The eldest son of Adolf Hitler’s private secretary Martin Bormann, the man baptized with the Führer as his godfather and known within the family as “Kruncy,” died in a German care home in 2013 after a life that took him from the inner circle of the Nazi regime to a Catholic priesthood, a mission in post-colonial Africa, and finally to allegations of sexual 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮 that he was never fit to answer.
Martin Adolf Bormann, born on April 14, 1930, into the household that produced the paperwork of the Holocaust, was 82 years old when he died in Herdecke on March 11, 2013. His death closed the strangest of all the biographies produced by the families of Hitler’s inner circle, a life that began in a mountain compound built around the Führer’s Bavarian retreat and ended in a dementia ward, with the question of whether his later repentance was genuine left unresolved.
The story of the Bormann children after the fall of the Third Reich is a story of aliases, false papers, scattered siblings, and a mother who died in an Italian military hospital before she could see any of it play out. It is also a story that only became fully visible decades later, when the eldest son began speaking publicly about a childhood spent believing every word of the propaganda that had surrounded him.
Martin Bormann had married Gerda Buch on September 2, 1929, in a ceremony at which Hitler himself served as a witness. She was 19, the daughter of Walter Buch, a senior party judge. Over the following 14 years she gave birth to 10 children.
Nine survived infancy. In 1939 she received the Cross of Honor of the German Mother in the Gold Class, an award reserved for mothers of eight or more children.
Each child carried an ideological signature. The firstborn took his first name from the Führer and was called Adolf Martin. Heinrich Hugo, born in 1936, was named after Heinrich Himmler, who served as his godfather.
A daughter christened Ilsa in 1931 after Ilsa Hess was hastily renamed Eika when Rudolf Hess flew to Britain in May 1941. A son born Adolf in 1934 became Helmut at the same time. The family adjusted its register as the reputations of the regime’s senior figures rose and fell.
Gerda Bormann was no quiet wife. She was a committed anti-Semite and an admirer of Julius Streicher, the publisher of the virulently anti-Jewish newspaper Der Stürmer. Letters published after the war revealed her advocating a state-sanctioned system of multiple marriage, a so-called Volksnoter, under which approved men would father children with several women at once.
When her husband began an 𝒶𝒻𝒻𝒶𝒾𝓇 with the actress Manja Behrens, Gerda is reported to have written approving the arrangement, suggesting the two women alternate years bearing his children so that he would always have a wife available.
The children spent their early summers on the Obersalzberg in the Bavarian Alps, the private complex Martin Bormann had personally developed around Hitler’s Berghof. There were guarded approaches, villas for ranking officers, and a kindergarten for the children of the regime’s most senior families. Hitler lived a short walk from the Bormann house.
He had stood at the front when the boy was baptized in 1930 and had given him his first name.
By the time Kruncy was 10 years old, he believed completely in everything his godfather stood for. He entered formal Nazi schooling at that age. From 1940 to 1945 he attended 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 on the Obersalzberg. Klaus Bormann, as the eldest son was formally known, was at the academy, 15 years old and waiting for orders that were no longer coming.
Within weeks the academy had closed, the Obersalzberg was burning, and his father had vanished from the bunker.
On April 25, 1945, the United States Army Air Forces bombed the Obersalzberg. The raid destroyed much of the complex Bormann had spent years developing. Within hours, Gerda packed what she could carry and left the mountain with eight of her children, heading south.
The eldest son was still at the academy in the Tyrol. Her husband was in Berlin.
The route took them through Innsbruck and over the Brenner Pass into German-occupied South Tyrol. Their first stop, in the village of St. Christina in the Val Gardena, was already occupied by a Wehrmacht unit.
They moved on to nearby Wolkenstein, around 20 kilometers northeast of Bolzano, and settled in a property called Villa Stievia. Gerda adopted the alias Bergmann. The children were registered at the local school under the same false name.
Two streets away, in the Casa al Monte, 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,” meaning breakout attempt, written on May 2, 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 it would take 27 years to surface.
Gerda did not stay hidden for long. By mid-1945 she had been identified, arrested, and brought to the Untermais prison in Merano. American and British intelligence officers from the Combined Intelligence Committee 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. As a wife and a mother, she had played no role in the regime’s operational decisions.
