Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler (9 page)

Hermann Göring, that great collector of titles, had proved equally incompetent in the position of Reich commissioner for the Four-Year Plan as he was in strategic command of the Luftwaffe. Sensing that Göring—after the failure of his boast that he could sustain the Sixth Army at Stalingrad—was falling out of favor with Hitler, Goebbels and Speer tried to persuade Hitler to dismiss him so they could take over control of the domestic economy for more efficient war production. This attempt soon failed, however, in a welter of other plots. In the turmoil following Stalingrad, pent-up rivalries among the hierarchy came boiling to the surface.

Having the ear of Hitler, Party Chief Reichsleiter Martin Bormann suggested that a triumvirate representing the state, the party, and the armed forces be established as a Council of Three with dictatorial powers to control the economy—exactly what Goebbels and Speer were proposing for themselves. They immediately changed tack and now sought an alliance with Göring and Himmler to thwart Bormann. But Himmler was in a separate plot with Bormann to gain more power at the expense of Göring. As the controller of Hitler’s personal finances, Bormann finessed the plotters by giving Göring six million reichsmarks to indulge himself away from Hitler’s court. In the end, none of these plots succeeded in its object since Hitler was indifferent to such ploys beyond creating divisions among his acolytes.

IN THE WORDS OF DR. OTTO DIETRICH
, the Reich press chief, “Hitler created in the political leadership of Germany the
greatest confusion that has ever existed
in a civilized state.” The plots and counterplots of 1943 were a prime example of how
Hitler exercised his absolute power
by fomenting fierce rivalries among his immediate subordinates so that none could ever acquire sufficient power or influence to challenge the Führer himself. Indeed, such episodes represent the whole Nazi regime in microcosm.

The popular perception holds that the Third Reich was a monolithic totalitarian state that controlled a reluctant population through terror and Teutonic efficiency. While the reign of terror was real enough, the government institutions of the Third Reich were in fact massively inefficient, hampered by conflicts of interest and muddled chains of command and absurdly wasteful of money, time, and manpower. Hitler showed little interest in or talent for administration; he preferred to wield power through many competing organizations that owed their very existence to his good offices. In line with his conception of creative chaos, different individuals and agencies were given ill-defined responsibilities in closely related fields of activity in everything from postal administration to weapons development. The price demanded for Hitler’s support in the resulting turf wars was total personal loyalty. This might earn supplicants a loosely expressed general directive that they could interpret as endorsing their particular agendas. In pursuit of these rivalries, empire building and bureaucratic obstruction were rife and were deliberately encouraged by Hitler, according to his simplistic view that the strongest would prevail through competition.

The architecture of the Nazi
state machinery defied all logical explanation
. Before the war, the operations of government were nominally entrusted to seventeen ministries, yet the last actual cabinet meeting had taken place in November 1937. On August 30, 1939, the Ministerial Council for the Defense of the State had been formed. It was composed of six of Hitler’s closest followers and bureaucrats; this body, chaired by Göring, could enact laws at Hitler’s will. Commissioners were appointed with broadly defined powers within various areas of government activity, but there was no actual machinery for coordinating their work. Worse, there was at every level a divisive duplication of authority caused by the parallel prerogatives of state and Nazi Party functionaries. Virtually every state body was replicated with a party equivalent, with each vying for resources and favor.

Heinrich Himmler, as national leader of the SS and chief of German police, was already ruler of the entire security and police apparatus, but his ambitions for expanding his SS empire knew no bounds. The whole machinery of government was interpenetrated by Himmler’s practice of awarding parallel SS ranks to functionaries of every kind. Adm. Canaris’s Abwehr military intelligence department, answerable to the Armed Forces Supreme Command, was a particular target for Himmler’s ambition. Its activities were mirrored by the intelligence and counterintelligence branch of the SS, the Security Service—Sicherheitsdienst. This was commanded until June 1942 by Himmler’s deputy, SS and Police Gen. Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the Reich Main Security Office. Each agency scrabbled for supremacy at the expense of efficient operations against the common enemy.

