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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?
What really happened to Martin Bormann?
Click image for pdf leaflet: "The world's leading. . ."
I
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
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.
Soviet
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.
In
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].
David Irving