The Bridge at Arnhem

[David Guyatt]

I recently came across this Daily Telegraph article again (HERE) about the death of Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands. I had read it at the time and found it to be chillingly deceitful. Bernhard was a Nazi spy working for I G Farben's NW7 intelligence operation. The British Admiralty refused to allow him access to British secrets and the King had to plead to Churchill to give him a role during the war (besides that of being pro Nazi). So, of course Churchill complied. Bernhard was put on the planning group for Montgomery's Operation Market Garden.

The Telegraph obituary says "there was pressure for Bernhard to have Deutschland Uber Alles (one of the two Nazi anthems) sung at the wedding, but Bernhard refused point blank". What the article doesn't say is that he did have the Horst Wessel song (the other Nazi anthem) sung at his wedding instead (I've linked it below). I learned about this from a WWII Dutch resistance fighter Wim, who knew a great deal about Prince Bernhard's Nazi background and dealings.

Besides this, the Telegraph article simply glosses over Prince Bernhard's very strong Nazi connections. For example he had lots of property in Argentina where thousands of wanted war criminal nazis fled to after the war. His portfolio included property in Bariloche, Argentina, the exact German influenced town where Hitler lived with Eva Braun and their two daughters after the war.



For those who are interested in the Bormann story, the interview by Laurence de Milo (a female reporter) of Jorge Silva Cotto, Peron's Aide de Camp, is critical testimony of Bormann's survival and freedom to live in luxury in the best hotel in Buenos Aires after the war. The interview has many cuts in it as Cotto clearly has things he prefers not to answer publicly. But even so it is riveting watching. Publication was withheld until after his death under the agreement reached with de Milo.



Colonel ( later General) Ian Bell of the British Army below reveals how he hunted for Bormann and tracked him down to the Italian port of Bari, where he watched him board a vessel bound for freedom. For me the important revelation in this short clip is the orders he received from headquarters when he phoned in his report of having found Bormann: "right Bell, follow but do not apprehend, repeat, do not apprehend."



I absolutely accept that Bell is telling the truth in the above clip. The problem I have though is that it conflicts with what I regard as the most authoritative account of Bormann's escape, and that is the one told by American journalist, Paul Manning, who's book Martin Bormann: Nazi in Exile is some of the best investigative journalism I can remember. A free .pdf copy of this book is available to download at Peter's excellent Wikispooks:

https://wikispooks.com/wiki/File:Martin_..._Exile.pdf

Manning based his book on leaked FBI files (so far as I can judge anyway) and is very detailed about how Bormann escaped. He first went via the Northern escape route, where he holed up in a house in Denmark (where incidentally, Prof Anthony Sutton of British Army Intelligence was located on the Danish-German border having been tasked to search for Bormann) before heading to the Italian port of Genoa and freedom in Argentina.

Some may ask why someone in the FBI would turn over these critical and secret files to Manning? Well, Manning was a top journalist of his day for one. Secondly, it is quite apparent that Bormann, Hitler and thousands of other of the most vile nazi's escaped with the knowledge and complicity of elements inside the US (and presumably British government - given the latter's floating of false stories about Bormann et all in post war years) in exchange for something. Clearly negotiations were held and deals cut. The best guess is that critical weapon technology transfers occurred - quite likely the necessary plutonium the US needed to complete their Atom bomb, the Manhattan Project, as outlined in Carter Hydrick's excellent book, Critical Mass (I'm going to try to upload here a .pdf of this book later).

There was also the strong likelihood of blackmail involved. Bormann and other top Nazis would've known about all the smelly negotiations with British royals and the senior British aristo elites who sought to overthrow (murder) Churchill and the British royal family in seeking a peace treaty with Hitler so both nations could join together to fight the Soviet Union. There was also all the American and British corporations who were providing Hitler with essential war materiel without which his Third Reich would ground to a halt. For example, the British company De Beers continued to supply the Third Reich with industrial nations throughout the war. The British government knew this, but also needed their own industrial diamond supply from De Beers, and so took no action and simply covered the De Beers story up. Had any of this and much else besides, come into the public domain at the end of the war, governments and royal houses would fall.

The story od De Beers is told by Jan Roberts in her excellent book, Glitter & Greed: The Secret World of the Diamond Empire (HERE). I know Jan and was in contact with her for a long while. She suffered for her book. The documentary she made for the BBC was pulled at the last minute, with no explanation offered. She was very badly beaten up one evening too - just some of the treatment honest journalists can expect to endure when trying to get important information into the public domain and earn a crust at the same time (the poor journalist is often the honest journalist because there is no money to be made in truth telling… it's normally far too explosive and damaging the powers that be).

