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Chapter 15: THE PHOENIX RISES: THE BORMANN PLAN
1 Ladislas Farago, Aftermath; Martin Bormann and the Fourth Reich (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974), p. 60. As the war turned irrevocably against the Third Reich, top Nazi leaders began to plan for the future, among them the Nazi Party's Reichsleiter Martin Bormann, Adolf Hitler's secretary and virtual shadow, and financial administrator of the Party's, as well as of Hitler's own personal and considerable, fortune. While much of this story is known to the general public in broad outline, few appreciate the degree of organization, planning, and success it had, and, unfortunately, may be continuing to have. Even fewer appreciate its significance, for what began in the secret societies of post-World War One Germany as the most explosive political movement in modern history would end by once again going underground, and operating behind a variety of false fronts that included corporations, black projects, secret societies, and criminal and paramilitary syndicates. It would thus exercise a considerable, though hidden, moral and cultural influence on the world that emerged after World War Two. With the failure of the final large German offensive in Soviet Russia at Kursk in 1943, the Nazi leadership had but two courses of action:
At first the movement of resources abroad -monetary, technological, and human - proceeded haphazardly. Money and loot from a plundered Europe made its way into secret Swiss bank accounts, or in the case of hard assets - precious minerals, bullion, art, diamonds and other gemstones and so on - made its way overland through France into "neutral" but decidedly pro-Axis Nationalist Spain. But it soon became apparent that haphazard efforts would not ensure the survival of the Party, nor the furtherance of its ideals, nor the spread of its power in the postwar world, nor the continuance of its research projects, which would have to be continued if it ever hoped to regain power and influence. Organization and long-range planning in depth and breadth had to occur if Nazism were to survive covertly. To this end, Reichsleiter Martin Bormann orchestrated a top secret meeting on August 10, 1944, at the Hotel Rotes Haus in Strassburg, in occupied France. Representatives of all the major German industrial and armaments firms were present, including the huge firms of Krupp, Thyssen, and of course, I.G. Farben. Also present were Bormann himself, Hjalmar Schacht, president of the Reichsbank, and his son-in-law, the famous SS commando, Colonel Otto Skorzeny, leader of the daring air mission to rescue Benito Mussolini in 1943. At this meeting,
2 Henry Stevens, The Last Battalion and German Arctic, Antarctic, and Andean Bases, p. 58. As a result of this plan, the well-known SS-run ratlines were formed to assist fleeing SS and other Nazis, to provide for their financial security, relocation, and false identities. The most famous of these was of course the ODESSA group, or the Organization Der Ehemahlige SS Angehorige, or "Organization of Former SS Members." Another famous organization was "Die Spinne" or The Spider. In any case, under the Riechsleiter's powerful protection, the SS, in concert with the Kriegsmarine, began to smuggle enormous quantities of gold, precious gems, art and both genuine and counterfeit cash out of Germany. To a lesser extent, machine tools, steel, technicians and other personnel began to be quietly siphoned off Germany industry and smuggled out of Europe.3 The financial treasure trove was then laundered by the SS via a variety of methods, for example, through Evita Peron's Swiss bank accounts, through dummy corporations, through the South American drug trade, and so on.4 During this immediate postwar period, most of this fortune was controlled by Otto Skorzeny. The German industrialists who had been set up abroad with SS money dating back to the deal at the Rotes Haus in Strassbourg in 1944 were asked by Skorzeny to pay back their loans. Both Thyssen and Krupp did so, as presumably did others. To give the reader an idea of the sums collected by Skorzeny, Eva Peron alone had an estimated $800 million dollars in bank deposits, in 1945, and 4,600 carats of diamonds and other precious stones, 90 kilograms of platinum and 2,500 kilograms of gold.5 With these monies, the SS purchased huge tracts of land in South America and elsewhere, and large corporations were established in which "research which (sic) had begun in Germany could be carried through."6 These "secure areas" or Sperrgebiete often saw the establishment of whole towns, airfields, highways and all the amenities of civilized German life.7 Local security was, of course, provided by the SS or "contract labor" from the host country. The most famous of these colonies, perhaps, is the Colonia Dignidad in Chile, a "colony" notorious for the disappearances of the too- inquisitive reporter, and implicated in the US overthrow of the Chilean Marxist government of Salvador Allende in the early 1970s and the training of Chilean dictator