Branch: Civilian
Born: 17 June 1900, Wegeleben, Prussia, Germany.
Died:
Appointment's:
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Martin Ludwig Bormann was a prominent National Socialist official. Martin
Bormann became head of the Party Chancellery (Parteikanzlei)
and private secretary to
Adolf
Hitler. Martin Bormann gained
Adolf
Hitler's trust and derived immense power within the Third
Reich by controlling access to the
Adolf
Hitler and by regulating the orbits of those closest to
him.
Early life and family
Born in Wegeleben (now in Saxony-Anhalt) in the Kingdom of
Prussia in the German Empire, Martin Bormann was born to a
Lutheran family, the son of Theodor Bormann 1862 to 1903,
a post office employee, and his second wife, Antonie Bernhardine
Mennong. Martin Bormann had two half-siblings Else and Walter
Bormann from his father's earlier marriage to Louise Grobler,
who died in 1898. Antonie Bormann gave birth to three sons,
one of whom died in infancy. Martin born 1900 and Albert born
1902 survived to adulthood.
Martin Bormann dropped out of school to work on a farm in
Mecklenburg. Martin Bormann served in an artillery regiment
in the last days of World War I, but never saw action. Martin
Bormann then became an estate manager in Mecklenburg, which
brought him into contact with the Freikorps residing on the
estate. Martin Bormann took part in their activities, mostly
in assassinations and the intimidation of trade union organisers.
On 17 March 1924, Martin Bormann was sentenced to a year in
prison as an accomplice to his friend Rudolf Höss in
the murder of Walther Kadow, who they thought had betrayed
Freikorps Albert Leo Schlageter to the French during the occupation
of the Ruhr District.
On 2 September 1929, Martin Bormann married 19-year-old Gerda
Buch, whose father, Major Walter Buch, served as a chairman
of the National Socialist Party Court. Martin Bormann had recently met
Adolf
Hitler, who agreed to serve as a witness at their wedding.
Gerda Martin Bormann would give birth to 10 children one
died shortly after birth.
The children of Martin and Gerda Martin Bormann were
Adolf Bormann born 14 April 1930 called Krönzi named
after his godfather
Adolf
Hitler)
Ilse Bormann born 9 July 1931 twin sister Ehrengard died after
the birth named after her godmother Ilse Hess, later called
Eike, died 1958
Irmgard Bormann born 25 July 1933
Rudolf Gerhard Bormann born 31 August 1934 named after his
godfather
Rudolf
Hess)
Heinrich Hugo Bormann born 13 June 1936 named after his godfather
Heinrich
Himmler)
Eva Ute Bormann born 4 August 1938
Gerda Bormann born 23 October 1940
Fred Hartmut Bormann (born 4 March 1942
Volker Bormann born 18 September 1943, died 1946)
Gerda Bormann suffered from cancer in her later years, and
died of mercury poisoning on 23 March 1946, in Merano, Italy.
All of Martin Bormann's children survived the war. Most were
cared for anonymously in foster homes. His eldest son, Martin,
was
Adolf Hitler's
godson. Martin abandoned the Lutheran faith of his family
and was ordained a Roman Catholic priest in 1953, but left
the priesthood in the late 1960s. He married an ex-nun in
1971 and became a teacher of theology.
Rise through the National Socialist Party
In 1927, Martin Bormann joined the NSDAP. His NSDAP number
was 60,508 and his (honorary) SS membership number was originally
278,267. By special order of
Heinrich
Himmler in 1938, Martin Bormann was granted SS number
555 to reflect his Alter Kämpfer (Old Fighter) status.
Martin Bormann became the party's regional press officer and
business manager in 1928.
Reich Leader and Head of the Party Chancellery
On 10 October 1933, Martin Bormann became a Reich Leader (Reichsleiter)
of the NSDAP, and in November, a member of the Reichstag.
