The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups

the Grove experience, in which the members and guests sleep in some 104 log-cabin “camps” scattered among the trees. As if in proof of the Bohos’ hedonistic intentions, an effigy of “Dull Care” (representing the burdens of everyday life) is burned every 14 July at the foot of a 40-foot (12m) concrete owl in the Grove’s mock-druidic “Cremation of Care Ceremony”. The motto of the Grove is: “Weaving spiders, come not here.”

But weaving spiders do go to the Grove, and some of them are tarantulas. And what a tangled web they spin! As the leading academic historian of the Grove, Peter Martin Phillips, observed: “A person would have to look very hard to find such a dense concentration and variety of American socio-economic elites in one place anywhere else in the United States.” Additionally, one would be hard pushed outside of the KKK to find a whiter crowd of Americans: just 1 per cent of the Club’s members are not Caucasian.

Every American Republican president since Calvin Coolidge has attended the Grove, including Richard Nixon, who complained that “it was the most faggy goddamned thing you could ever imagine”. Current US politicians who attend the Grove include Henry Kissinger, Colin Powell (a rare non-white) and Newt Gingrich. Meanwhile, approximately one-third of the leading US companies have a representative at the Grove summer fest; by Phillips’s estimate 11 per cent of Bohemian Club members together own US$30 476 billion of corporate stock. Alan Greenspan, once of the Federal Bank, and A. W. Clausen of the World Bank are both Grove habitues. It beggars belief that these elites do not “talk shop” together. Indeed, by the Grove’s own admission, the Manhattan Project to build the US atomic bomb was conceived in Mandalay camp at the Grove. Dwight Eisenhower began his bid for the presidency after canvassing support at the Grove.

A feature of the Bohemian Grove is the daily “Lakeside Chat”, a lecture by a worthy in his field. Ostensibly these “Chats” can be on any conceivable subject, but they tend to be skewed towards politics. Titles include “Defining the New World Order” and “America’s Health Revolution: Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Pays?”

With its potent amalgamation of secrecy, money and power, the Bohemian Grove has been a target for investigative exposes. In Trance Formation of America (1995) Grove worker Cathy O’Brien recorded lurid tales of sex slaves, although no such torrid goings-on were found by British reporter Jon Ronson when he crashed the Grove for his book Them. Ronson similarly failed to find the Babylonian Brotherhood transforming themselves into giant lizards, as David Icke insisted he would, and nor did he find the New World Order there. “My lasting impression,” wrote Ronson, “was of an all-pervading sense of immaturity: the Elvis impersonators, the cod-pagan spooky rituals, the heavy drinking… emotionally they [the Grovers] seemed trapped in their college years.”

Many of the liberal-left political protests against the Grove are co-ordinated by the Bohemian Grove Action Network. According to BGAN:

When powerful people work together, they become even more powerful. The Grove membership is wealthy, and becoming more so, while the middle class is steadily becoming poorer. This close-knit group determines whether prices rise or fall (by their control of the banking system, money supply, and markets), and they make money whichever way markets fluctuate. They determine what our rights are and which laws have effect, by appointing judges. They decide who our highest officials shall be by consensus among themselves, and then selling candidates to us via the media which they own. Important issues and facts are omitted from discussion in the press, or slanted to suit their goals, but they are discussed frankly at the Grove. Is there true democracy when so much power is concentrated in so few hands? Is there any real difference between the public and private sectors when cabinet members come from the boardrooms of large corporations? Is the spending of billions on weapons, which are by consensus no longer needed, really the will of the people? Or is it the will of General Electric, General Dynamics, and the other weapons contractors represented at the Grove?

The BGAN overstates the case: the Grove is too unwieldy to rule America and thus the world. Aside from injecting an annual morale-boosting shot in the arm to the US Eurocentric male elite, the Grove is a good ole boys’ networking opportunity. It is the place in America to win friends (and contracts, jobs…) and influence people in high places.

