Norman spent three years in Argentina, a period he described as a “release” from Germany and his family. His mother “took all his air.” He also spoke openly of his father’s affair with his childhood love and has said that he could understand why he wanted to leave his wife for her.70 After he returned to Munich, Norman lived in his mother’s apartment, with portraits of both of his parents and some of the family furniture. Niklas’s older brother was tormented by the past and admired the courage of his youngest sibling when he wrote about their father and attacked him so virulently with words that were as crude as his gestures. Norman found it more difficult to question his father. He loved him and was never able to detach himself completely from him; as the oldest son, he saw firsthand his father’s rise through the ranks of the Nazi regime, an experience that Niklas believes prevented Norman from making a successful life for himself, both personally and professionally.
Niklas has a daughter but Norman refused to have children for fear of passing on his father’s genes. His one love, Ellens, was married, and Norman paid her husband ten thousand deutschmarks to divorce her. She committed suicide on her fortieth birthday, June 3, 1967. Niklas thinks Norman married an ardent anti-Semite in his second marriage.71
Right up until his death, Norman kept a painted portrait of his father over his bed in the Munich apartment, even though he had long abused alcohol to try to forget him. In Bruder Norman!, the last book in his family trilogy, Niklas discusses his brother’s addiction, which ruined his life. The book opens on Norman’s death, and its subtitle is Norman’s mantra: “My father was a Nazi criminal but I loved him.” Norman, who, in his last years, rarely left the armchair that was placed in front of the window of his apartment, reached out to Niklas at the end of his life, and the book was born of a conversation they had about their lives, or more precisely, their father’s. Their mother’s repugnant morals, their parents’ near divorce, Hitler, Hans Frank’s execution and conversion to Catholicism are all discussed. The two brothers hold radically different views on these subjects, however: Niklas wanted to understand everything that Norman wanted to forget. Norman’s tombstone is inscribed with this epitaph: “Now you are free from the torments of your love for your father” (Jetzt bist du all die Liebesqualen durch deinen Vater los).
Norman, whom Hans Frank nicknamed “Normi,” did not share Niklas’s interpretation of the family’s years in Poland. He was an adolescent at the time and perfectly able to understand the world around him, but he claimed that he was too preoccupied by puberty to notice. To get to the German school in Kraków on his bicycle, he crossed the city but he said he never noticed the SS barracks next to it. He didn’t remember “the Jews, half-naked in the cold, unloading coal from a truck,” but one of his classmates did, in perfect detail.72
His younger brothers and sisters were not often in Kraków, and his sister, Sigrid, had her own life. His only memories of those years were of his distant parents and his solitude, nothing else. “The time of the General Government was strange. Overall, I was happy. I was going through puberty and that was more interesting to me than anything happening around me.”73 After the war, when he read his father’s writings, he felt ashamed. “It was not the father I loved. It’s such a contradiction in him, I can’t understand it. How could he be so cultured and good to me and then say things so stupid and hateful?”74
Unlike Niklas, Norman never wanted to believe his father had played a role in the extermination of millions of Jews, although he remembered seeing trucks rumble through the neighborhood with AUSCHWITZ written in large letters on their sides. It was not until he was seventy-seven that he could face the truth, as related in the last volume of the Frank trilogy. Niklas credits him, however, as the only one of the Frank children who ever confronted their father; one day, he was playing soccer with other German children below the castle, when they heard shots and saw a group of men lined up against the castle walls fall to the ground in a pool of blood. He was fourteen or fifteen at the time and he asked his father why those men, who had been singing the Polish national anthem a moment earlier, had just been executed. “I don’t want to hear another word about this until after the war,”75 his father told him.
