High in the Bavarian Alps, during the 1930s, Adolf Hitler’s mountain retreat at Obersalzberg had become the informal center of power in Nazi Germany. Party leaders, ministers, generals, and foreign visitors passed through its doors. Among the men with permanent access to Hitler was Martin Bormann, an ambitious party official who was steadily becoming one of the most powerful figures in the Third Reich. Nearby, his growing family enjoyed a privileged life at the heart of the Nazi elite.
His children played in the shadow of Hitler’s residence, growing up closer to power than almost any other children in Germany. One boy, known within the family as Krönchen, or Little Crown, seemed destined for a special future as the heir to the Third Reich. As the son of Hitler’s trusted private secretary, he grew up closer to the center of Nazi power than almost any other German child. Yet the path his life would eventually take could not have been further from the world into which he was born.
His name was Martin Adolf Bormann. Martin Adolf Bormann was born on April 14, 1930, in Grünwald, a suburb south of Munich. He was the eldest of ten children born to Martin Bormann, the future head of the Nazi Party Chancellery and Hitler’s private secretary. His mother was Gerda Buch, the daughter of Walter Buch, the long-serving president of the Nazi Party’s internal court.
The family was shaped by ideology as much as by family routine. The elder Martin Bormann was one of the most powerful and feared men in the Third Reich, a man who made himself indispensable to Hitler by controlling access to him and processing nearly every piece of civilian paperwork that crossed the Führer’s desk. His wife fully shared his convictions. Gerda Bormann was a dedicated National Socialist who treated childbearing as a political duty, eventually giving birth to ten children.
In letters she wrote to her husband at the front, she rejected sympathy as a weakness and even suggested that he take a second wife in an effort to raise the birth rate. Nazi children were selectively baptized. Martin Adolf was accepted into the German Evangelical Church with Hitler named as his godfather in a largely ceremonial gesture. But as his parents’ hostility toward organized Christianity deepened, none of the later children were baptized at all.
From his earliest years, Martin Adolf was immersed in the world of the Nazi leadership. During the war years, the family lived partly at Obersalzberg, the fortified mountain retreat near Berchtesgaden, where his father oversaw the construction of an entire complex of villas, roads, and barracks around Hitler’s residence, the Berghof. The Bormann children were frequent visitors. A much-cited incident dates from when Martin Adolf was about eight years old.
When he stood before the Führer, the boy raised his arm and shouted, “Heil Hitler, Führer. ” He received an immediate slap from his father. He had forgotten that in Hitler’s presence, he was supposed to say only “Heil,” not “Heil Hitler. ”
In 1940, at the age of ten, Martin Adolf was sent to the Napola at Feldafing, an elite boarding school founded by the Nazi Party in 1933.
Located on the shores of Lake Starnberg in Bavaria, the school had been created to shape the ideological elite, the future leaders of the party and state. Martin Adolf spent five years there, absorbing Nazi doctrine, undergoing physical training, and being prepared for a role in a world that was visibly collapsing around him. Even as his education continued, he remained, by his own later account, a zealous young Nazi throughout, completely committed to the ideology his parents had instilled in him from childhood. On April 15, 1945, as the school was dissolved, Martin Adolf was part of a group of pupils in Matrei am Osttirol, a market town in what is now East Tyrol, Austria, who were told to make their way to their families.
The Western Allied armies were advancing from the west and the Red Army from the east, and the Reich was only weeks away from complete collapse. A party official in Munich named Hummel advised the fifteen-year-old Martin Adolf to try to reach his mother, who had fled from Urlach with eight of her younger children after an Allied air raid and was then sheltering in the village of Völkenstein in South Tyrol. The journey proved impossible. Transport had ceased to function, roads were clogged with columns of retreating soldiers, and every authority was falling apart.
Martin Adolf found himself stranded in Salzburg, where the regional Nazi leader Gustav Adolf Scheel provided him with forged identity papers. He found shelter with a farmer named Nikolaus Henvatter at a farm called Kralleitenhof halfway up a mountain in the Salzburg Alps. He gave a false name and said nothing about his true identity. In the meantime, Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945, and Berlin fell.
In the chaos of the final escape attempts, the elder Martin Bormann disappeared. Witnesses reported seeing him flee with a small group in the early hours of May 2, 1945, heading through the burning city under Soviet fire. After that, no trace of him was found. His wife, interrogated by Allied intelligence officers after her arrest in Italy, could offer no information about him.
