Martin Bormann
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Martin Bormann (June 17, 1900 – May 2?, 1945) was a prominent German National Socialist (Nazi) official who became head of the Party Chancellery (Parteikanzlei) and Private Secretary to Adolf Hitler, gaining his trust and deriving immense power within the Third Reich by controlling access to the Nazi dictator.
Early life
Born in Wegeleben (near Halberstadt) in the German Empire, the son of post office employee Theodor Bormann and his wife Louise Gobler. Bormann dropped out of school to work on a farm in Mecklenburg. After serving briefly with an artillery regiment at the end of World War I, Bormann joined the Freikorps in Mecklenburg. [link]In March 1924 he received a one-year sentence as an accomplice to his friend Rudolf Höss in the murder of Walther Kadow, who may have betrayed Albert Leo Schlageter to the French in the Ruhr. [link]
Rise through the Nazi party
After his release Bormann joined the NSDAP in Thuringia. Despite a coarse and brutal manner, he became the Party's regional press officer and later business manager in 1928. In 1929 Bormann married Gerda Buch, whose father Walter Buch served as a chairman of the Nazi Party Court. Bormann had recently met Hitler, who agreed to serve as a witness to their wedding.In October 1933 Bormann became a Reichsleiter of the NSDAP and in November a member of the Reichstag. From July 1933 until 1941 Bormann served as the personal secretary of Rudolf Hess. Bormann commissioned the building of the Kehlsteinhaus and after 13 months of expensive construction it was formally presented to Hitler in 1939.
The flight of Rudolf Hess to Britain in May 1941 cleared the way for Bormann to become head of the Parteikanzlei (Party Chancellery) that month and he proved to be a master of intricate political infighting. Bormann developed and administered the Adolf Hitler Endowment Fund of German Industry, a huge fund of "voluntary" contributions made by successful business entrepreneurs to the Führer. He re-allocated these funds as gifts to almost all of the party leadership.
Bormann took charge of all Hitler's paperwork, appointments, and personal finances. Hitler came to have complete trust in Bormann and the view of reality he presented. During a meeting the Führer was said to have screamed, "To win this war, I need Bormann!" Many historians have suggested Bormann held so much power that in some respects he became Germany's "secret leader" during the war. A collection of transcripts edited by Bormann during the war appeared in print in 1951 as Hitler's Table Talk 1941–1944 and is mostly a re-telling of Hitler's wartime dinner conversations.
Bormann's bureaucratic power and effective reach had broadened considerably by 1942, and, faced with the imminent demise of the Third Reich, he systematically went about the organizing of German corporate flight capital, setting up off-shore holding companies and business interests, in close coordination with the same Ruhr industrialists and German bankers who facilitated Hitler's explosive rise to power ten years before.[link] (See Ratlines (history))
At the Nuremberg trials, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, the Reich Commissioner for The Netherlands, testified that he had called Bormann to confirm an order to deport the Dutch Jews to Auschwitz and further testified that Bormann passed along the Führer's orders for the extermination of Jews during the Holocaust.
Death, rumors and remains
As World War II came to a close, Bormann held out with Hitler in the Führerbunker in Berlin. Hitler urged Bormann to save himself and after the dictator's suicide on the afternoon of April 30, Bormann left the Führerbunker on May 1 1945 with SS doctor Ludwig Stumpfegger and Hitler Youth leader Artur Axmann as part of a group attempting to break out of the Soviet encirclement. They emerged from an underground subway tunnel and quickly became disoriented among the ruins and ongoing battle. They walked for a time with some German tanks, but all three were temporarily stunned by an exploding anti-tank shell. Leaving the tanks and the rest of their group, they then walked along railroad 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 Bormann and Stumpfegger near the railroad switching yard, with moonlight clearly illuminating their faces (he assumed they had been shot in the back).However, during the chaotic closing days of the war there were contradictory reports as to Bormann's whereabouts (for example, Jakob Glas, Bormann's longtime chauffeur, insisted he saw Bormann in Munich weeks after May 1 1945). The bodies were not found and a global search followed, including extensive efforts in South America. With no proof of Bormann's death the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg tried Bormann in absentia in October 1946 and sentenced him to death. His court-appointed defense attorney used the unusual and unsuccessful defense that the court could not convict Bormann because he was already dead. In 1965 a retired postal worker named Albert Krumnow stated that he had personally buried the bodies of Bormann and Stumpfegger.
