining King Tigers belonging to Heavy SS Tank Battalion 503, attached to the 11th Waffen SS Panzergrenadier Nordland. By that evening they had knocked out about 30 T34s, and the following day led a successful counterattack against the Kroll Opera House directly opposite the Reichstag. Their efforts though, merely postponed the inevitable and by the end of the day, after receiving news of Hitler's suicide, orders were issued to abandon the position and that those who could do so were to prepare to break out of Berlin.

The plan was to escape from Berlin to the Allies on the western side of the Elbe or the German Army to the North. Prior to the breakout, Mohnke briefed all commanders [who could be reached]within the Zitadelle sector about the events as to Hitler's death and the planned break out. It was a "fateful moment" for Brigadeführer Mohnke as he made his way out of the Reich Chancellery on 1 May. He had been the first duty officer of the LSSAH at the building and now was leaving as the last battle commander there. Mohnke's group included his Adjutant Arthur Klingemeier, Hitler's personal pilot, Hans Baur, the chief of the Reichssicherheitsdienst [RSD] Hans Rattenhuber, secretary Traudl Junge, secretary Gerda Christian, secretary Else Krüger, Hitler's dietician, Constanze Manziarly, Dr. Ernst-Günther Schenck, and various others. Despite the temptation of a westbound breakout, Mohnke planned to break out north to a German army hold-out on the Prinzenallee.

The group headed along the subway but their route was blocked so they went above ground and later joined hundreds of other Germans civilians and military personnel who had sought refuge at the Schultheiss-Patzenhofer Brewery.

"It was planned for ten groups to break out from the Führer Bunker on the night of 1 May 1945 and penetrate the encirclement by force of arms. Brigadeführer Mohnke, commander of the Citadel, planned the operation and led out the first group at 2300.

"Initially they made good progress and eluded detection before reaching the subway station at Wilhelmsplatz. From there they walked down the tunnel towards Stadtmitte station. They had no contact to other groups, being without radios. They came to an iron door which sealed the tunnel. Before it stood two uniformed officials of the Berlin transport board, who refused to open the door since it was required to be kept shut at night by the regulations.

"Now occurred the most incomprehensible event in the entire drama.

"Berlin would fall to the Russians tomorrow. This was a last minute desperate attempt to escape years of captivity or worse. The women if captured were likely to be raped. Armed to the teeth, instead of drawing their pistols and forcing the officials to open the door, the SS group, led by Mohnke, a Knights Cross holder and hero of many battles, his group now swollen to several hundred strong by refugees and stragglers, accepted the regulations governing an underground railway system which had not functioned for weeks, and turned back".

-- Kempka, Erich, "Die letzten Tage mit Adolf Hitler" [The Last Days with Adolf Hitler], Preussisch-Oldendorf, 1981. An English edition of the book was published in 2010 by Frontline Books, under the title "I was Hitler's Chauffeur: The Memoirs of Erich Kempka"

Upon learning of General Weidling's order of 2 May 1945, calling for the complete surrender of all German forces still in Berlin [and knowing they could not get through the Soviet rings], Mohnke decided to surrender to the Soviet Army. However, several of Mohnke's group [including some of the SS personnel] opted to commit suicide. Some groups kept up pockets of resistance throughout the city and did not surrender until 8 May 1945.

Following their surrender Mohnke and other senior German officers were treated to a banquet by the Chief of Staff of the 8th Guards Army, General Vladimir Alexei Belyavski, who tried to get them drunk with Vodka to get information on Hitler's death. They didn't talk, Rattenhuber was taken to Moscow, where on 20 May he gave a long and detailed description of the last days of Hitler and the Nazi leadership in the Bunker. The text of this was kept in the Soviet archives until it was published by V.K. Vinogradov in the Russian edition of "Hitler's Death: Russia's Last Great Secret from the Files of the KGB in 2000"; and Mohnke was then handed over to the NKVD and on 9 May 1945 flown to Moscow for interrogation and kept in solitary confinement until 1949, when he was transferred to the Generals' Prison in Woikowo. He remained in captivity until 10 October 1955. He died in the coastal village of Damp, near Eckernförde in Schleswig-Holstein in August 2001, at the age of 90.

According to SS Major Joachim Tiburtius, in an interview published in the Berne newspaper "Der Bund" on 17 February 1953, Bormann and Axmann were crouching behind the tank using it as a mobile wall. When the tank was hit both men were thrown to the ground, Bormann's uniform smeared with filth. He left Axmann crouching behind a pile of rubble and pressed on. Major Tiburtius says he lost sight of Bormann at this point and turned back to the German lines which were still holding.

Fifteen minutes later, Tiburtius saw one building still intact - the Hotel Atlas - and he entered it seeking cover from the Russian bombardment. He was astonished to see Martin Bormann in the hotel lobby walking across the lobby towards the exit. Bormann was no longer wearing his uniform and had somewhere obviously found a suit of civilian clothes.

"He [Bormann] had by then changed into civilian clothes. We pushed on together towards the Schiffbauerdamm and the Albrectstrasse. Then I finally lost sight of him..."

Erich Kempka, Hitler's Chauffeur. testified at Nuremberg that he had last seen Werner Naumann walking a meter in front of Martin Bormann when the latter was hit by a Soviet rocket while crossing the Weidendammer Bridge under heavy fire in Berlin.

According to Hitler Youth leader Artur Axmann, the group followed a Tiger tank which spearheaded the first attempt to storm across the bridge, but it was destroyed. Bormann, Stumpfegger and himself were "knocked over" when the tank was hit. Axmann crawled to a shell hole where he met up again with Naumann, Bormann, Baur and Stumpfegger and they all made it across the bridge.

Another eyewitness later claimed to have observed the events at Weidendammer Bridge, also, and to be able to verify Bormann was killed by the tank blast. Except this witness, the Spaniard Juan Roca-Pinar, who, as an avowed Nazi was fighting near the bridge as part of a small SS unit, later reported that Bormann was not at the side of the tank but riding inside the tank when it was hit by the bazooka shell.

-- James McGovern, "Martin Bormann: 100,000 Marks Reward"

Roca-Pinar reported that he was ordered to board the tank and save Bormann, but when he opened the hatch to rescue survivors, he found Bormann dead from the blast. He nonetheless pulled Bormann's corpse from the tank before being forced to abandon it in the street under pressure of enemy fire.

Harry Mengershausen, a member of Hitler's bodyguard, agreed with Roca-Pinar - Bormann had been inside a tank. But he declared firmly that Bormann was not killed in the blast because he was not in the tank hit, but in an entirely different tank.

-- Ladislas Farago, "Aftermath: Martin Bormann and the Fourth Reich"

At 23:00 hours the mass escape began. Moving in small groups, they proceeded underground, as planned, to the Friedrichstrasse station.

Here they emerged to find the ruins of Berlin in flames, and Russian shells bursting everywhere around them.

Soviet troops were closing in on the building from every quarter, but it was the Soviet national holiday.

Werner Naumann, State Secretary in the Propaganda Ministry, was the leader of break-out group number 3 from the Führerbunker.

The group included Bormann, Ludwig Stumpfegger, who had succeeded Professor Theo Morell on 22 April as Hitler's last physician and Artur Axmann, the Reichsjugendführer, who had smuggled out of the building with him the pistol with which Hitler had shot himself [according to Otto Günsche].

From that group, only Naumann and Axmann escaped the Soviet Army encirclement of Berlin and made it to western Germany.

The first group managed to cross the River Spree by an iron footbridge that ran parallel to the Weidendammer Bridge.

The remaining groups likewise emerged at the Friedrichstrasse Station, but there became confused and disoriented.

They made their way north along the Friedrichstrasse to the Weidendammer Bridge, where they found their way blocked, at the bridge's north end, by an anti-tank barrier and heavy Russian fire.

They next withdrew to the south end of the bridge, where they were soon joined by a few German tanks. Gathering about the tanks, they again pressed forward, following the lead tanks as far as the Ziegelstrasse.

"He [Bormann] had by then changed into civilian clothes. We pushed on together towards the Schiffbauerdamm and the Albrectstrasse. Then I finally lost sight of him..."

-- James McGovern, "Martin Bormann: 100,000 Marks Reward"

-- Ladislas Farago, "Aftermath: Martin Bormann and the Fourth Reich"

In the book "Armour Battles of the Waffen-SS", a compilation of battle testimony from Waffen-SS Panzertruppen is the report by Unterscharführer Georg Diers, a Panzer Commander in SS PzAbt. 503 in the Battle for Berlin. In his entry for 1 May 1945 he says that he was ordered to the Reichschancellery to receive breakout orders. He states "I then had to go through this building and saw, at an inner yard near the wall, attempts to burn something [the body of Adolf Hitler] by throwing gasoline on it. With every attempt a cloud of smoke rose and the Russians immediately fired with mortar or artillery. Then two mines were put under it and detonated. Göbbels gave me the order: 'Assembly at the Friedrich Street railroad station, Weidenndammer Bridge. Three to five more Panzers may join you to breakout in the direction of Oranienburg'.

He goes on to say that as he was preparing for the breakout attempt:

"A number of uniformed men reported to me and requested to be taken along. They climbed onto the rear above the engine. We began our breakout at midnight or just before midnight.

"A high ranking officer joined us. His insignia could not be made out since he wore an overcoat. He was obviously respected by those around and asked to be taken along. He, too, climbed onto the rear".

His Königstiger received heavy fire from infantry and artillery coming from Ziegel Street and he says everything outside was shot off [track covers, tow cables, etc.] His driver drove at high speed onto the bridge and opened the commander's hatch and an Untersturmführer appeared at the side.

Defence of the Reichstag, Berlin 1 May 1945

On the 30 April, Unterscharführer Georg Diers and his crew of tank 314, were ordered to take up a defensive position at the Reichstag buildings. This was one of only two remaining King Tigers belonging to Heavy SS Tank Battalion 503 in Berlin. By that evening they had knocked out about 30 T34's, and the following day led a successful counter attack against the Kroll Opera House directly opposite the Reichstag. Their efforts though, merely postponed the inevitable and by the end of the day the order was given to abandon the position and prepare to break out of Berlin

"He stated he was the driver and second adjutant of Göbbels. He knew his way around the Berlin streets. He told me that he had jumped on to the track cover on the left when the Panzer had started out and had held on to the turret since he knew that there was fairly violent firing at Ziegel Street. To the question as to what had happeend to the people on the rear, he said they had been ripped apart. There were only pieces of cloth and flesh left... He was well informed and told me that the last one to join us was Martin Bormann".

Now it was every man for himself. Leaving the rest of their group, Bormann, Stumpfegger, and Axmann walked along railroad tracks to Lehrter station. Bormann and Stumpfegger followed the railway tracks towards Stettiner Station. Axmann decided to go alone in the opposite direction of his two companions. When he encountered a Red Army patrol, Axmann doubled back and later insisted he had seen the bodies of Bormann and Stumpfegger behind the bridge, where the Invalidienstrasse crosses the railroad tracks near the railroad switching yard [Stettiner Bahnhof] with moonlight clearly illuminating their faces. Both were dead. He did not check the bodies, so he did not know how they died.

Axmann could see no signs of an explosion, and assumed that they had been shot in the back.

Axmann and Kempka were the last to see Bormann. There has been much discussion on the validity of their statements. One obvious confound is the fact that both witnesses were top ranking Nazis. There was certainly a motive for a deliberate false story, although they both asserted that they were no friends of his as did many of those known to Bormann. The fact that the men had both been on the bridge and in sight of Bormann and yet their stories contradict each other throws suspicion upon their testimonies. Both men had been close to Bormann when the tank exploded but Kempka reported that Bormann could not have survived the blast. But, as he did not see the body even further suspicion is cast upon his testimony. Axmann did claim to see the body but even he said that although he presumed them to be dead he was not a medical man. His statements were not used in Bormann’s Nuremberg trial, as they were unverifiable. Without a body it was difficult to verify either of these claims.

The bodies must have lain there some time. Bormann's expensive leather greatcoat was taken off the body, and the contents of its pockets were taken to Moscow, including his pocket diary: the entire diary is reproduced [including some, but not all, of the original longhand pages] in "Die letzten Notizen von Martin Bormann. Ein Dokument und sein Verfasser" by Lev Bezyminski [Stuttgart: DVA, 1974].

There is no doubt as to the diary's authenticity, as crosschecks with other rare documents establish.

There is unique testimony that proves the Bormann diary to be a fake

Shortly after the war, pilot Hanna Reitsch, who was in the Führerbunker for three days [26–29 April 1945], told American interrogator Robert E. Work that during this period Bormann had been writing an extremely detailed document which he intended to preserve for posterity.

Work recorded: "Bormann rarely moved from his writing desk. He was 'putting down events for future generations'. Every word, every action was recorded on paper. Often, he would approach someone and gloomily ask about the exact contents of the Führer's conversation with a person to whom he had just given an audience. He also meticulously wrote down everything that took place with the others in the Bunker. This document was supposed to be removed from the Bunker at the last moment so that, according to the modest Bormann, it could 'take its place among the greatest chapters of German history'.

However, the Bormann diary, which the Russians subsequently presented to the world is a paltry affair containing entries that are typically only between one and three short lines long. The diary is only a few months long and reads like a reminder note book with entries such as

24 February 1945 --- Met with Gauleiters, Hierl awarded German Order. It really does not have any real insights at all.

The most substantial entry that for 27 April, runs to a mere eight lines. On 30 April 1945 there is an obscure entry:

30. 4. 45
Adolf Hitler
Eva H. [Hitler]

It is hard to believe that even in the most cursory entry Bormann would not at least have recorded the precise time of the Führer's demise.

The last note on 1 May 1945 reads: "Escape attempt!"

Clearly, the diary does not provide a complete narrative of the death throes of the Third Reich.

Although most historians [including David Irving, the self-described apostle of "Real History"] accept its authenticity without demur, it can only be a fake.

Soviet Lieutenant General Konstantin Telegin of the Soviet 5th Assault Army remembered his men bringing to him Bormann’s diary: "It was brought in immediately after the fighting had ended. As far as I can remember, it was found on the road when they were cleaning up the battle area".

In all these years, the only solid piece of evidence to appear has been Bormann’s diary of his last weeks in Berlin. I am satisfied that this document, which was produced by the Russians, is genuine; but the circumstances of its discovery are obscure, and it is not very informative, for it ceases with the word "Ausbruchsversuch"—the attempted escape from the Bunker. It is possible that Bormann discarded this document in his flight to safety; but it is equally possible that it was taken from his unrecognized body.

-- Hugh Trevor-Roper
14 November 1974

Inspired by the diary and reports from prisoners, General Telegin said: "Naturally, we sent a recon group to the bridge, who searched the site of the breakthrough attempt. All they found were a few civilians. Bormann was not found".

There the story would have ended, had the controversy about Bormann not continued.

One reason why doubt remains is the amount of conflicting stories about Bormann's "alleged" escape on the night of 1/2 May 1945.

In the early morning hours of 1 May 1945 Heinz Linge left the Führerbunker. Linge later recalled: "I teamed up with SS-Obersturmbannführer Erich Kempka. In full uniform we climbed through a window of the New Reich Chancellery cellar. Under a hail of shell and mortar fire we crossed Friedrich-Strasse to the railway station where a couple of our Panzers were standing and still offering the Russians battle. Towards midnight on the Weidendamm bridge we came upon Stumpfegger, Baur and Bormann who had lost their bearings, arrived by a roundabout route and were now separated from the Russians by an anti-tank barrier. As three of our Panzers and three armoured vehicles rolled up, Bormann decided to break through the Russian lines using a Panzer. Kempka jumped up, stopped the vehicles and told the leading Panzer commander what was required. Under the protection of this Panzer heading for the tank barrier, Bormann, Naumann and Stumpfegger doubled forward while I watched. The Panzer was hit by a projectile from a Panzerfaust. The people alongside it were tossed into the air like dolls by the explosion. I could no longer see Stumpfegger nor Bormann. I presumed they were dead".