Canaris and Heydrich, who shared a mutual love of riding and of music, maintained an ostensibly cordial relationship. They sometimes dined together
en famille.
The cold-blooded killer Heydrich was also an accomplished violinist and he often played for Canaris’s wife. When the professional rivalry became too intense, however, Canaris betrayed Heydrich’s movements in Czechoslovakia to Britain’s MI6. Two parachutists of the Czech Brigade, Jan Kubis and Jozef Gabcik, threw an antitank grenade at Heydrich’s open-top Mercedes in a Prague street on May 27, 1942. Several fragments and bits of horsehair seat upholstery entered Heydrich’s back. He was at first expected to recover from the operation to extract the debris, but the wounds became infected and he died a week later. The death of the central architect of the “Final Solution”—which he had unveiled at the Wannsee conference that January—led to mass reprisals that killed about 5,000 Czech men, women, and children.

AMONG THE ABHORRENT FIGURES
at the pinnacle of the Nazi hierarchy, popular history recalls in particular the flamboyant, drug-addicted Luftwaffe commander in chief Hermann Göring, the occultist security overlord Heinrich Himmler, and the odious propaganda minister and de facto interior minister Joseph Goebbels. In truth, however, the most devious of them all, and the master of palace intrigue, was the relatively faceless party chief Martin Bormann. Hitler’s shadow and gatekeeper for much of the Third Reich, Bormann was a figure forever lurking in the background at the Führer’s elbow. His battlegrounds were the card-index file and the double-entry ledger. His principal weapon was the teleprinter, through which he issued a torrent of instructions to his ubiquitous regional gauleiters (district leaders). To these party officials, Bormann was known behind his back as the “
Telex General
.”

Bormann had come to the Nazi Party relatively late, joining only in 1926, so the
Alte Kämpfer
(“Old Fighters”) who had supported Hitler in the Munich putsch attempt tended to dismiss him. Nevertheless, he held the party membership number 6088 and was therefore eligible for the Gold Party Badge, awarded to party members with a registration number under 100,000. Bormann’s first job was to run the relief fund for the storm troopers of the Sturmabteilungen (SA—the party’s brown-shirted uniformed part-time activists) who were injured in brawls and riots. He cannily negotiated reduced premiums to the insurance company concerned while at the same time increasing the contributions from NSDAP members by 50 percent; furthermore, the payment of dues was now compulsory, while any payment of benefits was at Bormann’s sole discretion. In short order, this scheme raised 1.4 million reichsmarks in a single year—much to Hitler’s delight. The Führer moved Bormann and the SA fund into the NSDAP proper. Bormann now worked at the Brown House, the party headquarters in Munich, where he aspired to taking over the post of party treasurer from Franz Xaver Schwarz.

Meanwhile, he progressed to controlling the finances of the Adolf Hitler Spende der Deutsche Wirtschaft, the
“
Adolf Hitler Fund of German Business.” This AH Fund was originally established as “a token of gratitude to the leader” in order to provide campaign funds and finance for cultural activities within the NSDAP. In reality it became
Hitler’s personal treasure chest
, with revenues gathered from many sources. The most important were the contributions made by industrialists—such as Krupp and Thyssen and of course IG Farben—who were benefiting enormously from German rearmament. In essence, this was a tax amounting to one-half percent of a company’s payroll, payable directly to the Führer. In its first year alone, 30 million reichsmarks poured into the coffers of the AH Fund.

In 1929, Bormann married Gerda Buch, the daughter of a senior party official, and on July 3, 1933, he was appointed chief of staff to the deputy Führer, Rudolf Hess. Hess was as uninterested as Hitler in paperwork, so Bormann’s skill in turning Hitler’s spontaneous verbal directives into coherent orders was invaluable. The Führer would comment approvingly that “
Bormann’s proposals are so precisely worked out
that I have only to say ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ With him, I deal in ten minutes with a pile of documents for which with another man I should need hours.” On October 10, 1933, Hitler appointed Bormann as a party Reichsleiter or national leader, making him fourth in the Nazi hierarchy behind Hitler, Göring, and Hess. The intertwining of party and state authority, as described above, would henceforth give Bormann all the freedom of maneuver that he needed.