Continuing on the Bormann story, the following is an extract from Manning's book starting on page 196:

But would Martin Bormann survive if he left his modest sanc-tuary in northwest Germany? The administrators of ODESSA, aside f rom their role as short-term munitions merchants that they were later to segue into other commercial activities, were conf ident that they could get Party Minister Bormann right across Germany to Munich and over the Alps to Genoa. They had already moved several thousand SS men by this under- ground railroad, and thus far everything had gone according to schedule. "Saf e houses" had been established along the route, and the travelers always arrived and departed on time. By the time the f irst Nuremberg trial had ended in early 1946, Bor- mann was ready f or progress. General Mueller had him con-veyed to another saf e house near Domstedt. Griesheim-Domstedt was and still is the publishing center f or the U.S. Army's Stars & Stripes newspaper for Europe. The late editions go to press at midnight, and shortly thereafter trucks, operated exclusively by the Stars & Stripes command, line up f or their bundles of newspapers that must be distributed by morning to all U.S. Army bases. In 1946 it was a simple matter for Mueller to arrange for Bormann to be a casual passenger aboard such a truck, which halted brief ly as it turned out of the publishing plant and picked him up. Accelerating, it turned onto the Auto- bahn, then drove straight to Munich. Just before reaching U.S. Army headquarters, the German driver slowed to a stop and Bormann jumped out, disappearing into the downtown area of the city. He reached a safe house, where his brother Albert had been waiting; they remained there quietly, awaiting further instructions.
Bormann left Munich with an SS companion and guide, by automobile provided by a German mayor who was able to get rationed gasoline. In the pastoral uplands of Bavaria they parked the car at a previously agreed-on point, so the mayor could fetch it and drive it back. Bormann had been advised that it was best to travel on foot beyond this point in order to avoid interception and interrogation by U.S. CIC patrols. So the pair took to the countryside on foot and headed toward the Austrian Tirol. Their appearance was quite commonplace; few gave them more than a glance. The spring before millions of refugees and displaced persons had swarmed across Germany, prisoners of all nationalities making their way home, more than a million Ger-man families f rom the East f leeing bef ore the Red Army into western Germany. The Wehrmacht had disintegrated into long columns of prisoners walking toward prisoner-of -war camps. Mass chaos had characterized 1945, but now in the winter and spring of 1946 some order appeared; however, plodding men and women, Red Cross vehicles, and fast-driving U.S. Army trucks were familiar sights in the area beyond Munich. The two men made their way up mountain roads and across valleys, and no attention was paid to them by the civilians trying to f arm their patches or cut firewood in the forests.

Bormann and his companion crossed the Inn River, and were guided by local SS mountaineers to the Alpine village of Naud- ers, where the Austrian, Swiss, and Italian frontiers meet. The two rested in a safe house for several days, then set out on the next stage of the journey, which took them through Val di Adige and down to the green forestlands that line Lake Gardia. Here they halted for rest in the monastery overlooking the lake, feeling relatively safe. After a time they pushed on to a Fran-ciscan monastery in Genoa, where arrangements to receive them had been made by Heinrich Mueller.

New identification papers were handed to Bormann, together with the welcome news that in a matter of days he would be sailing to Spain. When he lef t the Franciscan monastery in Genoa and boarded a small Mediterranean steamer, his f irst stop was the port of Tarragona, to the south of Barcelona. It was night when the small vessel put into port, debarked the passenger, and steamed from the harbor. Bormann was met by two of Mueller's SS men, who promptly drove the party min-ister along the coast to Vendrell, where they picked up the auto route and headed inland. It was the purest scenic beauty that Bormann saw as they drove swif tly, with no stops other than to ref ill the gas tank f rom jerry cans they carried. They risked no appearance in a public place. Somewhat across the neck of Spain they turned of f at Todela, and continued over good secondary roads until the mountainous area of Logrono was reached. They passed Najera, then finally reached their destination, the Dominican monastery of San Domingo, which stands in the Province of Galicia, once called home by General Franco.

snip

But back in early 1947 a German of immense notoriety and importance waited his voyage to freedom. Martin Bormann, in the Dominican monastery of San Domingo, chafed under the constraint. Finally, the ship arrived to take him to South America, and he made his way at night to the harbor of Vigo. A rather sizeable freighter had been loaded with produce and other foodstuffs of Spain and with the most recent contingent of fleeing SS men. The last aboard was Party Minister Bormann, who went directly to the modest suite reserved f or him. He watched the hills of Spain recede in the distance, and thought wistfully that this was the last view he might ever have of the European continent. Certainly he would not be returning to this province of Galicia, where many fascists who had fled France and Belgium now resided in exile, such as Leon Degrelle, once the leader of the movement "Rex," who dwelled in a house in the mountains of Asturi, overlooking San Sebastian.

