By the spring of 1945, Martin Bormann had become one of the most feared and hated men in the crumbling Third Reich. He was not a field marshal or a minister, but he held a power that outranked them all: he controlled access to Adolf Hitler. Anyone who wanted to see the Führer had to go through Bormann first. In the final weeks, holed up in the bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery garden in battered Berlin, that made him the most dangerous man in Germany.
In many ways, Bormann was actually running things. He drafted orders on blank sheets of paper that Hitler had already signed, turning the Führer’s fading authority into his own. He was a bull-necked spider at the center of the Nazi web, connected to the rest of the collapsing Reich by telephone and teleprinter. As Hitler grew weaker and more isolated, Bormann grew stronger.
His enemies called him the brown eminence, and they feared him accordingly. Not long ago, while filming in Berlin, I stumbled across an unexpected survivor of the 1945 battle: Martin Bormann’s headquarters. It stands just a stone’s throw from the Reich Chancellery and the Führerbunker, and it is still perfectly intact today. Bormann’s path to power began far from the marble halls of Berlin.
He was an early Nazi Party member, a former World War I artilleryman who worked as an estate manager after the war. In the early 1920s, he took part in the murder of a local schoolteacher and spent a year in jail for it. His accomplice in that killing was Rudolf Höss, the man who would later become the infamous commandant of Auschwitz. It was a brutal beginning, but it did nothing to slow Bormann’s rise.
He got his start in the party working for its in-house insurance service, a modest position that changed dramatically in July 1933, a few months after Hitler became Chancellor. Bormann was appointed Chief of Staff to Rudolf Hess, the Deputy Führer. From that position, he entered Hitler’s inner circle and quickly made himself indispensable. He provided Hitler with briefings, handled state and private matters alike, and excelled at flattery.
He was also responsible for creating Obersalzberg, the private community above Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps, where Hitler kept his house, the Berghof. In May 1941, Rudolf Hess made his bizarre flight to Scotland and never came back. Bormann was promoted to take over Hess’s duties, though the title of Deputy Führer went instead to Hermann Göring. Bormann became head of a new organization called the Party Chancellery.
It was an extremely powerful position, giving him administrative control over the entire Nazi Party apparatus throughout Germany. It also reflected Hitler’s style of leadership: divide and rule. Bormann’s office was in direct competition with the Reich Chancellery, headed by Dr. Hans Lammers, and with Hitler’s private Führer’s Chancellery, run by Philipp Bouhler.
The three offices sometimes overlapped, sometimes clashed over legislation and policy. But Bormann’s power quickly eclipsed the others simply because he was more personally useful to Hitler. He ran Hitler’s building projects, managed his personal finances, and generated more cash for the Führer. When Hitler wanted orders delivered to his ministers or party officials, he always went through Bormann.
By 1943, Bormann’s unofficial role was made official: he was appointed Hitler’s private secretary, a position he had held in practice since the mid-1930s. Beneath Bormann stood two powerful deputies. The first was State Secretary Gerhard Klopfer, who took part in the Wannsee Conference and helped draw up the plan for the implementation of the Final Solution against the Jews. The second was SS-Gruppenführer Helmut Friedrichs.
Where did Bormann’s power officially reside in Berlin? At number 54 Wilhelmstrasse. In its prime, Wilhelmstrasse was a fine street of palaces and government buildings dating from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But Allied bombing, the street fighting of the Battle of Berlin, and post-war Soviet and East German demolitions left their mark.
Almost all of the pre-war structures are gone, replaced by ugly East German blocks or modern glass offices. Interestingly, the largest pre-war structure to survive on Wilhelmstrasse today is Göring’s Air Ministry, a vast 1930s edifice that survived both Allied bombs and Soviet bullets, and later the East German wrecking balls as well. It now serves as the Federal Ministry of Finance. The other large Nazi-era survivor is Goebbels’ old propaganda ministry, an extension he added to an eighteenth-century building that was later demolished.