Hitler's chuaffeur Kempka said they went through the underground railway tunnel beneath the river Spree to the Friedrichstrasse station where they emerged and met up with a tank unit and near Zieigelstrasse and the armoured car which Martin Bormann was allegedly sheltering beside exploded. Kempka said he saw Bormann on fire and fall down dead.

The problem with this story which Axmann partly agreed with up to the exploding armoured car is that neither Axmann nor Kempka could have passed through the underground railway tunnel because the SS flooded it to stop the Soviets on 23 April 1945.

Artur Axmann said he found Bormann lying dead on his back several blocks away on a bridge near Lehrter S-Bahn [rail station] with no injuries and his face bathed in moonlight. Unfortunately there was almost no moon that night as it was 13 days past the full moon and the highest the moon reached before dawn was 18 degrees above the horizon. It was a very thin crescent and unable to bathe anybody's face in moonlight.

For Berlin [52°31'N 13°24'E, GMT+1] on 2 May 1945, the Moon was: "waning gibbous with 78% of the Moon's visible disk illuminated.", certainly not a thin crescent. [Borman allegedly died on 2 May 1945 between 1:30 AM and 2:30 AM].

Thus it seems that the Moon was more illuminated, but, on the other hand, less high on the horizon than stated.

Axmann also said he was captured by Russian soldiers between Ziegelstrasse and Lehrter S-Bahn. Axmann said that although he was in a senior SS Hitlerjugend uniform they just let him walk away, whilst Hans Baur who followed the same route complained Soviet snipers shot at anything that moved. Hitler's pilot Hans Baur was shot quite badly in fact, losing his leg.

Both accounts also conflict with the account of the tank commander George Diers Pz Abt 503 who says his Panzer carried Bormann on its tail and did not explode at all, but rather his passengers were shot off the rear by small arms fire.

Diers said his King Tiger in company with other Panzers and fleeing VIPs was shot up by small arms fire near Ziegel Strasse. Diers related that someone jumped up to his turret and advised him to change direction westward.

When Diers asked what happened to three passengers aboard his tank previously which included Bormann, the individual giving instructions said they were "ripped apart" and shot to pieces by shooting from Ziegel Strasse. Unfortunately the skeleton later proved by DNA testing to be Bormann's had no bones fractured by bullets..

Another problem with Diers' account is that he says the party including Bormann, Kempka, and Axmann travelled with his tanks from the Führer Bunker and not underground.

Paul Manning cited two of Hitler's dental assistants to Dr Blaschke who said that two Bormann look alikes were removed from concentration camps and given identical dentistry to Bormann's and accompanied the break out party. Thus the confusion was planned in advance by Bormann.

Also a Ju-52 left Berlin's Brandenburg gates on 29 April 1945 from the same runway used by Hanna Reitsch and Ritter von Greim earlier. Col Niklaus von Below is known to have flown out on 29 April 1945 and Hitler is known to have ordered Bormann to escape as executor of his last will.

During the Cold War the CIA needed Stalin to believe Bormann had died in Berlin. The Soviets were looking for an excuse to accuse the west of aiding Bormann's flight.

David Irving:

For many years mystery surrounded Bormann's whereabouts. My good friend the late Ladislas "Laci" Farago ["General Patton," "The Game of the Foxes", etc], proclaimed that he had located Bormann in South America.

After supervising the corpse-disposal arrangements following on the suicide of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun on the afternoon 30 April 1945, and waiting in vain for a further twenty-four hours for a favourable reply from the Soviet commanders to the overtures made to them by Dr Josef Göbbels, Bormann and a group of Hitler's senior colleagues made a final breakout attempt from the Berlin Bunker late on 1 May.

At the Weidendamm Bridge near Lehrter Station the group were cut off by enemy troops. Bormann and Stumpfegger made a run for it. A Soviet tank shell exploded only feet away from them -- Axmann testified that he saw it happen. Both survived the blast, but they were badly shaken and decided to swallow their cyanide capsules there and then, rather than surrender.

"Stern" journalist Jochen von Lang, born Joachim Piechocki, -- another friend of mine in those years, had been an SS liaison officer in Göbbels's Propaganda ministry at the end of the war; to him in fact had fallen the duty of making the famous 1 May 1945 broadcast on Berlin Radio announcing that the Führer had "fallen in battle".

Nonetheless, he was a fine researcher, and in 1972 von Lang and "Stern" magazine persuaded the Berlin police authorities to dig up the street at the spot where the bodies of Bormann and the doctor had last been seen. It was a macabre exercise, but it came off brilliantly, when two bodies were brought to light.

Forensic experts used dental pathology to identify the bodies -- hampered in Bormann's case initially by getting his jaw upside down, so I am told. In 1976, the leading Scandinavian dental pathologist Reidar F Sognnaes published a lengthy disquisition in a scientific journal, "Legal Medicine Annual", titled, "Dental Evidence in the Postmortem Identification of Adolf Hitler, Eva Braun and Martin Bormann." This established beyond doubt that Bormann's corpse was indeed his [his dental chart was on file].

As for the doctor, Stumpfegger, I located and visited his brother in the 1970s, living in Ingolstadt. A gold ring had been found on the corpse, with a date engaged inside. The brother confirmed to me that it was the date of Ludwig's wedding in 1938.

In 1998 DNA analysis confirmed that the other body was Martin Bormann's.

Two decades of unconfirmed sightings

During the chaotic closing days of the war, there were contradictory reports as to Bormann's whereabouts. For example, Jakob Glas, Bormann's long-time chauffeur, insisted he saw Bormann in Munich weeks after 1 May 1945. One of Bormann’s relatives had no doubts. In 1947, Walter Buch, the father of Bormann’s wife, Gerda, declared on his deathbed: "That damn Martin made it safely out of Germany."

The bodies were not found, and a global search followed. Unconfirmed sightings of Bormann were reported globally for two decades, particularly in Europe, Paraguay and elsewhere in South America. Several would-be Bormanns were spotted and even arrested - a Guatemalan peasant in 1967, a 72-year-old German living in Colombia a few years later. Some rumours claimed Bormann had plastic surgery while on the run and that it had spoiled his face. At a 1967 press conference Simon Wiesenthal asserted there was strong evidence Bormann was alive and well in South America. In 1972, Munich Bishop Johannes Neuhausler made public a postwar church document stating that Bormann had escaped Berlin during the final days and gone to Spain by airplane

It was apparent to anyone who desired to know that Martin Bormann had been operating in South America for some time.

Probably no other Nazi has more words written about him than Martin Bormann does. His fate has only recently been determined. However, the valuables that he shipped to Argentina in his project Action Feuerland are still clouded in a fog of mystery and intrigue.

There are several accounts about the fate of Bormann some plausible others bordering on the preposterous. The more common and believable account had Bormann reaching South America and living out his life there. An equally likely account has Bormann dying during the last days of the Third Reich while trying to escape from Berlin. In a third account Bormann escaped to the Soviet Union and lived out his life there. General Gehlen started this account. He claimed to have recognized Bormann in a crowd at a soccer game as the television camera panned the spectators.

Lately, two ridiculous accounts have emerged. One named Bormann as a Soviet mole inside Hitler’s inner circle. The other claimed that a British commando unit rescued Bormann from Berlin in order to recover the Nazi treasure. He then lived out his life in the English countryside.

Obviously, it would have been advantageous for Bormann to be declared killed in Berlin if he had survived. Nevertheless, recent DNA taken from one of the skulls found in Berlin matched closely to an uncle of Bormann. The skull still had glass shards between the teeth. If this evidence were indeed correct, it would suggest that Bormann being unable to escape from Berlin committed suicide.

Before DNA testing was available, considerable controversy over the identity of the skull existed. In fact, the skull was caked with red volcanic clay not found in the soil around Berlin but closely matching the soil of Paraguay. Nevertheless, the government turned the remains over to the family which had the remains cremated and the ashes scattered at sea hoping to settle the controversy for all-time.

Moreover, there were credible sightings of Bormann in South America until the 1960s. Considering the skull was caked with red clay; it appears that Bormann died in South America and later his body moved to Berlin. That view would be much more likely than believing he died in Berlin. There are hundreds of creditable reports since the end of the war until the 1960s of sightings of Bormann at various locations in Europe and later in South America. Believing Bormann died in Berlin requires discrediting all of these reports. Thus his ultimate fate is still unknown and clouded in a sea of controversy.

Ladislas Farago, an ethnic Hungarian who worked for the U.S. Naval Intelligence during World War II, cleverly utilized his unique knowledge and experience after it and caused a minor sensation in that year with his articles published in England’s "Daily Express", detailing Bormann’s activities.

By professionally arranging the materials at his disposal, in his widely known book "Aftermath: Martin Bormann and the Fourth Reich", the author attempted to prove that Adolf Hitler's personal secretary, chief of the Parteikanzlei, and "gray cardinal" Bormann escaped from the intelligence services of the anti-fascist coalition countries and made it to Latin America, where he lived without serious problems and died at a senior age.

Farago presented in a lively fashion the history of searches for Bormann, cited a whole bulk of documents, and supplied details of conversations with eyewitnesses of Bormann's secret life and even with Bormann himself. The books left many readers convinced that the Third Reich's number two official had miraculously survived and discredited the report that Bormann's skeleton had been found at a construction site in Berlin a few years after the end of the war and identified.

In Farago's interpretation, Bormann created in Latin America a secret network of his aides and native sympathizers which replicated the "authority vertical", the administrative system, and the security machine of the Third Reich. Bormann's empire allegedly spread over Argentine, Paraguay, Chile, and Bolivia, and also had bases in other Latin American countries.

Farago's evidence, which drew heavily on official governmental documents, was compelling enough to persuade Dr. Robert M.W. Kempner [a lawyer at the Nuremberg Trials] to briefly reopen an active investigation in 1972; and his investigative work led to a "New York Times" story published on 27 November, 1972, and datelined "Buenos Aires." It stated: "Argentine secret service sources said today that Martin Bormann was sheltered in the country after World War II, but could not confirm reports that he still lived there. Sources in Salta confirmed that the ranch where Bormann was said to have lived was owned by German industrialists. The intelligence sources said other Nazis arrived in Argentina with Bormann and were sheltered there, particularly by Vittorio Mussolini, son of the Italian dictator".

Farago's claims, however, were generally rejected by historians and critics.

In "Aftermath: Martin Bormann and the Fourth Reich", Ladislas Farago lays out a story similar to Paul Manning’s but differing in a number of key areas.

Just like Manning, Farago asserts that Bormann escaped with Müller’s assistance to South America and like-minded ruler Perón. The specifics differ in that Farago accuses the Catholic church of operating an “underground railroad” for ex-Nazis to escape to South America. Once in South America, Farago also says that Bormann ran his huge conglomerate of corporations and was protected by former Gestapo and SS. Farago backs up his claims with much more hard evidence than Manning; his book contains citations and images of various American, Chilean, Paraguayan, Bolivian, and Argentinian documents.

Problems with argument

Ignorance of scientific evidence

Bones recovered in Berlin were consistent with photographs and dental records of Bormann. Recently those bones were compared with DNA from a relative of Bormann and they were found to be indeed Borman’s.
Vastness of conspiracy

The scope of the conspiracy required to allow Bormann to live for decades in South America while running a huge network of corporations simply fails any rational scrutiny. So many people would have to be involved that at least one would leak the story to the mainstream press.
Lack of international action

Farago’s books actually resulted in the brief reopening of the Bormann case in 1972 but there was found to be insufficient evidence to prove that Bormann was still alive.
Farago argues the size and power of the conglomerate would dissuade nations from coming after Bormann for fear of economic repercussions.

Allegations that Bormann and his organization survived the war also figure prominently in the work of David Emory.

The next year, after journalist Paul Manning published an article in the "New York Times" detailing Bormann’s escape from justice, West German officials held a news conference proclaiming that Berlin workmen had unearthed two skeletons near the ruins of the Lehrter railroad station and that one of the skeletons had been identified as Bormann. He died in 1945 trying to escape Berlin, they stated.

After WWII Bormann remained a mysterious figure:

- Sentenced in absentia to 10 years imprisonment and forfeiture of all property by a Berchtesgaden denazification tribunal 18 July 1948 ["Encyclopedia of the Third Reich; NYT 19 July 1948]
- Trial in absentia by an Austrian people's court at Linz announced 9 August 1949 [LT 10 August 1949; disposition unknown]
- Declared legally dead 1954 [NYT 28 February 1965; NYT 12 May 1967]
- Declared dead 16 June 1960 by Berlin denazification court and property seized [NYT 16 June 1960]
- US Embassy to Argentina believed Bormann was living in Posadas, Misiones Province, Argentina in 1947-1948 [NYT 14 December 1993)]
= Walter Flegel arrested September 1960 in Argentina on suspicion of being Bormann [NYT 30 September 1960]
- Flegel freed 30 September 1960 by Argentine authorities after fingerprint test proves he is not Bormann [NYT 1 October 1960]
- German prosecutor believes Bormann still lives 14 April 1961 and prosecution re-opened [NYT 15 April 1961]
- Brazilian police investigating leads 19 March 1964 [NYT 20 Mar 1964] - Leads the result of an impostor but West German authorities investigating report Bormann died near Asuncion, Paraguay in 1959 [NYT 21 March 1964]
- $25,000 reward posted by West Germany for capture November 1964 [NYT 28 February 1965]
-Sons Adolf Martin Bormann Jr. and Gerhard Bormann interrogated by West German authorities at Frankfurt 28 May 1965 [NYT 29 May 1965]
- Arrest of Eduardo Garcia Gomez/Juan Calero or Falero Martinez at Mariscos, Guatemala May 1967 on suspicion of being Bormann [NYT 12 May 1967; NYT 13 May 1967; NYT 14 May 1967]
- Guatemalan freed after fingerprint test proves he is not Bormann 16 May 1967 [NYT 17 May 1967]
- Extradition request by West Germany to Brazil July 1967 [NYT 5 Jul 1967]
- Reportedly living in Brazil near the border with Paraguay 31 December 1967 (NYT 1 January 1968)
- Reportedly living in Latin America 25 November 1972 [NYT 26 November 1972; NYT 2 December 1972]; claims doubted [NYT 26 November 1972]
- West German authorities consider re-opening war crimes proceedings against Bormann December 1972 (NYT 5 December 1972)
- Bormann, Argentina, and 1945 U-Boat treasure detailed [NYT 13 November 1991; NYT 7 December 1991]
- Reportedly committed suicide at Berlin in May 1945 by biting a cyanide capsule, according to dental records examined by dental detective Dr. Reidar Sognnaes [NYT 10 September 1974]
- Paraguayan Interior Ministry report says Bormann entered Paraguay 1956 and died there in 1959 [NYT 1 June 1993].

As a member of the CBS radio network team that covered the war in Europe under the stewardship of the late Edward R. Murrow, Paul Manning trained as a gunner aboard B-17s and Liberators [B-24s] in order to cover the air war in Europe.

When Germany surrendered, he broadcast the ceremony on the CBS radio network. Manning then trained as a gunner aboard a B-29, and flew missions over Japan to cover the closing phase of the air war there. Eventually, he broadcast the surrender of Japan from the deck of the USS Missouri for CBS. After the war, Manning wrote for "The New York Times", among other publications, and authored several books.

