Documents on Real History

Quick navigation

Posted Wednesday, March 10, 2004

Letters to David Irving on this Website

 

Unless correspondents ask us not to, this Website will post selected letters that it receives and invite open debate.

 

Sean D. Buhr of British Columbia asks Wednesday, March 10, 2004 what really happened to Hitler's chief henchman Martin Bormann?

 

typewriter

 

What really happened to Martin Bormann?

Click image for pdf leaflet: "The world's leading. . ."

click for pdfI HAVE recently come across your web page, and especially the download page, and have found it very useful for university. I find that in my first year at university in Canada your works help tremendously in my research for my Twentieth Century history course.

I was wondering, if you have time, if you could actually help me with one of my assignments? The assignment deals with the explanation of the disappearance of Martin Bormann. I am just curious to hear your opinion. Do you think that it was really his body found in Berlin in 1972?

Do you think he really made it to the Soviet Union of South America as Hermann Göring claimed? Just curious what an established man in the field has to say.

Your new and devoted fan

Sean D Buhr
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

 

 

Our Hitler dossier
 

David Irving

DAVID IRVING replies:

TAKING your second inquiry first, about Martin Bormann. For many years mystery surrounded his whereabouts. My good friend the late Ladislas "Laci" Farago ("General Patton," "The Game of the Foxes", etc), a cheeky chappy if ever there was one, proclaimed with the chutzpah characteristic of his race that he had located MB in South America; the unfortunate victim of the resulting frenzy turned out to be quite innocent (but nobody demanded that Laci subsequently return the huge royalties he received, and nobody seized his possesions).

MB himself was less fortunate. After supervising the corpse-disposal arrangements following on the suicide of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun on the afternoon April 30, 1945, and waiting in vain for a further twenty-four hours for a favourable reply from the Soviet commanders to the overtures made to them by Dr Joseph Goebbels, Germany's new Chancellor-for-a-Day, Martin Bormann and a group of Hitler's senior colleagues made a final breakout attempt from the Berlin Bunker late on May 1.

BormannSoviet troops were closing in on the building from every quarter, but it was the Soviet national holiday. Erich Kempka, Hitler's chauffeur, was with Bormann's group, as were Hitler's last physician, Dr Ludwig Stumpfegger (who had succeeded Professor Theo Morell on April 22), and Artur Axmann, the Reichsjugendführer, who had smuggled out of the building with him the pistol with which Hitler had shot himself (so Otto Günsche told me).

At the Weidendamm Bridge near Lehrte Station the group were cut off by enemy troops. Bormann and Stumpfegger made a run for it. A Soviet tank shell exploded only feet away from them -- Axmann testified that he saw it happen. Both survived the blast, but they were badly shaken and decided to swallow their cyanide capsules there and then, rather than surrender.

The bodies must have lain there some time. Bormann's expensive leather greatcoat was taken off the body, and the contents of its pockets were taken to Moscow, including his pocket diary: the contents of the diary were published by my colleague the Soviet historian and former Intelligence officer Lev Bezymenski. There is no doubt as to the diary's authenticity, as crosschecks with other rare documents establish. There the story would have ended, had the controversy about Bormann -- fuelled by the usual money-hungry Jewish groups -- not continued. Simon Wiesenthal (right) and others continued the lucrative hunt for a live Martin Bormann years after the Reichsleiter unscrewed the cap off that lethal brass capsule.

Then along came Stern journalist Jochen von Lang -- another friend of mine in those years. Born Joachim Piechocki, he had been an SS liaison officer in Goebbels's propaganda ministry at the end of the war; to him in fact had fallen the duty of making the famous May 1, 1945 broadcast on Berlin Radio announcing that the Führer had "fallen in battle".

Nonetheless, he was a fine researcher, and in 1972 Von Lang and Stern magazine persuaded the Berlin police authorities to dig up the street at the spot where the bodies of MB and the doctor had last been seen. It was a macabre exercise, but it came off brilliantly, when two bodies were brought to light.

Forensic experts used dental pathology to identify the bodies -- hampered in MB's case initially by getting his jaw upside down, so I am told. In1976, the leading Scandinavian dental pathologist Reidar F Sognnaes published a lengthy disquisition in a scientific journal, Legal Medicine Annual, titled, "Dental Evidence in the Postmortem Identification of Adolf Hitler, Eva Braun and Martin Bormann." This established beyond doubt that MB's corpse was indeed his (his dental chart was on file).

Sognnaes incidentally performed the same exercise on Hitler's dental records -- the remains of his upper and lower jaw, which the Soviets had stored away, were illustrated as photographs by Bezymenski in his book Der Tod des Adolf Hitler (Hamburg, 1968). I had already beaten Sognnaes to it, publishing first in Die Zeit, (Hamburg) and then in Hitler's War (1977) a detailed comparison of those jaw-photos both with the X-rays of Hitler's jaw taken in September 1944 and with the sketches made from memory by his dentist Professor Hugo Blaschke while in US captivity; but that is another story.

As for the doctor, Stumpfegger, I located and visited his brother in the 1970s, living in Ingolstadt. A gold ring had been found on the corpse, with a date engaged inside. The brother confirmed to me that it was the date of Ludwig's wedding in 1938.

Bormann, von Puttkamer, von Below, Himmler, HitlerIn 1998 DNA analysis confirmed that the bdy was Martin Bormann's, and the German authorities finally allowed its cremation; the ashes were buried at sea.

The above should provide you with a modest insight into the workings of Real History.

     Photo: Bormann, von Puttkamer, von Below, Himmler, Hitler >>

BY the way, thanks for your comments about my books download page; although producing the pdf files for each book is very labour-intensive, I decided it was worthwhile, as many of my books are out of print. Most of my major publishers around the world (firms like The Viking Press, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, William Morrow, Ullstein, Hayakawa, Robert Laffont, Mondadori, Planeta) have come under pressure from Guess Who not to renew publication contracts (in Germany the pressure comes from the German government itself).

These traditional enemies of free speech reckoned without the Internet however, and my aim is to post eventually every single edition of my books, including all the worldwide foreign language editions, on this website, with the generous consent of Focal Point Publications and Parforce UK Ltd, who hold the world rights to most of these works. At present students and researchers can use them free. In later years I may apply a token charge, so that I and my family can derive some kind of small income, as everything I had, a lifetime's possessions, was seized in May 2002.

Meanwhile ... [aid].

 

August 1999: Martin Bormann's ashes are buried in the Baltic
The escape route of Martin Bormann
 
© Focal Point 2004 David Irving