Among the most sinister figures in Hitler’s inner circle, Martin Bormann wielded enormous power precisely because he stayed in the shadows. By 1945, he had become the gatekeeper of the Third Reich, the man everyone had to pass through before they could reach the ailing Führer. In those final weeks inside battered Berlin, in the bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery garden, Bormann was in many respects running the state itself. He drafted orders on blank sheets of paper that Hitler had pre-signed.
He was a bull-necked spider at the heart of the Nazi web, connected to the remnants of the collapsing empire by telephone and teleprinter. Genuinely feared, roundly disliked, he only grew more powerful as Hitler grew weaker and more dependent on the man his enemies called the brown eminence. Recently, while filming in Berlin, I stumbled upon a remarkable survivor of the 1945 battle: Martin Bormann’s headquarters. A stone’s throw from the Reich Chancellery and the Führerbunker, it still stands perfectly intact today.
Bormann had been an early Nazi Party member, a former artilleryman from the First World War who had worked as an estate manager afterward. He was jailed for a year for his part in the murder of a local schoolteacher. His accomplice in that crime was Rudolf Höss, who later became the infamous commandant of Auschwitz. Bormann got his start inside the NSDAP working for the party’s insurance service until July 1933, only a few months after Hitler became Chancellor.
Then he was appointed Chief of Staff to Rudolf Hess, the Deputy Führer. In that position, Bormann entered Hitler’s inner circle and made himself completely invaluable. He supplied the Führer with briefings and handled matters of every kind, both state and private. He excelled at flattery and took charge of creating Obersalzberg, Hitler’s private mountain community above Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps, where the Führer kept his house, the Berghof.
When Hess bolted to Scotland in May 1941, Bormann inherited most of his duties, though the title of Deputy Führer went to Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring. Bormann instead became head of a new organization called the Party Chancellery, an extremely powerful position that gave him administrative control over the entire Nazi Party apparatus across Germany. This arrangement also revealed Hitler’s style of divide and rule. Bormann’s office was deliberately set up in direct competition with the Reich Chancellery, headed by Dr.
Hans Lammers, and also with the Führer’s Chancellery, a private office of Hitler’s that handled different matters from the other two. Overlaps and conflicts between the three Chancelleries were constant. Philip Bouhler led the Führer’s Chancellery. Yet Bormann’s influence soon eclipsed both Lammers and Bouhler for a simple reason: he was more personally useful to Hitler.
He managed lavish building projects on the Führer’s behalf, ran Hitler’s personal finances, and generated new cash for him. Hitler always went through Bormann when issuing orders to ministers and party officials alike. In 1943, Bormann was also officially appointed Hitler’s private secretary, which confirmed a role he had been filling informally since the mid-1930s. Immediately below Bormann stood two powerful deputies.
The first was State Secretary Gerhard Klopfer, who took part in the Wannsee Conference and helped draft the plan for the implementation of the Final Solution against the Jews. The second was SS-Gruppenführer Helmut Friedrichs. They were the men who ran the machinery when Bormann was away. Bormann’s power officially resided in the government quarter of Berlin at number 54 Wilhelmstrasse.
That street had once been a fine avenue of beautiful palaces and government buildings dating back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A combination of Allied bombing, the street fighting of the Battle of Berlin, and postwar Soviet and East German demolitions has left its mark. Almost all of the prewar structures are gone, replaced by hideous postwar East German buildings or modern glass replacements. Oddly enough, the largest prewar structure to survive on Wilhelmstrasse today is Göring’s Air Ministry building, a massive 1930s edifice that somehow survived Allied bombs, the Soviet street fighting, and East German wrecking balls.
It now serves as the Federal Ministry of Finance. Another large Nazi-era building to survive, at Wilhelmplatz 8-9 and Mauerstraße 45-53, is Dr. Joseph Goebbels’s old propaganda ministry. The extension he added to the original eighteenth-century building, which was knocked down after the war, still stands and currently houses the Federal Ministry of Health and Social Security.
