Martin Bormann was among the most sinister figures in Hitler’s inner circle, and by 1945 he had become the gatekeeper to the ailing Führer. In the final weeks inside the bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery garden in Berlin, Bormann was in many respects running things, often drafting orders on blank sheets of paper that Hitler had pre-signed. He was a bull-necked spider at the heart of the Nazi web, genuinely feared and roundly disliked, but growing more powerful as Hitler became weaker and more reliant on him. Recently, while filming in Berlin, a historian stumbled upon an interesting survivor of the 1945 battle: Bormann’s headquarters.
Located a stone’s throw from the Reich Chancellery and the Führerbunker, the building remains perfectly intact today. Bormann was an early Nazi Party member and a former World War I artilleryman. After the war, he worked as an estate manager and was later jailed for a year for his part in the murder of a local school teacher. His accomplice in that murder was Rudolf Höss, who later became the infamous commandant of Auschwitz.
Bormann got his start in the NSDAP working for its in-house insurance service until July 1933, a few months after Hitler became Chancellor, when he was appointed Chief of Staff to Rudolf Hess, the Deputy Führer. In this position, Bormann entered Hitler’s inner circle and soon made himself invaluable, providing Hitler with briefings and handling all manner of matters, both state and private. He excelled at flattering Hitler and was responsible for creating Obersalzberg, Hitler’s private retreat above Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps, where the Führer maintained his private house, the Berghof. When Hess flew to Scotland in May 1941, Bormann was promoted to Hess’s former duties, except that of Deputy Führer, which was given to Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring.
Bormann became head of a new organization called the Party Chancellery. This was an extremely powerful position, in effect giving him administrative control over the entire Nazi Party apparatus throughout Germany. It was also indicative of Hitler’s divide-and-rule style of leadership. Bormann’s office was in direct competition with the Reich Chancellery, headed by Dr.
Hans Lammers, and also the Führer’s Chancellery, a private office that handled different matters. However, Bormann’s power would soon eclipse that of Lammers and Philip Bouhler, chief of the Führer’s Chancellery, for the simple reason that he was more personally useful to Hitler. From lavish building projects on Hitler’s behalf to running Hitler’s personal finances, Bormann made himself indispensable. Hitler always went through Bormann when issuing orders to both his ministers and his party officials.
In 1943, Bormann was also appointed Hitler’s official private secretary, confirming a position he had held unofficially since the mid-1930s. Immediately below Bormann were his two powerful deputies. The first was State Secretary Gerhard Klopfer, who took part in the Wannsee Conference and drew up the plan for the implementation of the Final Solution against the Jews. The second was SS-Gruppenführer Helmut Friedrichs.
Bormann’s power officially resided in the government quarter of Berlin at number 54 Wilhelmstrasse. The street was once a fine avenue of beautiful palaces and government buildings dating back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but a combination of Allied bombing, street fighting in the Battle of Berlin, and post-war Soviet and East German demolitions left their mark. Almost all of the pre-war structures are gone, replaced with post-war East German buildings or their modern glass replacements. The largest pre-war structure to survive on Wilhelmstrasse today is Göring’s Air Ministry building, a huge 1930s edifice that survived both the Allied bombs and the street fighting with the Soviets, as well as East German wrecking balls.
It is today the Federal Ministry of Finance. Another large Nazi-era building to survive near the street is Dr. Joseph Goebbels’ old propaganda ministry. The extension he made to the original 18th century building still stands today and currently houses the Federal Ministry of Health and Social Security.
Bormann’s old headquarters was originally built in 1903 and 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, 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 until 1941, when Bormann succeeded and the new office of the Party Chancellery was created for him. Von Ribbentrop moved out to the Foreign Ministry building, also on Wilhelmstrasse, but that building no longer exists.
This building was Bormann’s headquarters throughout World War II, though he tended to be physically absent most of the time as he stayed extremely close to Hitler at his military headquarters or 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. Bormann returned with Hitler to Berlin on the 16th of January 1945 from the Führer’s last military headquarters in the west, the Adlerhorst in western Germany, from where Hitler had managed his Ardennes Offensive against the Americans in the winter of 1944-45.
Hitler moved back to his apartment inside the old Reich Chancellery, while Bormann maintained an apartment at his Wilhelmstrasse headquarters. Hitler began sleeping in the Führerbunker beneath the new Reich Chancellery from February 1945 onwards due to British and US bombing raids on Berlin, but continued to work in his Reich Chancellery offices by day and take his meals above ground. In mid-March 1945, Hitler retired completely into his bunker, only leaving a handful of times before his death on the 30th of April. Bormann maintained a small office inside the lower bunker adjacent to Hitler’s room, keeping his extremely close proximity to the Führer until the very end.
Though he also returned periodically to his own headquarters across the street at 54 Wilhelmstrasse, which had its own bunker in the cellars. He maintained his powerful position via the communications network throughout the rest of the crumbling Reich until the end of Hitler’s life and for a day or so afterwards. Due to the Soviet threat to Berlin, 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, which was largely successful.
Bormann, having failed along with other members of Hitler’s staff to persuade the Führer to also fly south to Obersalzberg, 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 1st or 2nd of May 1945, disappearing into history. His disappearance remains the subject of investigation, including theories about his possible post-war life and death in South America, and a murky West German plot to pretend that he died in Berlin in May 1945. His secretary, Else Krüger, mysteriously ended up living in England post-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 and was arrested in Munich in 1946 by the US Counter Intelligence Corps. A war crimes case was brought against him, but it collapsed due to a lack of evidence, and he later died in West Germany in 1987 at the age of 81. Bormann’s other powerful deputy, Friedrichs, disappeared 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 for Berlin. In some of the holes, Soviet bullets still remain embedded in the bricks. The building was very badly damaged, and the first and second floors were largely destroyed by fire.
The right-side wing was partially destroyed, and part of the building’s roof was gone. Immediately after the war, the Soviet authorities decided to repair the building instead of tearing it down, which was the fate for 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 turned into the Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture, which it remains today.
It is the last of these 19th-century Wilhelmstrasse edifices to survive.