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Der Sekretär. Martin Bormann, der Mann, der Hitler beherrschte
German
511 pages, Perfect Paperback
First published January 1, 1977
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October 7, 2015
I've read many books about WWII, Mother having grown up in Oslo under German occupation, Father having served in Europe, Africa and Asia. Other than simply understanding the causes and progress of the war(s), I'm also interested in understanding the "enemy": Japan, Italy, Rumania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Croatia, Slovakia, Denmark, Germany--and how they viewed events. Germany being culturally the most familiar, National Socialist ideology has been of particular interest.
To approach the Nazi mindset I've read both editions of Hitler's Mein Kampf, much of Goebbel's journaling and as many biographies of the Nazi leadership as I can find, having done several of Hitler and Goering in addition to single works about Himmler, Ribbentrop, Heydrich, Rosenberg etc. In the background of all of them lurked the person of Martin Bormann, 'the man who manipulated Hitler' in the words of author von Lang.
Surprisingly, there's a lot of material about Bormann. He kept a daily journal and maintained a voluminous correspondence, official and personal. Although not well known to the public, he was all-too-well known to fellow bureaucrats, with and among whom he struggled for position alongside the maximum leader, Adolf Hitler. However, unlike many of the others, he did not struggle for wealth, or for fame, or for an ideology. What he sought, apparently, was simply to serve--and interpret--Der Fuehrer, a slavish devotion which was rewarded by the Leader's exceptional trust and dependence.
Like Hitler's respected adversary, Josef Stalin, Bormann was no great theorist. But, like Stalin, he was a consummate bureaucratic politician, rising, ever rising in influence as the Nazi state degenerated.
To approach the Nazi mindset I've read both editions of Hitler's Mein Kampf, much of Goebbel's journaling and as many biographies of the Nazi leadership as I can find, having done several of Hitler and Goering in addition to single works about Himmler, Ribbentrop, Heydrich, Rosenberg etc. In the background of all of them lurked the person of Martin Bormann, 'the man who manipulated Hitler' in the words of author von Lang.
Surprisingly, there's a lot of material about Bormann. He kept a daily journal and maintained a voluminous correspondence, official and personal. Although not well known to the public, he was all-too-well known to fellow bureaucrats, with and among whom he struggled for position alongside the maximum leader, Adolf Hitler. However, unlike many of the others, he did not struggle for wealth, or for fame, or for an ideology. What he sought, apparently, was simply to serve--and interpret--Der Fuehrer, a slavish devotion which was rewarded by the Leader's exceptional trust and dependence.
Like Hitler's respected adversary, Josef Stalin, Bormann was no great theorist. But, like Stalin, he was a consummate bureaucratic politician, rising, ever rising in influence as the Nazi state degenerated.
October 24, 2012
Think of a big investment bank that rises to become the preeminent bank in the world due to some massive fraud among its executives. The middle management enjoys almost unprecedented wealth and power, and spends their time carving out their little middle management empires and screwing each other over, some eventually rising to the very top. Then the fraud is exposed and there's this backbiting descent toward the legal reckoning, where everyone turns on each other. One by one these incredible and horrifying stories come out about the bad things done by this company, and the incredible short sightedness with which they were done.
The once powerful CEO is now almost never seen; now he has gone round the bend, and spends his days gulping powerful narcotics in the Hamptons and fearing his imminent demise at the hands of his erstwhile supporters who any day now, he feels, are going to realize his power is illusory and his series of big, stupid bets with the company's resources have done the company in. Meanwhile thousands of memos fly around the company, all in the CEO's name, which is still on every employee's lips -- everyone's using that authority for their own purposes, and all his lieutenants spend all their time trying to screw each other out of their pensions and set up offshore accounts in the Caymans and a plan to flee beyond extradition. Low level employees meet the axe every day, while being exhorted to stay true to the dream and that things are going to start looking up every day now -- the writing's been on the wall but most of the poor schmucks still believe what they're being told, or never have but feel they're locked in anyhow.
Finally everything comes crashing down and as people are sifting through the aftermath a picture emerges -- that perhaps the most dyed-in-the-wool bastard of the lot was the chief financial officer, who it turns out had played the most adroit game of political chess, sacrificed most of his rivals, and did terrible, terrible things to enrich himself even right up to the end when it was obviously pointless. Stories come out about how this guy defunded the entire pension fund and had orphans thrown out on the street in order to pay for his house and buy presents for the several girlfriends he kept on the side. That sort of thing.
So, yes, think of this investment bank in this situation.
Did you think of Nazi Germany? I bet you didn't. But, any offensiveness inherent in comparing an investment bank to the architects of the Holocaust aside, you probably should have. Because although the Nazis weren't an investment bank, and most investment banks don't engage in genocide or warmongering, there are some unpleasant parallels.