That extension remains standing and today houses the Federal Ministry of Health and Social Security. Bormann’s headquarters at 54 Wilhelmstrasse was originally built in 1903. It served as the liaison building between the office of the German emperor and the government, housing the Privy Civil Cabinet as part of the Prussian Ministry of State. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, it was the office of Otto Braun, the Prussian Minister President.
After Hitler came to power, the building housed Joachim von Ribbentrop and the NSDAP liaison office under Rudolf Hess. In 1941, when Bormann succeeded, the new office of the Party Chancellery was created for him. Von Ribbentrop moved out to the Foreign Ministry building elsewhere on Wilhelmstrasse, which no longer exists. This building was Bormann’s headquarters throughout the war, though he was physically absent most of the time.
He stayed extremely close to Hitler, either at military headquarters or at his private home. Bormann also kept an Alpine villa adjacent to Hitler’s house at Obersalzberg. His deputies, however, were often present in Berlin, keeping the machinery of the Party Chancellery running. Bormann returned to the capital with Hitler on January 16, 1945, arriving from the Führer’s last western military headquarters, the Adlerhorst, from which Hitler had managed the Ardennes Offensive in the winter of 1944–45.
Back in Berlin, Hitler moved into his apartment inside the old Reich Chancellery, while Bormann took an apartment at his Wilhelmstrasse headquarters. In February 1945, because of the constant British and American bombing raids, Hitler began sleeping in the Führerbunker beneath the new Reich Chancellery. By day he still worked in his offices above ground and took his meals there. But in mid-March 1945, Hitler withdrew completely into the bunker.
He would leave only a handful of times before his death on April 30. Bormann kept a small office inside the lower bunker, right next to Hitler’s room. He maintained his proximity to the Führer until the very end. Yet he also returned periodically to his own headquarters across the street, which had its own bunker in the cellars.
From there, and from his office beside Hitler, he kept the communications network running across the rest of the crumbling Reich. He held his position for as long as Hitler lived, and for a day or so afterwards. As the Soviet threat to Berlin grew, Bormann organized the evacuation of government ministries south to Bavaria, including the staff of the Party Chancellery. A relay of planes flew personnel and documents south in an operation code-named Seraglio.
It was largely successful. Bormann, along with the rest of Hitler’s staff, failed to persuade the Führer to fly south to Obersalzberg. So he remained in the bunker with only two members of his office staff: his adjutant, SS-Standartenführer Wilhelm Zander, and his secretary, Else Krüger. On May 1 or 2, 1945, Bormann took part in the breakout from the bunker and vanished into history.
What became of him remains a mystery to this day. Some believe he died during the breakout; others claim he survived and lived out his life in South America. There were even murky plots in West Germany to pretend he had died in Berlin in May 1945. As for his secretary, Else Krüger, she vanished from public view as well.
Strangely, she ended up living in England after the war, married to a British Intelligence Corps officer who had interrogated her in 1945. Bormann’s deputy, Gerhard Klopfer, also fled Berlin. In 1946, he was arrested by the US Counter Intelligence Corps in Munich. A war crimes case was brought against him, but it collapsed due to lack of evidence.
He later died in West Germany in 1987 at the age of 81. The other deputy, Helmut Friedrichs, disappeared entirely in February 1945 and was never seen again. He was declared legally dead in August 1951. Bormann’s headquarters was captured by the Soviets in early May 1945.
Like so many of the buildings along Wilhelmstrasse, its elegant facade was riddled with bullet and shrapnel damage from the Battle for Berlin. In some of the holes, Soviet bullets are still embedded in the bricks today. The building was badly damaged. The first and second floors were largely destroyed by fire.
The right-side wing was partly destroyed, and part of the roof was gone. Yet immediately after the war, the Soviet authorities decided to repair it instead of tearing it down, which was the fate of most of the edifices along Wilhelmstrasse. In the 1950s, it was used as student accommodation for Humboldt University. In 1970, the East German government took control.
And after German unification in 1990, it was turned into the Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture, which it remains to this day. It is the last of those nineteenth-century Wilhelmstrasse edifices to survive.
