Martin Bormann

• 1. Ashes Over the Baltic

  ›

  On the 16th of August 1999, the ashes of Martin Bormann were scattered over the Baltic Sea. German authorities chose open water partly so that neo-Nazis would have no tomb to turn into a monument. More than half a century after the war, the man in that urn still carried enough menace to need careful disposal.

  Bormann had been Adolf Hitler's private secretary. Colleagues in the Nazi leadership reached for him when they wanted something done, and feared him when they did not. He ran an enormous bureaucracy from a position that looked, on paper, like clerical work.

  This documentary follows three questions. How did a man with no gift for the platform come to stand beside Hitler at every turn? What did he do with that closeness once he had it? And how could a convicted man's body stay lost for decades?

  32616

• 2. Estates and Murder

  ›

  Martin Ludwig Bormann was born on the 17th of June 1900 in Wegeleben, in the Kingdom of Prussia. His father, Theodor, worked for the post office and died in 1903, when the boy was three. His mother, Antonie, soon remarried. Martin had two half-siblings from his father's first marriage, and a younger brother, Albert, born in 1902, who also survived to adulthood.

  In June 1918, Bormann broke off his studies at an agricultural trade high school and joined the 55th Field Artillery Regiment as a gunner. He never saw combat. He served garrison duty until February 1919. After a short spell in a cattle feed mill, he became manager of a large farm estate in Mecklenburg.

  Hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic had made money worthless, so stored crops became the real wealth of the countryside. Many estates, Bormann's among them, hosted Freikorps units to guard the harvest from looters. In 1922 he joined the Freikorps organisation headed by Gerhard Roßbach, acting as section leader and treasurer. Shortly after starting at the estate he had also joined an antisemitic landowners association.

  On the 26th of May 1923, a Freikorps member named Albert Leo Schlageter was executed after his arrest. Schlageter had been carrying out sabotage against French industry in the Ruhr. His comrades believed that a school teacher named Walther Kadow had tipped off the French occupation authorities.

  On the night of the 31st of May, Rudolf Höss, Bormann and several others led Kadow to a meadow outside town. Kadow was beaten and his throat was cut. Höss would later become commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp.

  After one of the perpetrators confessed, police dug up the body and laid charges in July. On the 17th of March 1924, Bormann was sentenced to a year in Elisabethstrasse Prison as an accomplice. He was released in February 1925 and joined the Frontbann, a short-lived Nazi paramilitary body created to stand in for the banned SA. In May 1926 he moved in with his mother in Oberweimar, one year before he joined the Nazi Party.

  22183523

• 3. The Relief Fund

  ›

  In 1927, Bormann joined the Nazi Party with membership number 60,508. He took a job at Der Nationalsozialist, a weekly paper edited by Hans Severus Ziegler, who was deputy Gauleiter for Thuringia. Bormann was made regional press officer, but his weakness at public speaking made him a poor fit. His organisational talent served him better, and he became business manager for the Gau.

  In October 1928, Bormann moved to Munich and took a post in the SA insurance office. Party members were often injured or killed in street fights with rival parties. Commercial insurers were unwilling to pay claims for that kind of violence.

  So in 1930, Bormann set up the Hilfskasse der NSDAP, a relief fund run directly by the party. Each member paid premiums, and members hurt on party business could receive compensation. Every payment was made at Bormann's sole discretion.

  The fund built him a reputation as a financial expert, and members who received money felt personally in his debt. It also became a last-resort source of cash for a party that was chronically short of it. After the Nazis won 107 seats in the 1930 general election, membership grew dramatically.

  From 1928 to 1930, Bormann also worked on the SA staff. There he founded the National Socialist Automobile Corps, precursor of the National Socialist Motor Corps. It coordinated cars and trucks donated by party members, and later expanded into training members in automotive skills.

  Bormann's SS number came later. He joined on the 1st of January 1937 as number 278,267, but in 1938 Heinrich Himmler gave him the special number 555 in recognition of his status as an Old Fighter.

  22182636

• 4. The Gatekeeper

  ›

  On the 1st of July 1933, Bormann became chief of staff to Rudolf Hess, the Deputy Führer. Hess's office settled disputes inside the party and acted as a go-between for party and state on policy and legislation. Bormann used the post to build a sprawling bureaucracy and to insert himself into as many decisions as possible.

  On the 10th of October 1933, Hitler named him Reichsleiter, the second highest political rank in the party. That November he was elected a Reichstag deputy for constituency 5, Frankfurt an der Oder, and he was reelected in 1936 and 1938. By June 1934 he was part of Hitler's inner circle, travelling everywhere with him and supplying briefings and summaries of events and requests.

