On October 1, 1946, judges from the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, and France delivered their verdicts in Nuremberg’s Palace of Justice against the leading figures of Nazi Germany. Most of the accused were present in the courtroom, but one seat remained empty. The man who should have been there had vanished during the final battle for Berlin, and no one knew for certain whether he was dead or alive. The court tried him in absentia and sentenced him to death for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Yet the absent defendant was not a famous general. Most Germans would not have recognized his face. He rarely spoke in public and never commanded troops, but for years he had stood close to Adolf Hitler and controlled most of the information that reached him. From that position, he helped push forward some of the regime’s most extreme policies, including the persecution and deportation of Jews, the brutal treatment of Soviet prisoners of war, and the exploitation of foreign workers in German factories and farms.
After the war, reports placed him in various parts of Europe and South America, and a search that would last for decades began. His name was Martin Bormann. Martin Ludwig Bormann was born on June 17, 1900, in the small town of Wegeleben, then part of the German Empire. He grew up in a modest Lutheran family.
His father, Theodor Bormann, worked as a postal clerk but died in 1903, when Martin was only three. His mother, Antonie, remarried soon afterward, and the family later lived in Eisenach and Weimar, both in central Germany, where Bormann continued his education. In June 1918, while still a student, he joined the German army during the final months of the First World War. He was assigned as a gunner in a field artillery regiment but was never sent into combat, remaining in garrison in Germany until he was discharged in early 1919.
After the war, Bormann began agricultural training in Mecklenburg, a rural region along Germany’s Baltic coast, and later worked on a farm near the town of Parchim in northern Germany. The Germany in which he began his postwar life was deeply divided and burdened by political violence. He soon became involved in an extreme nationalist movement, and while working on farms in Mecklenburg, he became a section leader and treasurer of the Rossbach Free Corps, one of the paramilitary groups that emerged in Germany after the First World War. Through this circle, Bormann became involved in the killing of Walther Kadow, a schoolteacher who had briefly worked with the group on a farm near Parchim.
Bormann and his comrades considered Kadow a traitor. Without evidence, they accused him of informing the French occupation authorities in the Ruhr, Germany’s main industrial region, about the activities of the nationalist Albert Leo Schlageter. The French had arrested Schlageter for sabotage against their occupation and executed him on May 26, 1923, making him an immediate martyr for Germany’s nationalist right. Five days later, on May 31, members of the Rossbach group took Kadow to a forest near Parchim, where he was severely beaten and then killed.
Among those directly involved was Rudolf Höss, who later became the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp in German-occupied Poland. Bormann’s exact role that night remains unclear. Some later accounts indicate he was among the group that took Kadow into the forest and describe him as taking part in the attack, while Bormann himself claimed at his trial that he only learned of the killing the following morning. What the court established was that he helped set the violence against Kadow in motion and later aided those responsible.
No direct order from Bormann to kill Kadow was proven. In March 1924, he was sentenced to one year in prison for aiding in the commission of serious bodily harm and for assisting the perpetrators after the crime. After his release from prison in February 1925, Bormann returned to the extreme right-wing political scene and gradually became involved in the Nazi movement, officially joining the Nazi Party in 1927. He was neither a gifted speaker nor a fierce fighter; his strengths lay in organization, finance, and administration.
He worked in the regional leadership in Thuringia in central Germany before moving to the party headquarters in Munich, the capital of Bavaria. From 1928, he worked in the insurance office of the SA, the Nazi paramilitary organization, and in 1930 he established a support fund for the Nazi Party, a relief scheme that compensated members injured in political violence. Every member contributed to this fund, giving Bormann control over growing sums of money and detailed knowledge of party affairs. Bormann’s marriage strengthened his position within the Nazi movement.
On September 2, 1929, he married Gerda Buch, the 19-year-old daughter of Walter Buch, the head of the Nazi Party’s internal court. Adolf Hitler and Rudolf Hess attended as witnesses. The couple had ten children, some named after other Nazi politicians, including Hitler himself. The marriage remained close despite Bormann’s affairs with other women.
Gerda Bormann shared his commitment to Nazi racial ideas and even supported polygamy for some German men. She applied that idea to her own marriage, accepting Bormann’s multiple relationships and suggesting that his partners bear children who would be raised together as part of one extended family. After the Nazis came to power in 1933, Bormann’s position within the party began to grow rapidly. In July, he became chief of staff to Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy in the Nazi Party.
Three months later, he was promoted to Reichsleiter, a rank given to a small group of senior party leaders who stood directly below Hitler in the Nazi hierarchy. Yet his real advantage lay in his management of the dictator’s money and personal affairs. Bormann helped establish and run the Adolf Hitler Fund for German Trade and Industry, financed through apparent donations from German companies, and managed Hitler’s private finances, including royalties from Mein Kampf and payments for the use of his image on postage stamps. Later, Bormann oversaw the expansion of the Berghof, Hitler’s mountain residence above Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps, and the wider Obersalzberg complex around it.
