Debunking the Myth that Martin Bormann was a Soviet Agent
Over the years I’ve seen various claims that Martin Bormann – Rudolf Hess’ successor as head of the National Socialist German Workers Party and one of Adolf Hitler’s right-hand men – but recently a jewish ‘convert to Christianity’ on X (formerly Twitter) who shall remain nameless decided to claim that it was ‘proven’ that Martin Bormann was an agent of the Soviet Union and also that Hitler worked for the jews/Illuminati.
Now I won’t comment on the latter claim here because it deserves its own article, but the former claim was made entirely on the basis of another jew named Henry Makow who made this argument solely on the basis of former Abwehr Eastern Front Intelligence chief Reinhard Gehlen – later the creator of the famous Gehlen Organization and West German intelligence – claiming to have ‘validated’ this in his memoirs that were published in English as ‘The Service’ in 1972. (1)
Makow typically removes a lot of what Gehlen actually said and tries to present his comments as being far more definitive than they actually are since Makow removes the elements where Gehlen talks about his ‘sources’ nor does Makow check what the secondary literature has had to say about this fairly famous claim let alone address that commentary.
However, I am not a jew and I try to present my sources to you my reader so you can make your own minds up and see what I am referring to for yourself.
Gehlen’s only mention of the ‘Bormann was a Soviet agent’ is made on pages 70-71 of ‘The Service’ where he states as follows:
‘What Canaris told me concerned the fateful role in which Hitler’s closest confidant, Martin Bormann, was cast in the last war years and in the postwar epoch too. Bormann, who had been Hitler’s personal secretary since early 1943, and chief of the Nazi party organization ever since Rudolf Hess’s flight to Scotland in May 1941, was Moscow’s most prominent informant and adviser from the very moment the campaign against Russia started. There is no foundation whatever for the allegations that have been made from time to time to the effect that Bormann is alive and well, living in the impenetrable jungle between Paraguay and Argentina, surrounded by heavily armed bodyguards. He crossed to the Russians in May 1945 and was taken back to the Soviet Union.
At the time, I believe, Canaris lacked proof. Our suspicions were largely confirmed when, independently of one another, we found out that Bormann and his group were operating an unsupervised radio transmitter network and using it to send coded messages to Moscow. When the OKW monitors reported this, Canaris demanded an investigation; but word came back that Hitler himself had emphatically forbidden any intervention: he had been informed in advance by Bormann of these Funkspiele, or fake radio messages, he said, and he had approved them. This was the sum of our knowledge at the end of the war. Canaris and I both realized it was out of the question to put watchdogs on Bormann, the powerful man next to Hitler in the Nazi hierarchy. And neither of us was in any position to denounce the Reichsleiter with any prospect of success. The disdain Hitler had shown for my own intelligence summaries, however right they had later proven, was one factor, and the increasingly exposed position of Canaris and the Abwehr was another. The smallest slip would have put an end to our investigations, and probably to us as well. Canaris described to me his grounds of suspecting Bormann and told me what he assumed to be the reasons for his treachery. He would not exclude the possibility that Bormann was being blackmailed, but he was inclined to see the real motives in Reichsleiter’s immense and insatiable ambition – he was tortured by complexes toward the milieu in which he found himself and driven by the ambition to succeed Hitler when the day came. We now know of course how cunningly Bormann succeeded in bringing first Goering and then Goebbels into discredit with Hitler, for they his great rivals.
It was not until 1946, when I headed my own intelligence organization, that I had an opportunity to look into Bormann’s mysterious escape from Hitler’s Berlin bunker and his subsequent disappearance. Some time later I received conclusive proof of Bormann’s postwar movements. During the 1950s I was passed two separate reports from behind the Iron Curtain to the effect that Bormann was a Soviet agent and had lived after the war in the Soviet Union under perfect cover as an adviser to the Moscow government and has died in the meantime.’ (2)
Now if we break down what Gehlen is actually claiming here we get the following points:
A) Bormann had been a Soviet agent since at least June 1941.