Pinochet's DINA "interrogators."8 3 Stevens, op. cit., p. 59. And of course, these secure areas in the Andes and other remote South American locations are also reputed to be the sites of secret Nazi laboratories continuing the research on "flying saucers" and other wartime Nazi black projects.9 9 Stevens, The Last Battalion, p. 64. Whatever one may think of the truthfulness of the last allegation, it is true - and generally well known - that such colonies of Nazis did and still do exist in South America, with connections to the South American underworld and governments that one can only imagine. But there is good reason not to dismiss even the "continued research" allegation too quickly, for it conforms to a well-known pattern of secret post-war West German corporate and military research on the continent on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, Africa. In the final months of his administration, President Jimmy Carter accused South Africa's apartheid government of having tested an atom bomb in the Indian Ocean. German and American newspaper reporters quickly uncovered - in spite of Praetoria's denials - a tapestry of corporations and dummy corporations that clearly led back to West Germany's Bundeswehr, and to a multitude of personnel and military officers with ties to the Third Reich. The goal was clear: The Federal Republic was supplying massive technological assistance to South Africa (and to Israel as it turned out) in the areas of uranium enrichment and plutonium transmutation via centrifuges and other processes, in return for which uranium-rich South Africa bartered the raw atomic fuel itself. Germany could thus fulfill its postwar treaty obligations by not developing or deploying atomic, biological, or chemical weapons on German soil, while at the same time using South Africa to construct and test a bomb of essentially German design. If this sounds familiar, it is, for after World War One, Germany side- stepped the Versailles treaty -which forbade the Germans possession of tanks, aircraft, and heavy artillery beyond a certain caliber - by concluding a secret protocol in the Rapallo treaty with the other pariah of the day, the Soviet Union. Thus, as early as 1922, German officers were training in tank warfare in the Soviet Union with their Russian counterparts, among them the future Colonel-General Guderian who would lead the Second Panzer Army during Operation Barbarossa to the very gates of Moscow.10 In yet another important study challenging the standard assumptions of the origin and transmission vector of the human AIDS virus and the history of the discovery of HIV, Dr. Leonard G. Horowitz makes a solid case for its genesis within secret American biological warfare research at Fort Detrick, Maryland. But there is more to Horowitz's investigations than this, for there is a German connection lurking deep in the background, and once again, it goes back to Bormann and presages the 1944 Rotes Haus meeting in Strasbourg:
Merck, then, along with Rockefeller partner I.G. Farben, received huge sums of money from the Nazi war chest to actualize Hitler's proclaimed 'vision of a thousand-year Third Reich (and) world empire. This was outlined with clarity in a document called 'Neuordnung,' or 'New Order,' that was accompanied by a letter of transmittal to the (Bormann led) Ministry of Economics.
10 The often overlooked story of the West German bomb and its very secret development was covered in the New York Times book by Zdenek Cervenka and Barbara Rogers, The Nuclear Axis: the Secret Collaboration Between West Germany and South Africa, (New York Times, 1978), ISBN 0-8129-0760-4 11 Leonard Horowitz, D.M.D., M.A., M.P.H., Emerging Viruses: AIDS and Ebola: Nature, Accident, or Intentional? (Sandpoint, Idaho: tetrahedron, Inc., 1999), p. 335. Bormann apparently ignored his Fuhrer, and in a momentary burst of Christianity, heeded Christ by not burying his treasure, but investing and increasing it. In any case, as late as 1988, as the Soviet Union was nearing its collapse, Russian premier Mikhail Gorbachev appeared to be trying to point a finger of blame for the AIDS epidemic in Africa in Germany's direction. Via Russian diplomatic channels and contacts in the former Belgian Congo, now Zaire, the Russian government had learned of a Zairean physician who had formerly worked for the West German OTRAG corporation, or Orbital Transport and Missiles, AG. This doctor's OTRAG laboratory had been tasked with isolating viruses from the African green monkey that were capable of such rapid reproduction that it could destabilize the human immune system. The laboratory's assignment was to develop a mutant strain "that would be a human killer," since the green monkey variety was harmless to humans.12 But it is really the OTRAG establishment in Zaire that is itself of the greatest interest, for it fits the pattern of postwar SS relationships with South American governments and false from corporations. OTRAG was granted a lease by the Mobutu government to 29,000 square miles of Zaire, a lease that gave OTRAG "complete sovereignty and control over the area."13 What was the purpose of this land? Ostensibly, it was to develop and test there cheap satellite launch capability for private industry, an application with obvious military overtones.14 In other words, what one has with the OTRAG-Zaire enclave is something like an Area 51, but owned by a private corporation. The enclave is nothing less than a testing facility for missiles and laboratories for biological, and presumably other types of weapons development. According to the German Information Service of South Africa, OTRAG executives included former Nazis, some from the wartime V2 rocket project.15 12 Horowitz, Emerging Viruses, p. 364. 