Career
He served in World War I as an artilleryman on the western front. Bormann joined the Nazi Party in 1925, in 1930 was placed in charge of the "special fund" for political propaganda, and in 1933 became commander of the party's Brown House headquarters at Munich. He checked the list of party members to be liquidated in the 1934 purge and the list of army officers to be retired in 1938. In the Nazi secret police Bormann was chief of the Gestapo section, charged with the surveillance of party leaders, including even Göring and Hess. He replaced Hess in 1941 as Deputy Führer, and after Hitler and Himmler was the most powerful man in Nazi Germany. In 1943 he became Hitler's secretary, and on Apr. 29, 1945, he was appointed a party minister and executor of Hitler's will. As the Russians advanced on Berlin, Bormann's voice was heard over the radio from Hitler's headquarters broadcasting party orders and proclamations. The Russians failed to find him when they captured the chancellery. He was convicted, in absentia, Oct. 1, 1946, in the war crimes trials at Nürnberg, Germany, and sentenced to death. In 1973 a West German court certified that a skeleton found at a Berlin construction site was that of Bormann.