Martin Bormann Junior

The son of Hitler’s private secretary, Martin Adolf Bormann, was one of ten Nazi children, heavily indoctrinated pretty much since birth. He recalled the moment the radio announced that Hitler had committed suicide in Berlin, and that “all was now lost”.

Young Bormann was in the Hitler Jugend at the time, a teenager, surrounded by other teenagers, each of them indoctrinated to a ridiculous degree. Several of the boys looked at each other. Intensely. Sadly. Then walked out of the door of their barracks, onto the field, and shot themselves through the temple or the roof of their mouths.

To kill oneself was consider the highest honor, following their ‘great leader’, a bit of a German bushido warrior thing. Soldiers and officers, even young kids, killed themselves by the thousands out of loyalty to Hitler and the Third Reich…

Martin junior and his best friend looked at each other. Considered, for a brief moment, to kill themselves as well, as their friends had just done. Then they shook their heads, threw their guns, and walked out of the building together. They decided to live.

Bormann decided not only to live, that day, but to unlearn his indoctrination, step by step. He eventually became a Catholic priest and a fervent anti-fascist. So did many other people who grew up during Nazi-Germany — older Germans born during the 1930s and 1940s are among the most fiercely anti-Nazi people you can find, anywhere. You may have read about the madness; they lived through it.