A strange footnote to the true tale of Bormann's stay in the Dominican monastery of San Domingo is the suspect fire that destroyed the archives in 1969. Mueller, ever the supercautious protector, became aware that Israeli agents were backtracking Bormann's escape route. I have been told they wanted to dis- cover what Catholic priests and bishops might have aided Bormann in his escape, intending to use this information to embarrass the Vatican. The only evidence of record that Bormann had been sheltered in this Dominican monastery was the Book of Visitors he had signed the night he arrived. Twenty- three years later f ire broke out in the very shelves where this book was kept, and all was burned up.

When the large freighter carrying Bormann and a contingent of SS officers and soldiers steamed into the harbor of Buenos Aires in the winter of 1947, the anchor was dropped in the waters of the south quay near Riachuelo, one of the tributaries of the La Plata, named by the conquistadores for what it means, "silver." The ship did not come close to the piers, where enormous cranes and swarming dockworkers unload cargoes, but as dusk f ell a small f leet of boats began f errying the passengers and their belongings to shore. At sea, each SS man had been supplied with new identity cards, courtesy of the skilled en- gravers of Concentration Camp Sachsenhausen, passports bear- ing appropriate visas, and written instructions as to where each was to stay once ashore. Some were dispatched to rooming houses and others to obscure hotels, while still others traveled by public transportation to inland cities and towns, or even to adjoining countries. Jobs had been found for all, either in the companies Bormann had established in 1944 and 1945 or in older German corporations that had been doing business in Latin America for a number of years. All those who debarked from the vessel either had with them or were issued a modest sum of cash, sufficient to carry them until the first payday. None of them actually saw Bormann on the ship, save for the captain and several Nazi VIPs who came aboard the night of arrival. Their reception was warm and friendly, and the local NSDAP leaders knew that they were speaking with the official successor to Adolf Hitler, the Party Minister and Reichsleiter whose orders they would obey implicitly in the years ahead.

Manning quotes Gestapo Mueller many times throughout his book. According to official sources, he like Bormann died at the end of the war, although it has been suggested he escaped to the Soviet Union. He didn't. He got out with Bormann, simply because he was head of Bormann's extensive security network.

The below British Grenada TV documentary extract from 1978 shows Gestapo Mueller (known in Asuncion, Paraguay as "Enrique"). Mueller wasn't Grenada's TV's target. They were, instead focusing their programme on Eichmann.



The following two Youtube clips are also worth a watch for its telling of Hitler's escape to Argentina.



The second video below is more lengthy running to 1.18 hours but is especially well researched and documented. It features the British investigative journalist, Gerard Williams, who's book Grey Wolf is a must read (Willims regularly featured in the History Channel TV series Hunting Hitler).



Finally, the following is a feature length docu-drama made by Gerard Williams and team that dramatises Hitler's escape. I personally don't particularly like dramatised documentaries, preferring the more hard hitting format of factual television. But even so this is worth watching too.



In closing, I think it is important to mention two other seminal books on this subject. The first is by historian Ladislas Farago, titled Aftermath: Martin Bormann and the Fourth Reich (HERE).

Farago's book is excellently researched and Farago himself was widely regarded as a top-draw historian. However, his book got very badly reviewed because he published a photo he claimed was of Hitler in Argentina. It was a false photo. This, I'm afraid, was a case of an academic being too naive and trustworthy. The photo was given to him by Allen Dulles, former DCI of the CIA and the OSS station Chief in Bern, Switzerland during WWII.