In the autumn of 1945 she became seriously ill. Doctors at the Bolzano Hospital diagnosed advanced abdominal cancer. At British insistence she was transferred to the war hospital in Merano for treatment.
Her children were placed under the care of trusted intermediaries while she remained under guard, with visits restricted and correspondence blocked. She never recovered.
Gerda Bormann died on March 23, 1946. She was 36 years old. Her body was buried in the Merano military cemetery in grave 610, sharing the plot with a German soldier named Horst Brüger.
The youngest Bormann child, Volker, born in September 1943, had 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 1, 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.
On April 15, 1945, 10 days before the air raid on the Obersalzberg, the Nazi Party Academy at Matrei am Brenner closed its doors. The students were sent home. Kruncy, 15 years old at the time, was advised by a party functionary in Munich named Hummel 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 Hoenwarter at the Koglreithnerhof, a remote property halfway up a mountain in the Salzburg Alps. Kruncy 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 Hoenwarter and confessed his true identity. Hoenwarter informed the local priest of Weissbach bei Lofer, who in turn contacted the rector of the church of Maria Kirchenthal. The rector took the boy into his care.
Kruncy 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.
In Ingolstadt he joined the religious congregation of the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart and began studies toward the priesthood. 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 of them into the Catholic Church their parents had despised.
Erika died in 1958, still in her 20s, without ever knowing a settled adult life. The remaining siblings, Irmgard, Helmut, Heiner, Eva, Uta, Gerda, and Fred Hartmut, drifted into careers and marriages under the radar of public attention. None of them pursued political roles, gave major interviews, ran for office, or wrote memoirs.
The Bormann name in post-war Germany was something to be lived past rather than carried forward.
Only Kruncy went a different way. On July 26, 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 declared independence from Belgium the previous year and was descending 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.
The early 1970s were 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, Kruncy 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 11, 1973. In 1998, mitochondrial DNA testing comparing the skeleton with a living maternal relative confirmed the identification beyond dispute. On August 16, 1999, Kruncy 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 Kruncy 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.
Kruncy died in Herdecke on March 11, 2013. He was 82. The question of whether his redemption was real died with him.
The fate of the Bormann family stands as one of the most complete records of what happened to the households of Hitler’s closest lieutenants after the regime collapsed. While the wives of other senior Nazis were captured, interrogated, or took their own lives, Gerda Bormann died in custody of cancer, leaving eight children to be raised by Catholic clergymen who gradually converted them away from the ideology their parents had built their lives around.
The children who survived into adulthood never sought public attention. They married, worked, and raised families under names that carried no echo of the Chancellery or the Obersalzberg. Only the eldest, the boy Hitler had named and blessed, chose to speak, and when he did, he spoke as a priest to schoolchildren about the propaganda he had once believed.
Historians who have studied the family note that the Bormann children were among the youngest of the Nazi elite’s offspring to be left entirely orphaned by the war. Their father’s body lay unidentified in Berlin for 27 years while his son studied for the priesthood in Austria and Italy. Their mother’s grave in Merano, shared with a German soldier, remained largely unvisited for decades.
The archival record of Gerda Bormann’s interrogation, held in Allied intelligence files, shows a woman who insisted she knew nothing of her husband’s operational role and who was described by her interrogators as cooperative but uninformed. Whether that was true or simply the performance of a wife who had spent 14 years inside the regime’s innermost domestic circle remains a matter of historical debate.
What is not in dispute is the trajectory of the eldest son. Baptized with Adolf Hitler standing as his godfather, ordained a Catholic priest 28 years later, sent to Africa as a missionary, married after leaving the priesthood, and finally accused in old age of abusing the children he had taught, Martin Adolf Bormann lived long enough to see his father’s remains identified by DNA and his own reputation consumed by allegations he could no longer answer.
He died in a German town far from the Bavarian mountain where he had spent his early summers, the last surviving link to a household that had once stood a short walk from the Führer’s villa. His siblings, scattered across post-war Europe under other people’s care, outlived him in silence.