This gave Bormann regular access to Hitler and gradually made him one of the Nazi leaders through whom others had to pass to reach the dictator. The Second World War began on September 1, 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Less than two years later, on May 10, 1941, Rudolf Hess flew alone to Scotland in an unauthorized attempt to negotiate peace with Britain and was arrested. Hess’s departure opened an opportunity for Bormann.
Two days later, he took over Hess’s former office, which was reorganized as the Party Chancellery, the central administrative apparatus of the Nazi Party. Bormann used his growing influence to push forward some of the regime’s most extreme anti-Jewish policies. On May 31, 1941, he signed a decree extending the racist Nuremberg Laws to territories in occupied Poland that Nazi Germany had annexed directly into the Reich. As the persecution of Jews developed into systematic genocide, his role became more direct.
In October 1942, Bormann issued an order stating that Jews could no longer be definitively removed from German territory through emigration but would instead require the use of excessive force in special camps in the East, meaning the extermination camps. The following year, he signed a decree removing Jews from the protection of ordinary courts and placing them under the control of the Gestapo, the state secret police. Bormann’s influence extended beyond anti-Jewish policy. Through the Party Chancellery, he was involved in the treatment of the millions of foreign workers and prisoners of war used by Nazi Germany.
Party officials under his authority helped oversee the workers sent to German factories and farms, while Bormann circulated instructions regulating the brutal treatment of captured Soviet soldiers. He was also hostile to the Christian churches. Although raised Lutheran, Bormann had left the church and came to view Christianity and Nazi ideology as fundamentally opposed. He worked to reduce the role of clergy in schools and public life, although Hitler sometimes preferred to delay an open confrontation with the churches while Germany was still at war.
On April 12, 1943, Martin Bormann was officially appointed Secretary to the Führer, formalizing his close relationship with Hitler. By that time, however, his influence no longer depended on titles but on access. Hitler disliked paperwork, kept irregular hours, and often issued his decisions orally. Bormann recorded his instructions, circulated them through the Nazi bureaucracy, and controlled most of the information that reached him.
Ministers, generals, and senior party officials increasingly had to deal with Bormann if they wanted Hitler’s attention, earning him the nickname “the Brown Eminence,” because much of his power was exercised behind the scenes. The name was a play on “the Grey Eminence,” with brown referring to the color widely associated with the Nazi movement. Bormann used his privileged position not only to increase his personal influence but also to undermine rivals within the Nazi leadership. Even powerful figures such as Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, had to deal carefully with Bormann’s influence, as Bormann was constantly at Hitler’s side recording instructions and determining how they would be implemented.
As the war turned increasingly against Germany, Bormann’s influence on the home front continued to grow. The failed attempt to assassinate Hitler on July 20, 1944, accelerated this process, as the Nazi Party was given greater control over civilian mobilization and the final defense of the Reich. In the autumn, Bormann became the political and organizational leader of the Volkssturm, a desperate militia formed mostly of elderly men and teenage boys because of the shortage of trained soldiers in Germany. By early 1945, fighting had reached German territory itself.
On January 16, Bormann moved with Hitler into the Führerbunker, a concrete shelter beneath the garden of the Reich Chancellery, and remained there as Soviet Red Army forces advanced toward the capital. On April 29, 1945, Bormann witnessed Hitler’s marriage to Eva Braun and signed his last will and testament, confirming Bormann’s place among the regime’s remaining leaders. Adolf Hitler committed suicide the following day. Late on May 1, the survivors of the bunker began their attempt to escape through the ruins of central Berlin.
Bormann left with Ludwig Stumpfegger, one of Hitler’s doctors. Witnesses later saw the two men near the Weidendammer Bridge, where Friedrichstrasse crosses the River Spree in central Berlin. Artur Axmann, the leader of the Hitler Youth, claimed that he later found both men dead near Lehrter station, but without the bodies, his account could not be confirmed. The Second World War in Europe ended on May 8, 1945.
Because Bormann’s fate remained unknown, he was tried in absentia before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, the court established by the victorious Allied powers after the war to try the leading figures of Nazi Germany. Bormann was convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity and sentenced to death. The mystery surrounding his disappearance fueled rumors for decades, with claims that he had been seen in Argentina, Spain, and elsewhere, and some even suggesting he had worked for the Soviet Union. The puzzle was largely solved in December 1972, when construction workers near the old Lehrter station in West Berlin found two skeletons close to the spot where Bormann had last been seen.
Dental examinations confirmed the identity of one of them, and the following year the West German authorities officially declared him dead. Still, rumors of his escape persisted until a DNA examination finally confirmed his identity in 1998. The evidence showed that Bormann had never escaped from Berlin but had died during the final days of Nazi Germany at the age of 44.
His remains were later cremated and his ashes scattered in the Baltic Sea, so that his grave could not become a shrine for neo-Nazis.