5 – Martin Bormann
While the four stories that we have told thus far have been of Nazis who escaped and were chased, the story of Martin Bormann is somewhat different. Bormann’s centrality to the Nazi regime, his closeness to Hitler and his long-standing involvement in the party made him one of the most important figures unaccounted for in the chaos of 1945, while his mysterious fate marked him out as a target for Nazi hunters everywhere. The difference being, of course, that nobody was completely sure if there was anything to be found at all.
Bormann was the model Nazi. He came through the Freikorps, the post-World War I paramilitary organization that fought communists in the streets and proved himself early as a rabid hater of both Jews and Slavs. As the party grew, so did Bormann, taking roles in propaganda, finances and administration. By the time the Nazis took power, he found himself in Berlin at the heart of the government, working as chief of staff to Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s second in command. Later he would become Hitler’s personal secretary, dealing with the personal finances, living arrangements and day-to-day life of the Fuhrer.
Hitler’s preferred method of keeping government hierarchies in check was to play his underlings against each other. As he often gave spoken orders and rarely wrote anything down, in practice the best way to communicate with Hitler himself was via Martin Bormann. This gave him immeasurable power within the regime. When Hess fled to Britain in 1941, Bormann assumed his role. He would put his long-held hatred of Jews and Slavs to full effect, causing the deaths of millions of people.
As befitting someone with such importance to the Nazi regime, Bormann was in Berlin as the walls came crumbling down in 1945. While many of the hierarchy died with Hitler in his bunker, Bormann’s remains were not found and thus he was presumed to have escaped. Reports of his suicide in Berlin existed, but so did countless others that placed in him in Munich, in Spain, in Australia and beyond. The leader of the Hitler Youth claimed to have seen his body, but the Soviets never announced that they had found it, and when the time came to try prominent Nazis at Nuremberg, Bormann was on the list.
He was convicted in his absence and searches continued all over the world until the 1970s. Reinhard Gehlen, founder of the Gehlen Organization of former Nazis-turned US allies, said he was in Moscow and had long been a Soviet spy, while Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal insisted that he was in South America. Eventually, a body was exhumed in the Mitte district of Berlin, very close to what is now the Hauptbahnhof train station, and identified as that of Martin Bormann.
A search that had cost millions, a trial that caused headlines around the world and a mystery that had stumped the greatest of the Nazi hunters had ended up just a mile from where it had started, in the ruined heart of Berlin.