What Happened to Martin Bormann ?
At the end of April 1945, Hitler killed himself in his bunker. Some senior Nazi dignitaries are arrested, Joseph Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda, commits suicide with his wife and six children. Martin Bormann, one of the leaders of the Nazi Party and close to Hitler, remains nowhere to be found.
Dead or escaped?
From November 20, 1945 to October 1, 1946, a historic trial took place in Nuremberg, where 24 members of the National Socialist Party or leaders of the Third Reich were tried. At the end of the trial, Bormann was sentenced to death, along with 11 other Nazi dignitaries. The sentence is pronounced by custom: the accused did not appear in court.
Bormann was appointed to the leadership of the Nazi Party in January 1942, which gave him immense power. He retained this post until the fall of the Third Reich. He is a man whose brutality is recognized by the Nazis themselves, one of the regime's most hated figures. And, above all, he is close to Hitler. He is present in the bunker when the Führer ends his life on April 29, after appointing him as his executor. On the night of May 1 to 2, 1945, the people crammed into the underground network around the Chancellery attempted a massive escape. Many of them manage to get out of the surrounded capital. Is Martin Bormann one of these?
Some of his escapees say he is dead, but conflicting testimony abounds. For example, some claim to have seen Bormann die near a burning "Tiger" tank. The versions of the witnesses are in fact too diverse to convince. The Nuremberg Tribunal condemns Bormann as if he were alive, and Jewish organizations set out to find him.
The mad run of Martin Bormann
As soon as the Third Reich surrendered in May, the Allies started looking for the main Nazi and SS leaders. But their research, in a Germany in chaos, is difficult and many officials of the Nazi regime manage to flee through different channels. In 1968, Michael Bar-Zohar, journalist and former member of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, believed he could reconstruct Bormann’s route after careful investigation. According to him, after May 2, 1945, thanks to the Die Schleuse (Lock) network, the former Nazi leader left Berlin with false papers and went to Flensburg, then to the castle-hospital of Grosten, in Denmark. He would then have returned to the South, via the Brenner Pass. Passed to Italy, where he would have found refuge in convents, he would then have reached Spain. At the end of 1947, he would have left for Argentina and settled there, in Parana, until 1951.
Given several times for mortification
On that date, warned that secret agents were looking for him, he would have left for Brazil where there were, then as now, many German colonies. An Israeli agent, a former member of the Irgun, the Israeli secret service, manages to track down the German. But this one, who knows how to change hiding places whenever necessary, escapes him at the last minute. Bormann's trail was then lost for several years.
New clues emerge in 1959: a Paraguayan doctor found by Bar-Zohar claims to have treated, in Asuncion, a man whom he recognized as Hitler's former faithful. The latter would then be returned to Mato Grosso. The announcements of the death of the Nazi follow one another from this date. In 1960 he was said to have been killed by a Jewish doctor, without any evidence to confirm the information. Shortly after, he was said to have died of natural causes.
On December 7, 1962, the major news agencies again broadcast the news of Martin Bormann's death from stomach cancer. They even indicate the place where he is buried. There is no need for an autopsy to uncover the deception: the body exhumed is that of a Guarani Indian. If we are to believe Michael Bar-Zohar's investigation, Bormann would therefore have lived in Mato Grosso, a huge jungle interspersed with swamps and crossed only by two roads that are easy to monitor. He would have been protected there by powerful Nazi organizations in South America.
Nazi "hunters"
At the end of the war, the hunt for the former Nazis is organized. Within the British army is formed a Jewish brigade of young fighters, "the Avengers", which operates clandestinely in Europe and summarily executes any Nazis who are discovered. But the orders of the Haganah, a Jewish paramilitary organization which aspires to a certain respectability, oblige the members of this brigade to suspend their operations.
Nazi "hunters" then take over. A survivor of Mauthausen, Simon Wiesenthal created a Documentation Center in Vienna which gathered archives on the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis. With little means, they pursue former executioners around the world and, when they discover one, they report it to the appropriate authorities for trial or request for his extradition.
The Israeli secret service also continued similar searches. Their greatest achievement was the kidnapping in 1960 of Adolf Eichmann, former head of the Jewish Bureau of the Gestapo. Argentina, where he had settled, had refused his extradition. Tried by the Supreme Court of Israel, Eichmann is sentenced to death and hanged.