B) Bormann did not escape to South America at the end of the Second World War.
C) Bormann in fact escaped to the Soviet Union at the end of the Second World War.
D) Canaris and Gehlen picked up via the OKW signals unit that Bormann was using an unauthorized radio transmitter to contact Moscow which was personally authorised by Hitler. Gehlen refers to this as a ‘Funkspiele’ which refers to fake radio messages.
E) Canaris and Gehlen couldn’t do anything about it because they were not seen as politically aligned with the Third Reich by Hitler. Bormann is blamed for this and Gehlen claims Bormann was spreading misinformation about his political rivals such as Goebbels and Goering, but also Canaris and Gehlen.
F) In 1946 Gehlen began looking into the alleged escape of Bormann from Berlin in 1945.
G) It was only in the 1950s that Gehlen received two reports alleging that Bormann had been living in Moscow as an ‘advisor’ to Stalin’s Soviet regime but had died at some point during that decade of unknown causes.
Now let’s address these claims by firstly noting that Gehlen’s first claim – that Bormann had been working for Soviet intelligence since at least June 1941 – is not evidenced by anything he later states nor does he explain why he and Canaris allegedly believed that. All we have is Gehlen’s unsupported claimed which is completely insufficient as we shall see later.
Next, we have the claim that Bormann didn’t escape to South America as was commonly being claimed at the time most famously by the Hungarian jew Ladislas Farago in his 1974 best-seller ‘Aftermath: The Search for Martin Bormann’ but was making this assertion publicly as early as 1972 in the British ‘Daily Express’ newspaper but which was only the best-known assertion of the ‘Bormann Escape’ theory that been swirling since 1945. (3)
Gehlen claims these are wrong, but he has to come up with a counter-narrative which is the claim that Bormann was actually in the Soviet Union – Gehlen’s area of expertise about which he could claim to have sources, and no one could contradict him nor would the Soviet Union’s denials be simply believed – and to buttress this Gehlen claims to have had ‘two reports’ from unverified and unnamed ‘sources’ that Bormann had been living in the Soviet Union and been serving as an ‘advisor’ to Stalin’s regime.
The alleged ‘sources’ for Gehlen’s claim that Bormann was a Soviet agent are - as Bormann biographer Jochen von Lang noted as early as 1979 - ‘manifestly inadequate’ and clearly of ‘poor quality’ since the actual information provided is extremely vague and unspecific and thus is completely unsatisfactory as ‘evidence’ for anything. (4)
It is worth noting that Bormann being a Soviet agent fundamentally ignores Bormann’s life and political formation which was an anti-Semitic nationalist radical as part of the Rossbach Organization (formed and run by former Reichswehr Lieutenant Gerhard Rossbach) which committed several political murders of men they believed were Communist agents – of which Bormann was the treasurer – and his creation of the anti-Semitic group ‘Society Against Presumptiousness of the Jewry’. (5)
We also know that it was around this time that Bormann began to hate the middle class/bourgeois element of German society because it was insufficient radical on the jewish question (6) and that Bormann’s loss of his Lutheran faith and subsequent atheism as well as his alleged hatred for Christianity date from this time primarily because Christianity was often used - then as now - as an excuse for the jews/a reason to be insufficiently radical on the issue of race by the German middle class/bourgeois of the time. (7)
Bormann then – like both Joseph Goebbels and Reinhard Heydrich – is the victim of a concerted propaganda campaign to claim that he didn’t seriously hold the views that he espoused when Bormann – like both Goebbels and Heydrich – was an anti-Semitic anti-Communist nationalist radical from the early 1920s onwards.
To claim that he was a ‘Soviet agent’ as Gehlen does makes little sense which in part is why Gehlen provides little in the way of detail but instead basically says ‘trust me’ when in truth we have no reason to trust him on this whatsoever.
