Did a Jewish spymaster aid in efforts that led to Hitler’s destruction?
Not just a Jew, says two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Louis Kilzer, but a beautiful, young Jewish woman.
In his new book, “Hitler’s Traitor,” Kilzer deduces that the Moscow spymaster in charge of one of history’s most effective Soviet agents and Hitler’s greatest traitor, was a twentysomething chief operative named Maria Poliakova.
He also deduces that the great unknown traitor, who supplied Russians with strategic and tactical intelligence on the German army’s strength, disposition and movement — directly influencing the key Soviet victories at Stalingrad and Kursk-Orel — was none other than Hitler’s own right-hand man, his secretary Martin Bormann. In fact, the book is subtitled “Martin Bormann and the Defeat of the Reich.”
Kilzer will explain his theories Wednesday to the Association of Former Intelligence Officers in San Francisco and will speak again on Sunday, April 22 at the Marin Jewish Community Center in San Rafael.
During a telephone interview from his Denver office, where he works as the sole investigative reporter for the Rocky Mountain News, Kilzer shared his conclusions.
He said it was known for some time that the Red Army had a spy strategically placed within the Third Reich. This spy was so highly placed that he was able to get Hitler’s plans to Stalin within days, sometimes hours, of their issuance.
“But it was anyone’s guess who it was,” said the Yale graduate, even with the opening of previously top-secret World War II archives after the collapse of the Soviet Union. “Everyone seemed improbable.”
Kilzer began to suspect Bormann in 1991 while he was researching “Churchill’s Deception,” published in 1994. While he was going through files at the former KGB headquarters in Moscow, Bormann’s name continually popped up in material on Rudolf Hess, a deputy of the Third Reich.
Kilzer’s curiosity was sparked.
“I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I knew that something was a little strange — well, a lot strange,” he said.
Checking information on Bormann in the institute’s computer, he asked the clerk for five folders on Hitler’s secretary only to discover that they hadn’t been properly catalogued and couldn’t be located immediately.
“So longhand, on a yellow piece of paper I requested the folders,” said Kilzer. “Six or seven months later I got access to material never seen before.”
The files verified his hypothesis that Bormann was a constant “fly on the wall.” As an investigator trying to break a story, who sold a book proposal to publishers merely on a hunch, the discovery “was serendipity.”
At one point, for instance, he said, Bormann convinced Hitler to have stenographers in his meetings so that Hitler could “take credit for his victories” for posterity. As secretary and “chief architect of the Holocaust alongside Hitler,” Bormann, of course, had access to all the notes.
“He’s the only one that it could be,” said Kilzer. “I’m convinced that he’s the one. I lay up the reasoning in the last chapter, and a reader can take it or discard it. It’s almost like a prosecutor’s case and my readers are the jury.”
As to Bormann’s motive, Kilzer admits that’s the one thing that he’s “short on.”
Kilzer continued his research at the National Archives, which was then in Washington, D.C. (now in Maryland), to follow up leads that Poliakova was Bormann’s sophisticated spymaster.
Kilzer was so intrigued by this young woman — the only one of her family not to be killed by Stalin and to subsequently progress in the Red Army intelligence — that he plans to write his next book about her.
“She played a critical role in the defeat of Hitler,” said Kilzer. “Maybe it’s too extreme to say she played as big a role as Churchill or Roosevelt, but without her playing her role, the world would be vastly different today.
“And God gave her something more than just beauty and youth — he made her a Jew.
“I’m delighted that Maria is Jewish,” said Kilzer, who is not Jewish himself. “Somehow there’s justice in that.”