The two brothers had different feelings as well about carrying the Frank name; for Norman, it was a handicap, but Niklas felt people treated him with greater respect. They both agreed, however, that it played a determining role in their lives.76
Of the five Frank children, only Norman and Niklas admitted their father was a criminal. The other three lived different, often tragic, lives but refused to accept the truth. The oldest daughter, Sigrid, emigrated with her husband to South Africa in 1966 and was a supporter of the Apartheid regime. Niklas recalled in an interview that Sigrid was also a negationist, telling Niklas during a phone conversation: “If six million Jews had been burned, everybody would have burned [in] just six seconds, which just proves that it’s all lies.”77
The Franks’ second daughter, Brigitte, developed cancer and committed suicide in 1981 at the age of forty-six, the same age as her father when he died. Niklas has said that she was convinced her father was innocent and she could never bear living without him.78 She was the mother of two children, the oldest of whom, then eight years old, was sleeping with her when she swallowed a fatal dose of sleeping pills.79
The third of the Frank boys, Michael, died, obese, at the age of fifty-three. He drank thirteen liters of milk every day.
Niklas is the only surviving Frank child. He continues the tireless search for the truth that he began over fifty years ago. He is his father’s principal biographer, despite the hatred he feels for him. He is outraged by the position adopted by other Nazi children, such as Martin Adolf Bormann, of whom he has said: “Patricide is a taboo as old as the dawn of time, and Bormann’s son has acted no differently. An incredible number of German schools invited him to speak because he told everyone that his father was not only a criminal but a loving father too. It’s a fairly revolting strategy, adopted to diminish his father’s guilt, and eighty million hypocritical Germans were happy to fall in line with him.”80
Niklas lives with his wife in the countryside north of Hamburg. He gives talks in schools several times a year. Asked about the current migrant crisis in Europe, and Germany’s policy toward immigrants in 2015, he calls it a wonderful response but thinks that the overwhelming majority of Germans are silently opposed to it.
MARTIN ADOLF BORMANN JR.
The “Crown Prince”
On April 25, 1971, in a late afternoon rainstorm, the driver of a white Opel lost control of his car and crashed head-on into an American military vehicle. The camouflage green truck was driving without its lights on when the Opel tried to turn onto the same highway. The impact was so strong that the body of the car crumpled like an accordion, completely destroying the front of the vehicle and trapping its driver—now barely alive—inside. A few meters away, a car mechanic saw the truck pass and heard the crash shortly after. He rushes to the scene: is the driver alive or dead? The two American soldiers look on while the mechanic struggles to get to the driver, trapped between crushed metal and the dashboard. Using a crowbar, he manages to pry away the car’s frame, piece by piece. As he gets closer to the driver, he can see his face. He looks familiar. He knows this man. He has certainly seen him before, but where? Is he someone from the mechanic’s past? From that time he prefers to forget and never speak of? That was when he was a driver. Could it be that he drove this man, but when? The driver looks to be about forty years old, in which case he would have been a child all those years ago.
After wrestling with a final piece of twisted metal, he is able to pull the man free and begins resuscitation measures, still trying to place this face from his past. Finally, he can see him, a boy of about eleven, sitting quietly on the back seat of a black sedan. He is with his mother and his two sisters. He is dressed in lederhosen with suspenders, a red checked shirt and woolen knee-socks: the traditional clothing of Upper Bavari
a, where his former boss owned a house. That was when the mechanic was employed as a driver by Heinrich Himmler, the chief of the SS and the German police. But the seriously injured man whom he is holding now in his arms is none other than the son of Martin Bormann, the Führer’s personal secretary. Decades have passed but now the memories all come flooding back. He often drove the child back and forth between Gmund and Obersalzberg, where the Führer had a mountain retreat. Something now makes him look closer at the man: despite the blood that is everywhere, he can see that the man is wearing what looks like a cassock. The Bormann boy, a priest?
A first-response team arrives and the memory fades. The accident victim disappears behind the doors of the ambulance that will take him to the closest hospital. His condition is critical; his injuries are life-threatening. No one can say if he will survive. He slips into a coma. Ten days will pass before he awakes.
The oldest of the ten children of Martin Bormann and his wife, Gerda, Martin Adolf Jr., was born April 14, 1930, in Grünwald. His parents named him after the Führer, and he was Hitler’s first godson. His godmother was Ilse Hess, the wife of the Deputy Führer, Rudolf Hess, whom Martin Bormann served as his chief of staff. Later, following the customs of the Nazis, the Bormann’s would no longer have their children baptized.