When you think of Nazis you think of, of course, Hitler, and perhaps some of the other important figures, and you think of unspeakably evil things like the death camps and torture and atrocities and the war. And a lot of us scratch our heads wondering how ever it all could have happened; we come up with conclusions, of course, but they're ultimately unsatisfying and end up reducing down to 'these were very bad people' and maybe a cautionary tale or to about the dangers of waiting too long to confront evil. It's hard to fathom, though, so most of us give up, which is a shame because it's important to understand how things like this happen -- and not a false understanding, or a glossed over understanding that neatly transfers the blame away, but an understanding rooted in the human condition that doesn't let people blithely decide that this sort of thing can't happen in our own society.
The thing that makes von Lang's work so worth reading is that it cuts through all this frippery and leads you straight to the heart of evil, which is in the case of the Nazis, its banality. These aren't people twiddling their mustache while they tied twelve million people to the tracks to be plowed through by the oncoming train, and while there were definitely sadists and madmen among them, the unfortunate truth that confronts you throughout this work is that Nazi Germany ran not on the power of Adolf Hitler or the master race; largely, it ran on and was perpetuated by the self serving and small minded greed of a whole host of Nazis, who were content to see all manner of atrocities happen so long as they could keep their slice of power, and the attendant privilege and of course money. The book does a great job of painting how this system worked, and how the peculiarities of the Nazi structure, born initially from the political necessities by which their earliest leaders tenuously climbed to power (and then mostly did away with each other), became a vast engine of wealth and might that its leadership manipulated for their own ends - not unlike what might happen if the Mafia were a sovereign government, although one suspects the Mafia would have better food -- and ultimately, once the artificial buoyancy of military victory and foreign plunder vanished and the ring started closing in, how it descended into backbiting and betrayal, magnifying the disaster that was befalling Europe severalfold.
All this is conveyed through the story of Martin Bormann, the most important Nazi that most people have never heard of -- an unpleasant man, not unlike the faceless and conscienceless bureaucrats that we find all too many of in today's world. Possessed of few natural abilities save tireless labor, amorality, and naked ambition, he rose throughout the Party to become the man who controlled access to Hitler, and hence, in many ways, became as important and powerful as Hitler. von Lang paints a merciless picture of Bormann, who was by any account a petty and horrible human being who was first ridiculed, and then loathed, and then feared, by other Nazis. To hear von Lang tell it, Bormann not only controlled who got in to see Hitler, but he was such an adept political operative that he played his leader like a violin -- by controlling what he saw and read, playing upon his madness, irrationality and hatred, and putting his own words in Hitler's mouth when relaying orders.
One of the most existentially horrifying things about this whole tale is that, like many other Nazis, the end purposes to which Bormann employed these skills are almost unthinkably shallow in their greed and small mindedness. He used his incredible influence to alter the flow of events on a massive scale for reasons that seem trivial to us now -- to destroy a rival or to avoid taking the blame for a mistake, or even to humiliate some other person who Bormann believed had slighted him in the past. That there were countless chances to man up or at least try to lessen the slaughter, and that time and time again these chances were wasted and ignored. These are men who would have happily seen a million of their countrymen die a horrible death in order to bring about some minor fortune in their political favor, and in many cases that is exactly what they did. For the last three years at least of the Second World War these people realized that the tide had turned, but right up to the very end they continued playing a game that would be truly pathetic if it weren't for the millions that needlessly died and the millions more that were murdered.
It's an edifying read.
von Lang also spends a fair bit of time toward the end of the book addressing the question of how (or even whether) Bormann died, advancing the theory that he was killed while trying to flee Berlin, and offering specific evidence. It also briefly discusses other theories about Bormann (including the speculation that he was in fact a Red agent) but these parts of the book are... less interesting, and even dated, although the author makes much of them at times.
The once powerful CEO is now almost never seen; now he has gone round the bend, and spends his days gulping powerful narcotics in the Hamptons and fearing his imminent demise at the hands of his erstwhile supporters who any day now, he feels, are going to realize his power is illusory and his series of big, stupid bets with the company's resources have done the company in. Meanwhile thousands of memos fly around the company, all in the CEO's name, which is still on every employee's lips -- everyone's using that authority for their own purposes, and all his lieutenants spend all their time trying to screw each other out of their pensions and set up offshore accounts in the Caymans and a plan to flee beyond extradition. Low level employees meet the axe every day, while being exhorted to stay true to the dream and that things are going to start looking up every day now -- the writing's been on the wall but most of the poor schmucks still believe what they're being told, or never have but feel they're locked in anyhow.
