His time at the Ordensburgen would be a watershed in the life of the young Martin Adolf. He would never live with his family again; his removal was definitive. He would only visit his family during school holidays, when his father was usually away. When he and his father were together, Bormann was extremely severe with his son. Once, when Martin Adolf saluted the Führer with a “Heil Hitler,” his father slapped him violently; the custom when addressing Hitler directly was to say, “Heil, mein Führer.” Bormann’s cruelty had a profound effect on the boy, especially since it was never offset by even the slightest display of affection. There was no communication or human warmth at all between them. On visits, Martin Adolf usually spent his time helping a gardener or working on a farm in Obersalzberg. He only had good memories of the war years, although he was conscious of his strained relations with his father.
Because of his extremely busy schedule accompanying Hitler on all of his official business, Bormann only visited the academy once, in 1943. Martin Adolf recalled clearly that he questioned his father: “What is National Socialism?”
His father’s response was brief and direct and confirmed for him beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Nazi movement had no meaningful ideological underpinning but rested instead on unfailing allegiance to its “god,” Hitler: “National Socialism,” Bormann told him, “is the will of the Führer!”8
In his book, Leben gegen Schatten (Live Despite the Darkness), published in 1996, Martin Adolf explains that the absence of any clear program left National Socialism open to interpretation by the party’s factions. Hitler intervened as little as possible, and even then his explanations were ambiguous, which made it easier to play those factions against each other. According to Martin Adolf, it was “the will of Hitler” and the “religious roots” of the Nazi ideology that justified anti-Semitism and the hatred for anything resembling Christianity.9
“What do I know, if anything, about my father?” Martin Adolf has asked himself. He grew up without ever knowing the elder Martin Bormann and rarely meeting him; his childhood was dictated by his strictly disciplinarian education founded on the veneration of the Führer, “God’s emissary,” and played to the soundtrack of Nazi music. He saw his father for the last time during the Christmas holidays in 1943. The school closed on April 23, 1945. Martin Adolf was fifteen. It was understood that the oldest students were to be sent to the front; however, the imminent capitulation of the Reich put an end to that plan.
“The worst was when, at two in the morning on May 1, the radio broadcast the news of the death of the Führer. For me, that was the end. I remember the moment vividly, but I cannot describe the silence that greeted the news … it must have lasted four hours. No one said a word, but eventually people began to go outside, and almost immediately, there was a gunshot, then another, and another. Inside, no one spoke, there was no sound, only the gunshots outside. We thought we were all going to die…. I saw no future for myself. Suddenly, behind the bodies that covered the little courtyard, another boy, who was eighteen, appeared. He invited me to come sit next to him. The air smelled fresh, birds were singing, we were still alive. I know that, if we hadn’t been there for each other in that precise moment, neither of us would still be here. I know it.”10
This was the beginning of a new era for Martin Adolf: the end of the Ubermensch and the dawn of the human community of God’s children.
The students at the academy fled in all directions to find their families on their own. Martin Adolf, whose nickname was the Krönzi (“the Crown Prince”), returned to Obersalzberg in his Hitler Youth uniform with a swastika armband. His mother had already left, however, headed for South Tyrol. She would take up residence in Wolkenstein—where Gudrun Himmler and her mother would also end up—and change her name to Bergmann.
Bormann’s secretary was still in his office. He ushered Martin Adolf in, gave him an ordinary gray jacket and told him to burn his uniform immediately and to change his name. He gave him forged identity papers under the name of Bergmann and stamped “KLV-Lager 39, Steinach a. Brenner.” With that, the young man presented himself to the National Socialist Party’s district chief, the Gauleiter of Salzburg, Gustav Adolf Scheel, who gave him new marching orders: to report to St. Johann’s school in Pongau as an apprentice agriculturist. Before he arrived there, however, all the students had been released; Martin Adolf found no one. The following day, walking in the streets, he caught sight of a black Mercedes sedan that looked exactly like his family’s car. He even thought he saw his mother, but realized it was just an illusion. He decided to leave and, upon crossing paths with a retreating Nazi convoy, followed it.
He was terrified, convinced that he would be executed on the spot if the Allies captured him, Bormann’s son. He had no idea what had happened to his father. He eventually heard rumors that his father had died fleeing the Allies’ attack on Berlin.
The Israeli psychologist Dan Bar-On, who interviewed Martin Adolf forty years after the war, reports that the younger Bormann was unable to control his emotions when he spoke of that period.11 He had no knowledge of the persecution of the Jews, had never heard of Kristallnacht nor ever seen a Star of David, because “there were no Jews in Berchtesgaden or at Obersalzberg.” No one discussed these in the Bormann home, either. He was more affected by the persecution of Christians, saying, “[T]he Catholic Church was presented as being an extension, so to speak, of Zionism. The confrontation with the Jews was considered to be over, finished, taken care of more or less.”12
In late May 1945, his wanderings took him into the mountains. He was sick with severe salmonella poisoning and stopped to rest at an old farmhouse in Hinterthal, south of Salzburg, on the Austrian side of the German border. The farmer living there asked no questions and simply took him in. Martin Adolf said his name was Bergmann and that he was from Munich—he gave a false address—and that both his parents had died in the air strikes; he did not want anyone to try to find them. He had not forgotten the advice his father’s secretary had given him: under no circumstances was he to reveal his true identity. He understood that the name Bormann would be a death sentence in postwar Germany. Some children of Nazi leaders had to confront the complete silence their families maintained about the war, but Martin Adolf Bormann was forced to live the rest of his life in complete anonymity.
