Gerda Bormann- Mother or Monster?
Who was the woman whose son had been nicknamed ‘Krönzi’ crown prince, as the one-day successor to Hitler? How much of her life was her own and what choices did she make? For centuries men have decided women’s fates; the Nazis were no exception. But they took the concept of motherhood to new heights by awarding mother crosses to their most prolific ‘broodmares’ ranked by offspring output: bronze, silver, and gold. Gerda Bormann was the incarnation of their ideology.
While researching information for my book ‘Boy Soldiers, I became interested in the life of the mother of Martin Adolf Bormann. After reading James Wyllie’s book Nazi Wives, I realized that her story raises the question of whether one can be a perpetrator and a victim at the same time. Where does personal responsibility start in altering the course of a life path that others have determined in advance? In that respect, Gerda enjoyed and suffered a quintessential woman’s fate. Keeping desirable females sequestered in a controlled environment to bear acceptable heirs was not a Nazi invention, but in her case, it took place in a modern, post suffragette age.
Gerda grew up as the daughter of Walter Buch. This decorated WWI military man was a dyed-in wool Nazi who had joined the party as early as 1922. Gerda was exposed to the inhumane, national socialist ideology from age eleven on-wards, accepting it as normal; she had no comparisons. As a teenager, she saw strappingly handsome, young Aryan men coming and going from her parents’ household. In her romantic mind, she must have thought that she would marry one of them. It is unclear whether Martin Bormann was her choice or the deal was brokered by the father and his future son-in-law, nine years older than Gerda.
She met her husband, Martin Bormann, when she was 17 and married him at 19. As she was underage, she needed her parents’ approval anyway. The age of the majority in Germany at the time was 21 years. Hitler was present at her wedding, which must have been presented to her as a big honor. Her husband gained a significant political advantage in his closeness to Hitler by marrying into the Buch family. His successful future career can be traced to this advantageous move.
Living up to the ideal of motherhood by bearing the Führer ten children in thirteen years, all German children were deemed to belong to Hitler personally, Gerda, hardly known in public, was pregnant for most of her short, adult life. She wore modest, traditional German costumes, accepted her husband as a superior, and never doubted the wisdom of Nazi doctrines, making her everything Hitler had propagated as the perfect woman.
She cranked out more children than Magda Goebbels, who Hitler styled as the ‘Mother of the Nation’. Magda only succeeded in producing five daughters and one Goebbels son, while Gerda had five sons. Gerda, not Magda, qualified for the golden mother cross, which was bestowed as of 1939 on every female with eight or more children.
Magda had been far from young and innocent when marrying Goebbels. Being born illegitimately, forced to renounce her adoptive Jewish father, Richard Friedländer, she had understood from an early age that power for her generation of women still came from the association with influential men. Ruthlessly ambitious, divorced from a wealthy industrialist Günther Quandt twice her age, already the mother of a child, she had scored congenially deformed Joseph as the next best thing to the Führer himself. Sporting a glamorous style, it made her the unofficial First Lady of the Empire.
But it was Gerda who lived proclaimed female Nazi values. She preferred traditional folksy German dirndls and braided hair, in line with the Bavarian Alps milkmaid look that the Führer found appealing. That was not a turn-on for her husband though. He preferred the company of, among others, the dazzling actress Manja Behrens, leaving Gerda to struggle with endless pregnancies and postpartum stress on her own. But it was something Gerda accepted as her duty as a German mother, whose sacrifices were needed for the ultimate victory of the Reich.
She might not have been her husband’s primary concern, but fortunately for her and her children’s welfare, she lived a life of luxury coated in Bavarian quaintness. Her sprawling alpine-style home did not only serve as a home for her brood but also as a vantage point for her husband to overlook the comings and goings at Hitler’s nearby ‘Berghof.’ With enough servants, her efforts of raising ten children could be focused on planning birthday parties and family events occasionally attended by ‘Uncle Adolf’. Her main concern were her husband’s extramarital affairs, not the state of the Reich. I found one obscure source that quoted her as suggesting that she and her husband’s mistresses should take yearly turns in bearing him children, giving her a year off between pregnancies, and making her more available as a wife. Whatever inspired that thought, she must have known about the ‘Lebensborn’ project. But besides that, it seems that few records survived that could shed light on her thoughts.
Despite being ideologically brainwashed and showing no critical reflection on what was going on in the world around her, Gerda was more of a mother than a Nazi. She tried to keep her kids alive by bringing them to safety at the end of the war in 1945. Most survived and were raised by foster families. Her oldest son, adopted by a Catholic farmer, dropped Adolf from his name and became a priest in postwar Germany. Gerda herself died of uterine cancer in an Italian prison at age 37 in 1946. Magda monstrously murdered her children in 1945 once they had outlived their usefulness as accessories to her title as ‘Mother of the Nation’ of Hitler’s Reich, before killing herself.