From 1 July 1933 until 1941, Martin Bormann served as the
personal secretary for
Rudolf
Hess. Martin Bormann commissioned the building of the
Kehlsteinhaus (Eagle's Nest). The Kehlsteinhaus was formally
presented to
Adolf
Hitler on 20 April 20 1938, after 13 months of expensive
construction, and is commemorated on a plaque just above the
entrance to the tunnel to the lift up to the Eagle's Nest.
During this period, Martin Bormann had also managed
Adolf
Hitler's finances through various schemes such as royalties
collected on
Adolf
Hitler's book, his image on postage stamps, as well as
setting up an
Adolf
Hitler Endowment Fund of German Industry, which was really
a thinly veiled extortion attempt on the behalf of
Adolf
Hitler to collect more money from German industrialists.
In May 1941, the flight of
Rudolf
Hess to Britain cleared the way for Martin Bormann to
become Head of the Party Chancellery (Parteikanzlei) that
same month. Martin Bormann proved to be a master of intricate
political infighting. Due to his mastery of such infighting,
along with his access and closeness to
Adolf
Hitler, and because of the trust
Adolf
Hitler held in him, he was able to constantly and effectively
check and thus make enemies of
Joseph
Goebbels,
Hermann
Göring,
Heinrich
Himmler,
Alfred
Rosenberg, Robert Ley,
Albert
Speer and a plethora of other high-ranking officers and
officials, both public and private. The ruthless and continuous
intriguing for power, influence, and favour from
Adolf
Hitler within the regime came to characterise the inner
workings of the Third Reich.
Martin Bormann took charge of all of
Adolf
Hitler's paperwork, appointments and personal finances.
Adolf Hitler
came to have complete trust in Martin Bormann and the view
of reality he presented. During one meeting,
Adolf
Hitler was said to have screamed, To win this war, I need
Martin Bormann! Some historians have suggested Martin Bormann
held so much power that, in some respects by 1945, he became
Germany's secret leader during the war. A collection of transcripts
edited by Martin Bormann during the war appeared in print
in 1952 and 1953 as
Adolf
Hitler's Table Talk 1941 to 1944, mostly a re-telling
of
Adolf Hitler's
wartime dinner conversations.
Martin Bormann's bureaucratic power and effective reach had
broadened considerably by 1942. Later, faced with the imminent
demise of the Third Reich, he systematically set about organising
German corporate flight capital, and established off-shore
holding companies and business interests in close coordination
with the same Ruhr industrialists and German bankers who,
although often not Nazis, had helped to facilitate
Adolf
Hitler's explosive rise to power 10 years before.
His view of Christianity was epitomized in a confidential
memo to the Gauleiters in 1942 by stating that Nazism was
completely incompatible with Christianity. Contrary to
Adolf
Hitler's tactical judgment, Martin Bormann pushed the
Kirchenkampf forward at the height of World War II. He reopened
the fight against the Christian churches, declaring in a confidential
memo to the Gauleiters in 1942 that their power 'must absolutely
and finally be broken.' Martin Bormann viewed the power of
the churches and Christianity to be completely incompatible
with Nazism, and saw their influence as a serious obstacle
to totalitarian rule. The sharpest anti-cleric in the National Socialist
leadership (he collected all the files of cases against the
clergy that he could lay his hands on), Martin Bormann was
the driving force of the Kirchenkampf, which
Adolf
Hitler for tactical reasons had wished to postpone until
after the war.
In February 1943, the German defeat at the Battle of Stalingrad
produced a crisis in the regime. Martin Bormann exploited
the disaster at Stalingrad, and his daily access to
Adolf
Hitler, to persuade him to create a three-man junta representing
the State, the Army and the Party, represented respectively
by
Hans
Lammers, head of the Reich Chancellery, Field Marshal
Wilhelm
Keitel, chief of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (Armed
Forces High Command, or OKW), and Martin Bormann, who controlled
the Party and access to the Führer. This Committee of
Three would exercise dictatorial powers over the home front.
Joseph
Goebbels,
Albert
Speer,
Hermann
Göring and
Heinrich
Himmler all saw this proposal as a power grab by Martin
Bormann and a threat to their power, and combined to block
it.
