How Germany and Japan Could've Won (Part II)
Stalin's Spy in Hitler's Inner Sanctum
In his book, Hitler's Traitor — Martin Bormann and the Defeat of the Reich (2000), author Louis C. Kilzer provides compelling arguments that Martin Bormann was indeed the spy-traitor, "Werther," spying from deep inside the Third Reich. He was the only person who was able to attend all the meetings in question, or if not, to have his informants and official stenographers record in minute details the German High Command's top secret transactions and military plans. Thus, he was capable of relaying information to the Russians, even before the German generals were able to review and put them into action! Not even Ultra and the secret decoding of the German Enigma code, Winston Churchill's secret weapon at Bletchley Park, was able to provide such detailed information and feedback!
Werther was not only able to have secret German military plans radioed to Moscow Center via the Lucy spy ring in Switzerland immediately after Wehrmacht conferences were over, but also let Stalin know who attended the conference and what each of the conferees stated. Werther was even capable of answering specific questions posed by Moscow Center (i.e., "Gisela," the young, attractive, secretive, Jewish-Russian spymaster, Maria Poliakova). Kilzer shows that only one man was in the key and only position, where he was able to do so, and that man could have only been Martin Bormann, the Fuhrer's trusted secretary!
Hitler was ruthless, but despite what we may have been led to believe, unlike Stalin, Hitler was not a paranoid individual, and he allowed treasonous activity to thrive within the military (e.g., Generals Ludwig Beck and Georg Thomas), the police (e.g., Heinrich Muller, left-wing, head of the Gestapo and creator of the funkspiel, radio playback messages to Moscow), and even German military Intelligence (e.g., the official Hans Bernd Gisevius, General Hans Oster, and Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr).
It was not until the serious attempt on his life by Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg at the Wolf's Lair on July 10, 1944, that Hitler struck back with a vengeance against the conspirators. Only then (and as the Third Reich rapidly crumbled) did he become sadistically vindictive and unforgiving against his opponents within the German military. And yet, Hitler never distrusted Martin Bormann, the "faithful" secretary, "who could get things done." On April 30, 1945, as he prepared for death, Hitler made Bormann the executor of his will and praised him as his "most faithful party comrade."
But Admiral Canaris, himself an honorary member of the Black Orchestra, suspected Bormann, the "Brown Bolshevik." One of Bormann's mistresses was a communist operative in the German resistance, but that fact was not known at the time, and so Bormann was not suspected. Some of the surviving top Nazis eventually came to suspect Bormann's betrayal to the Russians — but only as the piece meal revelations came to light during the Nuremberg war crime trials where they were being prosecuted. On the stand, when the prosecutor asked if he believed Bormann was dead, Reichsmarshall Hermann Goring replied, "... I hope he is frying in hell. But I don't know."
What information did the spy-traitor Werther provide to Moscow Center that was so vital to the Soviets? No less than very detailed and specific military intelligence that led to the defeat of the Wehrmacht at the pivotal Battle of Stalingrad in the winter of 1942-43 and the decisive Battle of Kursk (i.e., the largest tank battle in history) during the spring and early summer of 1943, from which the Third Reich did not recover the initiative in the Eastern front.
The only question remaining is this: Why did Bormann not seek a timely escape route to communist Russia before the final collapse of the Third Reich? That is the sixty-four million dollar question. He might have been guarding his identity even from the Soviets. To escape, he attempted, but to surrender, he probably thought would be futile! He had interpreted and carried out the Fuhrer's order of genocide of the Jews during the Holocaust and the elimination of the Ukrainians during the Wehrmacht drive to the east. And his betrayal was ideological, but we will probably never have all the answers.
Winston Churchill's Deception
In another book, Churchill's Deception — The Dark Secret that Destroyed Nazi Germany (1994), author Louis C. Kilzer tells how British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, with the assistance of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), conceived of a deception strategy to encourage Hitler to turn his war machine on Soviet Russia in order to save England from the German onslaught. Perhaps the facts have not been incorporated in the official history books to save the British government from possible embarrassment; but that should not be the case. Churchill had to do what he did to put the safety of the British Empire and its citizens above all else.