Much of his postwar career was devoted to researching the Nazi flight-capital program, and through this research he came to write "Martin Bormann: Nazi in Exile". Although his research on Bormann was partially funded by CBS News, the network never "went" with the story.

This statement was condemned by Britain's "Daily Express" as a whitewash perpetrated by the Brandt government. West German diplomatic officials were given official instruction, "...if anyone is arrested on suspicion that he is Bormann we will be dealing with an innocent man."

Some controversy continued, however. For example, Hugh Thomas' 1995 book "Doppelgängers" claimed there were forensic inconsistencies suggesting Bormann died later than 1945. When exhumed, Bormann’s skeleton was covered in flecks of red clay, whereas Berlin is a city based on yellow sand. This indicated to some that the body had been re-interred from somewhere with a clay-based soil, such as Paraguay, the Andes Mountains or even Russia.

Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal refused to accept the government’s declaration of Bormann‘s death, persisting in the belief that Bormann escaped Berlin with Axmann and headed south to the safety of the Alps. There he was rumoured to have been seen in both Bavaria and Austria. In fact, Bormann’s aide, Wilhelm Zander was captured in Passau, along the Austrian frontier in December 1945. From the Alps, Wiesenthal believed, Bormann and others escaped to South America.

Others, like English scholar and intelligence officer, Hugh Trevor-Roper, decried the evidence upon which the German government based its searches for Bormann: the testimony of one man. He and others argued that the testimony of Artur Axmann, the only man who said he saw Bormann dead was falsified to protect Bormann who was then on the run. Both men were unrepentant Nazis and shared the motivation to keep their cause alive. Axmann, they argued, probably escaped Berlin with Bormann. Russian investigator Lev Bezymenski wrote that Axmann’s statements had, "the apparent aim of convincing the world that the Reichsleiter had been killed." Bezymenski also wrote that Axmann’s statements, "give rise to a lot of doubt, especially when one considers that he changed his explanations at least three times in the postwar years". Some also believed it implausible that the Soviets would identify the body of Stumpfegger and ignore Bormann’s body, supposedly at Stumpfegger’s side. Further, that Bormann was reinterred only to later be "discovered" by the German government.

However, the entire case for the Berlin death of Bormann rested on dental records prepared from memory by a dentist who had been a loyal Nazi for many years, and the sole statement of a dental technician who had been imprisoned in Russia due to his proclaimed knowledge of Bormann’s dental work. Adding to suspicions that Bormann’s death announcement was most convenient for anyone wishing to cover Bormann’s tracks was the fact that Willy Brandt’s government canceled all rewards and warrants for Bormann and instructed West German embassies and consulates to ignore any future sightings of the Reichsleiter.

These suspicions were compounded by statements from several persons who told Paul Manning that the body found near the railroad station was placed there in 1945 by SS troops commanded by "Gestapo" Müller, who was known to have used decoy bodies on other occasions.

Bormann’s death notice did not convince the late Simon Wiesenthal of the Documentation Center in Vienna, who said: "Some doubts must remain whether the bones found in Berlin are really those of Bormann".

Another source is the 1981 book, "Martin Bormann, Nazi in Exile" by Paul Manning and a number of books published in the years following the war corroborate details of Manning's description of German flight capital, and the postwar Nazi underground.

According to Manning, Bormann was escorted from dying Berlin by selected SS men who passed him along a series of "safe houses" to Munich, where he hid out with his brother, Albert. In early 1946, Bormann was escorted on foot over the Alps to the northern Italian seaport of Genoa. There Bormann was housed in a Franciscan monastery. All this was arranged by "Gestapo" Müller.

In mid-1946, a steamer ship carried Bormann, provided with false identification papers, to Spain, where he entered the Dominican monastery of San Domingo in the province of Galicia, once the home of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, a supposed neutral who covertly supported Hitler. Manning noted that in 1969, when Bormann became aware that Israeli agents were sniffing along his escape route, there was a fire in San Domingo. Curiously, the fire started on the very shelves where the monastery kept its book of visitors, which contained Bormann’s name. This incriminating record suspiciously was destroyed.

In the winter of 1947, Martin Bormann and several SS officers arrived in Argentina, on the steamer Giovani, anchoring in the harbor of Buenos Aires, carrying a Vatican passport in the name of Reverend Juan Gomez. He was apparently welcomed at the pier by by Ludwig Freude and General Juan Batista Sosa Molina, the Minister of War, representing President Peron.

While on the run at the end of the war, Bormann controlled his vast commercial empire through an elaborate but well-planned communications system.

"Wherever positioned, he turned his hiding place into a party headquarters, and was in command of everything save security," explained Manning.

"Telephones were too dangerous, but he had couriers to bear documents to Sweden, where a Bormann commercial headquarters was maintained in Malmö [Sweden] to handle the affairs of a complex and growing postwar business empire. From Malmö, high-frequency radio could transmit coded information to listening posts in Switzerland, Spain, or Argentina to form a continuous line of instructions."

The Deputy Führer’s escape had not gone unnoticed. It was substantiated by a file on Bormann sent to the FBI and obtained by Paul Manning.

"When the file... was received at FBI headquarters it revealed that the Reichsleiter had indeed been tracked for years," he wrote.

"One report covered [Bormann’s] whereabouts from 1948 to 1961, in Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil, and Chile. The file revealed that he had been banking under his own name from his office in Germany in Deutsche Bank of Buenos Aires since 1941; that he held one joint account with the Argentinean dictator Juan Peron, and on 4, 5, and 14 August 1967, had written checks on demand accounts in First National City Bank [now Citibank] (Overseas Division) of New York, the Chase Manhattan Bank, and Manufacturers Hanover Trust Co., all cleared through Deutsche Bank of Buenos Aires".

Then there was a police report from Cordoba Province dated 22 April 1955 in which a police agent with special knowledge of Bormann spotted the Nazi in the company of two other men in a hotel and trailed them. He overheard one of the men acknowledge the short, balding man who obviously was the superior of the three by saying, "Jawohl, Herr Bormann".

Although many Nazis found safe havens in Brazil, Paraguay, Chile, and Uruguay, no South American nation was more accommodating than the Argentina of Dictator Juan Domingo Peron and his lovely second wife, Eva Maria Duarte de Peron, popularly known as Evita.

The Argentine dictator was greatly honored to shelter Deputy Führer Bormann.

After several low-key meetings with Bormann, Peron saw Bormann’s flight capital program as a means of boosting the Argentine economy.

"Both realized that the capture of Bormann was a clear and ever-present danger," noted Paul Manning, "and so Peron instructed the chief of his secret police to give all possible cooperation to Heinrich Müller in his task of protecting the party minister, a collaboration that continued for years."

In 1955, Peron was ousted in a military coup and forced to flee to neighbouring Paraguay and later to exile in Madrid, Spain. He left without the body of Eva, who had died from cancer in 1952, at age thirty-three.

According to Manning, the relationship between Bormann and Peron, "became somewhat frayed around the edges after Peron left for Panama and then exile in Spain in 1955, but [Gestapo] Müller today [1981] still wields power with the Argentinean secret police in all matters concerning Germans and the [Nazis] in South America."

ODESSA turned to gun-running as a means of financing its operations. In fact, it was never intended only as an escape route for Nazis, but, at Bormann’s instructions, it was set up as a profitable business enterprise as well. The plentiful supply of surplus arms in Europe turned out to be an immediately profitable commodity.

By 1980, Martin Bormann, then in his eighties, had traveled extensively in South America, often just ahead of Nazi hunters. He lived in a luxurious estate near Buenos Aires, writing his memoirs while still under the protection of "Gestapo" Müller.

Paul Manning said this aging recluse remained the guardian and silent manipulator of a gigantic industrial pyramid centered in Germany.

Bormann also had become mentor to a new generation of lawyers, bankers, and industrialists. In an undated interview following the 1981 publication of his book "Martin Bormann: Nazi in Exile", Manning stated: "The Bormann organization is not merely a group of ex-Nazis. It is a great economic power whose interests today supersede their ideology..."

Paul Manning's "Martin Bormann, Nazi in Exile" was completed in 1980 and published in 1981 by Lyle Stuart. Before the publication of a follow-up work, "In Search of Martin Bormann", one of Manning's four sons was murdered, convincing Manning that the murder of his son, Gerry, was a direct consequence of his continuing investigations into the Bormann Organization and its international financial dealings. He never published a follow-up work.

Paul Manning traveled extensively and interviewed dozens of persons in the course of his research. Martin Bormann, born in 1900, was very much alive in 1980, according to Manning, who died in 1995.

Manning was fully aware of the reported 1972 discovery of two bodies in the ruins of Berlin's old Lehrter railway station. Following their discovery, both bodies were identified through craniofacial and dental records as those of Martin Bormann and Dr.Ludwig Stumpfegger, Hitler's physician. Sworn testimony from survivors of Hitler's Berlin Bunker stated that these two were last seen fleeing the Bunker area together.

Manning, claimed that an unfortunate labor camp inmate's dentition had been prepared as a duplicate of Bormann's to fool investigators regarding his survival at a future date. Manning attributed this elaborate hoax to the sly planning of Heinrich [Gestapo] Müller, who remained with Bormann throughout the rest of their lives, protecting Bormann from discovery. It would be nice to see original notes of Manning's interviews with primary sources of the enlightening information pertaining to Martin Bormann's life after 1945.

Even in the absence such transcripts, Manning's well-written discoveries may have remained plausible were it not for advances in forensics.

In 1998, three years after Manning's death, Bormann's purported remains, which had been safeguarded for twenty-six years, were subjected to DNA tests in Germany.

The scientific results confirmed that Martin Bormann had, in fact, perished in Berlin in 1945.

Die-hard conspiracy buffs will simply claim that these test that the results were faked in collusion with the German government to perpetuate a Bormann death myth.

Two years later, in further research, the Bormann remains underwent a mitochondrial DNA comparison, the results of which were published in the 14 February 2001 issue of "International Journal of Legal Medicine". T

he results support overwhelmingly the hypothesis that the remains were, in fact, those of Martin Bormann.

Paul Manning's book, a result of two decades work by a highly skilled professional journalist, is very persuasive and used as a reference throughout the Internet.

If Bormann died in 1945 how are we to view Paul Manning? Is it possible that a mountain of data and innumerable cited interviews came from unreliable and tainted sources? Could Manning have been completely fooled, or was "Martin Bormann: Nazi in Exile", like "The Hitler Diaries", an elaborate literary hoax?

Allegedly facilitating this escape was ODESSA, a group set up by Bormann prior to the war’s end to help Nazis escape to South America.

Once in South America, Manning says that Bormann lived off Nazi money he put away during the war and did his best to spread Nazi ideology. He cites numerous unnamed sources and several documents as proof of Bormann’s survival and successful escape.

Manning further states that Bormann’s shrewd bureaucratic skills and the Nazi money he laundered were responsible for West Germany’s postwar economic boom. Manning saw Bormann as the incredibly powerful leader of an international empire of large [and profitable] corporations.

Even more extraordinary, Manning claims to have had many exchanges with Bormann through intermediaries saying that Bormann agreed to an interview but his Nazi cronies blocked him from carrying any interview out.

Problems with argument

Selective trust in anecdotal evidence

Manning takes as truth the stories of local South American leaders who claim to have met/spoken to/seen Bormann but he flatly rejects the testimony of some of Bormann’s closest comrades who state unequivocally that they saw him dead in Berlin. Of course one could argue that they lied to help their former boss escape trial [and certain death] at Nuremburg, but clearly many of these ex-Nazis could have escaped some of their punishment through bargaining if they had supplied information about the whereabouts or even continued survival of Bormann.
Lack of cited sources.

Manning tells of many details of Bormann’s life in South American [his specific location, his mindset, his health, etc.] but entirely fails to document credibly where he acquired this information.
Contradictory actions of foreign governments.

Manning argues that after the War Bomann became “the object of history’s greatest manhunt” by American, British, and Israeli and countless other nations’ intelligence agencies.
However Manning also states that the CIA was complicit in the escape and continued protection of Bormann.

Why would the US government attempt to capture Bormann while at the same time trying to conceal his location

What about the voluminous investigative work on the interlocking industrial corporate and banking entities that were, Manning claims, involved in the transfer of assets from Nazi Germany before its collapse? Was this data exaggerated, invented, or the result of solid and reliable investigative journalism?

Russian spy?

Reinhard Gehlen states in his memoirs his conviction that Bormann was in fact a Russian agent and that at the time of his "disappearance" in Berlin he in reality went over to his Russian masters and was spirited away by them to Moscow. He bases this startling conclusion on a conversation he had with Admiral Canaris and on his conviction that there was an enemy agent at work inside the German supreme command. He deduced the latter from the fact that the Russians appeared to be able to obtain "rapid and detailed information on incidents and top-level decision-making on the German side". Of course, at the time he was writing up his memoirs (late 1960s to early 1970s), Gehlen was not aware of the British breaking of the Enigma codes. Gehlen goes on to say that he discovered that Bormann was engaged in a Funkspiel with Moscow with Hitler's express approval. He claims that in the 1950s, when he headed first the 'Gehlen Organisation' and later the Bundesnachrichtendienst [BND], the West-German Intelligence Service, he "was passed two separate reports from behind the Iron Curtain to the effect that Bormann had been a Soviet agent and had lived after the war in the Soviet Union under perfect cover as an adviser to the Moscow government. He has died in the meantime."

Discovery of remains

The hunt for Bormann lasted 26 years without success. International investigators and journalists searched for Bormann from Paraguay to Moscow and from Norway to Egypt. Digs for his body in Paraguay in March 1964 and Berlin in July 1964 met with no success. The German government offered a 100,000 mark reward in November 1964, but no one claimed it.

As Martin Bormann was missing, it was decided that he would be tried in absentia. Although the allies had testimony stating that Bormann was dead, they ignored it because if "Bormann at this point was to be declared dead by the court, and then to surface later on, die-hard Nazis would suspect that perhaps the Führer was alive too." In order for allied credibility to remain intact, Bormann was to be tried for Crimes against Peace, War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity.

Dr. Friedrich Bergold was appointed to this difficult task of defending a missing man. He considered it "a miscarriage of justice for the Tribunal to try his client in absentia," and used the unusual and unsuccessful defense that the court could not convict Bormann because he was already dead. The International Tribunal sentenced Reichsleiter Martin Bormann to death in October 1946 .

In 1965, a retired postal worker named Albert Krumnow stated that around 8 May 1945 the Soviets had ordered him and his colleagues to bury two bodies found near the railway bridge near Lehrter station. One was "a member of the Wehrmacht" and the other was "an SS doctor".

Krumnow’s colleague, Wagenpfohl is said to have found a paybook on the SS doctor’s body identifying him as Dr. Ludwig Stumpfegger. He gave the paybook to his boss, postal chief Berndt, who turned it over to the Soviets. They in turn destroyed it. The Soviets allowed Berndt to notify Stumpfegger’s wife. He wrote and told her that her husband’s body was "…interred with the bodies of several other dead soldiers in the grounds of the Alpendorf in Berlin NW 40, Invalidenstrasse 63."

In summer 1965, Berlin police excavated the alleged burial site looking for Bormann's remains, but found nothing. Krumnow stated he could no longer remember exactly where he buried the bodies. The German government determined that Berlin was simply "too full of cemeteries and mass graves dating from the last days of the war."

On the political end, the hunt for Bormann became a recurring memory of the Nazi regime and also an embarrassment that would not go away. On 13 December 13 1971, the West German government officially called an end to the search for Bormann. This pronouncement was met with protest from Jewish human rights groups and Nazi hunters like Simon Wiesenthal who insisted the search must continue until Bormann was found, alive or dead.