However, their alliance was shaky at best. This was mainly
due to the fact that during this period
Heinrich
Himmler was still cooperating with Martin Bormann to gain
more power at the expense of
Hermann
Göring and most of the traditional Reich administration.
Hermann
Göring loss of power had resulted from an overindulgence
in the trappings of power and his strained relations with
Joseph
Goebbels made it difficult for a unified coalition to
be formed, despite the attempts of
Albert
Speer and
Hermann
Göring Luftwaffe deputy Field Marshal
Erhard
Milch, to reconcile the two Party comrades.
However, the result was that nothing was done the Committee
of Three declined into irrelevance due to the loss of power
by
Wilhelm
Keitel and
Hans
Lammers and the ascension of Martin Bormann, and the situation
continued to drift, with administrative chaos increasingly
undermining the war effort. The ultimate responsibility for
this lay with
Adolf
Hitler, as
Joseph
Goebbels well knew, referring in his diary to a crisis
of leadership, but
Joseph
Goebbels was too much under
Adolf
Hitler's spell ever to challenge his power.
Martin Bormann was invariably the advocate of extremely harsh,
radical measures when it came to the treatment of Jews, of
the conquered eastern peoples or prisoners of war. He signed
the decree of 9 October 1942 prescribing that the permanent
elimination of the Jews from the territories of Greater Germany
can no longer be carried out by emigration but by the use
of ruthless force in the special camps of the East. A further
decree, signed by Martin Bormann on 1 July 1943, gave Adolf
Eichmann absolute powers over Jews, who now came under the
exclusive jurisdiction of the Gestapo.
Martin Bormann's memos concerning the Slavs make it clear
that he regarded them as a 'Sovietized mass' of sub-humans
who had no claim to national independence. In a brutal memo
of 19 August 1942, he wrote The Slavs are to work for us.
In so far as we do not need them, they may die. Slav fertility
is not desirable.
At the Nuremberg Trials, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, the Reich Commissioner
for the Netherlands, testified that he had called Martin Bormann
to confirm an order to deport the Dutch Jews to Auschwitz,
and further testified that Martin Bormann passed along
Adolf
Hitler's orders for the extermination of Jews during the
Holocaust. A telephone conversation between Martin Bormann
and
Heinrich
Himmler, who was his main antagonist in the struggle for
power within the National Socialist elite, was overheard by telephone operators
during which
Heinrich
Himmler reported to Martin Bormann the extermination of
40,000 Jews in Poland.
Heinrich
Himmler was sharply rebuked for using the word exterminated
rather than the codeword resettled, and Martin Bormann ordered
the apologetic
Heinrich
Himmler never again to report on this by phone but through
SS couriers.
Martin Bormann, his adjutant, SS-Standartenführer Wilhelm
Zander, and his secretary, Else Krüger, were with
Adolf
Hitler in the Führer's shelter (Führerbunker)
during the Battle of Berlin. The Führerbunker was located
under the Reich Chancellery (Reichskanzlei) gardens in the
centre government district of Berlin. On 23 April, his brother
Albert Bormann left the Berlin bunker complex by aircraft
for the Obersalzberg. He and several others had been ordered
by
Adolf Hitler
to leave Berlin.
On 28 April, Martin Bormann wired the following message to
Großadmiral
Karl
Dönitz Situation very serious. Those ordered to rescue
the Führer are keeping silent. Disloyalty seems to gain
the upper hand everywhere. Reichskanzlei a heap of rubble.
At 0400 on 29 April 1945,
Wilhelm
Burgdorf,
Joseph
Goebbels,
Hans
Krebs, and Martin Bormann witnessed and signed
Adolf
Hitler's last will and testament.
Adolf
Hitler dictated this document to his personal secretary,
Traudl Junge. Martin Bormann was Head of the Party Chancellery
(Parteikanzlei) and was also the private secretary to
Adolf
Hitler. Shortly before signing the last will and testament,
Adolf Hitler
married Eva Braun in a civil ceremony
.
The Soviet forces continued to fight their way into the centre
of Berlin.
