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Since January 1946, there have been reports of sightings of Bormann from a dozen or more countries. In 1954 he was officially declared dead by a West German court, but in 1964 the War Crimes Office in Frankfurt, obviously convinced he was still alive, posted a $28,000 reward for Bormann's capture. Meanwhile, Nazi Hunter Simon Wiesenthal claimed in The Murderers Among Us that Hitler's deputy had been smuggled out of Germany to South America by the Nazi underground escape organization. Wiesenthal said that on several occasions Bormann was seen nightclubbing with "the Mad Doctor of Auschwitz," Josef Mengele, who is now hiding in the jungles of Paraguay. Later, according to Wiesenthal, Bormann set up a colony of ex-Nazis in Argentina near the mountain town of Bariloche, where he remains today at the age of 71, well protected by thugs and armed guards.
High-level Leak. What, then, of Gehlen's allegations in Die Welt that Hitler's alter ego was a Soviet agent, rescued that fateful night in 1945 by Red Army soldiers and whisked off to the U.S.S.R. to continue his anti-German work? It is an established fact that there was a high-level leak of Nazi secrets to the Soviets. According to the first installment of Gehlen's memoirs, both he and his Abwehr (Army counterintelligence) superior, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. "came to the conviction that the Soviets must have at their disposal a well-informed intelligence source at the top of the German leadership," and that this source was Bormann. Gehlen says that he received two dependable reports in the 1950s that "Martin Bormann lived perfectly covered and protected in the Soviet Union" after the war and later information that he had died there. But Gehlen's first installment provides sparse proof for his allegations.
Hitler's successor, Admiral Dönitz, now 80, called the Gehlen theory "complete nonsense." Tass described it as a "fabrication" aimed at disrupting attempts for an East-West détente in Europe. Certainly the manuscript, which contains a detailed analysis of Soviet political and military goals for the next two decades and calls for a parallel buildup of Western military strength, can only be welcomed by foes of Chancellor Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik. That would include Die Welt Owner Axel Springer, whose criticism of the Brandt government borders on frenzy. Gehlen's memoirs could also be an overdramatized effort at self-justification.
For all that, there is at least some support for Gehlen's astonishing thesis. A 1947 book called Who Killed Hitler? states: "Russian intelligence reported Bormann under arrest, a prisoner of the Red Army in the Berlin area in early July 1945—two months after Berlin's capture!" An International News Service story in 1950 quotes Wilhelm Hoettl, a Nazi secret service expert, as saying that Bormann and other former German officials were running a bureau in the U.S.S.R. to "reorganize Germany, East and West, along the lines of a people's democracy."