Farago also persuaded Dulles to write a forward to this book. My guess is that Dulles must've laughed his arse off. He was the most untrustworthy American traitor of his generation imo. He negotiated Operation Sunrise with the Nazi SS General Karl Woolf that saw thousands of the Italian based Waffen SS escape to Latin America in exchange for agreeing to fight the Soviets in the forthcoming cold war. This story, as far as I am aware, has ever only been accurately and fully told by Peter Dale Scott in an unpublished manuscript that Peter kindly sent me when I was researching what had happened to Nazi gold back in the 1990's. Sadly, that and a great deal of my original research was lost when the hard-drive of my computer was lost in a computer repair shop (15 years research down the drain basically).

In any event, Farago's book is otherwise excellent. As is William Stevenson's book The Bormann Brotherhood (HERE).

In summary, my thesis is that Montgomery's plan to take the bridges unto and including the bridge at Arnhem, thereby bringing the war to a close by Christmas 1944, alarmed many important people who still had pro Hitler sympathies and other post war agendas - not to mention the transfer of very significant weapon technology with which to prosecute the cold war against the Soviet Union, not the possibility of avoiding fantastic scandals at home as a result of Bormann's knowledge of so much duplicity from various faction in the US and Great Britain.

Not least, I suspect, also because negotiations were ongoing to bring the Nazis back into the Western fold for the long sought war against Russia. Montgomery was too important a general to be ignored, so the powers that were simply took the decision to sabotage Operation Market Garden to give Bormann the time he needed to enact Operation Eagle's Flight and get all the Nazi loot and patents to safety and build the escape routes for, Hitler, himself and other top Third SS personnel that Manning discusses in his book.

This story necessarily remains speculative, although less so than before, thanks to the various testimonies that are now available about Bormann and Hitler - and about Prince Bernhard and his gofor, the Nazi double agent Christan Lindemans. However, I regard it as a common sense synthesis of what information is now known for sure. Concerning some relative matters I doubt that state papers will ever be made public and it is here, in the real of deduction and speculation this story will remain.
In closing I note that Lord Peter Carrington, the Grenadier Guards tank officer who, arguably was the one who scuppered the 1944 Operation Market Garden, was later awarded the not inconsiderable honour of being appointed in 1994, the Chancellor of the Order of the Garter, the highest chivalric order of the British royal family and the one they most favour themselves. This placed Carrington as an elect member in a galaxy of famous British names dating back over 700 years when the Order was first founded by Edward III. Was it a reward? Who knows?

PS, Lauren has kindly offered to post on this forum my archive dump on the whole smelly Rudolf Hess affair. This story has never been made public in one place before - and like the Bormann / Hitler / Arnhem Bridge story has been gradually revealed piecemeal making it very hard to put together. This story reveals why the Hess affair was so sensitive to the British elite and why it has been de facto kept secret for all this time. The sheer duplicity, double-dealing, betrayal and vile human darkness of the British royals, aristo's and elite is simply awful.

The last bits of the puzzle were made available by Martin Frost some years ago. Frost was a former MI5 operative and general spook; whereas his father was the assassin working for Churchil who took care of the real Hess and Prince George, Duke of Kent. Martin contacted me years ago on another matter, and we got into discussions about his copy of the so called Red Book, the membership roster of Colonel Ramsay's very pro-Hitler "Right Club". I tried, in vain, to get Martin to turn over a copy of the Red Book to me. He wanted to know why he should, and I answered truthfully, because I want to publish it.

Honesty is always the best policy imo, but this honest statement put a nail in the coffin of this particular negotiation. Which is very sad, because the Red Book was allegedly published by Robert Saikia in 2010 (HERE). I'm am certainly not accusing the author of publisher of a cover up, but Frost has made clear that the full membership roster totalled 6,000 names, not the smaller number of just under 300, published in the linked book. Frost also made available a number of the names he had extracted from his copy and I found all of them in Saikai's book, including a very old friend of mine, UFO writer, Brinsley le Poer Trench, which came as a mighty surprise to me (but in retrospect, given the Nazi origin of the so called "Flying Saucers" of his various books period, it now makes sense).

Martin had a fantastic website that was the very devil to navigate around. I think it had been repeatedly closed down, again and again, because he was telling secrets that he shouldn't really have been telling - and he just reconstituted the whole website each time in another domain that was less reachable by the authorities. But as I say, because of the various fragmentation of each website, navigation was simply awful with there being no central registry. But for the researcher it was a veritable goldmine. Sadly, the whole thing disappeared when he died and is irretrievable by Wayback machine. At least this has been my experience when trying to get back pages from it. Fortunately, as I usually do, I made copies of everything I considered important at the time.

See Lauren's post HERE, due shortly.