If we add to this picture the fact that Bormann is has been claimed to have stated that Heinrich Muller – head of the Gestapo and another figure who disappeared in Battle for Berlin – was a ‘Soviet agent’ which is turn based on yet another dubious memoir in this case Walter Schellenberg of the SD and Wilhelm Canaris’ successor as head of German Foreign Intelligence in 1944. (8)
Then we throw another monkey wrench in Gehlen’s claims as well as Makow’s attempt to weaponize them against National Socialism in the present era in that we have Gehlen’s boss from 1944-1945 stating that the ‘Soviet spy’ was not Bormann but rather Muller and this rather explicitly referred to the ‘Red Orchestra’ Soviet espionage network. (9)
This reference is telling and extremely important given Gehlen’s unevidenced claim that Bormann was running a rogue radio transmitter network to run a Funkspiele – literally ‘Radio Game’ – feeding false information to Moscow. This would be odd but not unlikely as German counterintelligence routinely used Funkspiele to deceive and subvert their opponents including the Soviet Union (10) mostly famously the ‘Englandspiel’ run by the Abwehr and SD in the Netherlands against the British SOE with great success. (11)
There is no actual evidence that Bormann was actually running his own Funkspiele against the Soviet Union, but it is not inconceivable that he may well have done so but what neither Gehlen nor Makow mention is there are two very obvious reasons he would have been doing so and neither imply he was a ‘Soviet spy’.
First is the fact that Bormann might have been running such a Funkspiele using his own authority as the de facto leader of the NSDAP’s organizational apparatus to try and gain an intelligence coup and thus increase the (declining) influence of the NSDAP’s organizational apparatus within the power structures of the Third Reich from 1941 onwards given that it isn’t widely known that the NSDAP actually had its own intelligence apparatus from 1933 which was called the ‘Aussenpolitisches Amt der NSDAP’ (‘NSDAP Office of Foreign Affairs’) which Bormann was keen to try and revive. (12)
Second is the fact that – per Schellenberg’s comment – Bormann was looking to try and infiltrate the famous ‘Red Orchestra’ Soviet intelligence network by pretending to be a new part of it, which would indeed have been a true Funkspiele.
The reason Bormann would have been doing this is quite simple in that the ‘Red Orchestra’ network was gathering large amounts of accurate intelligence from the OKW/OKH headquarters and feeding it back to the NKVD/STAVKA in Moscow which they used to great advantage during the battles on the Eastern Front which was well-known to the OKW/OKH as well as the Abwehr and SD but they never actually managed to figure out where the leak was. (13)
We however do know that this leak was neither Bormann nor Muller – which represent speculations about where it actually was not the truth – since as Max Hastings has explained at length:
‘Rossler was repeatedly pressed by Moscow, through Rado, to reveal his sources, and equally insistently he declined to do so. Dr. Christian Schneider, a German émigré codenamed ‘Taylor,’ joined Rossler’s business. As a test of his worth, he was invited to identify German formations deployed on the Southern Front in Russia, together with the number of Wehrmacht PoWs in Soviet hands. When he responded correctly to both questions, Moscow was suitably impressed. Wehrmacht chief of staff Gen. Franz Halder later raged about the leakiness of the OKW and OKH: ‘Almost every offensive operation of ours was betrayed to the enemy even before it appeared on my desk.’ Speculation has persisted into the twenty-first century about the source of Rossler’s extraordinary information stream. He himself indicated that he had a range of contacts in the German high command. Eastern Front intelligence chief Reinhard Gehlen later claimed, absurdly, that Martin Bormann was in Rossler’s pay.