Her health was also deteriorating rapidly. In the autumn of 1945, she was taken to the prison hospital in Merano, a town in South Tyrol, where doctors discovered she had uterine cancer. She died there on March 23, 1946, at the age of thirty-six. Meanwhile, the farmer treated the former heir to Nazi Germany like his own son.
That remained the case even after Bormann revealed his identity to him in October 1946, when he learned that his father had been sentenced to death in absentia. Instead of reporting him, Henvatter turned to the local priest, and the priest of the pilgrimage church in Maria Kirenthal took him into his home. During this period, Martin Adolf confronted for the first time the full scope of the crimes committed by the regime he had been raised to serve. He also witnessed the help and kindness of Catholic believers and church authorities.
Combined, these influences led him to convert to Catholicism. The faith that Martin Adolf Bormann began to embrace represented a complete reversal of everything his upbringing had intended for him. While serving as an altar boy in Maria Kirenthal, he was arrested by American intelligence and taken to Tamsweg, a town in the Austrian state of Salzburg, for questioning over several days. The Americans wanted to know where his father was.
He did not really know. Repeated tests confirmed that he was telling the truth, and he returned to the parish. After his time in Maria Kirenthal, Martin Adolf Bormann came under the educational care and support of the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart. He enrolled in their school and, after completing his secondary education in 1951, entered religious formation.
In the same year he went to Austria and began the prescribed novitiate, followed by philosophical and theological studies in Innsbruck. He kept his birth name throughout, dropping only the name Adolf in daily use. As he later explained, no one can choose their parents. He gradually resumed contact with his brothers and sisters, nearly all of whom had also converted to Catholicism, with the exception of one sister.
On July 26, 1958, Martin Adolf Bormann was ordained a Catholic priest. In 1961, he was assigned to the newly independent Republic of the Congo, formerly the Belgian Congo, a country in turmoil due to the violence of decolonization and Cold War interventions. He worked in pastoral care and education under very difficult conditions. In 1964, Bormann was forced to flee because of the Simba rebellion, which targeted foreigners and missionaries as symbols of external domination.
He returned for an additional year in 1966, but the environment remained unstable and he left the country again. In 1969, he suffered a life-threatening injury in a car accident. During his long recovery, a nun named Cordula cared for him until he regained his health. Their relationship developed beyond what their religious vows allowed.
In the early 1970s, Bormann left the priesthood and Cordula renounced her vows as a nun. They married in 1971 and had no children. He later worked teaching philosophy and theology in the town of Gayen in West Germany until his retirement. While Martin Adolf moved further away from the world of the Third Reich, questions about his father’s fate persisted for decades.
Rumors pointed to his presence in South America, Australia, or Italy. Intelligence agencies, including the CIA and the West German government, searched for him without success. Then, in December 1972, construction workers found human remains near the Lehrter railway station in West Berlin. Glass fragments embedded in the jaw of the skeleton suggested death by cyanide capsule.
Dental reconstruction pointed to Martin Bormann the elder, and the West German government officially declared him dead. But doubts continued, and the identity was not definitively confirmed until 1998 through DNA testing, comparing the remains with a sample from a living relative. On August 16, 1999, at the initiative of the Frankfurt public prosecutor’s office, Martin Bormann’s remains were secretly cremated in Bavaria and his ashes were scattered into the Baltic Sea in Kiel Bay outside German territorial waters. The authorities wanted to ensure that no grave could become a shrine for neo-Nazi remembrance.
Martin Adolf Bormann did not remain silent about his origins or his father’s crimes. From 1987, he participated in the reconciliation group “Children of Perpetrators, Children of Victims,” promoting dialogue between the descendants of Nazi officials and the descendants of those they killed. Bormann later spoke in classrooms across Germany and Austria about his biography, the Nazi past, and the responsibility to confront what his father’s generation had done. In 2011, a shadow fell over his final years when a former student at an Austrian Catholic boarding school accused him of rape, claiming the assault occurred when he was twelve years old and Bormann was working there as a priest and teacher in the early 1960s.
Other former students claimed severe physical violence had been used against them and others during the same period. For some, these allegations suggested that the son had ultimately become morally worse than the father he had spent his life repudiating. Bormann denied any knowledge of the accusations. By that time, he was suffering from advanced dementia and was no longer able to offer a coherent defense.
The Catholic Church compensated the man who made the accusation. Martin Adolf Bormann, the former heir to the Third Reich and Catholic priest, died on March 11, 2013, in Herzeele, a town in western Germany. He was eighty-two years old.