13 Ibid., p. 365. 14 Ibid., pp. 365-366. 15 Ibid., p. 366. This in itself should give one pause, for it indicates that German rocket research was continued, not just by former Nazis working for Von Braun's NASA in the USA, or building massive boosters for Korolev in the Soviet Union, but also for West Germany itself! Moreover, OTRAG's shares were subsidized by the West German government, Chancellor Helmut Schmidt's denials notwithstanding.16 Finally, in what is a clear indication that OTRAG's purpose and goals were not simply to contrive cheap satellite launch capability, Penthouse magazine ran an expose of the German company, disclosing its ties to the Dornier and Messerschmitt-Belkow-Blohm aerospace and armaments firms which were quietly developing and testing German cruise missiles on OTRAG's Zaire range, with the aid of cruise missile technology provided to them by the American Boeing Corporation.17 Dornier and Messerschmitt were, of course, clearly tied to the Third Reich's war machine and had deep ties to its black projects. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid, p. 367.
A. Bormann 's Special Evacuation Command and the Link to the Kammlerstab In part one we noted that Carter Hydrick theorized that it was none other than Martin Bormann who arranged the surrender of the U-234 and its precious cargo of enriched uranium, infrared proximity fuses, heavy water, and possibly even atom bomb designs or an actual functioning atom bomb to the United States.18 Recent research by Nick Cook would tend to corroborate Bormann's role in, and therefore probable accurate knowledge of, the full scope and extent of Kammler's secret black projects empire. 18 It should be noted that Hydrick does not maintain that the Nazis were successful in building and successfully testing an atom bomb during the war, much less of trying to transport blueprints or a functioning model to the Japanese in the U-234. I maintain this possibility on the basis of the research presented in part one, and on the corroborative evidence presented by Robert Wilcox in his Japan's Secret War, that the Japanese successfully tested a bomb shortly after the bombing of Nagasaki. An infusion of actual bomb designs to the Japanese by the Germans late in the war might account for their relatively quick ability to develop and test a weapon under such difficult circumstances as the Japanese economy and military were in at the end of the war. However, it should also be noted that the Japanese had independently designed their own workable bomb along similar lines as existing German designs, as well as along the lines employed in the Little Boy Hiroshima bomb. Bormann's position as controller of Nazi Party finances as well as of Hitler 's estate would have given him control over yet another source of funding for these projects, a source completely independent of the state. It is in this total context both of Carter Hydride's meticulous research, as well as of Bormann's own Rotes Haus plan for Nazi survival, that we may place Bormann's 1945 establishment of a special SS evacuation Kommando, an act that placed jurisdiction over the Ju 290 four engine and Ju 390 six engine heavy-lift ultra long range air transport of Luftwaffe Kampfgeschwader 200 under the direct control of none other than SS General Hans Kammler. The intention is clear: as much of the actual research files and equipment of the Kammlerstab as could be evacuated from Germany for destinations unknown was to be handled by Kammler personally. This special evacuation command held these aircraft in readiness near Lower Silesia in late 1945. By this point, Kammler's power, backed by the Reichsleiter himself, was so great that he could refuse a request by Reichsfuhrer SS Himmler for the use of one of these aircraft.19 Kammler, "with such aircraft at his disposal" would have been able to fly a large cargo of "documents, personnel and technology pretty much anywhere" that he wanted to. "Spain, South America - Argentina even -would have represented no problem to such a long-range platform."20 Cook himself quips, "What was the point of chasing Kammler, if he'd already shipped everything out?"21 19 Nick Cook, the Hunt for Zero Point, pp. 186-187, 199. 20 Ibid., p. 199. 