Aftermath: Martin Bormann & the Fourth Reich

Ladislas Farago – 1972

Normally I wouldn’t recommend a book that has been so soundly discredited, but Aftermath, if taken with a thousand grains of salt and treated as an elaborate work of fiction, is pretty interesting.  Respected military/espionage historian Ladislas Farago undertakes to uncover what happened to Hitler’s executive secretary Martin Bormann, who was an extremely powerful bureaucrat in the Third Reich who controlled access to Hitler and was hated and feared by even the highest ranking Nazi ministers, including Goebbels and Himmler.  After Hitler’s suicide in 1945 as the Allies closed in on Berlin, Bormann fled.  Since his remains were not found, it was reasonable to suppose that he may have escaped to South America like so many of his fellow countrymen did.  Much of Farago’s book is about the fugitive Nazis who prospered in Argentina and surrounding countries thanks to sympathetic military regimes like Juan Peron’s.  The premise is not unthinkable; there was Eichmann, Mengele, Barbie and many other famous cases.  Farago gives us a more-or-less accurate overview of the notorious Nazis who fled and the legendary Nazi-hunters – such as Simon Wiesenthal – who struggled to find them and bring them to justice.   Where Farago goes wrong is in inserting himself into the story in order to give his book a boost above the many others coming out at the time about Nazi fugitives.  The finale involves Farago trudging through a jungle and coming face-to-face with Bormann himself.  Unfortunately for Farago, 1972 saw not only the publication of Aftermath but a new investigation into Bormann’s death prompted by the discovery of a skeleton in Berlin.  Forensic methods not available in the 40s confirmed the bones to be those of Bormann’s; (and this was later confirmed by DNA testing in the 1990s).  Farago immediately claimed that the evidence was fake and part of the same global conspiracy that was protecting ex-Nazis and fostering what was intended to be a restored, or Fourth, Reich.  He quickly published a revision with a post-script rebutting the findings in Berlin, but it was too late.  His hoax was exposed and even the more paranoid of conspiracy-theorists had to concede that Martin Bormann indeed must have died trying to flee Berlin in 1945.  Although you can enjoy the book in the same spirit as you may enjoy Clifford Irving’s faux biography of Howard Hughes, Farago’s case is sad because the Bormann issue casts a shadow over Farago’s other historical books.  You can’t help but wonder, with just cause, what other “facts” in them may have questionable origins.