The son of Adolf Hitler’s private secretary was ordained as a Catholic priest in 1958, 28 years after Hitler stood as his godfather at his baptism. Born on April 14th, 1930, the boy was named Adolf Martin Bormann in honor of the Führer. His family called him Kruncy, short for Kronprinz, or Crown Prince. By the time of his ordination, he had hidden his birth name for years.
His father, Martin Bormann, had personally developed the Obersalzberg complex in the Bavarian Alps around Hitler’s Berghof. Hitler lived a short walk from the Bormann house. As godfather, he attended the child’s baptism in 1930, gave him his first name, and watched him grow up across school holidays. By the age of 10, Kruncy believed completely in everything his godfather stood for.
In 1940, at 10 years old, he entered the Nazi Party Academy at Matrei am Brenner, an institution designed to train a future ruling class. His mother, Gerda Buch, had married Martin Bormann on September 2nd, 1929, when she was 19. Hitler was a witness at the wedding. Over 14 years, she gave birth to 10 children, nine of whom survived infancy.
In 1939, she received the Cross of Honor of the German Mother in Gold, awarded to mothers of eight or more children. Each child carried an ideological signature. A son born in 1936 was named Heinrich Hugo after Heinrich Himmler. A daughter christened Ilsa after Ilsa Hess was hastily renamed Eika when Rudolf Hess flew to Britain in May 1941.
Another son, Adolf, born in 1934, became Helmut at the same time. Gerda Bormann was a committed anti-Semite and admirer of Julius Streicher, publisher of Der Stürmer. Letters published after the war revealed her advocacy of a state-sanctioned multiple marriage system, under which approved men would father children with several women at once. In April 1945, Kruncy was 15 years old and still at the academy in Tyrol, waiting for orders that were no longer coming.
His father was in the Berlin bunker. His mother and eight siblings were at the Obersalzberg. On April 25th, 1945, United States Army Air Forces bombed the Obersalzberg, destroying much of the complex. Within hours, Gerda packed what she could carry and left the mountain with eight of her children, heading south.
They traveled through Innsbruck and over the Brenner Pass into German-occupied South Tyrol. They settled in Wolkenstein, around 20 kilometers northeast of Bolzano, at a property called Villa Stievia. Gerda adopted the alias Bergmann, and the children were registered at the local school under the same false name. Two streets away, Margarete Himmler was hiding with her daughter under similar pretenses.
Her husband was already dead. Martin Bormann’s last bunker diary entry was a single word: “Ausbruchversuch,” breakout attempt, written on May 2nd, 1945 as the Soviets closed in on the Chancellery. He left that night with a small group and was never seen alive again. By mid-1945, Gerda had been identified and arrested.
American and British intelligence officers questioned her for days about her husband’s whereabouts. She had no useful information to give them. In the autumn of 1945, she became seriously ill. Doctors diagnosed advanced abdominal cancer.
She died on March 23rd, 1946, at age 36. Her body was buried in the Merano military cemetery, sharing a plot with a German soldier. The youngest Bormann child, Volker, born in September 1943, died later that same year. Of the nine children who had survived to the end of the war, eight were left without either parent.
On October 1st, 1946, the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg sentenced Martin Bormann to death in absentia. Kruncy, still 15, had been advised by a party functionary to make his way south to his mother in Wolkenstein. He never reached her. Stranded in Salzburg as the war ended, a senior party official supplied him with false identity papers and arranged shelter with a Catholic farmer named Nikolaus Hoenwarter.
He shed his name and his history. To his neighbors, he was a teenage refugee from somewhere further north. He lived that way for almost two years. In 1947, he read in the Salzburger Nachrichten that his mother had died in an Italian hospital the previous year.
He confessed his true identity to Hoenwarter. The local priest took the boy into his care. He had been baptized Lutheran and converted to Catholicism. American intelligence officers tracked him down and held him for several days of questioning, looking for his father.
Convinced he genuinely knew nothing, they returned him to the parish. He joined the religious congregation of the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart and began studies toward the priesthood. The other surviving children followed quieter paths. A Catholic clergyman in the Rhineland took on their care and gradually received most into the Catholic Church their parents had despised.
One sibling, Erika, died in 1958 in her 20s. The rest drifted into careers and marriages under the radar of public attention. Only Kruncy went a different way. On July 26th, 1958, 28 years after his baptism with Hitler as godfather, he was ordained a Catholic priest in Innsbruck.
In 1961, the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart sent him to the newly independent Congo. The country was descending into conflict. He worked in pastoral care and education at Catholic missions across the region. In 1964, as the Simba Rebellion targeted Western missionaries, he was forced to flee.
A return visit in 1966 lasted one year. In 1969, he suffered a near-fatal injury. A nun named Cordula nursed him back to health. Their relationship deepened during his recovery.
Both renounced their vows. They married in 1971. He took a teaching post in theology and held it for two decades, retiring in 1992. In the second half of his life, he began speaking publicly about who he had been and who his father was.
In 1987, he joined Children of Perpetrators, Children of Victims, a reconciliation group founded by Israeli psychologist Dan Bar-On. In 1993, he traveled discreetly to Israel for a symposium where eight other children of Nazi war criminals met with nine children of Holocaust survivors. He visited Yad Vashem. In a 2000 interview, he said that while he could not acquit his father of his political guilt, he still loved him as a father.
He toured German and Austrian schools, walking students through Nazi propaganda texts and explaining how he, as a child, had believed every word. His father had been dead since 1945. Workers digging on a Berlin construction site in December 1972 uncovered two skeletons near the former Chancellery. Dental records identified one as Martin Bormann.
West German authorities formally declared him dead on April 11th, 1973. In 1998, mitochondrial DNA testing confirmed the identification beyond dispute. On August 16th, 1999, Kruncy scattered his father’s ashes in the Baltic Sea. In 2011, a former pupil from an Austrian Catholic boarding school publicly accused him of sexual abuse.
Other former pupils alleged severe physical violence. By then, he had advanced dementia and could not coherently respond. No prosecution followed. Austria’s Klasnic Commission, which investigated abuse within the Catholic Church, awarded the accuser compensation.
Kruncy died in Herdecke on March 11th, 2013, at age 82.