6. Martin Bormann killed himself after an unsuccessful effort to escape Berlin with a copy of Hitler’s will
Martin Bormann (b. 1900) was Chief of the Nazi Party Chancellery, Secretary to the Führer of the German Reich, and later succeeded Hitler as Party Minister of the National Socialist German Worker’s Party after the latter’s suicide on April 30 1945. Enlisting with the 55th Field Artillery Regiment in the last days of the First World War, Bormann never saw action in the conflict. Joining the Freikorps in 1922, Bormann was sentenced to a year in prison in 1924 as an accomplice for murder and upon release entered the Frontbann, a Nazi paramilitary group. Finally becoming a member of the Nazi Party in 1927, and later the SS in 1937, Bormann worked as a regional press officer and subsequently as a business manager for the Sturmabteilung (SA) operating the Party’s insurance fund.
After the Machtergreifung, Bormann became Chief-of-Staff for Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess, serving as Hess’s personal secretary until 1941, as well as being appointed a Reichsleiter (National Leader) of the Nazi Party in 1933. By 1934 Bormann was one of Hitler’s inner circle, including overseeing renovation of the Berghof, and informally acted as the Führer’s secretary, routinely traveling with Hitler. Successful at playing the politics of the Reich, after the defection of Hess in 1941 the position of Deputy Führer was abolished and its duties passed to Bormann, who also acquired the leadership of the Party Chancellery. By 1943, with Hitler focused on military matters, Bormann was appointed Personal Secretary to the Führer with de facto control over domestic matters. A fanatical anti-Semite, among other decrees issued by Bormann he declared only by the use of “ruthless force in the special camps of the East” could the Jewish Problem be solved and granted Adolf Eichmann absolute authority over Jews.
Witness to and named as the executor of Hitler’s will, Bormann attempted to escape the Führerbunker on May 1 1945 carrying a copy of the deceased Führer’s last testament. After succeeding on the third attempt to cross the Spree river, but facing an encircling Red Army, Bormann, along with SS Doctor Ludwig Stumpfegger, swallowed cyanide to avoid capture on a bridge near Lehrter train station. Suspected to have possibly survived, and tried in absentia at Nuremberg, Bormann’s suicide was only confirmed in 1972 when human remains were discovered during excavations at Lehrter station. Fragments of glass, similar to that of a cyanide capsule, were discovered in the jaws of the skulls, and in 1998 genetic testing confirmed the remains to be those of Bormann and Stumpfegger.