  In 1935, Bormann took charge of renovations at the Berghof, Hitler's property at Obersalzberg. Hitler had rented it since 1925 and bought it in the early 1930s. Bormann commissioned barracks for SS guards, roads, garages, a guesthouse and staff housing.

  He bought neighbouring farms in his own name until the complex covered 10 square kilometres. Hermann Göring, Albert Speer and Bormann himself built houses inside the perimeter. For Hitler's fiftieth birthday on the 20th of April 1939, Bormann commissioned the Kehlsteinhaus, or Eagle's Nest, a tea house high above the Berghof. Hitler rarely used it, but Bormann enjoyed taking guests there to impress them.

  Hitler also handed Bormann control of his personal finances. That income included his salaries as chancellor and president, royalties from Mein Kampf, and money from the use of his image on postage stamps. Bormann created the Adolf Hitler Fund of German Trade and Industry to collect donations from industrialists. Some of the money went to party leaders, but Bormann kept most of it for Hitler's personal use.

  Bormann, Henry Picker and Heinrich Heim recorded Hitler's dinner conversation and his monologues late into the night. The material was published after the war as Hitler's Table Talk. Historian Mikael Nilsson argues that the three distorted the record so it would help Bormann win arguments within the leadership. Picker said Bormann made him insert fictitious statements to fit Bormann's own fight against the churches.

  Hitler rarely issued written orders, and often passed instructions along verbally, sometimes through Bormann. He also played his top lieutenants against one another on purpose. Anyone who fell out with Bormann lost access to Hitler.

  Bormann proved a master of this infighting. He curtailed the power of Joseph Goebbels, Göring, Himmler, Alfred Rosenberg, Robert Ley, Hans Frank and Speer, and many of them became his enemies. Associates began calling him the Brown Eminence, but never to his face.

  Hess flew alone to Britain on the 10th of May 1941, hoping to open peace negotiations because he feared a war on two fronts. He was arrested on arrival and later received a life sentence at Nuremberg. Speer recalled that Hitler took the flight as a personal betrayal and one of the worst blows of his life.

  On the 12th of May 1941, Hitler abolished the post of Deputy Führer and gave Hess's duties to Bormann as head of the Parteikanzlei, the Party Chancellery. From there Bormann handled all party appointments and answered only to Hitler. He also held final approval over civil service appointments, which cut across the territory of Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick.

  By a decree of the 29th of May, Bormann took Hess's seat on the six-member Council of Ministers for Defense of the Reich, which worked as a war cabinet. He was also given cabinet rank equivalent to a Reichsminister without portfolio.

  In early 1943, a labour crisis pushed Hitler to form the Committee of Three to centralise control of the war economy. Its members were Hans Lammers of the Reich Chancellery, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel of the armed forces high command, and Bormann for the party. It met eleven times between January and August 1943.

  The cabinet ministers, who were shut out of the committee, saw it as a threat. Goebbels, Göring and Speer worked together to bring it down, and it faded into irrelevance. Nothing changed.

  On the 12th of April 1943, Hitler formally appointed Bormann Personal Secretary to the Führer. Speer described him as holding de facto control of all domestic matters. Even so, historian Jonathan Petropoulos notes that every Führer decree still passed through Lammers at the Reich Chancellery.

  2218263227

• 5. The Bormann Household

  ›

  On the 2nd of September 1929, Bormann married Gerda Buch, who was 19. Her father, Major Walter Buch, chaired the party committee that settled internal disputes. Hitler was a frequent visitor to the Buch house, and Bormann met him there. Hitler and Rudolf Hess served as witnesses at the wedding.

  Bormann also kept a series of mistresses, among them the actress Manja Behrens. With Gerda he had ten children.

  The eldest, born on the 14th of April 1930, was named Adolf Martin after his godfather, Hitler. The family called him Krönzi, short for Kronprinz, meaning crown prince.

  Ilse Bormann, born on the 9th of July 1931, was named after her godmother, Ilse Hess. Her twin sister, Ehrengard, died shortly after birth. After Rudolf Hess flew to Britain in 1941, Ilse's name was changed to Eike.

  A son, Rudolf Gerhard, born on the 31st of August 1934, had Hess as his godfather. His name was changed to Helmut after the flight. Heinrich Hugo, born on the 13th of June 1936, was named after his godfather, Himmler.

  On the 25th of April 1945, Gerda and the children fled Obersalzberg for Italy after an Allied air attack. Gerda died of cancer in Merano on the 23rd of March 1946. Volker, born in 1943, died that same year. The other children survived the war and were placed in foster homes.

  The eldest son, Martin, was ordained a Roman Catholic priest and worked as a missionary in Africa. He later left the priesthood and married.