Churchill had read and studied Mein Kampf and knew to some degree how the mind of the Fuhrer worked. Hitler had an obsession with preservation of the British Empire and Nordic solidarity between the two countries, England and Germany. Churchill knew this and also understood that Hitler's main objective was to invade and conquer the east and establish hegemony over Central and Eastern Europe. Hitler also detested Stalin and Bolshevism. He also wanted lebensraum (living space) for the German Volk in the east, Poland, the Ukraine, White Russia, etc.
After the Anschluss with Austria, the seizure of the Sudetenland and then the rest of Czechoslovakia, and finally the blitzkrieg and partition of Poland — France and England distrusted the Fuhrer and were committed to war with Germany. The Phony War was a period of overt inactivity but covert negotiations and peace feelers that led nowhere.
After Hitler's Western conquests — i.e., Denmark, Belgium, Norway, the Netherlands and France — he wanted to make peace with England, so he could turn his attention to the conquest of the east, particularly the Ukraine and the Caucasus, where he needed the Soviet oil fields to run his Panzers. But Churchill refused to make peace openly. Instead, Churchill created a fake, unofficial, and secretive "Peace Party," which included the Duke of Windsor and the Duke of Hamilton, and with the connivance of the British SIS finally lured Rudolf Hess, Hitler's trusted Deputy Fuhrer, to Scotland to negotiate an Anglo-German peace.
Hess' secretive solo flight was to end with his landing at the Duke of Hamilton's estate at Dungavel House. In other words, this was a planned mission authorized secretly by Adolf Hitler and manipulated by the SIS. Churchill wanted to hedge his bets and encourage Hitler and the Wehrmacht to turn eastward and abandoned the Battle of Britain. In fact, the day that Hess parachuted into Scotland, May 10, 1941, was also the deadliest for England. Reichsmarshall Herman Goring unleashed his Luftwaffe with a vengeance in an attempt to force England to reach an understanding with Hess while he was in Scotland and before Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, an invasion that began like thunder barely six weeks later.
In this book, Kilzer intimates that later while England waited for the outcome of Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union of June 22, 1941, Hitler became convinced that his western flank was protected and that an understanding had been reached between his captive Deputy Fuhrer Hess and the British "Peace Party," the fake front organization which was in fact orchestrated by Churchill.
According to Kilzer, when Joseph Stalin found out about this Hess Affair "deception" a year and a half later in October 1942, it marked the beginning of the cold war. I disagree with that assessment. Given all that we now know about Stalin's personality and his reign of terror, mass murders, the revelations of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, government-contrived famines, purges, repressions, and hatred for the West, the cold war would have begun as in fact it did, even before World War II was over regardless of the Hess Affair. We do know this from the nest of spies that Stalin was already employing against his Western "allies," even before the Hess Affair.
I also disagree with Kilzer that had Churchill made peace with Hitler, the 50 million lives of World War II, including 6 million Jews, could have been saved. If an Anglo-German understanding had been reached in 1941, perhaps all of the conquered territories of Western Europe may have regained their freedom. (Hitler was prepared to do so if only England would have signed a peace treaty and given him a free hand in the east.)
So, England and Western Europe would have preserved their freedom and independence, but that was it. Hitler would have proceeded with Operation Barbarossa and the conquest of the East as he had planned, and with the extermination of the Jews with even with more confidence as he had pledged to do in Mein Kampf. England has nothing to fear from the truth; after all, at the time of Operation Barbarossa, it was not England but Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia who were allies, those mutually back-stabbing signatories of the shameful 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Pact, in which the partners dismembered the Baltic states and Poland photo, right, map showing division of Poland).
Great Britain has nothing to fear from the revelation of this deception and Winston Churchill's legacy is secure!