Late in 1945, British Intelligence appointed Hugh Trevor-Roper to investigate the evidence surrounding the death of Hitler. His book, "The Last Days of Hitler", followed in 1946 as a result of this investigation, and was updated by him over the years as new evidence emerged.

Roper left the issue of Bormann's death open in early editions of the work, because evidence of Bormann's death rested solely on the testimony of Artur Axmann. Although Axmann's testimony regarding other events was truthful so far as it could be independently verified, Roper realized that Axmann might be giving false evidence to protect Bormann from further search.

Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal refused to accept the government’s declaration of Bormann‘s death, persisting in the belief that Bormann escaped Berlin with Axmann and headed south to the safety of the Alps. There he was rumored to have been seen in both Bavaria and Austria. In fact, Bormann’s aide, Wilhelm Zander was captured in Passau, along the Austrian frontier in December 1945. From the Alps, Wiesenthal believed, Bormann and others escaped to South America.

Others, like English scholar and Intelligence officer, Hugh Trevor-Roper, decried the evidence upon which the German government based its searches for Bormann: the testimony of one man. He and others argued that the testimony of Artur Axmann, the only man who said he saw Bormann dead was falsified to protect Bormann who was then on the run. Both men were unrepentant Nazis and shared the motivation to keep their cause alive. Axmann, they argued, probably escaped Berlin with Bormann. Russian investigator Lev Bezymenski wrote that Axmann’s statements had, "the apparent aim of convincing the world that the Reichsleiter had been killed". Bezymenski also wrote that Axmann’s statements, "give rise to a lot of doubt, especially when one considers that he changed his explanations at least three times in the postwar years." Some also believed it implausible that the Soviets would identify the body of Stumpfegger and ignore Bormann’s body, supposedly at Stumpfegger’s side. Further, that Bormann was re-interred only to later be "discovered" by the German government.

Almost a year later, on 7 December 1972, Axmann and Krumnow's accounts were bolstered when construction workers uncovered human remains near the Lehrter Bahnhof in West Berlin just 12 meters from the spot where Krumnow claimed he had buried them. Dental records — reconstructed from memory in 1945 by Dr. Hugo Blaschke — identified the skeleton as Bormann's, and damage to the collarbone was consistent with injuries Bormann's sons reported he had sustained in a riding accident in 1939. The forensic identification was validated by Dr. Reidar F. Sognnaes, a leading Scandinavian dental pathologist and celebrated U.S. expert in such matters. [Reidar F. Sognnaes, 'Dental Evidence in the Postmortem Identification of Adolf Hitler, Eva Braun and Martin Bormann', in "Legal Medicine Annual", 1976]

The second skeleton was deemed to be Stumpfegger‘s, since it was of similar height to his last known proportions. Fragments of glass in the jawbones of both skeletons suggested that Bormann and Stumpfegger committed suicide by biting cyanide capsules in order to avoid capture. Soon after, in a press conference held by the West German government, Bormann was declared dead, a statement condemned by "London's Daily Express" as a whitewash perpetrated by the Brandt government. West German diplomatic officials were given official instruction, "...if anyone is arrested on suspicion that he is Bormann we will be dealing with an innocent man.

Bormann was the adminstrator of Operation Regentröpfchen, the evacuation of Reich gold, money and treasure to Argentina, and the size of this fortune evidenced by the few documents released from Argentine official archives is mind boggling. If Bormann survived and escaped, it was to Argentina that he came.

Postwar Nazi money laundering through bogus land deals was administered from San Carlos de Bariloche in Neuquen province. In the early 1960s there were reports in the local and foreign Press of a grave in the cemetery at Bariloche, allegedly that of Martin Bormann, having been visited by officials of the German Embassy, after which it vanished.

But the new evidence caused Roper to write in the 1978 edition of "The Last Days of Hitler that": "...in view of new evidence which has recently been found, I believe that it [the question of Bormann's death] can now be closed".

As stated in the Final Report of the Frankfurt State Prosecution office under File Index No. Js 11/61 [GStA Ffm.] in "Criminal Action against Martin Bormann on Charge of Murder", dated 4 April 1973:

XI. Result

Although nature has placed limits on human powers of recognition [BGHZ Vol. 36, pp. 379-393-NJW 1962, 1505], it is proved with certainty that the two skeletons found on the Ulap fairgrounds in Berlin on and 8 December 1972, are identical with the accused Martin Bormann and Dr. Ludwig Stumpfegger.

The accused and Dr. Ludwig Stumpfegger died in Berlin in the early hours of the morning of 2 May 1945 -- sometime between 1:30 and 2:30 A.M.

XII. Further Measures

1. The search for Martin Bormann is officially terminated.

Martin Bormann Has Left the Building

26 May 1995 -- One of the enduring mysteries of World War II is the fate of Deputy Führer Martin Bormann, the only top Nazi left unaccounted for [unless you go for those "They Saved Hitler's' Brain" stories].

He's supposed to be dead, but he's been spotted everywhere from Denmark to Paraguay. No one ever found his body, after all. In 1972 a German court decide that an old skull found in Berlin belonged to Bormann, but even though the Nazi-trackers at the Simon Wiesenthal center bought the finding, other researchers say the skull was a plant to throw off those very same Nazi hunters.

Why? Because, according to Shulman, "Bormann had the authority to release all German funds in Swiss banks".

Ready for the punch line? If the tale sounds like something out of James Bond that's because the raid was led by Ian Fleming, who upon retirement from Her Majesty's Secret service became the literary light who birthed the world's most famous secret agent.

Shulman took the tale from an anonymously penned book to which he wrote the preface and assumed, unsuccessfully, the responsibility of peddling to publishers. The author of the book is, Shulman says, an old Intelligence man in a position to know these things. And Shulman claims to have letters signed by none other than Winston Churchill himself, as well as Lord Mountbatten, that support the book's assertions. Nonetheless, two major publishers considered the manuscript carefully then, Shulman says, "for reasons on which I can only speculate, suddenly dropped it".

Shulman also says that he has witness who remembers Bormann in the British village, which Shulman so far refuses to name, and that the manuscript's anonymous author tried to sell his story to a tabloid, "News of the World" in 1966 but got the kibosh courtesy Britain's Ministry of Defence.

There are big problems checking the facts of Shulman's story.

The biggest, perhaps, is that more or less everyone involved is long dead. Including Bormann who Shulman says shuffled off this Nazi coil in the early 1950s. Fleming died in 1964, having barely survived to see the movie of "Dr. No" and without breathing a word of the Bormann affair to even his closest friends. But then, as the widow of one Fleming Confidant pointed out, the real-life superspy was a spook to the end.

"He maintained that you must never say anything more than you are morally bound to say."

Update: The wild and imaginative stories about Bormann continued even after the discovery in 1972 of two skeletons near the Lehrter railway station in Berlin. The authorities said the men were probably Bormann and Ludwig Stumpfegger, one of Hitler's doctors. Splinters of glass cyanide capsules were found in the jawbones.

Although the German Government was satisfied with this theory, they locked up the remains in a cupboard at the Frankfurt Public Prosecutor's Office. Family members were prevented from taking them away until there was final identification.

Three years ago, "The News of the World" told the story of a certain Peter Broderick-Hartley who had lived and died in Reigate, Surrey. The paper claimed he was, in fact, Martin Bormann, who had had plastic surgery.

In 1996, a British publisher paid £500,000 for rights to a book claiming that Winston Churchill smuggled Hitler's lieutenant to England in 1945 to get access to Nazi gold held in Swiss bank accounts. The author of the James Bond books, Ian Fleming, was also said to be involved.

James Bond Nabs Martin Bormann
Nicholas Tozer
1 September 1998

In an article published last year in "The New York Times" Argentine Foreign Minister Guido Di Tella responded to an earlier op-ed article written by Ann Louise Bardach [NYT, 22 March 1997)]pointing out a number of ‘imprecisions, distortions and innuendos’ about Argentina’s pro-Nazi record as a neutral during most of World War II’ that -in Di Tella’s view- "left unattended can only mislead the less well informed among NYT’s readership".

Among other clarifications Di Tella points out that "there can be no doubt that until 1949, when restrictions on the emigration of former Third Reich based Nazis were removed, Argentina competed with others interested in Germany’s brainpower, as part of a process which also turned Argentina into a safe haven for some Nazi war criminals. Worthy of note though, is the fact that if Simon Wiesenthal was right when he wrote that Martin Bormann died in Berlin in 1945, an assesment shared by the relevant German and Israeli authorities, he could have never set foot in Argentina after the war, as implied by Bardach".

Be that as it may, if a book recently published in London is ever proven to be accurate Di Tella, Wiesenthal, as well as relevant German and Israeli authorities, could all be proved wrong. This new book claims that Martin Bormann, Hitler’s private secretary and Nazi Party Chancellor, not only survived the final collapse of the Nazi era at the Führerbunker in Berlin in May 1945, but in fact went on to live with a new identity -until as late as 1989- not in Buenos Aires as the 1960′s quip assured ["Martin Bormann is alive and well and living in Argentina"], but as a respectable gentleman living in England after being smuggled out of Berlin by a British commando team specially picked to do the job by Winston Churchill in person.

Incredible as it may sound such is the gist of the non-fiction book "OpJB. The Last great secret of the Second World War" by Christopher Creighton, [Pocket Books, London, 1997], a fascinating tale which the publishers preface by saying that "the following account is one of the most extraordinary stories to emerge from the Second World War" and is issued "under assurances by the author that the story is true" adding that they have not been able to ‘verify his acount by independent research’. ‘Indeed the documentary trial is often at odds with the author’s narrative. In secret intelligence work it is very difficult to come up with absolute proof and in May 1945 Berlin was the end of the world. According to Creighton, evidence went missing and in the fog of war files were adjusted by those with a hidden motive. Creighton further describes how records were compromised in order to create a legend that served a darker purpose. In the end, readers will have to make their own judgements about what they believe. What is not in doubt is that this book is a thrilling story from a remarkable man’, as the publishers admit quite candidly.

What makes "OpJB" such a unique book to read is the magnitude of the new gist it casts on events which have been extensively scrutinized by others authors. Starting from the name ‘OpJB’ which stands for Operation James Bond, a name which today is inextricable linked to a certain fictional British secret agent known as 007. Such a coincidence of names is by no means accidental and stems from the fact that the man who went on to become the author of the highly succesful 007 series, Ian Fleming, was in real life a Royal Navy intelligence officer during World War II, and is also a leading figure in this extraordinary non-fictional tale.

At a first glance prospective readers could feel inclined to discard this book as an elaborate hoax, but would be well recommended to resist such a temptation and read on as Creighton may be a weird fish, but he is nonetheless also a number of things which cannot be disputed, namely a former Royal Navy special operations officer who is known to have been a personal friend of such people as Fleming, Churchill and the likes of Lord Mountbatten, German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and King George VI among others.

The second fact worth bearing in mind is the author’s first hand knowledge of precise "inside" details of not only "OpJB", but of other well documented events taking place at the time, many of which are supported by evidence in the form of letters from such heavyweight names as Churchill, Mountbatten and Fleming.

Despite the often impressive supporting evidence the story Creighton -whose real name is John Ainsworth Davis- has to tell is mind-boggling: In a nutshell, that Churchill ordered an ultrasecret operation to snatch Bormann from the ruins of Berlin as a way of getting his hands on much of the Nazi booty to which he had access. To do so a special commando team supported by men and women of the German resistance [the German Freedom Fighters, GFF] and an assorted number of both male and female members of the British and US armed forces were assembled with the specific mission of snatching the Nazi bigwig from the ruins of the collapsing Third Reich. This highly trained commando group ventured into the heart of Nazi Berlin and, in what can only be rated as an extraordinary operation, spirited Bormann through both German and Russian lines back to safety into the British controlled area of Germany and from there to the UK where the Nazi chief was both interrogated and given a new identity. As part of a deception ploy a body of a Bormann look-alike and suitably doctored medical records were left in Berlin to cover up.

The books makes simple fascinating reading because it unveils to what extent secret intelligence work needs to be kept secret, even from people who readers would like to believe are in ‘a position to know’ including in this case such names as the top historians of this period of time, undisputed authorities such as Hugh Trevor-Roper [now Lord Dacre] or Hugh Thomas, both of whom have written extensively about the Nazi era and are -in Creighton’s view- both duped by the ruse.

In yet another twist of history Creighton claims that the then head of ultra-secret M section of Naval Intelligence, Major Desmond Morton, another key actor in this incredible story, takes Bormann back to Germany after the war were the former Nazi boss is able to sit in the visitor’s gallery at the Nuremberg trial at which he is sentenced in absentia.

Another stunning revelation would be the degree to which governments can manipulate information, doctoring all sorts of records so that the paperwork supports the facts which are being specifically being construed for reasons of state.

Finally, it is also particularly interesting to note that the battle for Nazi booty is not as new as the latest wave of probes for looted gold would suggest, but in fact were high on the Allies list of priorities even at the time of the war.

This book is a must for anyone who has ever pondered on what might have happened to Bormann, whose whereabouts have been the matter of speculation for over half a century.

It is to be hoped that "OpJB" triggers off some form of response from official circles in Britain, the US, Germany and Israel so we can finally get to know what happened as the Third Reich collapsed in 1945 and what came of Martin Bormann, who according to this book was ‘alive and well and living in the UK’ until his death many years after the closing battle of Berlin.

New Genetic Tests Said to Confirm: It's Martin Bormann
The New York Times
4 May 1998

Genetic tests confirm that remains found in Berlin in 1972 are of Hitler's private secretary, Martin Bormann, who helped organize the Holocaust and was rumored to have escaped Germany after World War II, according to news reports today.

The bones were found at a construction site and experts concluded at the time that they were of Bormann and that he died on 2 May 1945 -possibly in a poison suicide- as the Soviet army invaded.

But rumors persisted over the years that Bormann, the second most powerful man in the Third Reich, had escaped to South America or elsewhere.

Florian Besold, a lawyer for the family, said last month that they wanted the testing partly because of a 1996 book by a British author who said Bormann was smuggled out of Berlin to England in 1945.

''It has to do with finally ending these crazy international rumors,'' Mr. Besold said at the time.

A newspaper in Paraguay reported in 1993 that Bormann had lived in that country for three years, had died in Asuncion on 15 February 1959, and was buried in a nearby town.

In 1998, a DNA examination was conducted by Wolfgang Eisenmenger, Professor of Forensic Science at München University working on behalf of the Justice Ministry in Frankfurt am Main. Using Bormann’s dental, medical, and fingerprint records, as well, Eisenmenger was able to conclude that the skeleton was in fact that of Martin Bormann. He also found the cause of death to be self inflicted poisoning. The other skeleton found was determined to be that of Hitler’s doctor, SS-Obersturmbannführer Dr. med. Ludwig Stumpfegger. Bormann’s remains were cremated and scattered over the Baltic Sea on 16 August 1999 to prevent neo-Nazis from building a shrine in Germany.

The skull when unearthed was caked in red volcanic soil which matched soil found in Paraguay suggesting Bormann had first been buried in Paraguay, unearthed and then reburied in Berlin.

Both the Bormann family and German government refused requests to have the soil tested and the skeleton was cremated in great secrecy.

At the time there were protests in many newspapers wanting to know more about the red soil. These included:

The News Letter [Belfast, Northern Ireland]; 5/5/1998
The Birmingham Post [England]; 5/11/1998
The Scotsman [Edinburgh, Scotland]; 8/30/1999

Hitler's dentist Dr Hugo Blaschke reconstructed both Bormann, Göbbels and Hitler's dental records for the Allies in 1945. Bormann's skull had about eight fillings not performed before May 1945. It had an upper right 3rd molar crown not present in 1945 and a lower window crown bridge from lower right to lower left lateral incisor inclusive.