BORMANN’S ABILITY TO INGRATIATE HIMSELF
with the Führer was uncanny. He altered his sleeping pattern to coincide with Hitler’s and even mimicked his master by eating vegetarian food and avoiding alcohol when they were dining together—although in private he gorged himself on schnitzel, wurst, and schnapps. As one regional gauleiter commented, “Bormann
clung to Hitler like ivy
around an oak, using him to get to the light and to the very summit.” This he achieved after Deputy Führer Hess—already a marginalized figure—embarked on his bizarre solo flight to Scotland on May 10, 1941, apparently to seek a peace agreement with opponents of the British government. Hess’s departure from the scene allowed Bormann to get even closer to Hitler. He was now entirely responsible for arranging the Führer’s daily schedule, appointments, and personal business. He was always at his master’s side and never took a vacation for fear of losing influence. His reward came in April 1943, when he was appointed secretary to the Führer and chief of the party chancellery. The latter post gave him immense influence over the gauleiters who controlled every district (
Gau
) across the Third Reich. He was now so indispensable that the Führer was prompted to say, “To win this war,
I need Bormann
.”

He also needed Bormann to control his personal finances. At a dinner party with Himmler in October 1941, Hitler had declaimed, “As far as
my own private existence
is concerned, I shall always live simply, but in my capacity as Führer and Head of State I am obliged to stand out clearly from amongst all the people around me. If my close associates glitter with decorations, I can distinguish myself from them only by wearing none at all.” This claim of monkish asceticism was not strictly true. Hitler enjoyed a lavish lifestyle at his Bavarian residence, the Berghof, in the mountain village retreat of Berchtesgaden in Obersalzburg municipality. Besides the Berghof itself, separate villas were provided at Obersalzberg for all the notables of the Nazi hierarchy. This compound had all been created for the Führer by Bormann and
financed from the AH Fund
to the tune of about 100 million reichsmarks. With its splendid views of the Bavarian Alps, the Berghof was Hitler’s favorite retreat. This was where he spent time with his mistress, Eva Braun, and entertained foreign visitors and his close and trusted associates—his
Berg Leute
, or mountain people.

As Otto Dietrich would write,

Bormann then assumed economic and financial direction of the entire “
household of the Führer
.” He was especially attentive to the lady of the house, anticipating her every wish and skillfully helping her with the often rather complicated arrangements for social and state functions. This was all the more necessary, since she herself tactfully kept in the background as much as possible. Bormann’s adroitness in this matter undoubtedly strengthened his unassailable position of trust with Hitler, who was extraordinarily sensitive about Eva Braun.

There was, however, no love lost between Bormann and Braun; behind his back she called him an “oversexed toad.”

With
his brilliant business acumen
, Bormann found many ways to bolster Hitler’s personal fortune. Apart from the considerable income derived from royalties on
Mein Kampf
—which, since it was required reading in German schools, sold millions of copies—Bormann devised a scheme to capitalize on image rights whereby Hitler received a payment for every use of his likeness, be it on a postcard or even a postage stamp. These monies were paid into a separate Adolf Hitler Cultural Fund to support the performing arts and to purchase paintings for the Führer’s personal collection. By the outbreak of war in 1939, Hitler’s annual income was immense, but—thanks to a deal that Bormann had arranged with the authorities—he paid no income tax. Like other Nazi leaders, Hitler had foreign bank accounts, including one with the Union Bank of Switzerland in Bern and another in Holland. These accounts received the royalties earned on Hitler’s book sales abroad and, more importantly, allowed him to indulge the one passion in his life besides politics—his obsession with art.

Chapter 4