  22182336

• 6. Church and East

  ›

  Article 24 of the National Socialist Program of 1920 endorsed positive Christianity, and a Reichskonkordat treaty signed with the Vatican in 1933 purported to guarantee religious freedom for Catholics. Many Nazis nonetheless considered Christianity incompatible with their movement. Bormann, a strong opponent of Christianity, agreed.

  Historian Alan Bullock observes that Hitler meant to put off eliminating the churches until after the war. His repeated hostile remarks, however, told his subordinates that the Kirchenkampf, or church struggle, would be tolerated and even encouraged. Historian Richard Overy describes Bormann as an atheist.

  Speer recalled in his memoirs that while he drafted plans for Germania, the intended rebuilding of Berlin, Bormann told him the churches were to receive no building sites. Meanwhile the Gestapo confiscated hundreds of monasteries in Germany and Austria and expelled their occupants.

  In 1941, Clemens August Graf von Galen, the Catholic Bishop of Münster, protested publicly against these seizures and against Action T4, the Nazi programme of killing the mentally ill, physically deformed and incurably sick. His sermons called the programme illegal and immoral and drew international attention. They sparked a wide protest movement among church leaders, the strongest challenge to any Nazi policy up to that point.

  Bormann and others demanded that Galen be hanged. Hitler and Goebbels judged that his death would make him a martyr and cause more unrest. Hitler chose to settle the matter after the war.

  Historian George Mosse summarised Bormann's beliefs this way: "God is present, but as a world-force which presides over the laws of life which the Nazis alone have understood." Mosse added that Gauleiters were advised to weaken the churches by "keeping them divided, encouraging particularism among them".

  On the 31st of May 1941, Bormann signed the decree extending the 1935 Nuremberg Laws to the annexed territories of the East. On the 9th of October 1942, he signed another declaring that the permanent Final Solution in Greater Germany could no longer be pursued through emigration, only through "ruthless force in the special camps of the East". That meant extermination in Nazi death camps.

  A further decree he signed on the 1st of July 1943 gave Adolf Eichmann absolute powers over Jews, who now fell under the exclusive jurisdiction of the Gestapo. Historian Richard J. Evans estimates that 5.5 to 6 million Jews, two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe, were exterminated during the Holocaust.

  The Edict on Criminal Law Practices against Poles and Jews in the Incorporated Eastern Territories was promulgated on the 4th of December 1941. Bormann, knowing that Hitler regarded Slavs as inferior, had lobbied against applying German criminal law there. The edict instead imposed a separate penal code under martial law, allowing corporal punishment and death sentences for even the most trivial offences.

  Erich Koch, the Reichskommissar for Ukraine, treated Slavic people with brutality, and Bormann backed him. Alfred Rosenberg, head of the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, preferred a more moderate course. After touring collective farms near Vinnytsia, Bormann worried that the healthy, robust population might become a danger to the regime.

  Following a discussion with Hitler, he sent Rosenberg a directive that read in part: "The Slavs are to work for us. In so far as we don't need them, they may die. The fertility of the Slavs is undesirable. As to food, they are to not get more than necessary. We are the masters; we come first."

  On the 18th of October 1944, the Volkssturm was founded, with Bormann and Himmler sharing responsibility. It drafted every remaining able-bodied man aged 16 to 60. Poorly equipped and trained, the men were sent to the eastern front, where nearly 175,000 were killed without any discernible effect on the Soviet advance.

  In early 1945, Bormann edited the Bormann dictations, supposed remarks by Hitler to him. Historians dispute both their authenticity and how heavily Bormann altered Hitler's words.

  728253210

• 7. Bunker to Nuremberg

  ›

  On the 16th of January 1945, Hitler moved his headquarters into the Führerbunker, beneath the Reich Chancellery garden in Berlin. Bormann, his secretary Else Krüger and others went with him and remained until the end of April. The Battle of Berlin began on the 16th of April, and by the 19th the Red Army had started to encircle the city.

  On the 20th of April, his 56th birthday, Hitler made his last trip above ground. In the ruined chancellery garden he awarded Iron Crosses to boy soldiers of the Hitler Youth. On the 23rd of April, Albert Bormann left the bunker on Hitler's orders and flew to the Obersalzberg.

  In the early morning of the 29th of April 1945, Wilhelm Burgdorf, Goebbels, Hans Krebs and Bormann witnessed and signed Hitler's last will. It called Bormann "my most faithful Party comrade" and named him executor of the estate. That night Hitler married Eva Braun in a civil ceremony.

  Hitler and Braun died by suicide on the afternoon of the 30th of April. Braun took cyanide and Hitler shot himself, and their bodies were burned in the chancellery garden. Under Hitler's last wishes, Bormann became Party Minister. Karl Dönitz was named Reichspräsident and Goebbels Chancellor. Goebbels and his wife Magda died by suicide the next day.

