Bormann-Buch, Gerda.

Bormann-Buch Gerda, born 23-10-1909 in Konstanz am Bodensee, the daughter, oldest of four children, of Supreme Nazi Party Judge and SS Obergruppenführer Walter Buch

. a career officer who came from a family of pharmacists and his wife Else Pleusser. (1887–1944). Her sister and brothers were Hans-Walter Buch, Lore Buch and Hermann Buch. Her parents brought up the children in the spirit of National Socialist ideology and anti-Semitism. She married Martin Bormann and bore him 10 children,

Adolf Martin Bormann (* 14. April 1930, † 11. März 2013; nickname „Krönzi“, called after his godfather Adolf Hitler, Ilse Bormann (* 9. Juli 1931–1958; the twins Ehrengard died shortly after birth. As Ilse was called after her godmother Ilse Heß, her name was changed after Rudolf Hess’s flight to England in 1941 to „Eike“, Irmgard Bormann (* 25. Juli 1933), Rudolf Gerhard Bormann (* 31. August 1934; called after Rudolf Heß, 1941 new name „Helmut“) Heinrich Hugo Bormann (* 13. Juni 1936; nickname „Heiner“, after his godfather Reichsheini Heinrich Himmler, Eva Ute Bormann (* 4. August 1938), Gerda Bormann (* 23. Oktober 1940), Fred Hartmut Bormann (* 4. März 1942) and Volker Bormann (* 18. September 1943–1946). She was honored with the Cross of Honour of the German Mother (Ehrenkreuz der Deutschen Mutter) was introduced by the Nazi party by Statutory Order on 16-12-1938. The gold award was given to mothers of eight or more children. The union with Gerda Buch propelled Bormann into the upper echelons of the Nazi Party. Gerda of a fervently Protestant and nationalist ex-officer had inherited the hatred of Jews with her mother’s milk. Father Walter Buch did not stop cursing the Jews: “Jews are not people, they are putrefaction.”

After the end of World War II in Europe, Walter Buch was seized and sentenced to five years in a labour camp. In July 1949, in the course of another wave of Denazification, he was classified as a major regime functionary or “Hauptschuldiger“. On 12 November, he ended his own life by slitting his wrists and throwing himself into the Ammersee. Gerda was a fanatic, very anti-Semitic and devoted Nazi and was a fan of Julius Streicher, the ‘Jew- Baiter number one’ and the editor and publisher of ‘Der Stürmer.’ On 01-01-1934, Buch was to be appointed supreme party judge of the NSDAP. Bormann and Hitler met each other for the first time in the home of Buch. Gerda, nineteen years old, there met the famous Martin Bormann, head of Party Chancellery in Nazi- Germany  and a close friend of Hitler. Tall Arian Gerda was almost a foot taller than the squad Bormann and since Bormann was already convicted of assault at that point, her father reluctantly agreed to the relationship. In the same year Gerda also joined the NSDAP (membership number 120.112). The couple married on 02-09-1929, with Adolf Hitler and Rudolf Hess acting as witnesses.

Gerda’s marriage to the equally sentimental and cruel Martin Bormann was unusual. Especially in the presence of guests, the god of the Obersalzberg treated his wife so rude that the visitors were embarrassed. For example, if he whistled his fingers, she had to come right away. Bormann smoked frequently drank to excess and ate meat.

In private, Hitler’s confidant turned out to be a sentimental husband, who wrote tender and somewhat infantile letters to the woman with whom he fathered ten children: “Who is everything to us? Who is our highest happiness? Who is our greatest wealth? Who is our most beautiful treasure? Daddy and all the kids: Mommy! “” That wrote the same Bormann who made a racket at home and kicked at his children.

But Gerda Bormann shared her husband’s political views and supported him. She was a staunch anti-Semite. The attitude that already goes back to her upbringing was reinforced by her radical husband and the same environment. In the letters to her husband, she removed her other reluctance and persistently insulted “international Judaism”. The idea of ​​the “Volksnotehe”, with which the increasing war losses of the German population should be compensated, goes back to them. Gerda Bormann believed that only a radically new social order could help National Socialism. So she looked for ways to abolish monogamy and to introduce the “Volksnotehe”. In February 1944, she pleaded for the creation of several parallel marriages in the interests of the state. Every male, worthy member of society should be legally entitled to multiple marriages. The co-wives would live under the same conditions as the “first wife” and the man would visit her every two weeks. At the same time, she advocated equating illegitimate children and wanted to ban the word “adultery” from German usage. The draft laws already discussed in 1943 stipulated, among other things, that every German woman should be obliged to father four children with a man, who would have to be available for another woman once this number had been reached.

So Martin Bormann also had a lover too, the actrice Manja Behrens, with her he spent more time than with his own family. Manja Behrens would die old age 88 on 18-01-2003, in Berlin. Of her husbands mistress, Gerda wrote to Martin ‘See to it that one year she has a child and next year I have a child, so that you will always have a wife who is serviceable’. After the war Martin Bormann was missing and Gerda moved with eight of her children in the village of Wolkenstein, twenty kilometres north east of Bolzano. She was dicoverd and interrogated for days in prison Untermais. She was not allowed to have visits ore writing letters. In the autumn of 1945 Gerda Bormann was brought to the hospital in the Italian city Merano. There the doctors discovered that she had uterine cancer. In the spring of 1946, however, she did not die directly from cancer but from mercury poisoning caused by the treatment. The woman of the once so powerfull Martin Bormann died on 23-04-1946 in Merano at the age of 37. She was buried at the military cemetery in Merano with a German soldier private Horst Brügger in the same grave, nr. 610. Later her remains were removed, cremated and scattered in the sea. The eight children were adopted by the catholic clergyman Theodor Schmitz. All of Bormann’s children except on survived the war. One, Ehrengarth Eicke’s twin sister, died young of bovine tuberculosis because Bormann insisted they drink raw milk for “health reasons”. Martin Jr. , his father called him a “mama’s boy”, was packed off one summer to a Spartan SS camp, which featured combat training, forched marches, close order drill, corporal punishment, and compulsory morning swims in frigid water. Martin Jr. abandoned the Lutheran faith of his family and was ordained a Roman Catholic priest in 1953, but left the priesthood in the late 1960s. Early 1960 he still led the wedding of his brother Gerhard Bormann as a priest in the the Barockchurch Maria Kirchental   He married an ex-nun Rosemarie, nicknamed Cordula   in 1971 and became a teacher of theology, living in Berchtesgaden and died 11-03-2013, age 82 in Herdecke..