Hitler’s personal secretary Martin Bormann was born on June 17, 1900. He was certainly one of the most powerful men in the Third Reich, competing even with Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels and Hermann Göring. Bormann was almost always in the immediate vicinity of Hitler, not in the field, so he could control the flow of information coming to the Führer, as well as give orders that came from the Führer. Bormann is known to have influenced Hitler’s conception of what was going on around him, for example in the famous case of Göring’s alleged betrayal of the Führer.
Martin Bormann was born in the predominantly Protestant town of Wegeleben in Germany, between Magdeburg and Göttingen. So Bormann was born into a Protestant (Lutheran) family. However, it later became distinctly anticlerical. He advocated a sharp showdown with the churches, Slavs and Jews.
In the Nazi Station (NSDAP) Bormann gained distinctly sonic positions. He received the Reichsleiter party rank (the highest rank in the NSDAP after the Führer). He also became head of the Party Office and then the Führer’s personal secretary. He had a very strong influence on the appointment of civil servants and until 1943 he largely controlled the situation in the domestic political field. There was also reportedly the opinion that by his influence on Hitler, Bormann was in fact secretly the true ruler of Germany.
