When anyone mentions the name Martin Bormann most baby-boomers will know who he was, they will also be quick to tell you that; while there was a wild goose-chase across the globe to find him, he certainly died in 1945, proved they say, by the finding of his bones in Berlin in 1972.
Two Nazi witnesses at the Nuremberg trials testified to the fact that they had seen Bormann and fellow Nazi, Dr Ludwig Stumpfegger dead, in the vicinity of the Weidendamm Bridge and the Lehrter train station in Berlin, only hours after fleeing the bunker – where Hitler had supposedly put a bullet through his brain. One witness going as far as to say that he had even seen Bormann’s dead ”moonlit face”.
From 1945 the hunt for Martin Bormann was on. During the confusion of those early post war years, the West German government kept the heat up, but UKUSA’s ‘hunt’ was only, If anything, lukewarm. A concentrated search effort had been made in 1945 around the site , of the supposed ‘moonlit’ scenario of Bormann and Stumpfegger, with who he was last seen alive. With the advantage of hordes of allied troops on the ground to co-ordinate a thorough search near and around the Lehrter station in Berlin, no stone was left unturned. The same was done independently by a Russian recon group, after Lieutenant General Konstantin Telegin, of the Soviet 5th Shock Army was delivered of a diary said to be of Bormann’s, found near the same site.
In those early post war years, it was not yet a ‘cold case’, with memories still fresh and the ground still soft. Any such corpses although decomposed, would have certainly been on, or near the surface and easily identifiable with the minimum of forensics; but not as much as a scrap of flesh was found of either man. At least they had some disputable charred remains of Hitler, but the bodies of Bormann and Stumpfegger had literally ‘vanished’ into thin air, along with the Nazi loot. (more...)