  At around 11:00 pm on the 1st of May 1945, Bormann left the bunker with SS doctor Ludwig Stumpfegger, Hitler Youth leader Artur Axmann and Hitler's pilot Hans Baur. He carried a copy of the will. The group went on foot through a subway tunnel to Friedrichstraße station and surfaced there.

  Several of them tried to cross the Spree at the Weidendammer Bridge while crouching behind a Tiger tank. An anti-tank round hit the tank and knocked Bormann and Stumpfegger to the ground. On their third attempt, Bormann, Stumpfegger and several others got across.

  Bormann, Stumpfegger and Axmann followed the railway tracks to Lehrter station, where Axmann chose to go the other way. He met a Red Army patrol and turned back. Near the railway shunting yard he saw two bodies on a bridge, which he later identified as Bormann and Stumpfegger. He had no time to check them, so he could not say how they had died.

  The Soviets apparently never found Bormann's body, and sightings multiplied. Reports placed him in Argentina, Spain and elsewhere. His wife was put under surveillance in case he tried to contact her.

  Jakob Glas, Bormann's long-time chauffeur, insisted he saw Bormann in Munich in July 1946. In October and November 1945, notices about the coming Nuremberg trials were placed in newspapers and broadcast on the radio in case Bormann was alive to hear them.

  The trial opened on the 20th of November 1945. With no proof of his death, the International Military Tribunal tried Bormann in absentia, as article 12 of its charter allowed. He faced three counts: conspiracy to wage a war of aggression, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.

  Lieutenant Thomas F. Lambert Jr. handled the prosecution, and Friedrich Bergold the defence. The prosecution said Bormann helped plan and co-signed virtually all of the regime's antisemitic legislation. Bergold argued, without success, that the court could not convict a man who was already dead. Because Bormann's work had been so shadowy, Bergold could not refute the claims about how deeply he had shaped decisions.

  Bormann was convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity and acquitted of conspiracy to wage a war of aggression. On the 1st of October 1946, he was sentenced to death by hanging. The sentence carried a provision that if he were later found alive, new facts could be weighed to reduce or overturn it.

  345193115

• 8. Finding the Bones

  ›

  In 1963, a retired postal worker named Albert Krumnow told police that around the 8th of May 1945, the Soviets had ordered him and his colleagues to bury two bodies near a railway bridge by Lehrter station. One wore a Wehrmacht uniform and the other only underwear. His colleague Wagenpfohl found an SS doctor's paybook on the second body, naming Ludwig Stumpfegger.

  Wagenpfohl gave the paybook to his boss, postal chief Berndt, who handed it to the Soviets, and they destroyed it. On the 14th of August 1945, Wagenpfohl had written to Stumpfegger's wife that her husband lay buried with several other dead soldiers at Invalidenstrasse 63 in Berlin.

  The search elsewhere went nowhere. In 1964, the West German government offered a reward of 100,000 Deutsche Marks for information leading to Bormann's capture. Sightings were reported in Australia, Denmark, Italy and South America. The CIA and West German authorities also tried and failed to locate him.

  Reinhard Gehlen, an army intelligence officer, claimed in his autobiography that Bormann had been a Soviet spy who escaped to Moscow. Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal believed Bormann was living in South America. Excavations on the 20th and the 21st of July 1965 at the site Axmann and Krumnow described found nothing. In 1971, West Germany declared its hunt over.

  On the 7th of December 1972, construction workers uncovered human remains near Lehrter station in West Berlin, only 12 metres from the spot where Krumnow said he had buried them. Autopsies found fragments of glass in the jaws of both skeletons. That suggested the men had bitten cyanide capsules to avoid capture.

  In 1945, Hugo Blaschke had reconstructed Bormann's dental records from memory, and they identified one skeleton as Bormann's. Damage to the collarbone matched a riding accident that Bormann's sons said he suffered in 1939. Examiners judged that the skeleton's size and the skull's shape were identical to Bormann's.

  The second skeleton was judged to be Stumpfegger's because its height matched his last known proportions. Composite photographs overlaying the skulls on the men's faces fit completely. Facial reconstruction was carried out in early 1973 on both skulls. Soon afterward, the West German government declared Bormann dead.

  Bormann's family was not allowed to cremate the body, in case later forensic examination proved necessary. The family refused burial and refused to take the remains. The bones were placed in a vault at the Public Prosecutor's Office in Karlsruhe, which at that time was shared with the Federal Court of Justice.

  On the 4th of May 1998, German authorities ordered genetic testing on fragments of the skull. Wolfgang Eisenmenger, Professor of Forensic Science at LMU Munich, led the work. DNA from one of Bormann's relatives showed that the skull was his. Only after that result were the remains released to the family.

  166152035