Despite his penchant for secrecy, aliases and bulletproof cars, and his aversion to photographers and public appearances, his notoriety as a superspy has always made General Reinhard Gehlen a controversial figure. As head of German military intelligence on the Eastern Front during World War II, Gehlen so infuriated Hitler with his precise predictions of Soviet victories that der Führer ordered him sent to an insane asylum. Instead, he fled to the Bavarian Alps, and later made a deal with the invading Americans: 50 cases of secret data on the Red Army in return for U.S. financial and political backing for what became Bonn's postwar espionage organization, the BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst). An obsessive antiCommunist, Gehlen helped plot some of the crucial undercover moves of the cold war. But the shadowy chief of German intelligence was forced into retirement at the age of 66 in 1968, partly because two of his aides were found to be Soviet double agents. Now Gehlen has again stirred up a controversy—this time with his forthcoming memoirs, Der Dienst (The Service).
Hated and Feared. The book is said to have brought $175,000 for its serialization, starting last week in the West German newspaper Die Welt, and over $500,000 has reportedly been bid by a group of book publishers led by the World Publishing Co. in New York. Gehlen claims to have known about the Berlin Wall before it went up, to have been aware of plans for the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia before it occurred, and to have correctly predicted the outbreak of the Arab-Israeli war of 1967. Perhaps his most startling assertion is that missing Nazi War Criminal Martin Bormann was really a Soviet agent who died in the Soviet Union less than three years ago.
A more shadowy figure than Gehlen himself, Reichsleiter (National Leader) Bormann rose from an obscure fund raiser for the Nazi Party to become the second most powerful official of the Third Reich. The short, stocky Bormann was Secretary to the Fuhrer, Director of the Party Chancellery, and one of the most hated and feared men in Hitler's Germany.
After he replaced Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess in 1941, he exercised virtual control over everyone Hitler saw and everything Hitler read. As executor of Hitler's estate, he was the first to enter the room in the Führerbunker after Hitler's suicide. Turning the government over to Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, Bormann fled the bunker on the night of May 1, 1945, in an attempt to slip through the tightening Soviet ring of tanks and troops only 300 yards away. Somewhere between the bunker and Friedrichstrasse Station, Martin Bormann vanished.
Mountain Hideout. It is here that the mystery surrounding Bormann begins. At the 1945-46 Nuremberg trials, when Bormann was sentenced to death in absentia for his war crimes, two men claimed that he died on the night of May 1 before reaching the Friedrichstrasse Station. But his corpse was never found, and four weeks later his voice was reportedly heard over a secret radio station in Stockholm, triggering rumors that have not yet ceased.