Adolf Martin Bormann was born on April 14th, 1930, and his godfather was Adolf Hitler. At home, the family called him Krönchen, short for Kronprinz, or Crown Prince. Twenty-eight years later, he was ordained a Catholic priest, after spending much of his life hiding the name he was born with. His father, Martin Bormann, had personally developed the Obersalzberg complex in the Bavarian Alps around Hitler’s Berghof.
Hitler lived a short walk from the Bormann house and watched the boy grow up across school holidays and family weekends. By the time Krönchen was 10, he believed completely in everything his godfather stood for. His mother, Gerda Buch, married Martin Bormann on September 2nd, 1929, when she was 19. Hitler himself was a witness at the wedding.
Over the following 14 years, she gave birth to 10 children, nine of whom survived infancy. In 1939, she received the Cross of Honor of the German Mother in the Gold Class. Each child carried an ideological signature. Heinrich Hugo, born in 1936, was named after Heinrich Himmler, his godfather.
A daughter christened Ilse in 1931 after Ilse Hess was hastily renamed Eika when Rudolf Hess flew to Britain in May 1941. Another son, Adolf, born in 1934, became Helmut at the same time. The family adjusted its register as the regime’s reputations rose and fell. Gerda was a committed anti-Semite and an admirer of Julius Streicher, publisher of Der Stürmer.
Letters published after the war 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 the actress Manja Behrens, she reportedly wrote approving the arrangement, suggesting the two women alternate years bearing his children so that he would always have a wife available. In 1940, at age 10, the boy entered formal Nazi schooling at the Nazi Party Academy at Matrei am Brenner in the Tyrol, an institution conceived by chief ideologist Alfred Rosenberg to train a future ruling class. By April 1945, his father was in the Berlin bunker, his mother and eight siblings were still at the Obersalzberg, and he was at the academy, 15 years old and waiting for orders that were no longer coming.
Within weeks, the academy closed. The Obersalzberg was burning, and his father had vanished from the bunker. On April 25th, 1945, United States Army Air Forces bombed the Obersalzberg, destroying much of the complex. Within hours, Gerda packed what she could carry and left the mountain with eight of her children, heading south.
Their route took them through Innsbruck and over the Brenner Pass into German-occupied South Tyrol. After a brief stop in the village of St. Christina, they settled in nearby Wolkenstein in a property called Villa Stievia. Gerda adopted the alias Bergmann, and the children were registered at the local school under the same false name.
Two streets away, Margarete Himmler was hiding with her daughter under similar pretenses. Her husband was already dead. Martin Bormann’s last bunker diary entry was a single word, “Ausbruchversuch,” or breakout attempt, written on May 2nd, 1945, as the Soviets closed in on the Chancellery. He left the bunker that night with a small group and was never seen alive again.
For decades, his disappearance would generate sightings across South America. The truth lay closer to home but would take 27 years to surface. By mid-1945, Gerda had been identified, arrested, and brought to the Untermais prison in Merano. American and British intelligence officers questioned her for days about her husband’s whereabouts, his contacts, and the regime’s final movements.
She had no useful information to give them. In the autumn of 1945, she became seriously ill, and doctors at the Bolzano Hospital diagnosed advanced abdominal cancer. Her children were placed under the care of trusted intermediaries while she remained under guard. Gerda Bormann died on March 23rd, 1946.
She was 36. Her body was buried in the Merano military cemetery in grave 610. The youngest Bormann child, Volker, born in September 1943, died later that same year. Of the nine children who had survived to the end of the war, eight were left without either parent.
On October 1st, 1946, the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg sentenced Martin Bormann to death in absentia. The eldest son, 16 years old, did not yet know his mother was dead. The Nazi Party Academy at Matrei am Brenner had closed its doors on April 15th, 1945, ten days before the air raid on the Obersalzberg. The students were sent home.
Krönchen, 15 at the time, was advised by a party functionary in Munich 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 had crossed back into Austria, the war was effectively over. He ended up stranded in Salzburg.
There, a senior party official supplied him with false identity papers and arranged for him to take shelter with a Catholic farmer named Nikolaus Hohenwarter at a remote property in the Salzburg Alps. He shed his name and his history. He worked the farm and attended mass on Sundays with the family. To his neighbors, he was 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 it to Hohenwarter and confessed his true identity. Hohenwarter informed the local priest, who in turn contacted the rector of the church of Maria Kirchental. The rector took the boy into his care. He had been baptized Lutheran.
He converted to Catholicism. Soon after, American intelligence officers tracked him down, arrested him and an altar boy, and held him at Zell am See for several days of questioning. They were looking for his father. Convinced he genuinely knew nothing, they returned him to the parish.
The other surviving children followed quieter paths. Theodor Schmit, 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. Erika died in 1958, still in her 20s. The remaining siblings drifted into careers and marriages under the radar of public attention.
None of them pursued political roles, gave major interviews, or wrote memoirs. Only Krönchen went a different way. On July 26th, 1958, 28 years after his baptism with Hitler as godfather, he was ordained a Catholic priest in Innsbruck. In 1961, the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart sent him, then 31, to the newly independent Congo.
The country had descended into the conflict that would consume it for the rest of the decade. 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, born Rosemary, nursed him back to health. Their relationship deepened during his recovery. In the early 1970s, a period of mass departures from religious life across 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, he began speaking publicly about who he had been and who his father was. He joined Children of Perpetrators, Children of Victims in 1987, a reconciliation group founded by the Israeli psychologist Dan Bar-On.
Six years later, he traveled discreetly to Israel for a four-day symposium at Neve Shalom, 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 with The Spectator, 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. The father he had loved 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 on April 11th, 1973. In 1998, mitochondrial DNA testing comparing the skeleton with a living maternal relative confirmed the identification beyond dispute. On August 16th, 1999, Krönchen 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 he 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.
Austria’s Klasnic Commission, which investigated abuse within the Catholic Church, awarded the accuser compensation. He died in Herdecke on March 11th, 2013. He was 82.
The question of whether his redemption was real died with him.
