MARTIN BORMANN

Old Nazis never die. They go to Antarctica or, in the case of Adolf Hitler, to the Nazi Moon Base. Or, more plausibly, in the case of Martin Bormann they go to the Soviet Union.In May 1941 Bormann was made Nazi Party Chancellor, a position he used to become the Third Reich’s main bureaucrat. He was also Hitler’s right-hand man, his personal secretary and his sounding board, and remained with the Führer until the end. 

The last incontestable sighting of Bormann was in the early hours of 2 May 1945, on Invalidenstrasse Bridge in Berlin, as he sought to escape from encircling Russian troops. Post-war investigation by the Allies surmised that Bormann had committed suicide or been killed near the bridge, but in the absence of a body there could be no confirmation. For two decades rumours flew that Bormann was alive and well and living in (variously) Germany, South America and Spain. 

Then, in 1971, Reinhard Gehlen published his memoirs, The Service, which stated as fact that Bormann had survived the war and hidden from view in the unlikeliest place of all, the USSR, where he had only recently died.Unlike other Bormann spotters, Gehlen had pedigree. He was the former head of Nazi intelligence on the Eastern Front and, with the help of the CIA and the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, had taken on the job of spy chief in the new Federal Republic of Germany. Gehlen asserted that there existed film of Bormann watching sports with Soviet bigwigs. 

And he made another sensational claim: Bormann was the Russian spy code-named Werther who had infiltrated Hitler’s military planning sessions, and passed on the top-secret knowledge to Moscow that Russia needed to win Stalingrad, Kursk and other battles on the Eastern Front.Gehlen’s identification of Bormann as Werther received a boost in 2000 with the publication of Hitler’s Traitor: Martin Bormann and the Defeat of the Reich by Louis Kilzer. So fast was intelligence passed from Hitler’s ops room to Stalin’s, Kilzer posited, that it must have come from someone right at Hitler’s side: Bormann. If Bormann was Werther it makes it natural that Stalin would have given him sanctuary after the war – hence the sightings of him in the USSR.

There is, however, strong forensic evidence that Bormann died during the battle of Berlin in 1945. In 1972 construction workers at Lehrter Banhof dug up two bodies, one of which was identified as Bormann’s by his wartime dentist Dr Hugo Blaschke. (The other body belonged to SS doctor Ludwig Stumpfegger.) The bodies were found just 40 feet (12m) from where Albert Krumnow, a postal worker, had previously claimed to have buried Bormann and Stumpfegger. 

In 1998 DNA tests on the skull of one of the Lehrter corpses confirmed it as Martin Bormann’s. Traces of glass in the jaws suggested the two men had committed suicide by biting on cyanide capsules.The positive identification of the Lehrter corpse as Bormann’s holes the “Bormann was Werther” theory – because, if Bormann had been a Soviet spy, presumably events would indeed have followed the scenario Gehlen proposed. So who was Werther? 

Bernd Ruland, a teleprinter supervisor at Hitler’s wartime radio centre at Zossen, suggested in a 1973 book that Werther was not one but two people: two female teleprinters at Zossen.Almost inevitably, the forensic identification of Bormann’s corpse has not killed off the conspiracy theories. In Doppelgängers, Hugh Thomas suggested there were forensic indicators that Bormann died later than 1945, notably that the condition of the teeth were those of a man older than 45 (Bormann’s age in 1945) and that there appeared to be dental work in excess of the 1945 record. 

Moreover, the skull contained traces of a volcanic red clay not found in Berlin but common in Paraguay – where there had been several Bormann sightings. Since DNA testing proved the skull to be Bormann’s, the necessary inference was that Bormann did survive the war and was reburied in Berlin by accomplices to give credence to the story that he fell in 1945.

Old Nazis do eventually die, but the conspiracy theories about them go on for ever.