21 Ibid. This revelation, coming late in the story of research into Nazi secret weapons and the Nazi UFO legend, gives a clear indication that more than just money, bullion, gems, art treasures or personnel were involved in Bormann's survival plan. Clearly, Bormann meant to preserve and continue the research already under way in the Reich by transplanting the technology and continuing its development elsewhere, either under independent Nazi control - as the various "survival" myths maintain - or under the nominal control of a host government, or via some combination of both modalities. If Carter Hydrick is correct that it was Bormann's intention to surrender the bulk of this technology to the United States - and I believe he is - then this puts Himmler's last ditch and clumsy efforts to negotiate a separate peace with the Western Allies via Sweden into a new light. As has already been suggested in this work, Himmler was perhaps offering them the vast cache of secrets he thought he controlled through Kammler's "think tank." And, as has been seen, it is very possible that the American intelligence community already knew of this treasure trove via their SS contacts through Allen Dulles and SS General Wolff, and had made "other arrangements" that included neither Himmler nor the British. Thus, by the time of Kammler's refusal to his SS boss to allow him the use of a Ju 290 or Ju 390, effective control and disposition of the SS black projects had slipped from Himmler's hands and into Bormann's. Himmler could neither surrender nor even barter for his life, because he had nothing left with which to bargain. Kammler, and Bormann, however, had a great deal to offer the Americans in exchange for their lives.
B. Paperclip, Compartmentalization, and Capitalization According to Nick Cook, Operation Paperclip, the covert project to bring former Nazi scientists and engineers to the United States to work on America's own aerospace and military black projects after the war, was the primary beneficiary of the Kammlerstab's think tank secrets, blueprints, and patents.
22 Nick Cook, The Hunt for Zero Point, p. 252. But an important question remains to be answered here. Could these Nazis have continued their lines of research quasi- independently, even while ostensibly working for the US military? Could they have again reconstituted themselves as a similar "state within a state," a black projects coordination office within the structures otherwise nominally under the control, of the American government and military? Clearly, it would be difficult, especially if there were no means of independent financing of these projects, altogether apart from the US government's own "black budget." But we have already seen that a crucial component of Bormann's postwar survival and resuscitation plan was capitalization. Three conduits in particular were often utilized by O.D.E.S.S.A and other postwar Nazi secret organizations:
The United State, particularly in the last few decades, seems to have been a fertile ground for all three types of activity, at least in general terms. As for maintaining the secrecy of such an independent and "occulted" entity, this is a solved problem, for the Manhattan Project was just such an entity, with only a very few at the highest echelons of its myriad compartmentalized "need-to-know" departments possessing the whole picture. In the postwar atmosphere, particularly with the Cold War ensuing, it may actually have been quite easy to accomplish. With US government defense contracts and black projects run increasingly on a cost-plus basis, all expenses for such research was funded, with an addition margin tacked on for corporate profit. This, added to the other genuinely off-the-books funding that Bormann and the SS envisioned, would have supplied twin sources of funding of almost limitless wealth. But the most important consideration with respect to this question is the fact that the very classification and compartmentalization of black projects would itself operate as a favorable environment to run an "unofficial" black project within an "official" one. With projects split over several locations, its needed technologies farmed out to various companies, various departments of government, and coordinated from some secret center, it would seem a relatively easy, rather than difficult, thing to do. The Nazi Party had been constituted, from its early secret society beginnings, and up until the very day of the German capitulation, as a state within a state. Within that structure, Himmler had constituted the SS as a state within the state within the state. And within that Kammler had assembled and coordinated a vast machinery of horror and weapons research that lived, parasitically, on the body of its host, the SS and the Party, themselves murderous parasites living off the misery of Germany and Europe. Kammler had done it once, and may very well have done it again, "with a little help from his friends." As was mentioned previously, perhaps President Dwight Eisenhower, when he warned of the morally and spiritually corrupting dangers of the military-industrial complex, had in mind a phenomenon that was not so much home-grown, as much as one that had been transplanted.
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