Martin Bormann became known as the “Brown Eminence” as he assumed ever greater power and responsibility. He was also relentlessly calculating, earning him the nickname “Machiavelli of the office desk.”1 He was born in 1900 into the petty bourgeoisie of Saxony Anhalt. He first made a name for himself as a convicted accomplice to murder in 1923, before falling under the spell of a certain Adolf Hitler. He was short, stocky, and unattractive but he became so indispensable that, some said, his power surpassed Hitler’s. He began his career in the office of Rudolf Hess, the Nazi Party’s secretary, and gradually moved up the ranks to finally supplant his boss. He controlled all communication with the Führer, who trusted him completely and designated him as the executor of his will shortly before he died. Bormann was convinced that the Reich could win the war, right up until its defeat. Unlike other Nazi officials, he never attempted to negotiate a peace treaty with the Allies, even when the end was near.
His career took a decisive turn when Rudolf Hess left on his mad peace mission to Great Britain on May 10, 1941, following which he was named Hess’s successor as the Head of the Parteikanzlei, or the Chancellery of the National Socialist Party. His rise was unstoppable. In April 1943, he was officially appointed Personal Secretary to the Führer. It was also Bormann who, for Hitler’s fiftieth birthday in 1939, made him a present of the Eagle’s Nest that would become his mountain retreat: a chalet perched on a rocky outcrop at the summit of the Kehlstein, at an altitude of six thousand feet. He became the man in charge at Obersalzberg. Nothing escaped Bormann’s reach, and Hitler praised his abilities. He was feared by all, including other officials, even the likes of Heinrich Himmler, Hermann Göring, and Rudolf Hess. Albert Speer called him the most dangerous man in Hitler’s circle. Bormann held a unique power over him. Beginning in early 1935, Bormann was given control of Hitler’s personal finances, which he managed magisterially. Hitler’s income included royalties collected from Mein Kampf and the use of the Führer’s image on postage stamps and from the sale of plots of land in Obersalzberg.
Speer was not the only one who was wary of Bormann; all of Hitler’s inner circle hated and feared him. Everyone who suffered a fall from grace detected a plot hatched against him by Bormann. His power reached its apogee during the years of the Reich’s decline. His proximity to the Führer allowed him to progressively eclipse even the highest-ranking Nazi officials.
His wife, Gerda Buch, was the daughter of another important figure in the National Socialist Party and a close friend of Hitler’s. Gerda and Martin were married in a Nazi ceremony on September 2, 1929, and began a happy marriage. Martin Bormann wrote lengthy correspondence to his wife during his frequent absences. In the summer of 1936, the family moved from Pullach, near Munich, to Obersalzberg. Martin Adolf was born in 1930. His memories of his early, carefree childhood were few, but one memory stood out: one day when he was playing in the garden, his sister was hit in the head by a swing, and Martin, fearing a tanning, hid himself in the cellar—so well, in fact, that no one found him. However, when night fell and plunged him into darkness, he panicked; he was so traumatized by the experience that his mother considered the fright was punishment enough.2
In addition to a baby sister who died just after birth, Martin Adolf had nine siblings: twins Ilse and Erengard Franziska (1931), Irmgard (1933), Rudolf Gerhard (1934), Heinrich Hugo (1936), Eva Ute (1938), Gerda (1940), Fred Hartmut (1942), and Volker (1943).
Martin Adolf went to the primary school in Berchtesgaden but his parents, who were openly anti-Christian, insisted he be excused from religious education classes. Martin Adolf remembered that during catechism hour, he was sent to another classroom where he did his homework on a bench at the rear of the room. He realized from a very young age that he was different from other children. He was the only one excluded from catechism class and never understood why. When he asked his parents, they would simply reply, “We don’t need it.”