Adolf
Hitler and Eva committed suicide during the afternoon
of the 30 April. Eva took cyanide and
Adolf
Hitler shot himself. As per instructions, their bodies
were taken to the garden and burned. In accordance with
Adolf
Hitler's last will and testament,
Joseph
Goebbels, the Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda,
became the new Head of Government and Chancellor of Germany
(Reichskanzler). Martin Bormann was named as Party Minister,
thus officially confirming his position as de facto General
Secretary of the Party.
At 0315 on 1 May, Reichskanzler
Joseph
Goebbels and Martin Bormann sent a radio message to
Karl
Dönitz informing him of
Adolf
Hitler's death. In accordance with
Adolf
Hitler's last wishes,
Karl
Dönitz was appointed as the new President of Germany
(Reichspräsident).
Joseph
Goebbels and his wife committed suicide later that same
day.
On 2 May, the Battle in Berlin ended when General der Artillerie
Helmuth Weidling, the commander of the Berlin Defence Area,
unconditionally surrendered the city to General Vasily Chuikov,
the commander of the Soviet 8th Guards Army. It is agreed
that, by this day, Martin Bormann had left the Führerbunker.
It has been reported that he left with Ludwig Stumpfegger
and Artur Axmann as part of a group attempting to break out
of the Soviet encirclement of the city.
Death, rumours of survival and discovery of remains
Axmann's account of Martin Bormann's death
As World War II came to a close, Martin Bormann held out with
Adolf Hitler
in the Führerbunker in Berlin. On 30 April 1945, just
before committing suicide,
Adolf
Hitler signed the order to allow a breakout. On 1 May,
Martin Bormann left the Führerbunker with SS doctor Ludwig
Stumpfegger,
Adolf
Hitler Youth leader Artur Axmann and
Adolf
Hitler's pilot Hans Baur as part of one of the groups
attempting to break out of the Soviet encirclement. At the
Weidendammer Bridge, a Tiger tank spearheaded the first attempt
to storm across the bridge, but it was destroyed. Martin Bormann
and Stumpfegger were knocked over when the tank was hit. There
followed two more attempts and on the third attempt, made
around 100, Martin Bormann in his group from the Reich Chancellery
crossed the Spree. Leaving the rest of their group, Martin
Bormann, Stumpfegger and Axmann walked along railway tracks
to Lehrter station, where Axmann decided to go alone in the
opposite direction of his two companions. When he encountered
a Red Army patrol, Axmann doubled back and later insisted
he had seen the bodies of Martin Bormann and Stumpfegger near
the railway switching yard with moonlight clearly illuminating
their faces. He did not check the bodies, so he did not know
what killed them.
Axmann, Werner Naumann, and their adjutants escaped Berlin.
Axmann hid in the Bavarian Alps under the alias Erich Siewert.
He was arrested in December 1945 while organising an underground
National Socialist movement. Naumann found asylum in Argentina, where he
became an editor of the neo-National Socialist magazine Der Weg.
Lieutenant General Konstantin Telegin, of the Soviet 5th Assault
Army, remembered his men bringing Martin Bormann's diary
to him. It was brought-in immediately after the fighting had
ended. As far as I can remember, it was found on the road
when they were cleaning up the battle area. Inspired by the
diary and reports from prisoners, Telegin said, Naturally,
we sent a recon group to the bridge, who searched the site
of the breakthrough attempt. All they found were a few civilians.
Martin Bormann was not found.
Tried at Nuremberg in absentia
During the chaotic closing days of the war, there were contradictory
reports as to Martin Bormann's whereabouts. For example, Jakob
Glas, Martin Bormann's long-time chauffeur, insisted he saw
Martin Bormann in Munich weeks after 1 May 1945. The bodies
were not found, and a global search followed including extensive
efforts in South America. With no evidence sufficient to confirm
Martin Bormann's death, the International Military Tribunal
at Nuremberg tried Martin Bormann in absentia in October 1946
and sentenced him to death. His court-appointed defence lawyer
used the unusual and unsuccessful defence that the court could
not convict Martin Bormann because he was already dead.