The family who took him in cared for him as if he were their own child. They were pious people who understood from the first time they took the boy to church that he had had no religious instruction. As for Martin Adolf, he said he learned from his time with them what Christian living meant: the opposite of everything he had been taught. On this isolated mountain, he discovered a loving family and a new home and found an ideal environment for reflection, even shepherding the family’s animals. However, he could not escape the revelations that were coming to light about war crimes and the Holocaust, of which he had never heard speak before. The family’s only news outlet was the renowned Austrian daily, Salzburger Nachrichten, which opened his eyes to the horrific extent of the Nazis’ barbarity.
It was no longer possible to ignore his father’s role in the war. Photos taken at Bergen-Belsen would haunt him for the rest of his life. The Ordensburgen had used laborers from Dachau, but Martin Adolf assumed they were criminals. In any case, they looked nothing at all like the walking cadavers the Allies discovered at the camps in 1945. He finally understood the abysmal horror that humans can perpetrate.13 He also developed a clear reasoning for the feelings of guilt that children can have for the crimes committed by their parents:
The Fourth Commandment demands only that children love and respect their parents, as parents, and not as individuals exercising a role in society. Whatever our father did or did not do in his political functions, in other words, outside of his role as a father to us, not only eludes our understanding but neither engages our responsibility nor asks us to take responsibility. It often happens that children bear the wrongs of their parents, when a wrong has been committed and the children are
aware of it. They carry the emotional weight of their pain and shame, but not the responsibility for the wrong. It is often the same for parents, when their children commit a wrong; the parents are not responsible, even if the errors of children can surely be attributed to the parents’ education of their children.14
The young man struggled to come to terms with his past and his parentage, believing in the impossibility of escaping one’s parents “whoever they might be.” In 1947, desperate to find some kind of peace, he finally revealed his identity to the village vicar, Father Regens, an erudite, intelligent, and pious man. Martin Adolf had thrown himself into an intensive catechism course at the Church of Maria Kirchental, led by Father Regens, who planted the seed of a vocation in him. He helped him through his moral wrestlings and made him a man of God.
Whereas the Nuremberg court had just delivered a death sentence in absentia on his father for war crimes and crimes against humanity, Martin Adolf was finding salvation in God. And whereas Bormann père had been a fierce adversary of Christianity, Martin Adolf embraced it wholly, questioning his father’s resistance to it. It was Bormann who advocated imposing even stricter limits on the Church’s authority, in alignment with the views of Hitler who lamented Christianity’s weakness: “You see, it’s been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn’t we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion too would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity, with its meekness and flabbiness!”15
Nevertheless, faced with a hostile population, the Nazis were forced to reign in their attacks on the Church, especially in strongly Catholic regions such as Bavaria; a law passed in 1941, which banned schools from displaying the crucifix on their walls, spurred the population, already exhausted by the war, to resist Nazi policies against the Church.
Martin Adolf found some explanation for his father’s devotion to National Socialism when he learned that he ran away from home when he was fifteen to escape his stepfather’s bullying and intransigent religiosity. More reasons presented themselves when he examined the ideological conflict between National Socialism and Christianity. His father understood the Church’s influence in society as an obvious provocation that had to be suppressed. Since Hitler was the supreme leader of the people, religion contradicted the Führer’s superior will. As Hitler’s devoted and zealous servant, Bormann took all of Hitler’s statements at face value, including this one: “Christianity is an invention of sick brains.” The Führer’s power was boundless. Bormann certainly had personal reasons as well for his hostility to Christianity, which was an obstacle to his hunger for female conquests.
Martin Adolf believed that no man can ever be forced to renounce his personal convictions to commit a crime, and he was wholly convinced that his father knew of the Nazis’ atrocities and that he approved of them.16 His only explanation for his father’s actions was that he was so steeped in the National Socialist ideology that he never questioned it, and that he idolized Hitler as an omnipotent father. Martin Adolf refrained from judging his father, however, believing that to be the prerogative of God, the only fair judge of human behavior. Martin Adolf never discussed his father’s actions with him, but he wanted to shoulder responsibility for those crimes nevertheless, even for this man he hardly knew.
