Bormann, Martin

(1900-1945?), Nazi leader and close aide of Adolf Hitler. Bormann was born in Halberstadt into the family of a postal worker. Toward the end of World War I he interrupted his high school studies to enlist in the artillery, but the war ended before he reached the front. At the end of the war Bormann joined the Deutsche Freikorps, which carried out acts of violence along the Latvian border after Latvia declared itself independent. Subsequently, Bormann was active in the underground, paramilitary nationalist Frontbann organization, created by Ernst Rohm, and participated in one of its political assassinations (Fememorde). In 1923 he was arrested for this, and sentenced to a year's imprisonment. In prison he became acquainted with Rudolf Hoss, future commandant of the Auschwitz extermination camp. After Bormann's release in 1925, he joined the Nazi party and the SA (Sturmabteilung; Storm Troopers) in Thuringia, and in 1926 was appointed head of Nazi press affairs and deputy SA commander of the region. In 1928 he rose to the rank of Gauleiter of Thuringia. Known in the Nazi party as an active fund-raiser, he was appointed treasurer at the party center in Munich.With the Nazi rise to power in 1933, Bormann was elected to the Reichstag and became head of the office of Rudolf Hess, Hitler's deputy in the party.From this time Bormann remained at the center of Nazi power around Hitler and was responsible for all financial and administrative affairs. He was always in the shadow of the Fuhrer, excelling as a planner and a behind-the-scenes man, but not as a public speaker.After Hess's strange flight to Scotland in 1941, Bormann's power increased. In 1942 he was appointed head of the party secretariat and of the party staff, with the rank of Reichsminister, and in 1943 he became Hitler's secretary. In this capacity, Bormann also controlled Hitler's appointments calendar, sometimes preventing important figures such as Hermann Goring, Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler, and Albert Speer from approaching the leader. He took notes on Hitler's speeches and monologues at luncheons with his favorites, the material known as Hitler's "Table Talks." As the war continued and became Hitler's principal occupation, Bormann's status grew, since he was charged in Hitler's name not only with party affairs but with the domestic affairs of Germany. In particular, Bormann was active in fields such as the Euthanasia Program, the war against the Church, the pillage of art objects in the occupied countries of Eastern Europe, and the expansion of forced-labor programs throughout Europe. Above all, Bormann, who was completely amoral, was the zealous executor of the racist plan of National Socialism and in particular of the persecution and extermination of the Jews. He signed the series of anti-Jewish edicts ordering the deportation of the Jews to the East, the concentration of power in Jewish affairs in the hands of the SS, and the concealment of the massacre as the "transfer of the Jews to labor in the East." Bormann was appointed commander of the People's Army (Volkssturm), created toward the end of the war, in October 1944. His desire for greater personal power did not cease even after Hitler entered his bunker in Berlin. In the last stage of Nazi rule, Bormann tried to have Goring executed, was a witness to Hitler's marriage to Eva Braun a day before their suicide, and observed the suicide of Goebbels and his family. Before the surrender, it was Bormann who informed Adm. Karl Donitz that Donitz had been appointed the Fuhrer's successor.After Hitler's death, Bormann allegedly tried to conduct negotiations with the Soviets, but after becoming convinced that these were hopeless he gave the order to escape from the bunker. With that his trace vanished. On October 29, 1945, Bormann was indicted in absentia with the other Nazi leaders by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, and on October 1, 1946, he was sentenced to death in absentia. Bormann's fate is uncertain. According to unreliable testimony, he was killed by a Soviet shell or committed suicide, and according to rumors that spread in the 1960s he escaped to South America, perhaps to Paraguay. In early 1973 a West German forensic expert determined that one of two skeletons discovered in West Berlin during excavations in 1972 was almost certainly that of Bormann. On the basis of this determination, Bormann was officially declared dead.