In 1965, a retired postal worker named Albert Krumnow stated
that around 8 May 1945 the Soviets had ordered him and his
colleagues to bury two bodies found near the railway bridge
near Lehrter station. One was a member of the Wehrmacht and
the other was an SS doctor.
Krumnow's colleague, Wagenpfohl is said to have found
a paybook on the SS doctor's body identifying him as
Dr. Ludwig Stumpfegger. He gave the paybook to his boss, postal
chief Berndt, who turned it over to the Soviets. They in turn
destroyed it. The Soviets allowed Berndt to notify Stumpfegger's
wife. He wrote and told her that her husband's body was
…interred with the bodies of several other dead soldiers
in the grounds of the Alpendorf in Berlin NW 40, Invalidenstrasse
63.
In mid-1965, Berlin police excavated the alleged burial site
looking for Martin Bormann's remains, but found nothing. Krumnow
stated he could no longer remember exactly where he buried
the bodies. Stern magazine editor Jochen von Lang, whose investigation
inspired the dig, later wrote, even if bones had been discovered,
it would have been exceedingly difficult to identify them
as those of Martin Bormann. He went on to opine that the only
way to identify Martin Bormann would be to find glass particles
from a cyanide capsule in the jaw and that would border almost
on the miraculous.
Two decades of unconfirmed sightings
Unconfirmed sightings of Martin Bormann were reported globally
for 20 years, particularly in Europe, Paraguay and elsewhere
in South America. Some rumours claimed that Martin Bormann
had plastic surgery while on the run. At a 1967 press conference,
Simon Wiesenthal asserted there was strong evidence that Martin
Bormann was alive and well in South America. Writer Ladislas
Farago's widely-known 1974 book Aftermath Martin Bormann and
the Fourth Reich argued that Martin Bormann had survived the
war and lived in Argentina. Farago's evidence, which drew
heavily on official governmental documents, was compelling
enough to persuade Dr. Robert M. W. Kempner (a lawyer at the
Nuremberg Trials) to briefly re-open an active investigation
in 1972. However, Farago's claims were generally rejected
by historians and critics. Allegations that Martin Bormann
and his organisation survived the war figure prominently in
the work of David Emory. More recently, researchers Simon
Dunstan and Gerrard Williams have also stated in their recent
work that Martin Bormann escaped to South America and spent
the years prior to 1945 preparing the escape plan.
Allegations of being a Russian spy
Reinhard Gehlen states in his memoirs his conviction that
Martin Bormann was a Russian agent and that at the time of
his 'disappearance' in Berlin he in reality went over to his
Russian masters and was spirited away by them to Moscow. He
bases his conclusion on a conversation he had with Admiral
Wilhelm
Canaris and on his conviction that there was an enemy
agent at work inside the German supreme command. He deduced
the latter from the fact that the Russians appeared to be
able to obtain rapid and detailed information on incidents
and top-level decision-making on the German side. Of course,
at the time he was writing up his memoirs (late 1960s to early
1970s), Gehlen was not aware of the British breaking of the
Enigma codes. Gehlen goes on to say that he discovered that
Martin Bormann was engaged in a Funkspiel with Moscow with
Adolf Hitler's
express approval. He claims that in the 1950s, when he headed
first the Gehlen Organization and later the Bundesnachrichtendienst
(BND), the West German Intelligence Service, he was passed
two separate reports from behind the Iron Curtain to the effect
that Martin Bormann had been a Soviet agent and had lived
after the war in the Soviet Union under perfect cover as an
adviser to the Moscow government. He has died in the meantime.
(quotes from the 1971 ed.) After the collapse of the Soviet
Union, based on KGB archival material from this period, it
was claimed that the Russians may indeed have had a spy in
the bunker, code named Sasha. However, Sasha was said to have
been a Russian, not Martin Bormann.
Discovery of remains and controversy surrounding identification
The hunt for Martin Bormann lasted 26 years without success.
International investigators and journalists searched for Martin
Bormann from Paraguay to Moscow and from Norway to Egypt.
