On April 14th, 1930, Adolf Hitler’s private secretary became a father. His firstborn son was given the name Adolf Martin Bormann, with Hitler himself as godfather. At home, they called him Kruncy, short for Kronprinz, Crown Prince. Twenty-eight years later, he was ordained a Catholic priest, having hidden his birth name for half his life.
Kruncy grew up on the Obersalzberg, a private complex his father had built around Hitler’s Berghof. Hitler lived a short walk away, stood at the boy’s baptism, and watched him grow up. By the time Kruncy was ten, he believed completely in everything his godfather stood for. His mother, Gerda, was a committed anti-Semite and admirer of Julius Streicher.
She had married Martin Bormann in 1929, with Hitler as witness. Over fourteen years, she bore ten children, nine of whom survived. Each child carried an ideological signature: Kruncy named after the Führer, Heinrich Hugo after Himmler, and others renamed as the regime’s reputations rose and fell. In 1940, Kruncy entered the Nazi Party Academy at Matrei am Brenner, designed to train a future ruling class.
By April 1945, his father was in the Berlin bunker, his mother and siblings were at the Obersalzberg, and he was at the academy, fifteen years old, waiting for orders that never came. On April 25th, 1945, American bombers destroyed the Obersalzberg. Gerda packed what she could and fled south with eight children, adopting the alias Bergmann. They settled in Wolkenstein, where the children were registered at school under the false name.
Two streets away, Margarete Himmler hid with her daughter. Martin Bormann’s last diary entry was a single word: “Ausbruchversuch,” breakout attempt. He left the bunker on May 2nd, 1945, and was never seen alive again. Gerda was soon identified, arrested, and questioned by American and British intelligence.
She had no useful information. In autumn 1945, she fell seriously ill with advanced abdominal cancer. Transferred to a war hospital in Merano, she remained under guard, her children placed with intermediaries. She died on March 23rd, 1946, at thirty-six, and was buried in the Merano military cemetery.
The youngest child, Volker, died later that year. Eight children were left without either parent. On October 1st, 1946, Martin Bormann was sentenced to death in absentia at Nuremberg. The eldest son, sixteen, did not yet know his mother was dead.
When the academy closed on April 15th, 1945, Kruncy was advised to head south to his mother. He never reached her. Stranded in Salzburg, a party official supplied him with false papers and arranged shelter with a Catholic farmer, Nikolaus Hoenwarter, on a remote mountain farm. Kruncy shed his name and history, working the farm and attending Sunday mass.
To neighbors, he was just another refugee. In 1947, he read in the Salzburger Nachrichten that his mother had died the previous year. He confessed his identity to Hoenwarter, who contacted the local priest. The rector of Maria Kirchenthal took the boy in.
Kruncy, baptized Lutheran, converted to Catholicism. American intelligence officers arrested him briefly, questioning him about his father, but released him when convinced he knew nothing. He joined the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart and began studies for the priesthood. The other siblings were taken in by a Catholic clergyman, Theodor Schmit, and gradually converted to the Church their parents had despised.
Erika died in 1958, still in her twenties. The rest drifted into quiet lives, avoiding the Bormann name. Only Kruncy went a different way. On July 26th, 1958, twenty-eight years after his baptism with Hitler as godfather, he was ordained a priest in Innsbruck.
In 1961, he was sent to the newly independent Congo, working in pastoral care and education. In 1964, as the Simba Rebellion targeted Western missionaries, he fled. A return visit in 1966 lasted a year before he left for good. In 1969, he suffered a near-fatal injury.
A nun named Cordula nursed him back to health, and their relationship deepened. In the early 1970s, both renounced their vows and married in 1971. He took a teaching post in theology, holding it for two decades until retirement in 1992. In the second half of his life, Kruncy began speaking publicly about his past.
He joined Children of Perpetrators, Children of Victims in 1987, a reconciliation group founded by Israeli psychologist Dan Bar-On. Six years later, he traveled discreetly to Israel for a symposium where children of Nazi war criminals met children of Holocaust survivors. He visited Yad Vashem, unrecognized. In a 2000 interview, he said he could not acquit his father of political guilt but still loved him as a father.
He toured schools, explaining how he had believed Nazi propaganda as a child. His father had been dead since 1945. In December 1972, workers in Berlin uncovered two skeletons. Dental records identified one as Martin Bormann.
In 1998, mitochondrial DNA testing confirmed it beyond dispute. On August 16th, 1999, Kruncy scattered his father’s ashes in the Baltic Sea. Then came the coda. In 2011, a former pupil from an Austrian boarding school where Kruncy had taught in the early 1960s accused him of sexual abuse.
Other former pupils alleged severe physical violence. By then, he had advanced dementia and could not respond. No prosecution followed, but Austria’s Klasnic Commission awarded the accuser compensation. Kruncy died in Herdecke on March 11th, 2013, at eighty-two.
The question of whether his redemption was real died with him.
