Summer 1940, Obersalzberg, Bavaria. While Europe burned under Nazi conquest, life around Adolf Hitler’s mountain retreat still resembled an aristocratic holiday resort. The wives of the Nazi elite spent their days among Alpine gardens, afternoon coffee, and evening film screenings while their husbands oversaw war, occupation, and mass murder across the continent. Among these women, one held a position unlike almost any other.
She had known Hitler since childhood, had grown up listening to anti-Semitic ideology at her father’s table, and soon her husband would become the man controlling access to the Führer himself. Her name was Gerda Bormann. Gerda Bormann was born Gerda Buch on the 23rd of October 1909 in Konstanz, a city on the western shore of Lake Constance, then part of the German Empire. She was the eldest of four children born to Walter Buch, a career officer and committed nationalist, and his wife, Elsa Plötz.
Her father had served as an officer throughout the First World War and never accepted Germany’s defeat in 1918. By the end of 1922, he had joined the Nazi Party among its very earliest members. In 1927, he became chairman of the tribunal of the Nazi Party, responsible for internal discipline and ideological enforcement across the movement. Gerda’s father was a personal friend of Adolf Hitler, who visited the Buch household regularly throughout the 1920s.
Gerda grew up watching the Führer take meals at the family table, and her father did not spare his views on the Jewish question at home. He was known for declarations such as “Jews are not people, they are putrefaction. ” This was not extremism to Gerda, but the moral atmosphere of her childhood, absorbed before she had any capacity or chance to question it. After completing her education, Gerda trained to become a kindergarten teacher.
She came of age in a household where future leaders of the Nazi movement were regular guests. When she was 19, she met Martin Bormann, a Nazi party organizer nine years her senior who had already served prison time for his involvement in the murder of a German schoolteacher, Walther Kadow. Despite her father’s initial reluctance over Bormann’s criminal record, Walter Buch gave his consent. On the 2nd of September 1929, with Adolf Hitler and Rudolf Hess as witnesses, the marriage took place.
The union was not simply a personal event. It placed Martin Bormann at the center of a family network already embedded at the highest levels of the Nazi movement and gave him regular access to Hitler through the Buch household. He understood exactly what he was gaining, and from the moment of the wedding, Bormann’s ascent in the Nazi movement accelerated. By 1933, the year Adolf Hitler became German Chancellor, he was secretary to Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess.
In October of that year, he was elevated to Reichsleiter, the second highest position in the party hierarchy. Gerda watched all of this from close proximity and celebrated it without reservation. She believed in the Nazi movement and was doing everything to support it. Between 1930 and 1943, she bore ten children.
The first, born on the 14th of April 1930, was named Martin Adolf after his godfather Adolf Hitler. Subsequent children were named after other figures in the inner Nazi circle: Heinrich Hugo after his godfather Heinrich Himmler, and Rudolf Gerhard after Rudolf Hess. One twin daughter, Errengard, died shortly after birth of bovine tuberculosis because Bormann insisted they drink raw milk for health reasons. When Rudolf Hess flew to Scotland in 1941, his name became toxic overnight, and those children named after him and his wife were renamed Ilka and Helmut.
A tenth child, Volker, was born in September 1943. For bearing more than eight children for the Reich, Gerda was awarded the Cross of Honor of the German Mother in its gold grade. The Nazi state had reduced women to biological production, and Gerda Bormann embodied that reduction completely and willingly. She wore traditional German dress, submitted publicly to her husband’s authority, and presented herself as the model National Socialist wife and mother.
The family lived at the Obersalzberg in Bavaria, the Alpine complex that Martin Bormann himself had transformed from 1935 onward into a retreat and command center for Hitler and his inner circle. Bormann bought up surrounding farmland until the complex stretched across ten square kilometers, or about 3. 9 square miles, commissioning roads, barracks, guest houses, and the famous Kehlsteinhaus, the Eagle’s Nest. He moved his own family into a house within sight of the Berghof, Adolf Hitler’s holiday home in the Obersalzberg.
For Gerda, this closeness to Hitler was part of her entire adult life. Her children played within reach of the men who were ordering mass murder across occupied Europe. The domestic reality of this life was considerably less ceremonious. Martin Bormann was crude and domineering.
He was known among visitors to the Obersalzberg for whistling to summon his wife, as one might call a dog. He drank heavily, flew into rages over domestic matters, and according to some, resorted to physical violence against Gerda and the children in moments of uncontrolled rage. He allegedly beat two of his children with a whip because they were afraid of the large dog, and kicked another for falling into a puddle. In public, he subjected Gerda to humiliations that embarrassed guests.