Rado revealed after the war that the sources he and Rossler guarded so zealously for so long were… strips of punched paper. Each day of the war, more than 3,000 teleprinter messages were dispatched from OKW’s communications centre to the Fuhrerquartier, unencrypted since the link was a secure landline. One of Rossler’s agents persuaded two female teleprinter operators to pass him ‘spent’ ribbons, intended for destruction. By this means the spy received copies of some 4,500 top secret messages and eight hundred special reports, which were subsequently carried by courier to Switzerland. If this version of events is accurate, then Rossler’s notional sub-agents – codenamed ‘Olga’, ‘Werther’, ‘Teddi’, ‘Anna’, ‘Ferdinand’ – were in reality mere paper creations.’ (14)
Put another way: the ‘Lucy’ sub-network of ‘Red Orchestra’ was the problem and it wasn’t a Bormann or a Muller leaking the information to NKVD but rather two female members of the OKW/OKH’s communications staff breaching their own protocols to betray the Third Reich’s secrets and plans to the NKVD and the STAVKA in Moscow via Switzerland.
Gehlen’s fingering of Bormann as the ‘Soviet spy’ as Bormann’s own fingering of Muller as the same spy then represents an attempt to smooth over a critical failure of the Abwehr and the Gestapo/SD to figure out where the leak was coming from which – as we can see – was actually a basic problem that should have been detected and plugged by Canaris, Gehlen, Muller and Schellenberg but wasn’t and Bormann merely got fingered by Gehlen after the war because he was a plausible ‘evil villain’ and former political rival of Gehlen’s who could be saddled for Gehlen and his boss Canaris’ failure to uncover the truth about the ‘Lucy’ network operating with great success right under their nose.
This means that nearly all of Gehlen’s and thus also Makow’s claims that Bormann was a ‘Soviet agent’ can be neatly disposed of as the made-up nonsense/smear campaign that it surely was and is.
Perhaps even more fatal to this claim is the fact that Bormann’s corpse was actually discovered in Berlin in 1972 and formally identified by genetic testing – Bormann left multiple known children – along with his dental records to be his in 1998. (15)
Indeed, it turns out that Gehlen had been aware that Bormann had been killed in the Battle of Berlin in 1945 by the late 1940s long before he falsely claimed in his 1972 memoir that Bormann had ‘crossed the lines’ and was ‘working for the Soviet Union’ as Charles Whiting has pointed out:
‘The Gehlen Org turned up one new item. It made mention of photographs seen by one of Gehlen’s “V-men” which Russian soldiers had made of a journal on the corpse of an unknown German in May 1945, in Berlin. The journal turned out to be that of Martin Bormann and contained two entries which indicated that the corpse on which it was found was Martin Bormann himself. In other words, Gehlen had good reason to assume that Bormann had been killed by the Russians and buried in some mass grave at an unknown spot in Berlin.’ (16)
This means that Gehlen knowingly lied about Bormann, but the question is: why?
The answer to that question is actually remarkably simple in that was all about the money.
Gehlen needed something to ‘sell’ his memoirs to publishers and the general public and the advertising hook he chose to use allowed him to cover up his embarrassing failure to identify and eliminate the ‘Lucy’ sub-network of ‘Red Orchestra’ as well as throw mud on the reputation of an old political rival in the form of Bormann. This was all the better because Bormann was by then the subject of widespread and popular ‘survival’ conspiracy theories which would ensure that his memoirs would sell well since his claims would be taken at face value by many because of his status as the head of the Gehlen Organization and someone who was ‘in the room’ at the time.
We can actually see this in Henry Raymont’s coverage of the Gehlen memoirs in the ‘New York Times’ in 1971 before they were published in that the principal ‘revelation’ Gehlen made (his hook to get publishers and the public to buy the book basically) was about Bormann being a ‘Soviet spy’.
Raymont writes:
‘The book is reported to be commanding offers approaching $1‐million for world publication rights, following at least six months of secret negotiations that in themselves resemble an episode of international intrigue.
The memoirs discount previous accounts of Bormann's fate, which presumed him either to have died outside Hitler's bunker in Berlin or to be hiding in South America.
