The Phoenix Rises: the Bormann Plan

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; Martin Bormann and the Fourth Reich

As the war turned irrevocably against the Third Reich, top Nazi leaders began to plan for the future, among them the Reichsleiter Martin Bormann, Hitler's secretary and virtual shadow, and financial administrator of the Party's, as well as of Hitler's own personal and considerable, fortune.

Nazis Plotted Post-WWII Return

9/14/2000

NEW YORK (Reuter) - Realizing they were losing the war in 1944; Nazi leaders met top German industrialists to plan a secret post-war international network to restore them to power, according to a newly declassified U.S. intelligence document.

The document, which appears to confirm a meeting historians have long argued about, says an SS general and a representative of the German armaments ministry told such companies as Krupp and Roehling that they must be prepared to finance the Nazi party after the war when it went underground.

They were also told "existing financial reserves in foreign countries must be placed at the disposal of the party so that a strong German empire can be created after the defeat.''

The document, detailing an August 1944 meeting, was obtained Friday from the World Jewish Congress, which has been working with the Senate Banking Committee and the Holocaust Museum to determine what happened to looted Jewish money and property in the Second World War.

As a result of the probe, thousands of documents from 'Operation Safehaven'' have been made public. The operation was a U.S. intelligence effort to track how the German government used Swiss banks during the war to hide looted Jewish assets. The three-page document, released by the National Archives, was sent from Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force to the U.S. secretary of state in November 1944. It described a secret meeting at the Maison Rouge (the Red House Hotel) in Strasbourg, occupied France, on August 10, 1944.

The source for the report was an agent who attended and "had worked for the French on German problems since 1916.'' Jeffrey Bale, a Columbia University expert on clandestine Nazi networks, said historians have debated whether such a meeting could have taken place because it came a month after the attempt on Adolf Hitler's life, which had led to a crackdown on discussions of a possible German military defeat. Bale said the Red House meeting was mentioned in Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal's 1967 book "The Murderers Among Us'' and again in a 1978 book by French Communist Victor Alexandrov, ''The SS Mafia.''

A U.S. Treasury Department analysis in 1946 reported that the Germans had transferred $500 million out of the country before the war's end to countries such as Spain, Switzerland, Lichtenstein, Portugal, Argentina and Turkey where it was used to buy hundreds of companies. “As soon as the (Nazi) party becomes strong enough tore-establish its control over Germany, the industrialists will be paid for their efforts and cooperation by concessions and orders,'' the intelligence document said.

The meeting was presided over by a "Dr Scheid,'' described as an SS Obergruppenf ührer (general) and director of Hermsdorff & Schonburg Company. Attending were representatives of seven German companies including Krupp, Roehling, Messerschmidt, and Volkswagenwerk and officials of the ministries of armaments and the navy.

The industrialists were from companies with extensive interests in France and Scheid is quoted as saying the battle of France was lost and "from now ... German industry must realize that the war cannot be won and it must take steps in preparation for a post-war commercial campaign.'' He said

German industry must make contacts and alliances with foreign firms and lay the groundwork for borrowing considerable sums in foreign countries. He cited the Krupp company's sharing of patents with U.S. companies so that they would have to work with Krupp. A representative of the armaments ministry then presided over a smaller second meeting with Scheid and representatives of Krupp and Roehling, who were told the war was lost and would continue only until the unity of Germany was guaranteed. He said they must prepare themselves to finance the Nazi party when it went underground.

The intelligence report added that the meetings signaled a new Nazi policy "whereby industrialists with government assistance will export as much of their capital as possible.

Sybil Milton, senior historian at Washington's Holocaust Museum, said it has long been known that the Nazis planned to do something after the war and the document's importance may be in pointing researchers in a direction where they could determine what had been done.

"Now that the Nazi secret plan has been confirmed, the central question is whether it has been carried out,'' said Elan Steinberg,

The Plot Against The Peace

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.

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.

After the war, investigative journalists claimed to have uncovered a project, overseen by Martin Bormann and code-named Tierra del Fuego, which entailed sending Nazi assets to South America. This scheme, if in fact true, involved using Spain as part of the pipeline.

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." [Henry Stevens, The Last Battalion and German Arctic, Antarctic, and Andean Bases.]