Martin Adolf was baptized on May 4, 1947, and received into the Catholic Church of Germany. He enrolled in the secondary school of the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart in Salzburg-Liefering and began theology studies. On October 17, 1947, in a bus to Salzburg for an appointment about his studies, he thought he saw a woman who had been a secretary in the party chancellery in Munich, and that she had recognized him. He was detained the next day and taken before the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) of the US Military, then briefly jailed at Zell am See. He learned it was an anonymous tip that had led to his arrest and could not be sure it was the woman in the bus who had denounced him. The archbishop of Salzburg intervened on his behalf and obtained his immediate release. For Christmas that year, Martin Adolf, who was then seventeen, visited his maternal uncle in Ruhpolding, in Bavaria. This uncle, who was living under the name given him by the CIC, “Reinhold Meier,” informed him of his mother’s death from cancer on March 23, 1946, at the age of thirty-five. On her deathbed, she wished to be reconciled with the Church and receive a Christian burial. She had become close to Theo Schmitz, who was the chaplain at the prison hospital in Merano, who promised to look out for her children.
After the war, Gerda Bormann had been arrested in her house in Gröben, where she had been living with Martin Adolf’s nine siblings, who ranged in age from one year to thirteen years. She was taken to Merano by the Allied forces and detained in secret. The children were first baptized as Catholics (even though the oldest had already received the sacrament at birth), then placed with families from a wide swath of society, from aristocrats and doctors to shopkeepers and farmers. Only one of the children, Irmgard, refused to be converted, insisting she wanted to “stay like her father,” just like Gudrun Himmler did.
Two of the Bormann children died young. Three-year-old Volker refused to eat and died of malnutrition after several months. One of the older children died as well: Ilse (nicknamed Eicke later), who was taken in by the family of a Merano physician. She was fifteen at the time the Nuremberg court convicted her father, but he remained her hero and she never doubted his innocence. She had both her father’s looks and personality; her foster family had its hands full with this adolescent who demanded, ordered, and dominated everyone. At the British school for girls where she was sent, she let her classmates know that they needed to treat her with respect. She was the top student in her class and worked diligently to make her father proud of her. She married an Italian engineer in 1957, and had a daughter but died suddenly at the age of twenty-six.
Different fates awaited the other children. Many of them chose to live in South Tyrol and were rarely in contact with their oldest brother. Martin Adolf entered a Jesuit seminary in Ingolstadt in 1948. In 1951, he earned his secondary school diploma and in July 1958, was ordained a priest. He celebrated his first Mass at the Church of Maria Kirchental.17 Nevertheless, he lived in constant fear that his father would reappear one day and label him an “enemy,” because of his conversion to Catholicism. “I don’t hate my father,” he has said. “I learned over the course of several years to differentiate between the man who was my father and the man who was a politician and Nazi officer.”18
There was enormous speculation after the war as to what became of Martin Bormann: the death certificate that was drawn up on May 2, 1945, in the absence of a corpse, was false; he did not commit suicide in the bunker with Hitler but managed to escape. He survived the invasion because he was in reality a KGB agent working for Stalin; the Russian army evacuated him from Berlin, placing a bag over his head to hide his identity. In 1953, there was an alleged sighting of him in Chile. In 1993, the British newspaper the Independent published the news that he had been treated for stomach cancer by Josef Mengele, the notorious Auschwitz physician, in Paraguay, before dying on February 15, 1959. Another theory insists that he lived in South America disguised as a priest celebrating marriages, First Communions, and funerals, as well as administering last rites. Martin Adolf lived for years in doubt. Finally, in 1972, excavation work in Berlin uncovered human remains that would be identified as Bormann’s thanks to dental records and, in 1988, by DNA testing, although these results have also been contested.
In 1961, Martin Adolf traveled to Africa as a Catholic missionary. He spent years in Congo, which was then in the throes of a civil war, where he was tortured and forced to endure simulated executions. He was not afraid to die, but these traumatizing experiences ruined his health. In late 1965, he returned to Germany for treatment for a contagious disease. At the Institute for Tropical Medicine in Hamburg, he learned from his physician that the son of another Nazi official had recently been treated at the same hospital: Wolf R�
�diger Hess, the son of the party secretary whom his own father replaced at the chancellery in 1941. Both sons had traveled to Africa during the same period but had had radically different experiences there and taken away far different lessons. Martin Adolf returned briefly to Africa in March 1966 but remained for only nine months.
In 1971, he was the victim of a car accident that would open another chapter of his life, and the end of his evangelical mission. Nothing would ever be the same for him again. He attributed his survival to divine intervention, calling it both a “rearranging of the strings of fate” and “a gift of divine providence.”19 When he woke in the hospital, a nurse was at his bedside. She was a nun who had just returned from Ghana where she had been on a mission; it was love at first sight. They were soul mates and became inseparable; nothing would stand in the way of their love. Both renounced their religious vows and were married on November 8, 1971, in Haarlem, in Holland.
In 1973, the same man who had been forbidden from taking catechism class as a boy became a catechism teacher himself. His first application to teach religious education at a school in Mühldorfer was rejected because of his “past history,” but he found employment eventually in other institutions.20
Children of Nazis Page 12
