On October 1, 1946, judges from the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, and France delivered their verdicts at the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg, Germany, against the most prominent 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 disappeared during the final battle for Berlin, and no one knew with certainty whether he was dead or had survived. The court tried him in absentia and sentenced him to death for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The missing defendant was not a famous general, and most Germans would not have recognized his face. He rarely spoke in public and never commanded troops, yet for years he remained close to Adolf Hitler and controlled most of the information that reached him. From that position, he helped drive some of the regime's most radical policies, including the persecution and deportation of Jews, the brutal treatment of Soviet prisoners of war, and the exploitation of foreign laborers in German factories and farms. After the war, reports placed him in various parts of Europe and South America, prompting a search that lasted for decades. 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 years old. His mother, Antonie, remarried shortly afterward, and the family later settled in the cities of Eisenach and Weimar 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 World War I. Bormann was assigned as a gunner in a field artillery regiment, but he was never sent into combat and remained in a garrison in Germany until he was discharged in early 1919. He then began agricultural training in Mecklenburg, the rural region along Germany's Baltic coast, and later worked on a farm in Herzberg, near the town of Barchem in northern Germany.
The Germany in which Bormann began his postwar life was deeply divided and burdened by political violence. He soon became involved in the extreme right-wing nationalist movement, and while working on farms in Mecklenburg he became a cell leader and treasurer in the Rossbach Free Corps, one of the paramilitary groups that emerged in Germany after World War I. Through this circle, Bormann became entangled in the killing of Walter Kadow, a teacher who had briefly worked with the group at a farm near Barchem in northern Germany.
Bormann and his comrades considered Kadow a traitor. They accused him, without evidence, of informing the French occupation authorities in the Ruhr, Germany's main industrial region in the west, about the activities of the nationalist Albert Leo Schlageter. The French had arrested Schlageter on charges of sabotage against their occupation and executed him on May 26, 1923, making him an almost immediate martyr of the German nationalist right. Five days later, on May 31, members of the Rossbach group took Kadow to a forest near Barchem, where he was severely beaten and then killed.
Among those directly involved was Rudolf Hess, who later became commander of the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp in German-occupied Poland. Bormann's exact role that night remains unclear. Some later accounts suggest 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 did not learn of the killing until the following morning. What the court established was that he helped inflame the violence against Kadow and later assisted those responsible for it. 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 infliction of grievous bodily harm and for assisting the perpetrators after the crime.
After his release from prison in February 1925, Bormann returned to extreme right-wing political circles and gradually became involved in the Nazi movement, formally joining the Nazi Party in 1927. Bormann was neither a gifted orator nor a fierce fighter; his strengths lay in organization, finance, and administration. He worked in the regional leadership in Thuringia in central Germany and later moved to the headquarters in Munich, the capital of Bavaria. From 1928 he worked in the insurance office of the Sturmabteilung (SA), the Nazi paramilitary organization, and in 1930 he established a relief fund for the Nazi Party, a welfare fund that compensated members injured in political violence. Every member contributed to this fund, giving Bormann control over a growing amount of money and detailed knowledge of the organization's affairs.
Bormann's marriage also strengthened his position within the Nazi movement. On September 2, 1929, Martin Bormann married Gerda Buch, the 19-year-old daughter of Walter Buch, head of the Nazi Party's internal court, with Adolf Hitler and Rudolf Hess as witnesses. The couple had ten children, some named after other Nazi politicians, including Hitler himself. The two remained close despite Martin Bormann's relationships with other women. Gerda Bormann shared his commitment to Nazi racial ideas and even supported polygamy for some German men. She applied the same idea to her own marriage, accepting Bormann's multiple relationships and suggesting that his other partners bear children to be raised together as part of one extended family.
After the Nazis came to power in 1933, Bormann's position within the party grew rapidly. In July, he became chief of staff to Rudolf Hess, Adolf Hitler's deputy in the Nazi Party. Three months later, he was promoted to the rank of Reichsleiter, a title given to a small group of senior party leaders who stood directly below Hitler in the Nazi hierarchy. His real advantage, however, lay in managing the dictator's money and personal affairs. Bormann helped establish and run the Adolf Hitler Fund of German Trade and Industry, financed through nominal donations from German companies, and he managed Hitler's private finances, including the proceeds from his book "Mein Kampf," an autobiography and political manifesto, and payments for the use of his image on postage stamps.
Later, Bormann oversaw the expansion of the Berghof, the Führer's mountain home above Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps, and the wider Obersalzberg complex surrounding it. This gave Bormann regular access to Hitler and gradually made him one of the men through whom Nazi leaders had to pass to reach the dictator.
World War II 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 created 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 some of the regime's most radical anti-Jewish policies. On May 31, 1941, he signed a decree extending the scope of the racist Nuremberg Laws to territories in occupied Poland that Nazi Germany had directly annexed 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 removed from German territory through emigration, but would require the use of extreme 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 was not limited to anti-Jewish policy. Through the Party Chancellery, he was also involved in the treatment of millions of foreign laborers and prisoners of war used by Nazi Germany. Party officials subordinate to him helped oversee workers sent to German factories and farms, while Bormann circulated instructions governing the brutal treatment of captured Soviet soldiers. His hostility also extended to the Christian churches. Although raised Lutheran, Bormann left the church and came to view Christianity and Nazi ideology as fundamentally incompatible. He worked to reduce the role of clergy in schools and public life, though Hitler sometimes preferred to postpone open confrontation with the churches as long as Germany was still at war.
On April 12, 1943, Martin Bormann was formally appointed secretary to the Führer, making his close relationship with Hitler official. By then, however, his influence depended less on titles than on access. Hitler hated paperwork, kept unusual hours, and often issued his decisions orally. Bormann recorded his instructions, circulated them through the Nazi bureaucracy, and controlled most of the information reaching him. Ministers, generals, and senior party officials increasingly had to deal with Bormann if they wanted to attract Hitler's attention, earning him the nickname "the Brown Eminence," because much of his power was exercised behind the scenes. The nickname was a play on the term "the Grey Eminence," with brown referring to the color widely associated with the Nazi movement.
Bormann used his distinctive influence not only to increase his personal power but also to undermine his rivals within the Nazi leadership. Even influential figures such as Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, had to handle Bormann's influence cautiously, since Bormann was constantly at Hitler's side, recording instructions and determining how they would be carried out. As the war increasingly turned 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 older men and teenage boys because Germany lacked trained soldiers.
By early 1945, the 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 final will, which confirmed Bormann's standing among the regime's remaining leaders. Adolf Hitler committed suicide the following day.
Late on May 1, the survivors of the bunker began an attempt to escape through the ruins of central Berlin, and Bormann left accompanied by Ludwig Stumpfegger, one of Hitler's doctors. Witnesses later saw the two men near the Weidendammer Bridge, where Friedrichstrasse crosses the Spree River in central Berlin. Artur Axmann, leader of the Hitler Youth, claimed he later found the two men dead near the Lehrter railway station, but without the bodies being found, his account could not be confirmed.
World War II 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 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 alleged he had worked for the Soviet Union.
The puzzle was largely resolved in December 1972, when construction workers near the former Lehrter station in West Berlin found two skeletons close to the place where Bormann was last seen. Dental examinations confirmed the identity of one of them, and the following year West German authorities officially declared him dead. Rumors of his escape nevertheless persisted until DNA testing finally confirmed his identity in 1998. The evidence showed that Bormann never escaped Berlin, but died during the final days of Nazi Germany at the age of 44. His body was later cremated and his ashes scattered in the Baltic Sea, so that his grave would not become a memorial for neo-Nazis.