Bohemian Gravers rule America as invisible dictators: ALERT LEVEL 4

Further Reading

Peter Martin Phillips, A Relative Advantage: Sociology of the San Francisco Bohemian Club, PhD thesis, University of California Davis, 1994

Jon Ronson, Them: Adventures Among Extremists, 2001

Martin Bormann

Old Nazis never die. They go to Antarctica or, in the case of Adolf Hitler, to the Nazi Moon Base. Or, more plausibly, in the case of Martin Bormann they go to the Soviet Union.

In May 1941 Bormann was made Nazi Party Chancellor, a position he used to become the Third Reich’s main bureaucrat. He was also Hitler’s right-hand man, his personal secretary and his sounding board, and remained with the Fuhrer until the end. The last incontestable sighting of Bormann was in the early hours of 2 May 1945, on Invalidenstrasse Bridge in Berlin, as he sought to escape from encircling Russian troops. Post-war investigation by the Allies surmised that Bormann had committed suicide or been killed near the bridge, but in the absence of a body there could be no confirmation. For two decades rumours flew that Bormann was alive and well and living in (variously) Germany, South America and Spain. Then, in 1971, Reinhard Gehlen published his memoirs, The Service, which stated as fact that Bormann had survived the war and hidden from view in the unlikeliest place of all, the USSR, where he had only recently died.

Unlike other Bormann spotters, Gehlen had pedigree. He was the former head of Nazi intelligence on the Eastern Front and, with the help of the CIA and the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, had taken on the job of spy chief in the new Federal Republic of Germany. Gehlen asserted that there existed film of Bormann watching sports with Soviet bigwigs. And he made another sensational claim: Bormann was the Russian spy code-named Werther who had infiltrated Hitler’s military planning sessions, and passed on the top-secret knowledge to Moscow that Russia needed to win Stalingrad, Kursk and other battles on the Eastern Front.

Gehlen’s identification of Bormann as Werther received a boost in 2000 with the publication of Hitler’s Traitor: Martin Bormann and the Defeat of the Reich by Louis Kilzer. So fast was intelligence passed from Hitler’s ops room to Stalin’s, Kilzer posited, that it must have come from someone right at Hitler’s side: Bormann. If Bormann was Werther it makes it natural that Stalin would have given him sanctuary after the war—hence the sightings of him in the USSR.

There is, however, strong forensic evidence that Bormann died during the battle of Berlin in 1945. In 1972 construction workers at Lehrter Banhof dug up two bodies, one of which was identified as Bormann’s by his wartime dentist Dr Hugo Blaschke. (The other body belonged to SS doctor Ludwig Stumpfegger.) The bodies were found just 40 feet (12m) from where Albert Krumnow, a postal worker, had previously claimed to have buried Bormann and Stumpfegger. In 1998 DNA tests on the skull of one of the Lehrter corpses confirmed it as Martin Bormann’s. Traces of glass in the jaws suggested the two men had committed suicide by biting on cyanide capsules.

The positive identification of the Lehrter corpse as Bormann’s holes the “Bormann was Werther” theory— because, if Bormann had been a Soviet spy, presumably events would indeed have followed the scenario Gehlen proposed. So who was Werther? Bernd Ruland, a teleprinter supervisor at Hitler’s wartime radio centre at Zossen, suggested in a 1973 book that Werther was not one but two people: two female teleprinters at Zossen.

Almost inevitably, the forensic identification of Bormann’s corpse has not killed off the conspiracy theories. In Doppelgangers, Hugh Thomas suggested there were forensic indicators that Bormann died later than 1945, notably that the condition of the teeth were those of a man older than 45 (Bormann’s age in 1945) and that there appeared to be dental work in excess of the 1945 record. Moreover, the skull contained traces of a volcanic red clay not found in Berlin but common in Paraguay—where there had been several Bormann sightings. Since DNA testing proved the skull to be Bormann’s, the necessary inference was that Bormann did survive the war and was reburied in Berlin by accomplices to give credence to the story that he fell in 1945.

Old Nazis do eventually die, but the conspiracy theories about them go on for ever.

Martin Bormann survived the Second World War: ALERT LEVEL 8