Few important Third Reich personalities have been subjected to greater flood of tabloid journalism over the years that Martin Bormann However,  the overall body of writing sounds as if it were part of a therapy program in an asylum.It might be instructive to consider, briefly, the post-war career of Bormann, the former Reichsleiter and powerful Secretary to the Führer,  because it can serve as a comparison between historical writing and journalism. Creative writers assertions to the contrary, the two are not the same and the latter merely obscures the former. The basic facts concerning the fate of Martin Bormann are that on May 1, 1945, those persons remaining in the Chancellery bunker complex made an attempt to escape the underground confines of Hitler’s last headquarters. Among these were Bormann, Dr. Ludwig Stumpfegger, Hitler’s last doctor, Artur Axmann, leader of the Hitler Youth and others.They emerged from the relative safety of the bunkers to witness Soviet troops fighting the defenders of Berlin. The two Soviet generals leading this attack, Marshals Konev and Chukov, had both been charged by Stalin with the task of conquering the capital, but instead, attacked each other to impress Stalin. The streets were littered with rubble, the corpses of German and Soviet military personnel, and civilians who had tried to venture out of their hiding places in search of better shelter and food.

The escape party broke into smaller groups; one consisted of Dr. Stumpfegger and Martin Bormann. Sometime around midnight, Axmann came across the corpses of both men lying by the railroad bridge at the Invaliden Street. Neither man showed any sign of violence, but Axmann had no time to conduct a thorough investigation. After the cessation of hostilities, the Soviets had German civilians remove the corpses in the streets and bury them as quickly as possible. A number of persons came forward later to state that the bodies of Stumpfegger and Bormann were buried on the grounds of an exhibition hall near the railroad bridge. Searches were conducted but no bodies were located.

Bormann was charged, tried at Nuremberg and sentenced to death in absentia and in the ensuing years, a great manhunt for Bormann was conducted, mainly in the media.

Cataloging the various sightings of Bormann would assume epic proportions; but suffice it to say that the missing Reichsleiter was seen in Munich, Rome, Moscow, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil, Chile, Spain, Denmark, Sweden, Portugal, Japan and Panama. He was disguised as a farmer, a Franciscan monk, an export businessman and the owner of a bowling alley in Buenos Aires. He escaped from the ruins of Berlin on foot, in a helicopter, in a boat, a floatplane and possibly even on a donkey. He fled to Denmark or the Bavarian Alps at the same time and from there began his world cruise that so occupied various persons over the years.

Dr. Fritz Bauer, a Jewish attorney and former concentration camp inmate, became the postwar Attorney General for the State of Hesse and launched a campaign to track down and punish his former jailers. Bauer was successful in locating a number of minor players but the famous Bormann was always just one step ahead of him. His favorite phrase, given at numerous press conferences was, “We are now closing in on Bormann and will have him in custody soon.”

As the police will testify, whenever a particularly notorious murder has been committed, there are always a number of individuals with weak minds who come forward and confess. This is why the police always keep some details from their press releases and these details simply are not known to the spurious killers. A number of such individuals came forward from time to time to enrich the Sunday supplements and encourage writers like Ladislas Farago who claimed to have original postwar photographs of Bormann. When these proved to be fakes, Farago went on to other projects, leaving the field to Dr. Bauer and Simon Wiesenthal, an Austrian engineer who had also been incarcerated in a camp because he had the misfortune to be Jewish. Like the Attorney General, Wiesenthal was always just one step behind Bormann, but, the elusive man was constantly moving around, hidden in underground bunkers built by Nazi escapees deep inside various South American countries which these gentlemen claimed held more Third Reich leaders than the Nuremberg Party rallies.

Bauer and Wiesenthal were both motivated by a desire for revenge, but Bauer wished to try Bormann, and Wiesenthal was apparently far more interested in publicity and fund-raising. In the end, both they and a legion of tabloid journalists were to be disappointed. They never found a living Bormann, and their publishers, who would cheerfully print a street map of the lost continent of Atlantis with a perfectly straight face, began to look for other subjects such as flying saucer landings, plots by Martians to kill President Kennedy and Global Warming.

Although a living Bormann was never found, a dead one certainly was. On December 7/8, 1972, excavations at the site of the former exhibition hall uncovered two skeletons. They were located in the approximate area where the German gravediggers claimed they had put them in 1945. The remains were subjected to thorough testing by government pathologists and the final report indicated that without a doubt, these were the remains of Dr. Ludwig Stumpfegger and Martin Bormann. Quite naturally, journalists and other individuals with heavy investments in time or money were most unhappy about this closure of what had been a low-grade money machine.

The question arises that if Bormann had indeed been dead since May 1, 1945, who was running around the world in various guises, and positively identified by hundreds of absolutely trustworthy witnesses? Perhaps a simple explanation may be found in Müller’s comment about the witnesses that could be located through the medium of a cart full of cigarettes or perhaps the person seeking his few moments of fame and bribed with a bad dinner and cheap wine at a Buenos Aires restaurant might be a more likely suspect.         

Although Bormann has fallen off of the stage, rumors, backed up by more trustworthy witnesses have it that Bormann was rescued by a British intelligence team who were acting on the orders of Winston Churchill. Living safely in the English countryside, Bormann died several years ago and was buried in a secret, unknown grave in England. Martin Bormann now finds himself in good company, along with Lord Kitchener, Amelia Earhart, the Grand Duchess Anastasia of Russia, John Wilkes Booth and Elvis Presley, all of whom have been seen at various places, long after their deaths, by absolutely trustworthy witnesses.