The son of Adolf Hitler’s private secretary was born on April 14th, 1930, and received the name Adolf Martin Bormann. Hitler himself served as the boy’s godfather. At home, the family called him Kruncy, a nickname derived from the German word for Crown Prince. Twenty-eight years later, he was ordained a Catholic priest.
Kruncy spent his early childhood on the Obersalzberg, a private complex in the Bavarian Alps developed by his father, Martin Bormann, around Hitler’s Berghof residence. The compound housed guarded approaches, villas for senior officers, and a kindergarten for the children of the regime’s elite. Hitler lived a short walk from the Bormann house, and the young boy spent school holidays and weekends in his godfather’s company. By the time Kruncy was ten years old, he believed completely in everything Hitler and his father stood for.
Martin Bormann had married Gerda Buch on September 2nd, 1929. She was nineteen at the time, the daughter of senior party judge Walter Buch. Hitler had been a witness at the wedding. Over the following fourteen years, Gerda gave birth to ten children.
Nine survived infancy. In 1939, she received the Cross of Honor of the German Mother in the Gold Class, awarded to mothers of eight or more children. Each of the children carried an ideological signature. Heinrich Hugo, born in 1936, was named after Heinrich Himmler, his godfather.
A daughter christened Ilsa after Ilsa Hess was renamed Eika when Rudolf Hess flew to Britain in May 1941. Adolf, born in 1934, became Helmut at the same time. Gerda was no quiet wife. She was a committed anti-Semite and an admirer of Julius Streicher, publisher of the virulently anti-Jewish newspaper Der Stürmer.
Letters published after the war revealed she had advocated a state-sanctioned system of multiple marriage, under which approved men would father children with several women at once. Kruncy entered formal Nazi schooling at age ten. 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 remained on the Obersalzberg, and Kruncy was at the academy, fifteen years old and waiting for orders that never came. Within weeks, the academy had closed, the Obersalzberg had been bombed, and his father had vanished. On April 25th, 1945, United States Army Air Forces bombed the Obersalzberg. The raid destroyed much of the complex Martin 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 route took them through Innsbruck and over the Brenner Pass into German-occupied South Tyrol. Their first stop was the village of St. Christina in the Val Gardena, already occupied by a Wehrmacht unit.
They moved on to nearby Wolkenstein and settled 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. Martin Bormann’s last bunker diary entry was a single word: “Ausbruchversuch,” meaning 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.
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 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. 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.
Gerda Bormann died on March 23rd, 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, 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. His eldest son, sixteen years old, did not yet know his mother was dead. On April 15th, 1945, ten days before the air raid on the Obersalzberg, the Nazi Party Academy at Matrei am Brenner closed its doors.
Kruncy 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, and by the time he had crossed back into Austria, the war was effectively over. He ended up stranded in Salzburg.
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.
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 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 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 into the Catholic Church their parents had despised. Erika died in 1958, still in her twenties, without ever knowing a settled adult life. The remaining siblings 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. On July 26th, 1958, twenty-eight years after his baptism with Hitler as godfather, Kruncy was ordained a Catholic priest in Innsbruck. In 1961, the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart sent him, then thirty-one, to the newly independent Congo.
The country had declared independence from Belgium the previous year and was descending into conflict. 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, he began speaking publicly about who he had been and who his father was.
He joined a reconciliation group called Children of Perpetrators, Children of Victims in 1987, founded by 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, 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. His father 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 confirmed the identification beyond dispute. On August 16th, 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 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. Kruncy died in Herdecke on March 11th, 2013.
He was 82.