He watched as work on the Führer’s mountain progressed, according to his father’s orders. First, the residents had to be evicted, beginning in the early 1930s. Next, the entire area was cordoned off as a high-security zone and entirely rebuilt to accommodate the Reich’s highest-ranking officials and to host VIPs. Obersalzberg is on the German-Austrian border and faces Hitler’s favorite peak, the Untersberg, in the Berchtesgaden Alps. The Bormann children were raised in isolation in a house in the secure zone. This Nazi redoubt, which was guarded by the SS, was also the home of such Nazi leaders as Hermann Göring and Albert Speer and their families.
In addition to those children, Martin Adolf had for playmates the children of the gardener, the driver, and the chef at Obersalzberg. They played cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians, and war games, like all children their age. No visitors from the village were allowed, although some tried to get a peek at the “mountain people” who lived at such a great distance from the villagers. The zone measured almost three square miles and was fenced in on all sides. Albert Speer joked that it looked like a “big game hunting preserve” but it was a world unto itself, rigid and conventional, whose inhabitants were out of touch with the world on the other side.
Martin Adolf remembered the visits of dignitaries like Neville Chamberlain, Edouard Daladier, and Benito Mussolini, the prime ministers of Great Britain, France, and Italy respectively, who often visited the Führer for several days at a time. He was always made to dress for these occasions, and he never forgot his handshake with Mussolini; it left such an impression on him, in fact, that everything else about that day faded from his memory.
His mother, Gerda, was one of the rare Nazi wives who corresponded to the Nazis’ ideal woman: she was a housewife who could usually be found in her kitchen, she paid no attention to politics, and she took her role as a procreator of Nazi children very seriously. She bore Martin Bormann eleven children and was ever faithful to her adulterous husband. Above all, she demonstrated her commitment to “the cause” by encouraging polygamy to increase the birthrate. She wanted to provide even more children to the Führer and wrote to him enthusiastically: “We should introduce a law at the end of the war like the law passed at the end of the Thirty Years’ War, which allowed healthy productive men to have two wives.” Martin Bormann wrote in the margins: “Yes, absolutely, for the coming battle that will decide the fate of our nation.”3
Gerda was always thrilled when her husband was able to seduce some actress or another: the important thing was that he always had at his disposal a woman “of serviceable condition.” When he and the actress Manja Behrens started an affair, Gerda congratulated him and expressed her hope that she might bear him a child as quickly as possible. Bormann was not shy about bringing his mistress to Obersalzberg, wher
e she stayed in the family home. His boorishness was hardly appreciated by everyone, but Gerda’s consent kept the affair from taking on the dimensions of a scandal.4 As for Bormann, he could not have been more pleased by his wife’s attitude and her opinions on the role of women, especially since he had a huge sexual appetite. Gerda was a fanatical supporter of the Reich until the end. She even wanted the Reich to create a “National Emergency Marriage.”5 On the eve of the Reich’s fall, as her husband was beginning to realize the gravity of the situation, she wrote to him, “One day, the Reich of our dreams will emerge. Shall we, I wonder, or our children, live to see it?”6
In school, Martin Adolf was not a very diligent student, and he paid for it; his father scolded him severely and packed him off to an Ordensburgen, a Nazi Party academy, to be “trained.” Hitler had taken steps to create a system of schools to educate the Nazi elite, but none of the Reich’s officials, regardless of how fanatic, availed themselves of it. Bormann was the only one who sent his son there, and only as a punishment. Martin Adolf was ten when he entered the Reich school at Feldafing on Lake Starnberg. It had been created by Ernst Röhm in 1933 as a preparatory school for the Nazi elite. Each regional Gauleiter could propose three candidates, but Munich and Berlin were allowed five each. Martin Adolf was the only student who bypassed that system; essentially, his father pulled strings to have him admitted. He began training to become a paramilitary soldier, but, as Bormann’s son, he found it difficult to blend in. The curriculum also proved challenging for him, especially physical education, which was given priority in the curriculum. By force of will, he finally made a place for himself. In his National Socialism class, he had to memorize the party program and study Mein Kampf. Later, in the upper grades, the required text was Alfred Rosenberg’s Der Mythus des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts (The Myth of the Twentieth Century),7 although neither the students nor the teachers could make sense of it. He would later say that even his father was never able to read it start to finish, despite many attempts.
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