Digs for his body in Paraguay in March 1964 and Berlin in
July 1964 were unsuccessful. The German government offered
a 100,000-Mark reward in November 1964, but no one claimed
it. The final straw came in July 1965, when the search of
Albert Krumnow's Berlin location turned up nothing. The
German government determined that Berlin was simply too full
of cemeteries and mass graves dating from the last days of
the war.
On the political end, the hunt for Martin Bormann became a
recurring memory of the National Socialist Regime and also an embarrassment
that would not go away. On 13 December 1971, the West German
government officially called an end to the search for Martin
Bormann. This pronouncement was met with protest from Jewish
human rights groups and Nazi-hunters like Simon Wiesenthal
who insisted the search must continue until Martin Bormann
was found, alive or dead.
Almost a year later, on 7 December 1972, Axmann and Krumnow's
accounts were bolstered when construction workers uncovered
human remains near the Lehrter Bahnhof in West Berlin just
12 m from the spot where Krumnow claimed he had buried them.
Dental records reconstructed from memory in 1945 by Dr. Hugo
Blaschke identified the skeleton as Martin Bormann's, and
damage to the collarbone was consistent with injuries Martin
Bormann's sons reported he had sustained in a riding accident
in 1939. The second skeleton was deemed to be Stumpfegger‘s,
since it was of similar height to his last known proportions.
Fragments of glass in the jawbones of both skeletons suggested
that Martin Bormann and Stumpfegger committed suicide by biting
cyanide capsules to avoid capture. Soon after, in a press
conference held by the West German government, Martin Bormann
was declared dead, a statement condemned by Britain's Daily
Express as a whitewash perpetrated by the Brandt government.
West German diplomatic officials were given official instruction
that if anyone is arrested on suspicion that he is Martin
Bormann we will be dealing with an innocent man.
The remains were conclusively identified as Martin Bormann's
in 1998 when German authorities ordered a genetic test on
the skull. The test identified the skull as that of Martin
Bormann, using DNA from one of his relatives. Martin Bormann's
remains were cremated and the ashes scattered in the Baltic
Sea by Martin Bormann's son Martin Adolf Bormann, a Roman
Catholic and retired priest.
Despite these DNA tests, there had and continues to be controversy
regarding the authenticity of the remains. For example, Hugh
Thomas' 1995 book Doppelgängers claimed there were forensic
inconsistencies suggesting Martin Bormann died later than
1945. When exhumed, Martin Bormann's skeleton was covered
in flecks of red clay, whereas Berlin is a city based on yellow
sand. This indicated to some that the body had been re-interred
from somewhere with a clay-based soil, such as Paraguay, the
Andes Mountains or even Russia (as the Gehlen theory surmised).
Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal refused to accept the government's
declaration of Martin Bormann‘s death, persisting in
the belief that Martin Bormann escaped Berlin with Axmann
and headed south to the safety of the Alps. There he was rumoured
to have been seen in both Bavaria and Austria. Martin Bormann's
aide Wilhelm Zander was captured in Passau, along the Austrian
frontier, in December 1945. From the Alps, Wiesenthal believed,
Martin Bormann and others escaped to South America.
Others, like English scholar and intelligence officer Hugh
Trevor-Roper, decried the evidence upon which the German government
based its searches for Martin Bormann the testimony of one
man. He and others argued that the testimony of Artur Axmann,
the only man who said he saw Martin Bormann dead was falsified
to protect Martin Bormann who was then on the run. Both men
were unrepentant Nazis and shared the motivation to keep their
cause alive. Axmann, they argued, probably escaped Berlin
with Martin Bormann. Russian author Lev Bezymenski wrote that
Axmann's statements had, the apparent aim of convincing
the world that the Reichsleiter had been killed. Bezymenski
also wrote that Axmann's statements, give rise to a lot
of doubt, especially when one considers that he changed his
explanations at least three times in the postwar years. Some
also believed it implausible that the Soviets would identify
the body of Stumpfegger and ignore Martin Bormann's body,
supposedly at Stumpfegger's side. Further, it was said
that Martin Bormann was reinterred only to later be discovered
by the German government.
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