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 Angehörigen, or "Organization of Former SS Members." Another famous organization was "Die Spinne" or The Spider. In any case, under the Reichsleiter'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.

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. 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.

With these monies, the SS purchased huge tracts of land in South America and elsewhere, and large corporations were established in which "research which had begun in Germany could be carried through." These "secure areas" or Sperrgebiete often saw the establishment of whole towns, airfields, highways and all the amenities of civilized German life. 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, 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." [Q.v. Peter Levenda, Unholy Alliance: A History of Nazi Involvement with the Occult.] And of course, these secure areas in the Andes and other remote South American locations are also reputed to b the sites of secret Nazi laboratories continuing the research on "flying saucers" and other wartime Nazi black projects.

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.

What's the true story on
South American Nazis?

After the war Argentina and Paraguay were run for years by nationalist strongmen, Juan Peron and Alfredo Stroessner respectively, who liked to strut around in military regalia and brutalize dissidents. Argentina had remained officially neutral until early 1945, when economic pressure forced it to throw in with the Allies, but until that point was in intimate contact with Hitler's regime and the fascist Franco government in Spain. Postwar Brazil was still fascist-friendly, a legacy of deposed dictator Getulio Vargas. Surely it's no surprise that the leaders of these countries nurtured fraternal feelings for fleeing Nazis.

Not all fugitives from the Third Reich ended up in South America--quite a few are said to have headed for Spain or the Middle East, and the U.S. imported a crowd of Nazi rocket scientists during Operation Paperclip. That said, the true story of how war criminals like Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele wound up in the land of the gauchos has never been fully told, and even now it's difficult to separate fact from fiction.

Leading candidates for chief enabler of the great escape include:

Odessa. Part of the popular consciousness ever since Frederick Forsyth's best-selling 1972 novel The Odessa File, this secret group (the name is an acronym for Organization der ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen, "Organization of Former SS Members") supposedly used stashed war booty and connections in high places to spirit Nazi big shots out of reach of the Allies. Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal says he first heard about Odessa during the Nuremberg trials, and in his 1989 book Justice, Not Vengeance he seems convinced it exists, or rather existed. He offers little evidence, though, and others have their doubts. Even some believers say the organization was amateurish and short-lived.

The Catholic church. The claim that members of the Catholic hierarchy were instrumental in obtaining documents, cash, and safe passage for many escaping Nazis is only barely scandalous these days. The benign view is that individual clerics acted out of humanitarian concern, believing they were aiding refugees from postwar communist persecution, and were unaware of their charges' sordid pasts. Others say the Vatican knew quite well what was going on but wanted former Nazis as allies in its struggle against the reds. A figure commonly named in this context is Alois Hudal, an openly pro-Nazi German bishop in Rome who is said to have helped engineer the escapes of dozens if not hundreds of Nazis--including Eichmann, who was living in Argentina when the Mossad caught him in 1960, and Franz Stangl, commandant of the Treblinka death camp, who ultimately made his way to Brazil and was captured there in 1967.

The above plus Peron. Argentine journalist Uki Goñi, in The Real Odessa: Smuggling the Nazis to Peron's Argentina (2002), offers what amounts to a synthesis of earlier theories. The "real Odessa," he says, consisted of about a dozen energetic ex-Nazis and Nazi collaborators from several nations, including a few wanted war criminals, working in concert with the Peron regime and sympathetic Catholic officials in both Europe and Argentina. Goñi makes a plausible case that the cabal, which was organized in Buenos Aires following Peron's election as Argentina's president in 1946, orchestrated the emigration of hundreds, perhaps thousands of Nazis and other unsavory types to the country in the late 1940s and early 1950s. (He also claims that the cabal was based at the presidential palace, and that many of its members were given important jobs in Peron's government.) The old Nazis made frequent trips to Europe to troll for more fugitives; some war criminals had to be smuggled out, but in other cases countries were glad to unload their troublesome Nazi refugees. Visas and landing permits were handed out freely, the chief concern being that no communists or Jews be allowed in by mistake. How many ex-Nazis made it to Argentina is not known. Goñi says he identified 300 during six years of research, and it's easy to believe there were many more.

