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Chapter 15: THE PHOENIX RISES: THE BORMANN PLAN
"The documents I had before me... contained firsthand
evidence that the Reichsleiter had survived the war and succeeded in
escaping to Argentina. It was attested by the Argentine authorities
themselves, in highly classified intelligence reports and positions
papers drawn up for their own secret and official use."
Ladislas Farago, Aftermath
1
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: (1) continue the war and hope for the realization of their
secret weapons projects in time to provide a military resuscitation, or
(2) begin the process of moving capital, technology, and personnel to
ensure the survival of the Party by other means. The Nazi leadership chose
both courses of action.
1 Ladislas Farago, Aftermath; Martin
Bormann and the Fourth Reich (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974), p.
60.
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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, "provisions were made not only
to move great sums of money outside Germany but also to camouflage foreign
assets on paper for the resurrection of a financial-industrial empire,
of sorts, once the Reich collapsed. This empire was to be controlled by
the SS."2 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
2 Henry Stevens, The Last Battalion and
German Arctic, Antarctic, and Andean Bases, p. 58.
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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 Moines, 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 Colona Dignidad in (Me, a "colony" notorious for the disappearances
of the too- inquisitive reporter, and implicated in the US overthrow of
the Chilean Marxist government of Salvadore Allende in the early 1970s
and the training of Chilean dictator Pinochet's DINA "interrogators."8
And of course, these secure areas in the Andes
3 Stevens, op. cit., p. 59.
4 Ibid., p. 62.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid., p. 63.
7 bid., pp. 63-64.
8 Q.v. Peter Levenda, Unholy Alliance: A
History of Nazi Involvement with the Occult (New York: Avon Books, 1995),
pp. 300-301, 343-356.
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and other remote South American locations are also reputed
to br the sites of secret Nazi laboratories continuing the research on
"flying saucers" and other wartime Nazi black projects.9
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 t h e "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
9 Stevens, The Last Battalion, p. 64.
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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:
In the Spring of 1944, Merck and Company, Inc. received
a large cash infusion from Martin Bormann.... This at the time Merck's
president, George W. Merck, was advising President Roosevelt, and initiating
strategies, as America's biological weapons industry director. According
to CBS News correspondent Paul Manning, the lion's share of the Nazi gold
went to 750 corporations, largely including Merck, to secure a virtual
monopoly over the world's chemical and pharmaceutical industries. This
was done not only for Germany's economic recovery, but to assure the rise
of "The Fourth Reich.'
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. 'Bury your treasure,' Hitler advised Bormann,
'for you will need it to begin a Fourth Reich.'11
Bormann apparently ignored his Fuhrer, and in a momentary
burst of Christianity, heeded Christ by not burying his treasure, but
investing and increasing it.
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.
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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 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
12 Horowitz, Emerging Viruses, p. 364.
13 Ibid., p. 365.
14 Ibid., pp. 365-366.
15 Ibid., p. 366.
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Germany itself! Moreover, OTRAG's shares were subsidized
by the West German government, Chancellor Helmut Schmidt's denials notwithstanding.16
Finally, in wlut 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.
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. Bormann's
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid, p. 367.
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.
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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 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
19 Nick
Cook, the Hunt for Zero Point, pp. 186-187, 199.
20 Ibid., p. 199.
21 Ibid.
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the nominal control of a host fovernment, 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. "The state
within a state had been transported four thousand miles to the west
and somehow, I just knew, Kammler had come with it. The intuitive
feeling I'd experienced in all these years in obscure corners of
the US aerospace and defence industry had suddenly acquired a face."22
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
22 Nick Cook, The Hunt for Zero Point,
p. 252.
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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: (1) drugs
and thereby organized crime, (2) t h e Church, i.e., various "ministries"
within Protestantism and diverse religious orders and congregations within
the Roman Catholic Church, and (3) false corporate fronts and dummy corporations,
holding companies, and banking institutions. 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.
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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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