During the war Blaschke had performed a crown on Bormann's U/left cent incisor which in the 1972 skeleton was replaced by a three element bridge. There were also at least three teeth L/L 1st molar U/L bicuspid and U/L 2nd Bicuspid missing with bone growth over their sockets which had been present before the breakout on 1 May 1945.

There were also four conflicting versions of Bormann's fate on 2 May 1945 from Kempka, Diers, Axmann and Tiburtius.

These are known facts which conflict with the accepted explanation that DNA testing has solved Bormann's fate.

The scientists compared the DNA obtained from a piece of the skull with a tissue sample donated by an 83-year-old relative of Bormann living near Frankfurt, NOT Martin, jr, and found matching sequences.

The family denied that any such relative existed.

All that the DNA testing proved was that the body was in fact that of Martin Bormann. It did not prove that it had been there since 1945.

Before DNA testing confirmed the skull was Bormann's a careful analysis of dental work revealed work done on his teeth with techniques which did not exist in wartime Germany. There were also teeth missing which were present in April 1945 according to his wartime dentist, but where the missing teeth left sockets, these had grown over with bone indication he must have lived at least six months after April 1945 for the bone growth to occur.

Also, the DNA test was compared with a very distant relative. Why did they not get DNA from his surviving children? Surely that would have proved it. Bormann's children were never asked to provide DNA for the test.

As one of the top Nazi suspects, Bormann had been charged with war crimes and found guilty and sentenced to death in absentia in 1946 by the international military tribunal in Nuremberg.

In 1955 an Spanish Volunteer named Juan Pinar came back to Spain from a Russian camp for POWs. He declared that he fought in Berlin's Battle, and that he personally took Bormann's corpse from a tank. He said that Bomann died because of the explosion of a grenade that hit the tank.

Martin Bormann - Nazi Ideologue or Russian Spy?
By Ben Goldby

The Case

Martin Bormann was among the most sinister and feared members of the Nazi high command.

A trusted member of Hitler's inner circle, and head of the chancellery, Bormann was the Führer's right hand man.

He was regarded by the Nazis as a true believer, a zealot to the fascist cause, so completely committed to the Third Reich's odious aims of racial purification that he was above suspicion.

But as the Nazi regime crumbled, and the Soviet troops stormed Berlin, things rapidly changed for this pragmatic bureaucrat. It is suggested that Bormann may not be the dedicated, boot-licking Hitler devotee that he made himself out to be.

Conspiracy theorists believe Bormann was in fact a Russian spy, a murky contact known to Stalin's Intelligence chiefs as "Werther".

There is little doubt that a high-ranking German had been turned by their communist foes, but Bormann was not just any member of the high command, he was the personification of the Nazi stooge, Hitler's personal secretary, and a fearsome ideologue.

If the Russians did turn Bormann, it must be regarded as the espionage coup of the century.

But could a rabid, Führer-worshipping Nazi like Bormann really have fed information to Hitler's most hated foe, and if he did, how on earth did he manage to get away with it?

The Official Story

Bormann joined the Nazi party in 1925 and quickly rose through the ranks.

By the time Hitler seized power in 1933, Bormann was a trusted lieutenant and was handed the plum role of party chancellor.

Initially he lagged behind Rudolf Hess in the Fü’hrer's pecking order, but as the war in Europe intensified, the ruthless and bloodthirsty Bormann soon emerged as the perfect Nazi to become Hitler's deputy.

When Hess left for Britain, Bormann stepped up to become the Führer's right hand man, earning a reputation as a brutal, fanatical Nazi.

All of Hitler's papers, his diary, his day-to-day movements, were governed by Bormann, he alone controlled access to the leader, and therefore wielded huge power over the direction of the war effort.

A devious, manipulative power-broker, he jousted with SS chief Heinrich Himmler for dominance in Berlin.

Bormann was instrumental in devising and implementing the final solution, and his role in the holocaust was well-documented during the Nuremberg war crimes trials that followed the war.

Much of the administrative work that went into the mass transportation and extermination of Jews, homosexuals, Gypsies and other groups went through Bormann to Hitler, and some were even authorised by the deputy leader.

Such was his obsession with exterminating Jews, Bormann reportedly made furniture from the remains of those killed in the concentration camps.

As the war drew to a close and Berlin was surrounded Bormann was present in the Führerbunker where Hitler would take his own life, even acting as a witness to the leader's last will and testament.

He fled the Bunker with two other senior Nazis, and was reported dead by Artur Axmann, a fellow escapee and leader of the Hitler youth who had spotted Bormann's dead body near a rail line after they had separated in their bid to escape Berlin.

This account remained in serious doubt for five decades, despite the discovery of remains on the site Axmann identified as the scene of Bormann's demise in 1972.

As the only identification that could be carried out was based on a doctor's memory of Bormann's dental ecords from 1945, this account still remained in serious doubt, until a DNA test on the suspected Bormann body in 1998 confirmed the corpse to be his.

His remains were burned and scattered into the sea.

The Conspiracy Theory

The theory begins with Bormann's escape from Berlin.

Conspiracists claim that Axmann, a committed fanatic who wanted to continue Nazism from his hiding place in Austria, was not a credible witness, and could not even say how Bormann had died.

It is suggested that Bormann made good his escape, fleeing through Austria and on to one of a dozen different locations pointed to by theorists.

The two most popular conspiracies are:

1. That Bormann, who had unprecedented access to the funds of the Nazi party, had created a slush fund for fleeing party members, and was able to use this to escape to South America, where he lived into old age in either Chile or Argentina, and was easily able to bribe his way through any questions about his past.

2. The former Deputy Führer, a trusted subordinate with the ear of Hitler, spent the war passing detailed intelligence on German troop movements to the Soviets under the code name Werther.

As the Red Army surrounded Berlin, he split from Axmann and his fellow Nazis and handed himself over to the Russians, securing a life of luxury paid for by the communist state for his role in winning the war for Stalin.

Nazi hunters, including the celebrated Simon Wiesenthal, argued fervently that Axmann's account was a lie, and that Bormann had been allowed to escape to South America.

But the sensational theory that he was a Russian spy has received even more attention from the conspiracy community.

Former Wehrmacht General Reinhard Gehlen made the allegations in the 1970s after becoming convinced that the only way Stalin could have been so well informed was if he had a spy inside the Nazi elite.

Fingers were pointed at Bormann based on information received from Soviet intelligence officers, and on the fact that as private secretary to the Führer, Bormann would have had access to everything he needed to pass sensitive information to the Russians.

Mr. Klizer does provide evidence, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that Martin Bormann was indeed the spy-traitor, "Werther," spying from deep inside the Third Reich. He was the only person that was able to attend all the meetings in question, or if not, to have his informants and official stenographers record in minute details the German High Command's top secret transactions and military plans. Thus he was capable of relaying information to the Russians, even before the German generals were able to review and put them into action! Not even Ultra, the secret decoding of the German Enigma code, Winston Churchill's secret weapon at Bletchley Park, was able to provide this information and feedback!

Werther was not only able to have secret German military plans radioed to Moscow Center via the master spy Rudolf Rössler [code name "Lucy"] and his spy ring in Switzerland immediately after Wehrmacht conferences were over, but also let Stalin know who attended the conference and what each of the conferees stated.

Werther was even capable of answering specific questions posed by Moscow center ["Gisela," the young, attractive, secretive, Jewish-Russian Spymaster, Maria Poliakova].

Kilzer shows that only one man was in the key [and only position], where he was able to do so, and that man could have only been Martin Bormann, the Fuhrer's trusted secretary!

Hitler was ruthless, but despite what we may have been led to believe, unlike Stalin, he was not a paranoid individual, and he allowed treasonous activity to thrive within the military [Generals Ludwig Beck and Georg Thomas], the police [Heinrich Müller, head of the Gestapo and creator of the Funkspiel, radio playback messages to Moscow], and even German military Intelligence [Hans Bernd Gisevius, General Hans Oster, and Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr].

It was not until the attempt on his life by Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg at the Wolf's Lair on 20 July 1944, that Hitler struck back with a vengeance against the conspirators.

Only then [and as the Third Reich rapidly crumbled] did he become sadistically vindictive and unforgiving against his opponents within the German military. And yet, he never distrusted Martin Bormann, the "faithful" secretary, "who could get things done".

On 30 April 1945, as he prepared for death, Hitler made Bormann the executor of his will and praised him as his "most faithful party comrade."

But Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, himself an honorary member of the Black Orchestra, suspected Bormann, the "Brown Bolshevik".

One of Bormann's mistresses was a communist operative in the German resistance, but that was not then known, and he was not suspected. Some of the surviving top Nazis did come to suspect Bormann's betrayal to the Russians - but only as the piece meal revelations came to light at the Nuremberg war crime trials, as they were being prosecuted. On the stand, when the prosecutor asked if he believed Bormann was dead, Hermann Göring replied, "... I hope he is frying in hell. But I don't know."

What information did the spy-traitor, Werther, provide to Moscow Center that was so vital to the Soviets? No less than very detailed and specific military intelligence that led to the defeat of the Wehrmacht at the pivotal Battle of Stalingrad in the winter of 1942-43 and the decisive Battle of Kursk [the largest tank battle in history] during the spring and early summer of 1943, from which the Third Reich did not recover the initiative in the Eastern front.

The only question remaining for this reviewer is this: Why did Bormann not seek a timely escape route to communist Russia before the final collapse of the Reich? That is the 64 million dollar question. He might have been guarding his identity even from the Soviets.

To escape, he attempted, but to surrender, he probably thought, would be futile. He had interpreted and carried out the Führer's order of genocide of the Jews during the Holocaust and the elimination of the Ukrainians during the Wehrmacht drive to the East. And his betrayal was ideological, but we will probably never have all the answers.

Thumbs up! This non-fiction, suspense thriller is recommended for both history buffs and spy aficionados, as a book that merits reading in the realm of Soviet-Nazi World War II espionage, for those with an ear for the deadly symphonies of betrayal played by the Red and Black Orchestras.

Written by Miguel A. Faria, Jr., M.D., author of "Cuba in Revolution: Escape From a Lost Paradise" [2002]
This book review on "Hitler's Traitor: Martin Bormann and the Defeat of the Reich" by Louis C. Kilzer [2000]

Louis Kilzer, an investigative reporter, attempts to take readers to another level of war with his examination of the politics and personalities in Hitler's headquarters in his book, "Hitler's Traitor: Martin Bormann and the Defeat of the Third Reich". Since the war's end, students of the Third Reich's history have been fascinated both by a supposed traitor in the Nazi hierarchy, a Soviet agent code-named "Werther," and the personality and politics of Hitler's Party Secretary, Martin Bormann. Kilzer, with the techniques of his craft, attempts to prove that Bormann was in fact the traitor Werther, who fed countless pieces of information to the Soviets, thus making him one of Nazi Germany's most notorious turncoats.

Bormann remains an interesting personality in Hitler's inner circle. His confidential letters to his wife, published after the war, proved him to be a totally amoral person dedicated only to the maintenance of his personal power and pleasures. That he might have been a Soviet spy is not an original accusation. Earlier writers and members of the inner council of the National Socialist regime questioned Bormann's loyalty. Some, indeed, accused him of being a Soviet agent. Kilzer's book adds little if anything to our understanding of Bormann or to the validity of these charges. A review of the bibliography in many respects reveals why. There are no citations from any German sources other than English translations, and none from any German archive. By and large all of Kilzer's sources are well-used postwar books and studies. Only the "Black Bertha file" in Moscow shows any real original primary research in the overseas archives where any new revelations on this subject undoubtedly lie, if they exist.

As a consequence, the reader is presented with a rehash of the Soviet spy rings that penetrated German security (most notably the notorious "Rote Kapelle" that fed Stalin key Intelligence information) and a rather rambling account of Germany's war against the Soviets. In the end, the author attempts to validate that the key spy in the highest echelons of the German command was Martin Bormann. But Kilzer fails to provide proof for his accusations. In the end the proof seems to be: "Who else could it have been?" No smoking gun is produced, a factor that has caused earlier writers to question whether there even was an agent named Werther. The discriminating reader is again left with the same questions that have existed since the end of the war: Was there a Soviet agent code-named Werther? If so, who was he? Was it Martin Bormann, or possibly General Hans Oster, another German officer dedicated to destroying Hitler? We still don't know the answers.

-- Samuel J. Newland, "The German Army at War, 1939-1945"

Axmann was a notorious Nazi zealot, who was caught within months of his escape while trying to restart Nazism in Austria. If he felt he could aid a fellow ideologue's escape from Allied clutches, he would certainly have lied about seeing Bormann's body. As he is the only witness, the account of Bormann never escaping Berlin is shaky.

When Bormann's body was exhumed for DNA testing in the 90s it was covered in red clay rather than the yellow sand common beneath the soil of Germany. This suggests his body was transported from somewhere else before being tested.

The Red Army sometimes knew movement orders for German units in the field within hours of their release to German commanders. The only way they could gain such information was to have a mole at command level, with Bormann the prime candidate due to his unfettered access to documents.

Bletchley Park camouflaged their decodes as the product of "Super-Agents" at Hitler's HQ

The DNA testing seems to back up Axmann's account of Bormann's death as he attempted to flee Berlin. However, this counts for little as the body tested in the 90s could easily have been dumped at any stage by the German government. It is not conclusive proof that Bormann failed to escape.

Conclusion

Martin Bormann was a fearsome Nazi, a cruel, devious man who manipulated his way right to the top of Hitler's high command. That he was also working for the hated Soviet's was entirely possible, for however committed to the horrors of the holocaust and the twisted Nazi world view he was, he remained an arch pragmatist, willing to play all sides against the middle. Axmann's account of Bormann's death is unconvincing, and the numerous sightings of him all over the world suggest he did escape Berlin. The Russians would surely have protected such a valuable asset, a man who had helped them win the war, and had signed the death warrant for the Third Reich through his treachery. As more and more documents are declassified, the case against Bormann strengthens, it seems this conspiracy theory could well become historical fact in the future.. For now it remains an enthralling theory, with some gaps in the evidence that have yet to be filled.

In 1984, Harry Cooper, a former Naval Reserve officer and the founder of Sharkhunters, a respected submarine warfare-studying organization, received a letter from one of the many surviving WWII members of the organization. The man claimed he was a Spaniard and that his name was Don Angel Alcázar De Velasco, and that he had worked for Japanese and German intelligence.

He made more astounding claims, the most amazing of which was that it was he who smuggled top Nazi Martin Bormann out of Berlin via U-Boat to South America. It was Bormann who knew where the massive Nazi bank accounts were, ready to fund a planned National Socialist resurgence. Don Angel also said he knew what happened to Hitler and that he most certainly did not die in the Führerbunker, that he escaped Berlin as well, drugged and whisked away by those in his inner circle.

The 'dead Hitler' was nothing more than a double.

Sometime in the late 1980's Velasco gave Sharkhunters a 114 page-long [typewritten] document describing all his activities.

After extensive fact checking, background research and the submission of the manuscript to exacting scrutiny from a select group of World War II experts, no one could poke a single hole anywhere in Don Angel's story.

This is not just another "Hitler lived" book based on innuendo, rumor and fourth-hand information. Instead, "Escape from the Bunker" is the true and detailed recollections of the man who safely delivered Martin Bormann to Argentina and believes he met an aging Hitler in 1953.

Do Angel was a spy -that was confirmed by Sharkhunters Members both on the German side and on the American side, but they all had the same observation- that he was not a very good spy and everyone in the business knew that he was a spy!

In the early days of World War II, when it was just a European conflict, he was involved in "Operation Willie" in which he was the lynch pin to success in this operation. In this operation, the abdicated King Edward VIII of England, then the Duke of Windsor, was living in Portugal and his pro-Hitler and pro-German sentiments were widely reported in the world press.