Bormann’s headquarters, however, was older than both. Originally built in 1903, it served as the liaison building between the office of the German Emperor and the government, housing the Privy Civil Cabinet as part of the Prussian Ministry of State. From 1922 to 1932, it was the offices of the Prussian Minister President Otto Braun, and then briefly the office of the Prussian Council of State. Once Hitler came to power, the building housed Joachim von Ribbentrop and the NSDAP liaison office under Rudolf Hess.
In 1941, Bormann succeeded there, and the new office of the Party Chancellery was created for him. Von Ribbentrop had moved out to the Foreign Ministry building, also on Wilhelmstrasse, though that structure no longer exists. This building was Bormann’s headquarters throughout World War II, though he was usually absent in person. He stayed extremely close to Hitler at the Führer’s military headquarters or at his private home.
Bormann also maintained an Alpine villa adjacent to Hitler’s house at Obersalzberg. His deputies, however, were often present in Berlin at this building, keeping the machinery running. Bormann returned with Hitler to Berlin on the sixteenth of January 1945, coming from the Führer’s last military headquarters in the west, the Adlerhorst, from which Hitler had directed the Ardennes Offensive against the Americans in the winter of 1944-45. Back in Berlin, Hitler stayed in his apartment inside the old Reich Chancellery, while Bormann kept an apartment at his Wilhelmstrasse headquarters.
Because of British and American bombing raids, Hitler began sleeping in the Führerbunker beneath the new Reich Chancellery from February 1945 onward. By day he still worked in his Reich Chancellery offices and took his meals above ground. Then, in mid-March 1945, Hitler retired completely into his bunker, leaving only a handful of times before his death on the thirtieth of April. Bormann maintained a small office inside the lower bunker adjacent to Hitler’s room, keeping himself in extremely close proximity to the Führer until the very end.
Yet he also returned periodically to his own headquarters across the street at 54 Wilhelmstrasse, which had its own bunker in the cellars. Through the communications network that still linked him to the rest of the crumbling Reich, he held his powerful position until Hitler’s last day and for a day or so afterward. As the Soviet threat to Berlin grew, Bormann organized the evacuation of government ministries south to Bavaria, including members of the Party Chancellery. A relay of planes flew personnel and documents south in an operation code named Seraglio, and it was largely successful.
Along with other members of Hitler’s staff, Bormann failed to persuade the Führer to fly south to Obersalzberg. So he remained in the bunker with only two staff members from his office: his adjutant, SS-Standartenführer Wilhelm Zander, and his secretary, Else Krüger. Bormann took part in the breakout from the bunker on the first or second of May 1945, and then disappeared into history. What became of him remains a strange mystery.
I have investigated his disappearance, his possible postwar life and death in South America, and the murky West German plot to pretend that he died in Berlin in May 1945. I have also investigated Else Krüger, his secretary, who mysteriously ended up living in England after the war, married to the British Intelligence Corps officer who had interrogated her in 1945. As for Bormann’s two trusted deputies, Klopfer likewise fled Berlin. In 1946, he was arrested by the US Counter Intelligence Corps in Munich.
A war crimes case was brought against him, but it collapsed due to a lack of evidence. He later died in West Germany in 1987 at the age of eighty-one. Bormann’s other deputy, Friedrichs, vanished entirely in February 1945 and was never seen again. He was declared legally dead in August 1951.
Bormann’s headquarters was captured by the Soviets in early May 1945. Like so many of the buildings lining Wilhelmstrasse, its elegant facade was riddled with bullet and shrapnel damage from the Battle of Berlin. In some of the holes, Soviet bullets still remain embedded in the bricks. The building was badly damaged.
The first and second floors were largely destroyed by fire. The right-side wing was partially destroyed, and part of the roof was gone. Immediately after the war, however, the Soviet authorities decided to repair the building rather than tear it down, which was the fate of most of the edifices along Wilhelmstrasse. In the 1950s, it was used as student accommodation for Humboldt University until 1970, when the East German government took over control.
Following German unification in 1990, it was converted into the Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture, which it remains today. It is the last of those nineteenth-century Wilhelmstrasse edifices to survive, a silent witness to the dark empire that once operated from within its walls.