Martin Adolf Bormann - Early Life

Early Life

He was born Martin Adolf 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 try to reach his mother in the still German-occupied hamlet of Val Gardena/Gröden, near Selva/Wolkenstein in Italian South Tirol. 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.

During this time, 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 information to Father Regens of Maria Kirchtal, who promptly took the boy into his care.

Bormann would convert to Catholicism. As an altar boy at Maria Kirchtal, he 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 brothers and sisters, all of whom, except for one sister, had also been received into the Catholic Church.