Unconfirmed sightings of Bormann were reported globally for two decades, particularly in Europe, Paraguay and elsewhere in South America. Some rumours claimed Bormann had plastic surgery while on the run and that it had spoiled his face. At a 1967 press conference Simon Wiesenthal asserted there was strong evidence Bormann was alive and well in South America. Writer Ladislas Farago's widely known 1974 book Aftermath: Martin Bormann and the Fourth Reich argued 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 reopen an active investigation in 1972 but Farago's claims were generally rejected by historians and critics. Allegations that Bormann and his organization survived the war figure prominently in the work of David Emory.
Axmann and Krumnow's accounts were bolstered in late 1972 when construction workers uncovered human remains near the Lehrter Bahnhof in West Berlin, just 12 meters 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 Bormann's, and damage to the collarbone was consistent with injuries Bormann's sons reported he had sustained in a riding accident in 1939. Fragments of glass in the jawbones of both skeletons indicated that Bormann and Stumpfegger had committed suicide through biting cyanide capsules in order to avoid capture. Soon after, in a press conference held by the West German government, Bormann was declared dead, a statement condemned by London's Daily Express as a whitewash perpetrated by the Brandt government. West German diplomatic functionaries were given the official instruction: "If anyone is arrested on suspicion that he is Bormann we will be dealing with an innocent man."[link] In 1998, a test identified a skull as that of Bormann, using DNA from an unnamed 83-year-old relative. [link]. Some historians and conspiracy theorists reject this conclusion [[Citing sources citation needed]].
Bormann's children
Martin Bormann and his wife Gerda (who died of cancer in 1946) had ten children together, all of whom survived the war. Most were cared for anonymously in foster homes. His oldest son Martin was Hitler's godson. He became a Roman Catholic priest, later leaving the priesthood to marry and become a teacher of theology.References in popular culture
- Bormann's photo is shown in the 1971 film Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory and is identified as a man in South America who is the winner of the last golden ticket, a ticket that is later determined to be forgery.
- In the Philip K. Dick science fiction novel The Man in the High Castle, Bormann is the current leader of Germany.
- In Don Rosa's comic series The Pertwillaby Papers (first published in 1970s), Bormann was, after he disappeared, in charge of hiding the art treasures the Nazis had stolen from around the Europe; he is eventually found, frozen to death, on the North Pole.
- Bormann (as played by actor James Jeter) is shown as the bass player on the Sex Pistols' 1979 British hit "The Biggest Blow (A Punk Prayer)" in both the movie The Great Rock and Roll Swindle and on the single's picture sleeve. The single was recorded in Brazil with Ronnie Biggs on lead vocals, which presumably tied in with many post-war reports of Bormann's whereabouts in South America.
- In 1987, Manchester group The Fall released a single (a cover of R. Dean Taylor's "There's A Ghost in My House") with the song "Haf Found Bormann" as the B-side.
- In the 2005 Rebellion game Sniper Elite, the player is tasked to kill Bormann to prevent him from surrendering himself to Soviet agents.
- Henry Rowland plays Bormann in Russ Meyer's Supervixens (1975) and Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens (1979). He also plays an ex-Nazi butler in Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970), however, here he is not explicitly identified as Bormann.
- Thomas Thieme portrayed Bormann in the 2004 German movie Der Untergang about the last days of Hitler.
- Jack Higgins wrote two novels in which Martin Bormann is featured: The Valhalla Exchange (1976) and The Bormann Testament (2006).
References
- Ladislas Farago, Aftermath: Martin Bormann and the Fourth Reich, Simon and Schuster, 1974
- Pierre de Villemarest, Untouchable—Who protected Bormann & Gestapo Müller after 1945..., Aquilion, 2005, ISBN 1904997023
- Paul Manning, Martin Bormann, Nazi in Exile, Lyle Stuart, Inc., 1981, ISBN 0-8184-0309-8
- Louis Kilzer, Hitler's Traitor: Martin Bormann and the Defeat of the Reich, Presidio Press, 2000, ISBN 0891417109
- William Stevenson, The Bormann Brotherhood, Corgi Books, 1975, ISBN 0552097349
See also
External links
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