Martin Adolf Bormann

Martin Adolf Bormann (born Adolf Martin Bormann on 14 April 1930) is the eldest of ten children of Martin Bormann and the godson of Adolf Hitler.

Early life

He was born Adolf Martin Bormann, the first child of the head of the Nazi Party Chancellery and private secretary to Adolf Hitler. Martin Bormann (1900–1945) and his wife Gerda Buch (1909–1946). Nicknamed Krönzi which is short for Kronprinz (German for crown prince), he was an ardent young Nazi, attending the Nazi Party Academy of Matrei in the Tyrol from 1940 to 1945. On 15 April 1945, the school closed and young Martin was advised by a party functionary in Munich named Hummel to attempt to reach his mother in the occupied hamlet of Gröden, near Wolkenstein. Unable to get there, he found himself stranded in Salzburg where the gauleiter provided him with false identity papers and he found hospitality with a Catholic farmer, Nikolaus Hohenwarter, at the Querleitnerhof, halfway up a mountain in the Salzburg Alps.

In the meantime, his mother, Gerda, was subjected to relentless interrogation (Lebert, p. 95) by officers of the CIC (Combined Intelligence Committee, the joint US-British intelligence body). She died of abdominal cancer (Lebert, p. 97) in the prison hospital at Meran on 23 April 1946. The following year, her teenage son, Martin learned of his mother's death from an article in the Salzburger Nachrichten and only then confessed his true identity to Nikolas Hohenwarter, who reported the information to his local priest at Weissbach, who, in turn, gave this the information to Father Regens of Maria Kirchtal, who promptly took the boy into his care. The young Bormann then converted to Catholicism.

While an altar boy at Maria Kirchtal, Martin was arrested by US intelligence and imprisoned at Zell am See for several days of interrogation before being returned to his parish. He stayed there until he moved to the Heart of Jesus Missionaries in Ingolstadt. He had been able to resume contact with his eight brothers and sisters, all of whom, except for one sister, had been received into the Catholic Church.

Life as a priest

In 1947, he abandoned the Lutheranism of his family and became a Roman Catholic. In 1953, he was ordained a priest, serving in the Ordensgemeinschaft der Herz-Jesu-Missionare (Sacred Heart Fathers), in the Belgian Congo for many years.

Disaffected and under influence of the radical changes of the 1960s, not least by the Second Vatican Council and its spirit sweeping through the Church, he resigned the priesthood.

Life after the priesthood

Following a near-fatal injury in 1969 he was nursed back to health by a nun, (Sister) Cordula, who then also renounced her vows. They were married in 1971.

He became a teacher of theology and retired in 1992. As recently as 2001, he toured schools in Germany and Austria, speaking about the horrors of the Third Reich, and has even visited Israel, meeting with Holocaust survivors.

At the beginning of 2011, Bormann was accused of allegedly subjecting a former pupil at an Austrian Catholic boarding school to violent and protracted sexual abuse during his time there working as a priest and schoolmaster, more than 50 years previously. Bormann has denied knowledge of the events.