Bormann also conducted a long-running affair with the actress Manja Behrens, spending more time with her during the war years than with his own family. Gerda’s response was not grief or accusation, but an act of ideological rationalization. In a letter to her husband, she wrote, “See to it that one year she has a child, and next year I have a child, so that you will always have a wife who is serviceable. ” She went even farther.
In February 1944, she wrote formally to advocate for what she called “Volksnot Ehe,” emergency state polygamy, arguing that war losses made a radical restructuring of marriage necessary, with every man of sufficient worth legally entitled to multiple wives who would bear children in rotation. The word adultery, she proposed, should be struck from German usage entirely. In these views, she was more radical than many other Nazis. The same letters overflow with violent anti-Semitic language.
Gerda wrote about Jews with a venom matching anything her husband committed to paper. She was an admirer of Julius Streicher, the editor of the anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda newspaper Der Stürmer and one of the most rabid Jew-baiters in the entire Nazi leadership. She raised her children in a household that had explicitly rejected Christianity as incompatible with National Socialism. The eldest children had been baptized as a formality, the first with Hitler as godfather, but subsequent children received no baptism at all.
Her son, Martin Adolf, later described a household shaped above all by racial doctrine and Nazi ideological discipline, in which compassion was dismissed as weakness and the children were raised to see themselves as the biological elite of the Nazi state. Throughout these years, the man whose position gave Gerda all of this power was constructing the administrative machinery of genocide. Bormann had been involved in anti-Jewish measures from the earliest years of the regime. After Hess’s flight to Scotland on the 10th of May 1941, Bormann assumed control of the party chancellery, and he answered for his actions only to Hitler.
He signed the decree of the 31st of May 1941, extending the Nuremberg laws to the annexed eastern territories in Europe. After the May decree and the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, the chancellery received reports from the Einsatzgruppen, the SS mobile killing units operating in the east, as they murdered hundreds of thousands of Jews through the summer and autumn of 1941. Legal and administrative questions flowing from the Wannsee Conference of January 1942, at which the Final Solution was formally coordinated, were shared with the party chancellery, rendering it and its head complicit in everything that followed. On the 12th of April 1943, Hitler officially appointed Bormann as his personal secretary, giving him de facto control over all domestic matters in Germany.
Martin Bormann was one of the greatest initiators of the Holocaust. Gerda knew about her husband’s work and celebrated every step of his advancement in the mass murder. But at the end, the war she supported came also to her doorstep. On the 25th of April 1945, British and American bombers struck the Obersalzberg in a heavy raid that destroyed much of the complex.
Gerda fled south the same day with her children, crossing into Italy and making her way to the village of Wolkenstein in South Tyrol. Martin Bormann remained with Hitler in the Führerbunker in Berlin until the very end. He witnessed Hitler’s marriage to Eva Braun, was present in the bunker when Hitler committed suicide on the 30th of April, and fled the bunker on the 1st of May. He died that same night attempting to cross Soviet lines in Berlin, though his fate would not be confirmed for decades.
His remains were identified through DNA analysis only in 1998. Allied authorities located Gerda in Wolkenstein and arrested her. She was interrogated for several days in prison, permitted no visitors, and allowed to write no letters. In the autumn of 1945, she was transferred to a hospital in the Italian city of Merano, where doctors diagnosed her with uterine cancer.
She died on the 23rd of March 1946 and was buried in the German military cemetery at Merano, sharing a grave with a German soldier, Horst Bräker, at plot number 610. She did not die directly from the cancer, but from mercury poisoning caused by her treatment. Gerda’s father, Walter Buch, was classified in denazification proceedings as a Hauptschuldiger, a main offender, and he committed suicide on the 12th of November 1949. Her surviving children, who were in Italy with her, were left in the care of the clergyman Theodor Schmöltz, who later adopted them.
The eldest child, Martin Adolf, was ordained a priest in 1959, worked as a missionary in Africa, and spent the rest of his life reckoning publicly with what his parents had believed and done. Despite that, he was accused of crimes himself. In 2011, a former pupil at an Austrian Catholic boarding school accused him of having raped him as a 12-year-old when Bormann was working there as a priest and schoolmaster in the early 1960s. Other former pupils alleged severe physical violence had been used against them and others.
Gerda Bormann herself never faced trial and never publicly accounted for the ideology she had embraced so willingly. Yet the surviving letters leave little doubt about her beliefs. She was not a passive bystander living in the shadow of powerful men, but a committed Nazi who accepted and defended the racial worldview of the regime even within the most intimate sphere: family life. Her story is a reminder that the Nazi system was sustained not only by men who issued orders and organized mass murder, but also by those who normalized its ideas within homes and everyday life.
Gerda Bormann was 36 years old when she died.
