The Secretary

Jochen von Lang, a reporter and editor of the German magazine Die Stern, has produced a straightforwardly factual account of the career of Martin Bormann, the faceless bureaucrat whose inexorable rise in Nazi party ranks seemed to place him for a moment at the pinnacle of Nazi power. Despite the book's overblown title, von Lang depicts Bormann for the most part as a pedestrian, yet ruthlessly ambitious man, in the end as much manipulated as he was manipulator; Indeed, there is something pathetic about Bormann's end: having at last inherited Hitler's party rank, he found he did not have the F(infinity)hrer's power; at last the heir to the Third Reich, he found that empire reduced to a pile of rubble. Bormann's instinct for power was a fawning one, and whatever terror he visited upon his subordinates, his own authority resided completely in Hitler; and Lang's account underlines Alan Bullock's conclusion that ""once separated from Hitler, Bormann was a political cypher."" But precisely because of his cypher's anonymity, Bormann quickly came to be thought of both as the eminence grise of the Third Reich and as the one top Nazi who had escaped from Germany and survived incognito to hatch plots for world conquest. In this respect, von Lang's account offers something new, for the author claims the lion's share of the responsibility for locating Bormann's remains, thus proving that Hitler's secretary died by suicide in the hellish days of May 1945 (a clear rebuttal to Farrago's 1974 Aftermath: Martin Bormann and the Fourth Reich). The Frankfurt State Prosecutor's report, which identifies the skeleton uncovered in 1972 as Bormann's, is included here as a valuable appendix. One major drawback, however, is the book's complete lack of footnotes.