The goal of "Operation Willie" was for Don Angel to have "Teddy", as the former king was known, accompany him on a hunting expedition into Spain. Once inside Spain where the German Abwehr was heavily imbedded, "Teddy" would be captured by the Abwehr and held for ransom - the payoff was to be the end of hostilities between England and Germany. The plan failed. "Teddy" did not go hunting with Don Angel and so the whole plan fell apart.

Velasco then worked for the Japanese "To" [Eastern] spy ring for much of the war, where he was involved with many plots and intrigues.

Late in the war, Velasco began to work for the German security after the SS had taken it over from the Abwehr. He had several postings and finally, to the Führerbunker in Berlin for the final few months of the war - where he personally saw Adolf Hitler forcibly drugged by direct orders of Martin Bormann and removed from the Bunker before the alleged suicide.

Velasco continued to work for the 'movement' well after the end of the war, helping various people escape to South America via a well-organized escape agency. The people would travel through Europe under false names, usually with Vatican issued passports, to a little town called Villa Garcia some 30 kilometers from Vigo, Spain. From there, they were taken by various means [fishing boats, sailing boats, "black" U-Boats etc] to various destinations in South America. This went on from middle 1944 through middle 1947.

Martin Bormann is one of those he helped to escape, as proven by a CBS documentary that aired in the late 1960's or early 1970's - notwithstanding the "magical discovery" of a body said to be Bormann by the government.

Velasco worked for the old order until sometime in 1958 when he decided to quit the spook business and just live out his life in peace and quiet.

Velasco stated he was taken into Hitler's confidence at the last moment of the Third Reich, therefore, he was attending Hitler at his Bunker in April 1945. According to Velasco, Hitler did not commit suicide and was not in Berlin when Soviet troops occupied Berlin on 30 April 1945. Martin Bormann and Velasco himself took U-Boat, U-313 on 7 May 1946 from Villa Garcia, a fishing village of Northwestern Spain and reached Argentina after 18 days voyage.

[In official records, U-313 was allegedly surrendered at Narvik, Norway on 8 May 1945, transferred to Loch Eriboll, Scotland, for Operation Deadlight where U-313 was scuttled on 27 December 1945].

During the voyage, Bormann told Velasco that: Hitler was first transferred to a fortress in Bavaria. Eva Brown had died there because of the use of drugs in the bunker. [Other stories claims she did not die and followed Hitler to Argentina]. Then, Hitler was sent to Norway by ship. He was kept in a remote Norwegian village till his evacuation plan was carried out. He can not disclose where Hitler is. Bormann was proud that he managed to make the world believe Hitler's suicide.

Velasco also stated that he dispatched Adolf Eichmann from Madrid Airport to Buenos Aires, Argentina on 6 June 1946. Velasco managed to obtain a passport at the Argentina embassy in Madrid on 3 June 1946 and passed it to the person who disclosed his real name, Eichmann, on the way to the airport.

Maintaining command was so important to Hitler that he had ordered deserting SS officer Hermann Fegelein executed on 29 April 1945—and he was Eva Braun’s brother-in-law. In his Political Testament of 30 April 1945, the day he died, he expelled his long-time associates Reich Marshal Hermann Göring and SS chief Heinrich Himmler from both the party and the government for their unauthorized contacts with the western Allies, Britain and the U.S. Previously, he had stripped Waffen-SS General Sepp Dietrich [highly popular within the Waffen-SS] and his division of special honors for not fulfilling an order adequately in a battle in Hungary; Dietrich had been with Hitler for 17 years, since 1928, and was a bearer of the Knight’s Cross with oak leaves, swords and diamonds.

The last letter Hitler wrote apart from his last will and political testament was on 23 April 1945 to Field Marshal Ferdinand Schörner who had sent a radio message to Hitler exhorting him to leave Berlin as the Russians approached, and carry on the war from southern Germany. Hitler wrote out his response, which was radioed to Schörner. Asking him to push his group northwards, he wrote “every effort must be made to win the struggle for Berlin”.

With the forces available to him, Schörner was unable to break through the tightening Russian encirclement but was nonetheless promoted to commander-in-chief of the Wehrmacht on 29 April, the day before Hitler committed suicide. In this last letter Hitler stated: “I shall remain in Berlin, so as to take part, in honourable fashion, in the decisive battle for Germany, and to set a good example to all the rest”.

In an interview with Ron Laytner that she authorised for publication only after her death, the famous German aviatrix Hanna Reitsch stated explicitly that at least part of the account attributed to her had been fabricated:

"When I was released by the Americans I read historian Trevor-Roper's book, 'The Last Days of Hitler'. Throughout the book like a red line, runs an eyewitness report by Hanna Reitsch about the final days in the Bunker. I never said it. I never wrote it. I never signed it. It was something they invented. Hitler died with total dignity'. [1]

This report, dated 8 October 1945, was written by Reitsch's interrogator, Captain Robert E. Work [Air Division, Headquarters, United States Forces in Austria, Air Interrogation Unit], and published for the first time in, of all places, "Public Opinion Quarterly" in 1946–47. [2]

[1] Ron Laytner, "The First Astronaut Was A Woman", Edit International
[2] Robert E. Work, "Last Days in Hitler's Air Raid Shelter", Public Opinion Quarterly 1946–1947 Winter; 10(4):565-81. A different translation of the same report is included in Andrew Roberts, "Hitler's Death", although without the least acknowledgement that Reitsch had repudiated it.

In a 2007 interview, Rochus Misch - who worked as Hitler’s bodyguard, phone operator and courier for five years - said:

“Life in the Bunker was pretty normal. Hitler was mostly very calm".

He said historians, filmmakers and journalists always got it wrong when they described the mood in the Bunker as Soviet forces closed in on Hitler in the final days of the Nazi regime.

Baron Freytag von Löringhoven who was the last survivor among the close advisers of the Führer said:

"Hitler could be very aggressive but towards the end he was very controlled. He could be pleasant and even warm. He could be very charming - he was a real Austrian".

Theo Junker, the former Waffen-SS soldier with the Viking division who set up a Hitler- and Waffen-SS Memorial on his farm in Wisconsin, stated that while he was held at a British POW camp for SS and Waffen-SS in Neuengamme after the war, he met a former SS telephonist in the Führerbunker, who told him that Hitler was basically cool, calm, collected—and very much in command—right up until his last day. Despite all the stress, he never "cracked up," Junker quoted the man as saying.

Erna Flegel, Hitler's last nurse said:

"His authority was extraordinary. He was always polite and charming. There was really nothing to object to".

For these reasons, it is hard to imagine how Martin Bormann—a man unusually subservient to Hitler, albeit high-handed toward others—could have dared to drug and abduct Hitler and spirit him somehow out of surrounded Berlin to a U-Boat [and thence to South America]. Once Hitler came to, he would have had Bormann shot on principle if he had any SS guards with him, or he would have shot him himself. [On 30 June 1934 Hitler personally arrested, and then had shot, his long-time friend Ernst Röhm].

There can be no question of Hitler’s courage to engage in a final act of combat or to end his own life. The two-time Iron Cross winner in World War I, as even the most hostile English and postwar German historians have conceded, was a man of exemplary courage during 1914-1918.

As British activist-writer Michael Walsh wrote, in "Hitler’s War Record" [Historical Review Press Online]: "Werner Maser, former head of the Institute of Contemporary History at the University of Munich, although very hostile to Hitler, wrote a large neutral biography called "Hitler, Legend, Myth and Reality" [Harper and Row, 1971]".

The objective record is clear: "Hitler’s wartime record—campaigns, decorations, wounds, periods in hospital and on leave, is fully documented. In addition there is evidence to show that he was comradely, level headed and an unusually brave soldier, and that a number of his commanding officers singled him out for special mention. . . ."

In 1922, at a time when Hitler was still unknown, Gen. Friedrich Petz summarized the High Command’s appreciation of the gallant and self-effacing corporal as follows: "Hitler was quick in mind and body and had great powers of endurance. His most remarkable qualities were his personal courage and daring which enabled him to face any combat or perilous situation whatsoever".

Even those historians least favorably disposed toward Hitler, like Joachim Fest, conceded that "Hitler was a courageous and efficient soldier and was always a good comrade". He also noted: "The courage and the composure with which he faced the most deadly fire made him seem invulnerable to his comrades. ‘As long as Hitler is near us, nothing will happen to us,’ they kept repeating. It appears this made a deep impression on Hitler and reinforced his belief that he had been charged with a special mission".

Even Sebastian Haffner, a Jewish writer and fanatical Hitler hater, was forced to admit "Hitler had a fierce courage unmatched by anyone at the time or since".

In his massive and hostile "Hitler, 1889-1936: Hubris" [New York, W.W. Norton & Company, 1999], the first volume of his two-part Hitler biography, Prof. Ian Kershaw admits: "From all indications, Hitler was a committed, rather than simply a conscientious and dutiful soldier, and did not lack physical courage. His superiors held him in high regard. His immediate comrades, mainly the group of dispatch runners, respected him and, it seems, even quite liked him. . . ."

Interesting Side-light

Arthur Kannenberg, Hitler's butler, said: "'Before the end he [Hitler] gave me gold and silver cigarette cases engraved with his name. When he handed them over he said; 'Look after these until we meet again'.

Another version of Martin Bormann’s escape was reported by Josef Stalin’s Intelligence agents.

Stalin stated to Harry Hopkins, political consultant and confidant of Presidents Roosevelt and Truman, and later secretary of state, that Soviet agents reported Bormann’s escape from Berlin late the night of April 29 in a small plane and in the company of three men — one heavily bandaged — and a woman. From there, Stalin insisted, his agents traced Bormann to Hamburg, where he boarded a large U-Boat and departed Germany.

"Irrefutable proof exists that a small plane left the Tiergarten at dawn on 30 April 1945, flying in the direction of Hamburg. Three men and a woman are known to have been on board. It has also been established that a large submarine left Hamburg before the arrival of the British forces. Mysterious persons were on board the submarine...."

-- From a Soviet Intelligence Commission of Inquiry Report, as quoted by James McGovern, CIA agent in charge of researching the post-war survival of Martin Bormann

"Stalin told Harry Hopkins in Moscow that he believed Bormann escaped. Now he went further and said it was Bormann who got away in the fleeing U-Boat. More than that Stalin refused to disclose".

-- William Stevenson, author "The Bormann Brotherhood"

Stalin later reiterated his belief, claiming that Bormann was being harbored by the United States government in his escape and continued freedom. The Allies, led by the United States, refused to give this story credence and ignored Stalin's demands for an explanation, and, in fact, began claiming in defense that the Soviets held Bormann. But Stalin insisted until his death that his was the correct account of Martin Bormann's fate.

Several details of these events ring true. It is a well-known fact that while Berlin was being bombed and the Nazi leadership fell into panic or fled, Martin Bormann maintained secret radio negotiations with Admiral Karl Dönitz, the commander of all of Germany’s U-Boats, and had made plans to escape to Dönitz’s submarine headquarters. Dönitz at first resisted this effort but ultimately was ordered by Hitler [presumably at Bormann’s bidding] to accept Bormann at his headquarters. From this point on, details become sketchy and many disparate accounts are given of Bormann’s escape or possible end. But parallels from various, otherwise unconnected, Führer Bunker escape stories seem to indicate a probable scenario.

Hitler’s good friend Hanna Reitsch, the famous German aviatrix, tells in her autobiography how she flew seriously injured German Air Force General Ritter von Greim, whom Hitler had just made Commander of the Luftwaffe, out of Berlin late one night in the last days of the war. Other accounts confirm the flight was made 29 April 1945, the same night Stalin’s agents reported Bormann’s escape by small aircraft. Reitsch recounts how they flew to Dönitz’s headquarters “to make our last visit and farewell to Grand Admiral Dönitz” before flying south to the Austrian/Swiss border — an odd and seemingly careless detour of several hundred dangerous miles with the badly injured and very important General von Greim. Was there something more to that trip than fond good-byes?

International Journal of Legal Medicine
February 2001, Volume 114, Issue 3
Identification of the skeletal remains of Martin Bormann by mtDNA analysis

K. Anslinger, G. Weichhold, W. Keil, B. Bayer, W. Eisenmenger

Abstract

Contrary to statements of an eye-witness who reported that Martin Bormann, the second most powerful man in the Third Reich, died on 2 May 1945 in Berlin, rumours persisted over the years that he had escaped from Germany after World War II. In 1972, skeletal remains were found during construction work, and by investigating the teeth and the bones experts concluded that they were from Bormann. Nevertheless, new rumours arose and in order to end this speculation we were commissioned to identify the skeletal remains by mitochondrial DNA analysis. The comparison of the sequence of HV1 and HV2 from the skeletal remains and a living maternal relative of Martin Bormann revealed no differences and this sequence was not found in 1500 Caucasoid reference sequences. Based on this investigation, we support the hypothesis that the skeletal remains are those of Martin Bormann.

DNA Evidence Can Be Fabricated, Scientists Show
By Andrew Pollack
International New York Times
17 August, 2009

Scientists in Israel have demonstrated that it is possible to fabricate DNA evidence, undermining the credibility of what has been considered the gold standard of proof in criminal cases.

The scientists fabricated blood and saliva samples containing DNA from a person other than the donor of the blood and saliva. They also showed that if they had access to a DNA profile in a database, they could construct a sample of DNA to match that profile without obtaining any tissue from that person.

“You can just engineer a crime scene,” said Dan Frumkin, lead author of the paper, which has been published online by the journal "Forensic Science International: Genetics". “Any biology undergraduate could perform this.”

Dr. Frumkin is a founder of Nucleix, a company based in Tel Aviv that has developed a test to distinguish real DNA samples from fake ones that it hopes to sell to forensics laboratories.

The planting of fabricated DNA evidence at a crime scene is only one implication of the findings. A potential invasion of personal privacy is another.

Using some of the same techniques, it may be possible to scavenge anyone’s DNA from a discarded drinking cup or cigarette butt and turn it into a saliva sample that could be submitted to a genetic testing company that measures ancestry or the risk of getting various diseases. Celebrities might have to fear “genetic paparazzi,” said Gail H. Javitt of the Genetics and Public Policy Center at Johns Hopkins University.

Tania Simoncelli, science adviser to the American Civil Liberties Union, said the findings were worrisome.

“DNA is a lot easier to plant at a crime scene than fingerprints,” she said. “We’re creating a criminal justice system that is increasingly relying on this technology.”

John M. Butler, leader of the human identity testing project at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, said he was “impressed at how well they were able to fabricate the fake DNA profiles.” However, he added, “I think your average criminal wouldn’t be able to do something like that.”

The scientists fabricated DNA samples two ways. One required a real, if tiny, DNA sample, perhaps from a strand of hair or drinking cup. They amplified the tiny sample into a large quantity of DNA using a standard technique called whole genome amplification.

Of course, a drinking cup or piece of hair might itself be left at a crime scene to frame someone, but blood or saliva may be more believable.

The authors of the paper took blood from a woman and centrifuged it to remove the white cells, which contain DNA. To the remaining red cells they added DNA that had been amplified from a man’s hair.

Since red cells do not contain DNA, all of the genetic material in the blood sample was from the man. The authors sent it to a leading American forensics laboratory, which analyzed it as if it were a normal sample of a man’s blood.

The other technique relied on DNA profiles, stored in law enforcement databases as a series of numbers and letters corresponding to variations at 13 spots in a person’s genome.

From a pooled sample of many people’s DNA, the scientists cloned tiny DNA snippets representing the common variants at each spot, creating a library of such snippets. To prepare a DNA sample matching any profile, they just mixed the proper snippets together. They said that a library of 425 different DNA snippets would be enough to cover every conceivable profile.