It's a lot to swallow, no question, and notwithstanding his 591 footnotes Goñi concedes that many key Argentine records that would've corroborated his story have been destroyed. Still, he avoids the overheated claims of other writers, and the plain fact is that all those Nazis didn't wind up in South America by coincidence--they were going where they were welcome. As for the details? Given the current worldwide consensus that Nazis represent the ultimate human evil (and the resulting disinclination of officials in Argentina and elsewhere to come clean), Goñi's book may be as close as we'll get to the truth.

The Birth of the Fourth Reich

By Alex Constantine

In September 1944, Sims Carter, assistant chief of the Economic Warfare section of the Justice Department, testified before the Kilgore Committee that despite military defeat, the industrial cartels of Germany had renewed activity from bases in Argentina: "All the machinery," he said, "is ready for safeguarding German supremacy in the steadily expanding South American market."

Much of that market had been quietly incorporated by I.G. Farben and other financial backers of Hitler well before the war began. In the 1930s, as German factories tooled up for the onslaught, German entrepreneurs quietly built factories, railroads and chemical and steel plants throughout South America. The munitions industry was all but monopolized by Farben and Krupp, providing business fronts for the Nazi fifth column. The insinuation of Nazism into Caribbean politics was directed by Alfred Becker and Arnold Margerie, officers of Farben La Quimica Bayer in Caracas. Down in Argentina, Axel Wenner-Gren, a Swedish millionaire and crony of Herman Goering, Hitler's propaganda minister, established subsidiaries and gracefully snatched up the key industrial plants.

Edward Stettinius, U.S. secretary of state, speaking at an inter-American conference in 1945, warned that the Nazis would attempt "to escape the consequences of their crimes. We must be constantly on the alert for the flight into this hemisphere of Nazi funds and Nazi underground leaders who will seek to find a refuge here for an ultimate comeback." Among those to slip through the Allied dragnet in occupied Germany, scramble across the rat lines set up by American intelligence and the secret orders of the Vatican and settle in South America were Klaus Barbie (Bolivia), Heinrich Müller (Argentina), Josef Mengele (Paraguay), Walter Rauff (Chile), and Freidrich Schwend (Peru). Financial and political ties in South America, the collusion of American and Latin officials and military intelligence, subverted any attempt to block the resurgence. The heart of the Nazi Party remained nearly intact. In a book on Nazi industry and politics, German emigré Karl Otten described the underground leadership's ability "to perpetuate itself, and to render itself immortal, through its innermost core, the brains of a bellicose nation's brains ... in anonymity, [residing in] unknown places, secluded from the world, controlling politics no less than operations in the field."

The Nazis were created by the world oligarchy for war, turned out in Gnostic vestments. German terrorist units actually referred to themselves as "The Death's Heads," and were known to commit ritualistic murder. "The roots of the Nazi Party were buried in hidden places," said Hitler's friend Hermann Rauschning. The Nazis were covert operators, not to be confused with the German military; one fought an underground war, the other waged a Blitz. Hitler's bloodless covert warriors did not wither into dust after the military was defeated. Fascism survived and flourished.

In August, 1945 the U.S. argued for, and succeeded in disbanding, the UN War Crimes Commission in favor of the Nuremburg Tribunal. The architect of Nuremburg was Henry Stimson, a Yale "Bones" man, former secretary of state under Herbert Hoover. Stimson, a vocal atom bomb proponent, suggested it be used against Japan and every wheel and cog in government went into motion to accommodate him.

At Nuremburg, he fell back on a strategy that would become the staple of Congressional hearings - narrowing the scope of the investigation. "With the judgment at Nuremburg," wrote Stimson for Foreign Relations in January, 1947 [published by the Council of Foreign Relations, a public disinformation bureau], "we at least reach to the core of international strife."

Articulate, smooth, disingenuous words.

Stimson's tribunal reached to "the core of the strife," but the "penalty" for participation in genocide was hardly severe. The directors of I.G. Farben, the economic and industrial sponsors of the Nazi party, and Krupp, the principal supplier of munitions, were tried for making war in violation of the Briand-Kellogg Treaty, and were led through a revolving door - it couldn't be "proven beyond a doubt" their intent was "aggressive," as stipulated by the treaty. Upon their release, the directors of Krupp and Farben immediately went on to exchange Nazi gold for Swiss notes on the sly.