Finally everything comes crashing down and as people are sifting through the aftermath a picture emerges -- that perhaps the most dyed-in-the-wool bastard of the lot was the chief financial officer, who it turns out had played the most adroit game of political chess, sacrificed most of his rivals, and did terrible, terrible things to enrich himself even right up to the end when it was obviously pointless. Stories come out about how this guy defunded the entire pension fund and had orphans thrown out on the street in order to pay for his house and buy presents for the several girlfriends he kept on the side. That sort of thing.
So, yes, think of this investment bank in this situation.
Did you think of Nazi Germany? I bet you didn't. But, any offensiveness inherent in comparing an investment bank to the architects of the Holocaust aside, you probably should have. Because although the Nazis weren't an investment bank, and most investment banks don't engage in genocide or warmongering, there are some unpleasant parallels.
When you think of Nazis you think of, of course, Hitler, and perhaps some of the other important figures, and you think of unspeakably evil things like the death camps and torture and atrocities and the war. And a lot of us scratch our heads wondering how ever it all could have happened; we come up with conclusions, of course, but they're ultimately unsatisfying and end up reducing down to 'these were very bad people' and maybe a cautionary tale or to about the dangers of waiting too long to confront evil. It's hard to fathom, though, so most of us give up, which is a shame because it's important to understand how things like this happen -- and not a false understanding, or a glossed over understanding that neatly transfers the blame away, but an understanding rooted in the human condition that doesn't let people blithely decide that this sort of thing can't happen in our own society.
The thing that makes von Lang's work so worth reading is that it cuts through all this frippery and leads you straight to the heart of evil, which is in the case of the Nazis, its banality. These aren't people twiddling their mustache while they tied twelve million people to the tracks to be plowed through by the oncoming train, and while there were definitely sadists and madmen among them, the unfortunate truth that confronts you throughout this work is that Nazi Germany ran not on the power of Adolf Hitler or the master race; largely, it ran on and was perpetuated by the self serving and small minded greed of a whole host of Nazis, who were content to see all manner of atrocities happen so long as they could keep their slice of power, and the attendant privilege and of course money. The book does a great job of painting how this system worked, and how the peculiarities of the Nazi structure, born initially from the political necessities by which their earliest leaders tenuously climbed to power (and then mostly did away with each other), became a vast engine of wealth and might that its leadership manipulated for their own ends - not unlike what might happen if the Mafia were a sovereign government, although one suspects the Mafia would have better food -- and ultimately, once the artificial buoyancy of military victory and foreign plunder vanished and the ring started closing in, how it descended into backbiting and betrayal, magnifying the disaster that was befalling Europe severalfold.
All this is conveyed through the story of Martin Bormann, the most important Nazi that most people have never heard of -- an unpleasant man, not unlike the faceless and conscienceless bureaucrats that we find all too many of in today's world. Possessed of few natural abilities save tireless labor, amorality, and naked ambition, he rose throughout the Party to become the man who controlled access to Hitler, and hence, in many ways, became as important and powerful as Hitler. von Lang paints a merciless picture of Bormann, who was by any account a petty and horrible human being who was first ridiculed, and then loathed, and then feared, by other Nazis. To hear von Lang tell it, Bormann not only controlled who got in to see Hitler, but he was such an adept political operative that he played his leader like a violin -- by controlling what he saw and read, playing upon his madness, irrationality and hatred, and putting his own words in Hitler's mouth when relaying orders.
One of the most existentially horrifying things about this whole tale is that, like many other Nazis, the end purposes to which Bormann employed these skills are almost unthinkably shallow in their greed and small mindedness. He used his incredible influence to alter the flow of events on a massive scale for reasons that seem trivial to us now -- to destroy a rival or to avoid taking the blame for a mistake, or even to humiliate some other person who Bormann believed had slighted him in the past. That there were countless chances to man up or at least try to lessen the slaughter, and that time and time again these chances were wasted and ignored. These are men who would have happily seen a million of their countrymen die a horrible death in order to bring about some minor fortune in their political favor, and in many cases that is exactly what they did. For the last three years at least of the Second World War these people realized that the tide had turned, but right up to the very end they continued playing a game that would be truly pathetic if it weren't for the millions that needlessly died and the millions more that were murdered.
It's an edifying read.
von Lang also spends a fair bit of time toward the end of the book addressing the question of how (or even whether) Bormann died, advancing the theory that he was killed while trying to flee Berlin, and offering specific evidence. It also briefly discusses other theories about Bormann (including the speculation that he was in fact a Red agent) but these parts of the book are... less interesting, and even dated, although the author makes much of them at times.
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