Nucleix’s test to tell if a sample has been fabricated relies on the fact that amplified DNA — which would be used in either deception — is not methylated, meaning it lacks certain molecules that are attached to the DNA at specific points, usually to inactivate genes.

A version of this article appeared in print on 18 August 2009, on page D3 of the New York edition.

The "Diario Illustrado" of Santiago, Chile, 18 January1948 issue, stated:

"On 30 April, 1945, Berlin was in dissolution but little of that dissolution was evident at Tempelhof Airfield. At 4:15 p.m. a JU52 landed and S.S. troops directly from Rechlin for the defense of Berlin disembarked, all of them young, not older than 18 years.

"The gunner in the particular plane was an engineer by the name of B... whom I had known for a number of years and for whom I had endeavored to get exemption from military service. He sought to tank up and leave Berlin as quickly as possible. During this re-fueling interval Mr. B... was suddenly elbowed in the ribs by his radio operator with a nod to look in a certain direction.

"At about 100-120 meters he saw a sleek Messerschmitt Jet Model 332 [an editorial comment says this should be an Arado 234]. Mr. B.. and the radio operator saw, and without any doubt whatsoever, standing in front of the jet, their Commander in Chief, Adolf Hitler, dressed in field-grey uniform and gesticulating animatedly with some Party functionaries, who were obviously seeing him off.

"For about ten minutes whilst their plane was being refueled the two men observed this scene and around 4:30 p.m. they took to the air again. They were extremely astonished to hear during the midnight military news bulletin, some seven and a half hours later, that Hitler had committed suicide".

An editorial in "Zig Zag", Santiago, Chile, 16 January 1948, states that on 30 April 1945, Flight Captain Peter Baumgart took Adolf Hitler, his wife Eva Braun, as well as a few loyal friends by plane from Tempelhof Airport to Tondern in Denmark [still German controlled]. From Tondern, they took another plane to Kristiansund in Norway [also German controlled]. From there they joined a Submarine convoy.

Until shortly before the fall of Berlin, up to 40 aircraft were on constant standby at Berlin Gatow for the evacuation of Hitler and his entourage. These aircraft were: More than 13 Fw 200s, three Ju 290s, some He 111s, a large number of Ju 52s and "a few small machines".

The "few small machines" may have included one or two helicopters.

Although Germany had at least 30 helicopters operational at that time, nothing is known of their activities and none of the usual sources ever mention them.

According to James Corsi, author "Hunting Hitler", various documents suggest that Hitler's escape from Germany may have involved fleeing in a helicopter to Austria, then flying to Barcelona, and eventually arriving in Argentina via a German submarine. After he arrived, he lived in some luxury for the next 20 years, until he died in 1965.

Some Junkers Ju 290 airframes were civilianised during the war to fly discreet missions to Barcelona. Spain. Some of the last missions there were at the directions of Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz to evacuate records of U-boat movements into hiding before the collapse of Nazi Germany.

Ju-290A-6 was built for the sole purpose of being a transport for Hitler. Original pressurization was abandoned, and the aircraft was completed as a 50 seat transport. This aircraft was flying with KG 200 at Finsterwalde and in the last week of April 1945 flew from Prague to Barcelona with a number of Nazi officers. The pilot was Hauptmann Braun, original commander of LTS 290.

Its passengers may have included SS Lt General Hans Kammler who disappeared from Prague about the same time. Kammler was the head of the V-2 rocket project and other secret technologies. There is also a possibility that the mission was sanctioned by the Operation Paperclip [to recruit Nazi scientists for the USA] and Operation Sunrise [the secret surrender of Nazi Germany to US forces].

This aircraft [DB being the only markings] remained in Spain until purchased from a Allied Commission in 1950. After overhaul it was used as a personnel transport by the Spanish airforce based at Salamanca. A minor accident, forced its retirement in the mid 50's.

Nazi leader Adolf Hitler spent a month in Spain before fleeing Europe for South America, according to an Argentine investigator.

Abel Basti, who will soon publish "Destino Patagonia. Cómo Escapó Hitler" – his third book on Nazi movement in Argentina, claims to have found an FBI document, which states Hitler did not commit suicide in his Berlin Bunker.

A Fa 233 transport helicopter flew a secret operation on Hitler's order from Berlin to Danzig between 26 February and 5 March 1945, returning to Werder near Berlin on 11 March 1945 after a flight of 1,675 kms.

Source: The German Light Cruisers of WWII, Greenhill Books, 2002

The purpose of this flight is unknown but might have been a trial to test the aircraft's endurance.

Berlin-Danzig is the same distance as Berlin-German held northern Denmark and it was only one refuelling stop from there to Bodo in Norway, which the Third Reich controlled until the end.

The Ju 390, was a scaled-up Ju 290 [long-range maritime reconnaissance bomber]; it had six BMW 801D engines. Two prototypes were built in 1943 and in early 1944 - one flew from Mont-de-Marsan in France to within 20 km of the US coast near New York.

The second prototype was attached to KG 200. There is some documentary evidence that this machine loaded at Schweidnitz in early April 1945, and according to declassified SS documentary material was last seen in false Swedish livery under tarpaulin wraps and heavy guard at Bodo airfield, Norway that same month.

Suddenly in early May it was no longer there, and nobody knows what happened to it.

Declassified Argentine Intelligence documents state that in May 1945, a six-engined German transport aircraft from Europe landed on a large German ranch in Paysandu province, Uruguay with passengers and equipment, this ranch being near Puntas de Gualeguay about 70 kms out on the road from Paysandu town to Tacuarembo. The mile-wide River Uruguay separates Uruguay from Argentina. On the other bank from Paysandu is Entre Rios province, mostly marsh and wild pasture and a hotbed of German settlers. To transport passengers from Paysandu into and across Argentina was not an enormous undertaking.

After a long flight from Europe over the sea, Uruguay is the first neutral country on the South American landmass. It has many German settlers in the country; they tend to live in German villages and many of these settlers own large tracts of land.

Uruguay was neutral in the Second World War, Argentina was "at war with Germany" from March 1945. The only shots fired in anger between the two of them were the eight depth charges dropped on U-977 in the Gulf of San Matias on 18 July 1945.

Certain sections of the police and armed forces in Argentina had been "bought" with Reich gold but it was by no means safe to overfly Argentinean airspace and land a large aircraft, whereas what went on in Uruguay interested nobody, least of all the Uruguayans.

According to many sources Uruguay had declared war on Germany and Japan in February 1945 [On 23 February 1945 Uruguay was a signatory to the United Nations Declaration of War on the Axis], but a few state it only broke diplomatic and economic relations.

The total contribution of Uruguay to "the defeat of Hitlerism" to which it was pledged appears to have been nothing and to all intents and purposes the Germans probably considered Uruguay to be utterly harmless.

Instead, he flew to Spain with lover Eva Braun and 13 high-ranking Nazi officials.

“They took off from Berlin and landed in Barcelona on 27 April 1945, via Linz in Austria,” claims the journalist, who is investigating post-World War II Nazi activity in his native Argentina.

The FBI paperwork claims the Nazi leader and his party travelled in a Junkers 290 aircraft, which had the serial number 0163.

In the summer of 1945, Allied forces discovered this plane in the Travemünde airbase, close to the German city of Hamburg.

Using its flight documentation, the military traced the aeroplane’s movements to Spain.

“Hitler used Spain as a ‘trampoline.’ He spent a month in the country before escaping to South America by submarine.

Basti believes that Hitler, Braun and the 13 officers arrived in Argentina, "between July and August 1945. He then moved between the provinces of Buenos Aires, Córdoba, Mendoza and La Rioja".

From the very first day, Stalin had the idea that Hitler could have escaped to Spain [as quoted by Trevor-Roper]. General Berazin said: "my opinion is that Hitler has gone into hiding and is somewhere in Europe, possible with General Franco". Stalin said that he was alive "in hiding... possibly with General Franco". "Pravda" declared in an article entitled "Hitler's Agent, General Franco!" [6 July 1945] that the Fascist regimen in Spain should be destroyed as soon as possible.

There has been speculation and controversy over the death of Bormann.
He was ultimately indicted and sentenced to death at the Nuremberg Trials in October 1946, however his fate remains a mystery

In October 1933, Bormann became a Reich Leader of the NSDAP, and in November, a member of the Reichstag. From July 1933 until 1941, Bormann served as the personal secretary for Rudolf Hess. Bormann commissioned the building of the Kehlsteinhaus. The Kehlsteinhaus was formally presented to Hitler in 1939, after 13 months of expensive construction.

In May 1941, the flight of Hess to Britain cleared the way for Bormann to become Head of the Party Chancellery that same month. Bormann proved to be a master of intricate political infighting. He developed and administered the Adolf Hitler Endowment Fund of German Industry,

a huge fund of voluntary contributions made by successful entrepreneurs. Bormann re-allocated these funds as gifts to almost all of the party leadership.

Bormann took charge of all Hitler's paperwork, appointments, and personal finances. Hitler came to have complete trust in Bormann and the view of reality he presented. During a meeting, Hitler was said to have screamed, "To win this war, I need Bormann!". A collection of transcripts edited by Bormann during the war appeared in print in 1951 as "Hitler's Table Talk 1941–1944", mostly a re-telling of Hitler's wartime dinner conversations. The accuracy of the "Table Talk" is highly disputed, as it directly contradicts many of Hitler's publicly held positions, particularly in regards to religious adherence. The "Table Talk" is the only original source to claim that Hitler was an atheist. While Hitler's true religious feelings are unknown, Bormann was one of the few vocal atheists in the Nazi leadership.At the Nuremberg trials, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, the Reich Commissioner for The Netherlands, testified that he had called Bormann to confirm an order to deport the Dutch Jews to Auschwitz, and further testified that Bormann passed along Hitler's orders for the extermination of Jews during the Holocaust. A telephone conversation between Bormann and Heinrich Himmler was overheard by telephone operators during which Himmler reported to Bormann about the extermination of the Jews in Poland. Himmler was sharply rebuked for using the word "exterminated" rather than the codeword "resettled," and Bormann ordered the apologetic Himmler never again to report on this by phone but through SS couriers.

Berlin

Bormann was with German dictator Adolf Hitler in the Führer's shelter during the Battle for Berlin. The Führerbunker was located under the Reich Chancellery in the center of Berlin.

On 28 April 1945, Borman wired the following message to German Admiral Karl Dönitz: "Situation very serious… Those ordered to rescue the Führer are keeping silent… Disloyalty seems to gain the upper hand everywhere… Reichskanzlei a heap of rubble".

After midnight on 29 April, Wilhelm Burgdorf, Josef Göbbels, Hans Krebs, and Bormann witnessed and signed Hitler's Last Will and Testament. Hitler dictated this document to his personal private secretary, Traudl Junge. Borman was Head of the Party Chancellery and was also the private secretary to Hitler.

In his book "The Bunker", James O'Donnell, after comparing the wording of Hitler's Last Testament to the writings and statements of both Hitler and Josef Göbbels, concluded that Göbbels was at least partly responsible for helping Hitler to write it. Junge stated that Hitler was reading from notes when he dictated the testament; since Hitler could barely write by this stage.

Late on 30 April, as the Soviet forces continued to fight their way into the center of Berlin, Hitler married Eva Braun in the Führerbunker. Hitler and Braun then committed suicide. Braun committed suicide by taking cyanide and Hitler by shooting himself. Per instructions, their bodies were taken to the garden and burned. In accordance with Hitler's Last Will and Testament, Josef Göbbels, the Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, became the new "Head of Government" and Chancellor of Germany.

At 3:15 am on 1 May, Göbbels and Bormann sent a radio message to Dönitz informing him of Hitler's death. Per Hitler's last wishes, Dönitz was appointed as the new "President of Germany." Göbbels committed suicide later that same day.

On 2 May, the Battle of Berlin ended when General of the Artillery Helmuth Weidling, the commander of the Berlin Defense Area, unconditionally surrendered the city to General Vasily Chuikov, the commander of the Soviet 8th Guards Army. It is generally agreed that, by this day, Bormann had left the Führerbunker. It has been claimed that he left with Ludwig Stumpfegger and Artur Axmann as part of a group attempting to break out of the city.

Axmann's account of Bormann's death

As World War II came to a close, Bormann held out with Hitler in the Führerbunker in Berlin. On 30 April 1945, just before committing suicide, Hitler urged Bormann to save himself. On 1 May, Bormann left the Führerbunker with SS doctor Ludwig Stumpfegger and Hitler Youth leader Artur Axmann as part of a group attempting to break out of the Soviet encirclement. They emerged from an underground subway tunnel and quickly became disoriented among the ruins and ongoing battle. They walked for a time with some German tanks, but all three were temporarily stunned by an exploding anti-tank shell. Leaving the tanks and the rest of their group, they walked along railroad tracks to Lehrter station where Axmann decided to go alone in the opposite direction of his two companions. When he encountered a Red Army patrol, Axmann doubled back and later insisted he had seen the bodies of Bormann and Stumpfegger near the railroad switching yard with moonlight clearly illuminating their faces. He assumed they had been shot in the back.

Tried at Nuremberg in absentia

During the chaotic closing days of the war, there were contradictory reports as to Bormann's whereabouts.

For example, Jakob Glas, Bormann's long-time chauffeur, insisted he saw Bormann in Munich weeks after 1 May 1945.

The bodies were not found, and a global search followed including extensive efforts in South America. With no evidence sufficient to confirm Bormann's death, the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg tried Bormann in absentia in October 1946 and sentenced him to death. His court-appointed defense attorney used the unusual and unsuccessful defense that the court could not convict Bormann because he was already dead. In 1965, a retired postal worker named Albert Krumnow stated that he had personally buried the bodies of Bormann and Stumpfegger.

Two decades of unconfirmed sightings

Unconfirmed sightings of Bormann were reported globally for two decades, particularly in Europe, Paraguay, and elsewhere in South America. Some rumors claimed that Bormann had plastic surgery while on the run. At a 1967 press conference, Simon Wiesenthal asserted there was strong evidence that Bormann was alive and well in South America. Writer Ladislas Farago's widely-known 1974 book "Aftermath: Martin Bormann and the Fourth Reich" argued that Bormann had survived the war and lived in Argentina. Farago's evidence, which drew heavily on official governmental documents, was compelling enough to persuade Dr. Robert M. W. Kempner [a lawyer at the Nuremberg Trials] to briefly re-open an active investigation in 1972.

Axmann's account gains support

Axmann and Krumnow's accounts were bolstered in late 1972 when construction workers uncovered human remains near the Lehrter Bahnhof in West Berlin just 12 meters from the spot where Krumnow claimed he had buried them. Dental records—reconstructed from memory in 1945 by Dr. Hugo Blaschke—identified the skeleton as Bormann's, and damage to the collarbone was consistent with injuries Bormann's sons reported he had sustained in a riding accident in 1939. Fragments of glass in the jawbones of both skeletons indicated that Bormann and Stumpfegger had committed suicide by biting cyanide capsules in order to avoid capture.

Soon after, in a press conference held by the West German government, Bormann was declared dead, a statement condemned by "London's Daily Express" as a whitewash perpetrated by the Brandt government. West German diplomatic functionaries were given the official instruction: "If anyone is arrested on suspicion that he is Bormann we will be dealing with an innocent man".

In 1998, a test identified the skull as that of Bormann, using DNA from an unnamed 83-year-old relative.