They hid reserves away for the next phase of the war. All I.G. Farben facilities were left standing by American bombers on strict order from Washington. To smooth the path to corporate growth, General Patton stepped in and - in violation of the Postdate Agreement, which specifically called for the dismantling of Farben - reorganized the company and promoted many of its former mid-level executives. For every Nazi convicted at Nuremberg, four were released. Stimson's Catch 22 demanded that it be proven the culprits had shaped war policy. With "Judgment at Nuremberg" constricted by such reasoning, it was hardly surprising that the first trial ended with the conviction of a dozen Nazis from a pool of 22. For the next trial, the definitions of intent and authority were constricted even further, and 49 of the 52 leading German officers and industrialists were set free.

Dr. Robert Kempner, who might be described as an early "conspiracy theorist," wrote that with few exceptions, "the other SS leaders convicted at Nuremberg on charges of murder have been prematurely pardoned and freed, as a result of strong pressure by certain, partly still anonymous hinter-manner [sponsors]."

In June 1949 jurisdiction over the war criminals was handed to High Commissioner John McCloy, a hard-core "anti-Nazi." His attitude underwent a drastic change in closed sessions, however. McCloy's secret Clemency Board reduced the sentences of all but the most intractable SS. Nearly a third were released for "good behavior" at the behest of the General German Staff. Others were granted amnesty by the thousands. A year later, Jim Martin, a Defense Department investigator, traveled to Germany to track down Gerhard Westrick, the CEO of ITT in Germany and already a mover in the formation of the Fourth Reich.

Westrick had fled the Berlin bombing and took refuge in a castle to the south. By post he appealed for help from his Army cronies, who smuggled him to Paris to apprise Colonel Alex Sanders of the condition of ITT's German holdings. Westrick received a token prison sentence and was released. Hermann Abs, one of Hitler's principal financial backers, was employed as a consultant in the British zone for the Deutsche Bank.

The emerging order was merely a reorganization of the old. Anyone who caught on was ignored, or if they went public, were tarred by government officials as "Communists," including Dexter White and Lauchlin Currie of the Treasury Department. White and Currie were investigating financial dealings with Germany throughout the course of the war by Standard Oil, Chase and National City Banks, the Morgan family, ITT, Ford and GM, among others. The careers of both investigators were wiped out by the McCarthy hearings, and they were effectively silenced. Telford Taylor, chief counsel at Nuremberg, saw the proceedings for what they were. He was beside himself that the most powerful Nazis were acquitted on technicalities. "Murder, maiming, enslavement, ravage and plunder are a familiar litany," he wrote in 1970. What was unique about the Nazi conquests, especially in Eastern Europe, he said, "was the enormous scope of the atrocities and the systematic planning and meticulous execution of these hideous enterprises."

[ ... ]

DEUTSCHE BANK

Under the direction of Dr Herman Josef Abs (who never became a Nazi) the bank was responsible for financing the slave labour used by business giants such as Siemens, BMW, Volkswagen, I.G. Farben, Daimler Benz and others. The banks wealth quadrupled during the twelve years of Hitler's rule. Arrested by the British after the war for war crimes, he was quietly released after the intervention of the Bank of England to help restore the German banking industry in the British zone This caused much dissension between the British and the Americans who wanted the German Economy crushed. Later, he became financial advisor to the first West German Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer. Herman Abs died in 1994.

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. [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.] If it all 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.

In yet another important study [Leonard Horowitz, D.M.D., M.A., M.P.H., Emerging Viruses: AIDS and Ebola: Nature, Accident, or Intentional?] 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.'
Bormann apparently ignored his Führer, 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.
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." 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. 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. 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. Finally, it 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.
Bormann 's Special Evacuation Command and the Link to the Kammlerstab

Home Page

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. [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. Robert Wilcox in his Japan's Secret War, presents evidence 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.]

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 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 Hydrick'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 Reichsführer SS Himmler for the use of one of these aircraft.
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." Cook himself quips, "What was the point of chasing Kammler, if he'd already shipped everything out?" 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. Himmler was perhaps offering them the vast cache of secrets he thought he controlled through Kammler's "think tank." 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.
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."

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: (1) drugs and thereby organized crime, (2) the 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.

The Ten Commandments of Coverup

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." 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.

THE UNDERGROUND NAZI INVASION OF THE UNITED STATES