Word: bormanns
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Since January 1946, there have been reports of sightings of Bormann from a dozen or more countries. In 1954 he was officially declared dead by a West German court, but in 1964 the War Crimes Office in Frankfurt, obviously convinced he was still alive, posted a $28,000 reward for Bormann's capture. Meanwhile, Nazi Hunter Simon Wiesenthal claimed in The Murderers Among Us that Hitler's deputy had been smuggled out of Germany to South America by the Nazi underground escape organization. Wiesenthal said that on several occasions Bormann was seen nightclubbing with "the Mad Doctor...
...first installment of Gehlen's memoirs, both he and his Abwehr (Army counterintelligence) superior, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. "came to the conviction that the Soviets must have at their disposal a well-informed intelligence source at the top of the German leadership," and that this source was Bormann. Gehlen says that he received two dependable reports in the 1950s that "Martin Bormann lived perfectly covered and protected in the Soviet Union" after the war and later information that he had died there. But Gehlen's first installment provides sparse proof for his allegations...
...that, there is at least some support for Gehlen's astonishing thesis. A 1947 book called Who Killed Hitler? states: "Russian intelligence reported Bormann under arrest, a prisoner of the Red Army in the Berlin area in early July 1945-two months after Berlin's capture!" An International News Service story in 1950 quotes Wilhelm Hoettl, a Nazi secret service expert, as saying that Bormann and other former German officials were running a bureau in the U.S.S.R. to "reorganize Germany, East and West, along the lines of a people's democracy...
Cornelius Ryan, author of The Last Battle, said in a 1966 interview that a German general "told me he once had a secret meeting with Hitler, with Bormann the only other man present. Hitler gave orders about a change in command on the Eastern Front. Within two hours the Russian radio broadcast the names of the generals who would be replaced, who would take over, and specific details on new strategy...
Skeptics and Questioners. Top Allied intelligence sources in Germany are skeptical. They wonder why Gehlen did not turn over the information he had to the West German government, if he indeed had real evidence Bormann was a Soviet spy. The War Crimes Office in Frankfurt has announced that once the book is published, it will call Gehlen in for questioning, particularly since his intelligence agency was never able to unearth any clues to Bormann's whereabouts. Bonn officials are also studying the possibility that Gehlen may have broken the law by not making evidence in his possession available...