While filming in Berlin, I stumbled across a building that had survived the hell of 1945 almost untouched—a stone’s throw from where Hitler’s bunker once sat beneath the Reich Chancellery garden. It was Martin Bormann’s headquarters, the nerve center of the man who, by the end, was effectively running the Third Reich from the shadows. Bormann was a bull-necked spider at the heart of the Nazi web. Everyone who wanted access to the ailing Führer had to go through him.
He drafted orders on blank sheets of paper that Hitler had pre-signed, and he was feared and despised in equal measure. The weaker Hitler became, the more powerful Bormann grew. He hadn’t started out that way. Bormann was an early Nazi Party member, a former World War I artilleryman who worked as an estate manager after the war.
He was jailed for a year for his part in the murder of a local schoolteacher. His accomplice in that crime was Rudolf Höss, who would later become the infamous commandant of Auschwitz. Bormann got his real start in the party in 1933, when he was appointed Chief of Staff to Rudolf Hess, the Deputy Führer. From that position, he slipped into Hitler’s inner circle and made himself completely indispensable.
He handled briefings, managed state matters and private affairs alike, and flattered Hitler relentlessly. He was also the man behind Obersalzberg, Hitler’s private retreat above Berchtesgaden, where the Führer kept the Berghof. When Hess flew to Scotland in May 1941, Bormann stepped into his duties and became head of a new organization—the Party Chancellery. It was an enormously powerful position, giving him administrative control over the entire Nazi Party apparatus.
But true to Hitler’s style of leadership, it was also designed to create competition. Bormann’s office was in direct conflict with the Reich Chancellery, headed by Dr. Hans Lammers, and with Hitler’s private chancellery under Philip Bouhler. Bormann soon eclipsed them both simply because he was more personally useful to Hitler.
He ran Hitler’s building projects, managed his personal finances, and generated cash for him. By 1943, Bormann was officially appointed Hitler’s private secretary, formalizing a role he had held unofficially since the mid-1930s. Beneath him were two powerful deputies: State Secretary Gerhard Klopfer, who took part in the Wannsee Conference and helped draft the plan for the Final Solution, and SS-Gruppenführer Helmut Friedrichs. Officially, Bormann’s power resided at number 54 Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin.
The street was once lined with grand palaces and government buildings from the late 19th century, but Allied bombing, street fighting, and post-war demolitions by the Soviets and East Germans left most of it in ruins. Almost all of the pre-war structures are gone, replaced by ugly post-war buildings or modern glass facades. The largest pre-war structure on the street to survive is Göring’s Air Ministry, a massive 1930s edifice that survived both the bombs, the street fighting, and the East German wrecking balls. It now houses the Federal Ministry of Finance.
Nearby stands Goebbels’ old propaganda ministry, also intact and now used by the Federal Ministry of Health and Social Security. But Bormann’s headquarters was different—it was the last of the 19th-century buildings on the street still standing. Originally built in 1903, the building served as a liaison between the German emperor and the government, housing the Privy Civil Cabinet. Later, it was the office of Prussian Minister President Otto Braun.
When Hitler came to power, the building housed Joachim von Ribbentrop and the NSDAP liaison office under Rudolf Hess. In 1941, Bormann took over, and the new Party Chancellery was created there. Ribbentrop moved to the Foreign Ministry, a building that no longer exists. Throughout World War II, this was Bormann’s headquarters.
He was rarely there physically, preferring to stay close to Hitler at his military commands or at his Alpine villa adjacent to the Führer’s home. His deputies handled Berlin. But on January 16, 1945, Bormann returned to Berlin with Hitler from the Adlerhorst, the Führer’s last western headquarters, where Hitler had directed his Ardenne Offensive against the Americans. Hitler moved back into his apartment in the old Reich Chancellery, while Bormann kept an apartment at his own headquarters.
From February 1945, Hitler began sleeping in the Führerbunker beneath the new Reich Chancellery due to British and American bombing raids. By mid-March, he had retired completely into the bunker, leaving only a handful of times before his death on April 30. Bormann maintained a small office in the lower bunker, right next to Hitler’s room, keeping his proximity to the Führer until the very end. Periodically, he would return across the street to his own headquarters at 54 Wilhelmstrasse, which had its own bunker in the cellars.
From there, he kept running the crumbling Reich through the communications network until the last days. As the Soviets closed in on Berlin, Bormann organized the evacuation of government ministries south to Bavaria, including his own Party Chancellery staff. Planes ferried personnel and documents south in an operation code-named Seraglio. It was largely successful.
But Bormann failed to persuade Hitler to fly south to Obersalzberg. Instead, he remained in the bunker with only two staff members from his office—his adjutant, SS-Standartenführer Wilhelm Zander, and his secretary, Else Krüger. On the night of May 1, 1945, Bormann took part in the breakout from the bunker. He disappeared into history, never to be seen again by the authorities who hunted him.
That, of course, was only the beginning of a much stranger mystery. His two trusted deputies met very different fates. Klopfer fled Berlin and was arrested by US intelligence in Munich in 1946. A war crimes case was brought against him, but it collapsed for lack of evidence.
He died in West Germany in 1987 at the age of 81. Friedrichs, the other deputy, vanished entirely in February 1945, never seen again. He was declared legally dead in August 1951. Bormann’s headquarters was captured by the Soviets in early May 1945.
Its elegant facade was riddled with bullet and shrapnel damage from the Battle for Berlin. In some of the holes, Soviet bullets remained embedded in the bricks. The building was badly damaged—the first and second floors were largely destroyed by fire, the right wing partially destroyed, and part of the roof was gone. Despite all that, the Soviet authorities decided to repair the building rather than tear 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 until the East German government took control in 1970. After German unification in 1990, it was converted into the Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture, where it remains today. As I stood before that building, I couldn’t shake the thought that this was where one of the most sinister men of the Nazi regime had quietly pulled the strings. A man whose name most people have never heard, but whose influence touched every corner of Hitler’s empire.
The bunker where Hitler died is gone, buried under a parking lot, but Bormann’s headquarters still stands, a silent stone witness to the darkest days of the 20th century. The mystery of what happened to Bormann after he walked out of that bunker remains one of the great unanswered questions of the Third Reich—a question that has haunted historians for decades.