In fact, the memoirs say, as the. Russians closed in on the bunker, the Nazi leader crossed their lines and gained sanctuary in the Soviet Union. The information is attributed to a series of “unimpeachable” reports, presumably from General Gehlen's agents in the Soviet Union. The last report, which brought word of the death, came in 1969.’ (17)
So if we break this down Raymont is telling us that the principal selling point of Gehlen’s memoirs is his claim about the fate of Martin Bormann which I note is significantly different from the actual claim in his memoirs in that he claimed that ‘he’d been told of Bormann’s death in 1969’ just before he was set to publish his memoirs and which is probably the reason that Gehlen was paid $1 million (circa $8.6 million today) for international publishing rights.
The only way Gehlen would have been able to command that sort of money for his otherwise very lacklustre memoirs – they are short on any detail or significant revelations outside the claim that ‘Bormann was a Soviet agent’ – is if there was significant hook to interest people in them and given – as we’ve discussed – that Bormann survival fever was really just starting to build – it reached its peak in the 1980s with the publication of books like Paul Manning’s ‘Martin Bormann: Nazi in Exile’ in 1981 – then the Bormann claim was likely inserted into the text by Gehlen – despite him having known Bormann died during the Battle of Berlin in 1945 for more than twenty years at that point – in order to sell his book and – to be frank – make a lot of money from gullible publishers and readers in order to fund his very comfortable retirement.
So no Martin Bormann was not a Soviet spy and the sole basis of this claim is Reinhard Gehlen post-war memoirs which – as we have seen – does so despite Gehlen knowing it was completely untrue and it was done both to cover up Gehlen and Canaris failure to discover the truth behind the ‘Lucy’ sub-network of the ‘Red Orchestra’ Soviet spy ring as well as to fund Gehlen’s retirement by capitalizing on his perceived authority as a long-time intelligence chief and the increasingly potent Bormann survival fever which had been gripping the European and American public since the early 1960s to sell his memoirs at an extraordinarily high price.
References
(1) https://www.henrymakow.com/hitler_and_bormann_were_traito.html
(2) Reinhard Gehlen,1972, ‘The Service: The Memoirs of General Reinhard Gehlen’, 1st Edition, World Publishing: New York, pp. 70-71
(3) https://www.jta.org/archive/ladislas-farago-dead-at-74; for an earlier example of this theory and its sordid history see for example James McGovern, 1968, ‘Martin Bormann’, 1st Edition, Grosset & Dunlap: New York, pp. 5-6
(4) Jochen von Lang, 1979, ‘The Secretary: Martin Bormann: The Man Who Manipulated Hitler’, 1st Edition, Random House: New York, p. 358
(5) McGovern, Op. Cit., p. 9
(6) Ibid., p. 11
(7) Ibid., pp. 8; 48-49
(8) Charles Whiting, 2001, ‘The Search for ‘Gestapo’ Müller: The Man Without a Shadow’, 1st Edition, Pen & Sword: Barnsley, pp. 5-6
(9) Ibid., p. 5
(10) See for example David Kahn, 1978, ‘Hitler’s Spies: German military intelligence in World War II’, 1st Edition, MacMillan: New York, p. 511
(11) On this see Nicholas Kelso, 1988, ‘Errors of Judgement: SOE's Disaster in the Netherlands, 1941-44’, 1st Edition, Robert Hale: London
(12) Reinhard Bollmus, 2006, [1970], ‘Das Amt Rosenberg und seine Gegner: Studien zum Machtkampf im nationalsozialistischen Herrschaftssystem’, 1st Edition, Oldenbourg: Munich, p. 241
(13) Max Hastings, 2015, ‘The Secret War: Spies, Codes and Guerrillas 1939-1945’, 1st Edition, William Collins: London, p. 188
(14) Ibid.
(15) https://www.independent.co.uk/news/dna-test-closes-book-on-mystery-of-martin-bormann-1161449.html
(16) Charles Whiting, 1996, ‘The Hunt for Martin Bormann: The Truth’, 1st Edition, Leo Cooper: London, p. 130
(17) Henry Raymont, ‘Memoirs Tie Bormann to Soviet’, The New York Times, 5th September 1971, p. 25