The priest stood at the altar in Innsbruck, hands steady over the host, and took his vows. Nobody in the congregation knew what name he had been given at birth. Nobody knew that his godfather had been Adolf Hitler. He was born on April 14th, 1930, the first son of Martin Bormann, Hitler’s private secretary.
Hitler himself stood at the baptism, gave the boy his first name, and watched him grow up across family weekends at the Obersalzberg. At home, they called him Kruncy—short for Kronprinz, Crown Prince. By the time he was ten, Kruncy believed completely in everything his godfather stood for. The Obersalzberg complex in the Bavarian Alps was his world—guarded approaches, villas for senior officers, a kindergarten for the children of the regime’s most powerful families.
Hitler lived a short walk from the Bormann house. His mother, Gerda, had married Martin Bormann in 1929. She was nineteen, the daughter of a senior party judge. Over the next fourteen years, she gave birth to ten children, nine of whom survived.
In 1939, she received the Cross of Honor of the German Mother in Gold, awarded for bearing eight or more children. Every child carried an ideological signature. Kruncy took his first name from the Führer. A brother born in 1936 was named Heinrich after Heinrich Himmler, his godfather.
When Rudolf Hess flew to Britain in May 1941, a daughter hastily changed her name from Ilsa to Eika, and another child renamed from Adolf to Helmut. The family adjusted its registry as the regime’s reputations rose and fell. Gerda was no quiet wife. She was a committed anti-Semite and an admirer of Julius Streicher, publisher of Der Stürmer.
After the war, published letters revealed her advocating a state-sanctioned system of multiple marriage, under which approved men would father children with several women at once. When her husband began an affair with an actress, Gerda reportedly wrote to approve the arrangement, suggesting the two women alternate years bearing his children. At age ten, Kruncy entered formal Nazi schooling. From 1940 to 1945, he attended the Nazi Party Academy at Matrei am Brenner in the Tyrol, an institution created to train a future ruling class.
By April 1945, Kruncy was fifteen, waiting at the academy for orders that no longer came. His father was in the Berlin bunker. His mother and eight siblings were still at the Obersalzberg. Then, on April 25th, American bombers destroyed much of the complex.
Within hours, Gerda packed what she could and fled south with her children, adopting the alias Bergmann and registering the children at a local school under that false name. Two streets away, Margarete Himmler was hiding under similar pretenses with her daughter. Martin Bormann’s last bunker diary entry was a single word: “Ausbruchversuch”—breakout attempt—written on May 2nd, 1945. He left the bunker that night with a small group and was never seen alive again.
For decades, sightings would be reported across South America. Gerda did not stay hidden for long. By mid-1945, she was identified, arrested, and brought to a prison in Merano. American and British intelligence officers questioned her for days about her husband’s whereabouts.
She had no useful information. That autumn, she fell seriously ill. Doctors diagnosed advanced abdominal cancer. She was transferred to a war hospital under guard, with visits restricted and correspondence blocked.
She never recovered. Gerda Bormann died on March 23rd, 1946, at age thirty-six. Of the nine children who had survived the war, eight were left without either parent. The youngest, born in September 1943, died later that same year.
Kruncy, sixteen years old and separated from his family, did not yet know his mother was dead. Ten days before the air raid on the Obersalzberg, the academy at Matrei closed its doors. The students were sent home. A party functionary in Munich advised Kruncy to make his way south to his mother in Wolkenstein.
He never reached her. The roads were collapsing, the front was moving, and by the time he crossed back into Austria, the war was effectively over. He ended up stranded in Salzburg. A senior party official supplied him with false identity papers and arranged for him to take shelter with a Catholic farmer named Nikolaus Hoenwarter at a remote property halfway up a mountain in the Salzburg Alps.
Kruncy shed his name and his history. He worked the farm and attended mass on Sundays with the family. To his neighbors, he was just a teenage refugee from somewhere further north, one of thousands moving through the region in the chaos of 1945. None of them knew who he really was.
He lived that way for almost two years. In 1947, he read in the Salzburger Nachrichten that his mother had died the previous year in an Italian hospital. The article identified her by name. He took the paper to Hoenwarter and confessed his true identity.
Hoenwarter informed the local priest, who in turn contacted the rector of a nearby church. The rector took the boy into his care. Kruncy had been baptized Lutheran; he converted to Catholicism. Soon after, American intelligence officers tracked him down, arrested him and an altar boy, and held them both for several days of questioning.
They were looking for his father. Convinced he genuinely knew nothing, they returned him to the parish. In Ingolstadt, Kruncy joined the religious congregation of the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart and began studies toward the priesthood. The other surviving children followed quieter paths.
A Catholic clergyman in the Rhineland took on their care after their mother’s death and gradually received most into the Catholic Church their parents had despised. One sister died in 1958, still in her twenties. The remaining siblings drifted into careers and marriages under the radar of public attention. None pursued political roles, gave major interviews, ran for office, or wrote memoirs.
The Bormann name in post-war Germany was something to be lived past rather than carried forward. Only Kruncy went a different way. On July 26th, 1958, twenty-eight years after his baptism with Hitler as godfather, he was ordained a Catholic priest in Innsbruck. In 1961, the Missionaries sent him to the newly independent Congo.
The country had declared independence from Belgium the previous year and was descending into conflict. He worked in pastoral care and education at Catholic missions across the region. In 1964, as the Simba Rebellion targeted Western missionaries, he was forced to flee. A return visit in 1966 lasted one year before he left the country for good.
In 1969, he suffered a near-fatal injury. A nun named Cordula nursed him back to health. Their relationship deepened during his recovery. In the early 1970s, mass departures from religious life were sweeping the Catholic Church following the Second Vatican Council.
Both renounced their vows. They married in 1971. He took a teaching post in theology and held it for two decades, retiring in 1992. In the second half of his life, Kruncy began speaking publicly about who he had been and who his father was.
In 1987, he joined Children of Perpetrators, Children of Victims, a reconciliation group founded by an Israeli psychologist. Six years later, he traveled discreetly to Israel for a four-day symposium, where eight other children of Nazi war criminals met with nine children of Holocaust survivors. He visited Yad Vashem. He was not recognized.
In a 2000 interview, he said that while he could not acquit his father of his political guilt, he still loved him as a father. Tours of German and Austrian schools followed, walking students through Nazi propaganda texts and explaining how he, as a child, had believed every word of them. His father had been dead since 1945. Workers digging on a Berlin construction site in December 1972 uncovered two skeletons at the old Ulap fairgrounds near the former Chancellery.
Dental records identified one as Martin Bormann. West German authorities formally declared him dead in April 1973. In 1998, mitochondrial DNA testing confirmed the identification 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 Catholic boarding school where Kruncy had taught in the early 1960s publicly accused him of sexual abuse. Other former pupils alleged severe physical violence. By then, he had advanced dementia and could not coherently respond.
No prosecution followed. A commission investigating abuse within the Catholic Church awarded the accuser compensation. Kruncy died in Herdecke on March 11th, 2013, at age eighty-two.
The question of whether his redemption was real died with him.