Continuing Controversy

Some controversy continued, however. For example, Hugh Thomas' 1995 book "Doppelgängers" claimed there were forensic inconsistencies suggesting Bormann died later than 1945. According to this work and the very controversial "The Nazi Hydra in America: Wall Street and the Rise of the Fourth Reich" by Glen Yeadon, there were not only significant forensic inconsistencies with Bormann's having died in 1945, but there were also a very many credible sightings of Bormann in South America well in to the 1960s.

The forensic inconsistencies included the following:

1) A certain type of volcanic red clay that was found caked on much of the skull, which suggested that the skull had been dug up and moved since that type of soil doesn't exist in the ground in Berlin, but is instead largely found in Paraguay [which is where several of the Bormann sightings were reported to have occurred].

2) Record of dental work. Although Bormann's dental records dating back to 1945 matched dental work done on that skull, there was also other, more recently performed dental work that didn't show up on the 1945 dental records, but appeared to exist in addition to all of the other dental work that matched exactly the 1945 records.

3) The position and condition of the teeth in the skull indicated that the skull belonged to someone of a more advanced age then Bormann's almost 45 years at the time of his supposed 1945 death.

Since 1998 DNA testing revealed the skull to in fact be Bormann's, the theory that is suggested by the above evidence is that Bormann lived outside of Germany for some time, and that after his death his remains were buried somewhere [presumably near where he had been living]. Then, sometime later, as part of a cover-up, his remains were exhumed, altered appropriately, such as the planting of glass shards in the lower jar to mimic the result of having bitte[n down on a glass cyanide ampule, and then "planted" as evidence, with the intention of them being found in Berlin by "accident," to lend credence to story that Bormann had fallen nearby, in 1945, and that that was where his body was ultimately buried by someone who perhaps didn't recognize him or who did but didn't want it to be found at the time.

People have questioned why Bormann, if he had indeed been buried abroad, would have been exposed directly to the soil as opposed to being in a casket or sarcophagus of some kind. Theorists of this conspiracy suggest that perhaps, during his period of hiding, the plan had existed all along [or was conceived at least at the time of his death] and therefore he was buried locally to allow his body to naturally biodegrade before being exhumed and relocated back to a site in Berlin where it would eventually be found.

Theories as to who perpetrated this crime abound, from the West German government wanting to cover-up his escape to the Mossad wanting to cover-up the fact that they knew his whereabouts but were unable or unwilling to abduct him and bring him to justice as they had with Eichmann to elements of the British government wanting to cover-up the fact that they had helped him escape in order to get access to his vast fortune to the Soviets wanting to cover-up the fact that he had in fact been the deep-cover mole codenamed "Werther".

Though seemingly the stuff of wild conspiracy theories flying around out there, the idea of the Third Reich surviving the WW 2 defeat is really nothing new. And, in fact, on various levels their continuation is very real. At the very least, it is no secret that the remarkable technological aspect of Nazi Germany was allowed to continue in other countries such as the U.S. and Soviet Union.

For example, we know that many of NASA's founding fathers and leaders of the aerospace industry - such as Wernher von Braun [director of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center], Walter Dornberger [vice president of Bell Aircraft Company and Bell Aerosystems Company], Dr. Kurt H. Debus [director of Kennedy Space Center], Richard Gompertz [head of NASA's Chrysler space division] - were former Nazi scientists/officials. Many of these former Nazis were connected to one of Germany's most secret weapons programs, the V-2 rocket. Their contribution to the US space program was such that it would not be an exaggeration to state that without the technological 'gift' from the Reich, the Apollo missions to the Moon, one of the greatest achievement of mankind, would not have been possible In a sense, interestingly, the intense space race between the US and Soviet Union, which also acquired many Nazi technological secrets at the end of the war, was collectively the continuing legacy of Nazi technology.

It was in 1945 or so that the United States began a top-secret operation to recruit valuable Nazi scientists and specialists. Under this ethically questionable project, code-named 'Overcast' before evolving into 'Paperclip', many hundreds or thousands of those deemed valuable were brought into the United States. Officially, Operation Paperclip was cancelled by September 1947. In actuality, it is reported that the project only hid itself in the ultra-secret 'Deep Black' Realm and continued its recruitment activity until the mid-1950s. The covert activity is understandable when we consider how advanced Nazi technology and scientific ideas were, compared to the rest of the world at the time, many years ahead.

Through this process, "seeds" or "viruses" of the Third Reich were transported to other powerful nations, most notably the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The victorious nations, in a sense, made deals with the devil. And the head of this devil was General Hans Kammler, in charge of all secret high-tech weapons programs of Germany, who cleverly viewed those weapons and specialists as his ticket to freedom. In this light, the unknown fate of Kammler after the war, who mysteriously disappeared and is scarcely mentioned in official documents anywhere including the Nuremberg war crimes [despite being one of the most influential Nazi figures] is certainly suspicious.

And then there are the stories of the Nazis escaping to Spain, South America [especially Argentina], etc. More speculative, but there were also persistent rumors of Hitler's deputy Martin Bormann running a secret Nazi empire from South America. It is known that near the end of the war, 10 August 1944, Bormann held a meeting in the Hotel Maison Rouge at Strasbourg and told Nazi officials and German business leaders that it was necessary to prepare a postwar strategy to ensure eventual resurgence of Germany. Thus was born 'Operation Eagle Flight'. With the help of major foreign banks and businesses, it successfully created hundreds of front corporations all over the world, enabling the continuation of Nazi activities in the postwar era.

Also, as a part of this scheme, a secret organization called ODESSA [Organization der Ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen, The Organization of former SS members] was created to orchestrate the escape of SS officers from justice.

This group's purpose was to establish and facilitate secret escape routes, called ratlines, out of Germany to South America and the Middle East for hunted members. With alleged ties to Argentina, Egypt, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, and the Vatican, ODESSA ostensibly operated out of Buenos Aires and helped Adolf Eichmann, Josef Mengele, Erich Priebke, Aribert Heim and many other war criminals find refuge in Latin America and the Middle East.

SS-Obersturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny and Sturmbannführer Alfred Naujocks were both believed to have been active in this organization, but these suppositions have never been proven. Similarly, General Reinhard Gehlen's entire intelligence organisation that was employed and protected by US intelligence within a few months of the end of the war [and which subsequently became an important part of NATO Intelligence in eastern Europe as well as of Gladio, NATO's secret "stay-behind" paramilitary organizations], came under suspicion. In Argentina, Rudolfo Freude was allegedly a member of the network.

In November 2005, the Spanish newspaper "El Mundo" reported that Mauthausen concentration camp's Nazi doctor Aribert Heim, protected by ODESSA, had possibly been hiding in Spain for the past 20 years. According to sources from the Simon Wiesenthal Center quoted by "El Mundo", former soldiers of Otto Skorzeny [who died in an accident in Madrid in 1975] had helped maintain the organization in Spain, especially in the region around Malaga and Alicante.

According to Simon Wiesenthal, ODESSA was set up in 1946 to aid fugitive Nazis. Other sources, such as many interviews by the ZDF German TV station with former SS men, suggest that ODESSA never was the single world-wide secret organization that Wiesenthal described, but that there were several organizations, both overt and covert [including the CIA and several Latin American governments], that helped ex-SS men.

To some extent whether ODESSA was a criminal conspiracy that protected and smuggled out war criminals or an informal network by which various German and Allied elements protected "useful" former SS anti-communists from war crimes charges is purely a matter of viewpoint since, short of finding a genuine documentary constitution for it, any facts or actions would fit both descriptions equally.

Long before the ZDF TV network, biographer Gitta Sereny wrote in her 1974 book "Into that Darkness" that the ODESSA network was of minor importance if it existed at all. She attributed the fact that several criminal SS-men could escape due to the post war chaos and the lack of means of the Catholic Church, the Red Cross and the American military to verify the claims of people who came to them for help or were imprisoned. She also wrote that one pro-German Bishop called Aloïs Hudal in Rome who knowingly helped several ex-SS men to escape out of Europe must have had some help or permission from other people in the church hierarchy. One of the ex-SS men that he helped is the former commander of the extermination camp at Treblinka, Franz Stangl.

Uki Goñi, in his 2002 book "The Real Odessa: Smuggling the Nazis to Perón's Argentina" suggests that Sereny's more complex, less conspiratorial, story is closer to the real truth. The book prompted a US House of Representatives resolution in 2003, urging Argentina to open their hitherto secret documents concerning this matter.

Of particular importance in examining the postwar activities of high-ranking Nazis is Paul Manning's book "Martin Bormann: Nazi in Exile", which details Martin Bormann's rise to power through the Nazi Party and as Hitler's Chief of Staff. During the war, Manning himself was a correspondent for the fledgling CBS News along with Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite in London, and his reporting and subsequent researches present Bormann's cunning and skill in the organization and planning for the flight of Nazi-controlled capital from Europe during the dimming years of the war [notwithstanding the established fact of Bormann's death in Berlin on 1 May 1945].

According to Manning, "eventually, over 10,000 former German military made it to South America along escape routes ODESSA and Deutscher Hilfsverein...." . While in Manning ODESSA itself is incidental, the continuing existence of the Bormann Organization is a much larger and more menacing fact.

And, though very much in the realm of myth, it has been suggested by some that the Nazis had built a secret base in Antarctica for advanced saucer-shaped aircraft inside the hole at the South Pole where they sought refuge after the war.

Chester William Nimitz was a fleet admiral of the United States Navy. He played a major role in the naval history of World War II as Commander in Chief, United States Pacific Fleet [CinCPac], for U.S. naval forces and Commander in Chief, Pacific Ocean Areas [CinCPOA], for U.S. and Allied air, land, and sea forces during World War II.

Nimitz was the leading U.S. Navy authority on submarines. Qualified in submarines during his early years, he later oversaw the conversion of these vessels' propulsion from gasoline to diesel, and then later was key in acquiring approval to build the world's first nuclear-powered submarine, 'USS Nautilus', whose propulsion system later completely superseded Diesel-powered submarines in the U.S.

On 20 October 1945, at the Nuremberg trials, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, the only one of the defendants prepared to request specific counsel, asks for German naval judge advocate Flottenrichter [Captain] Otto Kranzbuhler. "But if he cannot be reached I have requested that a British or American submarine admiral come here to defend me. You see, he can understand me. He did the same job."

Kranzbuhler, on 6 March 1946, as Dönitz's counsel, requested the Tribunal's permission to send an interrogatory to Admiral Nimitz concerning US wartime policies and practices on the high seas, specifically those having to do with submarines. Kranzbuhler is accused of attempting the banned 'tu quoque' defense [the "you did it too" argument].

After much discussion behind closed doors, on 10 April 1946, Kranzbuhler wins a major victory as the Tribunal allows his proposed interrogatory to be sent to Admiral Nimitz.

"The International Military Tribunal have authorized the enclosed questionnaire formulated by counsel for Admiral Dönitz, to Admiral Nimitz. The basis of the Tribunal's decision in authorizing the questionnaire was that it was appropriate to construe the international law of submarine warfare by determining what actions were taken by the powers during the war".

An interrogatory was permitted to be submitted to Admiral Nimitz.

Dönitz produced an affidavit from Admiral Chester Nimitz admitting that he had also waged unrestricted submarine warfare in the Pacific since 7 December 1941 and that American submarines did not rescue survivors in situations where their own safety was in question. In view of all the facts proved and in particular of an order of the British Admiralty announced on 8 May 1940, according to which all vessels should be sunk at sight in the Skagerrak, the sentence of Dönitz was not assessed on the ground of his breaches of the international law of submarine warfare.

This evidence is widely credited as a reason why Dönitz was sentenced to only 10 years of imprisonment.

According to the BBC: "When Dönitz was released in 1956, Nimitz was among a number of Allied veterans who joined together to express in writing their regret about the way he had been treated".

Interestingly, Nimitz also went to privately visit Admiral Dönitz, after Dönitz's release from prison in 1956. Did Nimitz just extend pleasantries and condolences to his imprisoned Nazi counterpart, or did they have weightier matters to discuss?

Nimitz was a native German speaker and by virtue of his rank and position would have been privy to the very highest levels of war-time intelligence. He was uniquely qualified to debrief Dönitz, in a way that virtually no one else on the American side would have been.

It also must be mentioned that Nimitz was appointed the Chief of Naval Operations after WW II, and it was in this capacity that less than a year after the conclusion of hostilities in WW II he issued the orders for the well-known Antarctic "Operation High Jump".

Operation High Jump has been the subject of much speculation in both UFOlogy and Nazi conspiracy circles concerning the possible presence of a remnant, post-WW II, high-tech Nazi redoubt in the Antarctic region, perhaps incorporating a flying saucer base.

Who really knows? A great deal of what happened just before, during, and just after the conclusion of military hostilities in WW II remains very murky, to this day.

With respect to Grand Admiral Dönitz, he commanded the German Kriegsmarine during the last two years of WW II, and in the closing days of the war, Adolf Hitler appointed Dönitz to be Reichspräsident. Dönitz was, thus, "de facto and de jure" head of state of the Third Reich for the last week of its existence, in the first week of May 1945.

According to Joseph Farrell, the Bell program was conducted at a very secretive level by powerful elements of the SS, but was in reality also a securely compartmentalized Navy [Kriegsmarine] program, under the direction of Konteradmiral Wilhelm Rhein, who was Chief of Office Group for Research, Invention and Patenting, Naval Weapons Head Office, OKM from 1 September 1942 - 8 May 1945.

Admiral Rhein and Admiral Karl Witzell, head of the Marinewaffenhauptamt were involved with the Kriegsmarine nuclear propulsion and weapons programs during WW2, a project based at Hamburg and later at Stettin trying to create nuclear powered versions of the Type XXI Elektro U-Boot. .

On 1 April 1941 Witzell was promoted to General Admiral, he resigned on 31 August 1942 from active service and was placed at the disposal of the Navy on 1 October 1942, but no longer for active military service. He was appointed to the Presidential Council of the Reich Research Council, and finally awarded the 'Ritterkreuz des Kriegsverdienstkreuzes mit Schwertern' [Knight's Cross of War Merit Cross. with swords] on 5 October 1942 in recognition of its high contribution to the development of weapons and armor of the German Reich.

Despite having ending his military career Witzell became a Russian prisoner of war in May 1945 and was sentenced in the Soviet Union by a military tribunal in a 25-year prison sentence for war crimes on 25 June 1950 . On 7 October 1955, he returned prematurely returned home prematurely and became a founding member of the Association of Defence Technology.

However, the actual work on the “Bell” project itself was apparently directed by an SS General Emil Mazuw, about whom very little is known, albeit that he was one of the highest ranking Nazi officers in the Third Reich.

Farrell also points out the importance that mercury seems to have played in the Bell technology. As it happens, in the closing stages of the war, no less than three German U-Boats were dispatched to Japan bearing cargoes of mercury: U-864 with more than 60 tons of mercury in steel flasks, as well as jet engines, parts and technical drawings, U-234 with 562 kg of Uranium oxide [interestingly, U-234 is also the notation for one of the isotopes of Uranium], also mercury and optical glass in its keel, and U-859 with 31 tons of mercury. All of these German submarines were either surrendered or sunk in the last months and days of the war, so their cargoes are known.

Were other German submarines loaded with mercury or other exotic cargoes also underway at or near war's end, but perhaps completed their missions without being captured or sunk, and thus both their cargoes and destinations remain unknown? In that regard, it is noteworthy that German Submarines U-530 and U-977 both surrendered in Mar del Plata, Argentina, months after the formal cessation of military hostilities with the Third Reich. Did either of these submarines deliver a special cargo or special passengers to Argentina or another destination in the region, or is it simply that their commanding officers wished to surrender in Argentina. Who knows? But this is not the first or only time that Argentina has come to public mention as a destination for Nazis fleeing Europe after WW II.

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Martin Bormann