Martin Adolf Bormann
Encyclopedia
Martin Adolf Bormann is the eldest of ten children of Martin Bormann
Martin Bormann
Martin Ludwig Bormann was a prominent Nazi official. He became head of the Party Chancellery and private secretary to Adolf Hitler...

 and the godson of Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945...

.

Early life

He was born Martin Adolf Bormann, the first child of the head of the Nazi Party Chancellery and private secretary to Adolf Hitler. Martin Bormann
Martin Bormann
Martin Ludwig Bormann was a prominent Nazi official. He became head of the Party Chancellery and private secretary to Adolf Hitler...

 (1900–1945) and his wife Gerda Buch (1909–1946). Nicknamed Krönzi which is short for Kronprinz (German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

 for Crown prince
Crown Prince
A crown prince or crown princess is the heir or heiress apparent to the throne in a royal or imperial monarchy. The wife of a crown prince is also titled crown princess....

), he was an ardent young Nazi, attending the Nazi Party Academy of Matrei in the Tyrol from 1940 to 1945. On 15 April 1945, the school closed and young Martin was advised by a party functionary in Munich named Hummel to attempt to reach his mother in the occupied hamlet of Gröden, near Wolkenstein. Unable to get there, he found himself stranded in Salzburg where the Gauleiter provided him with false identity papers and he found hospitality with a Catholic farmer, Nikolaus Hohenwarter, at the Querleitnerhof, halfway up a mountain in the Salzburg Alps.

In the meantime, his mother, Gerda, was subjected to relentless interrogation (Lebert, p. 95) by officers of the CIC (Combined Intelligence Committee, the joint US-British intelligence body). She died of abdominal cancer (Lebert, p. 97) in the prison hospital at Meran on 23 April 1946. The following year, her teenage son, Martin learned of his mother's death from an article in the Salzburger Nachrichten and only then confessed his true identity to Nikolas Hohenwarter, who reported the information to his local priest at Weissbach, who, in turn, gave this the information to Father Regens of Maria Kirchtal, who promptly took the boy into his care. The young Bormann then converted to Catholicism.

While an altar boy at Maria Kirchtal, Martin was arrested by US intelligence and imprisoned at Zell am See for several days of interrogation before being returned to his parish. He stayed there until he moved to the Heart of Jesus Missionaries in Ingolstadt
Ingolstadt
Ingolstadt is a city in the Free State of Bavaria, in the Federal Republic of Germany. It is located along the banks of the Danube River, in the center of Bavaria. As at 31 March 2011, Ingolstadt had 125.407 residents...

. He had been able to resume contact with his eight brothers and sisters, all of whom, except for one sister, had been received into the Catholic Church.

Life as a priest

In 1947, he abandoned the Lutheranism
Lutheranism
Lutheranism is a major branch of Western Christianity that identifies with the theology of Martin Luther, a German reformer. Luther's efforts to reform the theology and practice of the church launched the Protestant Reformation...

 of his family and became a Roman Catholic. In 1953, he was ordained a priest
Priesthood (Catholic Church)
The ministerial orders of the Catholic Church include the orders of bishops, deacons and presbyters, which in Latin is sacerdos. The ordained priesthood and common priesthood are different in function and essence....

, serving in the Ordensgemeinschaft der Herz-Jesu-Missionare (Sacred Heart Fathers)
Missionaries of the Sacred Heart
The Missionaries of the Sacred Heart is a missionary congregation in the Latin Church,one of the 23 sui iuris churches which make up the Catholic Church led by the Bishop of Rome...

, in the Belgian Congo
Belgian Congo
The Belgian Congo was the formal title of present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo between King Leopold II's formal relinquishment of his personal control over the state to Belgium on 15 November 1908, and Congolese independence on 30 June 1960.-Congo Free State, 1884–1908:Until the latter...

 for many years.

Disaffected and under influence of the radical changes of the 1960s
1960s
The 1960s was the decade that started on January 1, 1960, and ended on December 31, 1969. It was the seventh decade of the 20th century.The 1960s term also refers to an era more often called The Sixties, denoting the complex of inter-related cultural and political trends across the globe...

, not least by the Second Vatican Council
Second Vatican Council
The Second Vatican Council addressed relations between the Roman Catholic Church and the modern world. It was the twenty-first Ecumenical Council of the Catholic Church and the second to be held at St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican. It opened under Pope John XXIII on 11 October 1962 and closed...

 and its spirit sweeping through the Church, he resigned the priesthood.

Life after the priesthood

Following a near-fatal injury in 1969 he was nursed back to health by a nun
Nun
A nun is a woman who has taken vows committing her to live a spiritual life. She may be an ascetic who voluntarily chooses to leave mainstream society and live her life in prayer and contemplation in a monastery or convent...

, (Sister) Cordula, who then also renounced her vows
Religious vows
Religious vows are the public vows made by the members of religious communities pertaining to their conduct, practices and views.In the Buddhist tradition, in particular within the Mahayana and Vajrayana tradition, many different kinds of religious vows are taken by the lay community as well as by...

. They were married in 1971.

He became a teacher of theology
Theology
Theology is the systematic and rational study of religion and its influences and of the nature of religious truths, or the learned profession acquired by completing specialized training in religious studies, usually at a university or school of divinity or seminary.-Definition:Augustine of Hippo...

 and retired in 1992. As recently as 2001, he toured schools in Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 and Austria
Austria
Austria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...

, speaking about the horrors of the Third Reich, and has even visited Israel
Israel
The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...

, meeting with Holocaust
The Holocaust
The Holocaust , also known as the Shoah , was the genocide of approximately six million European Jews and millions of others during World War II, a programme of systematic state-sponsored murder by Nazi...

 survivors.

At the beginning of 2011, Bormann was accused of allegedly subjecting a former pupil at an Austrian Catholic boarding school to violent and protracted sexual abuse during his time there working as a priest and schoolmaster, more than 50 years previously. Bormann has denied knowledge of the events.
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