Martin Bormann

Cold War Spies: General Reinhard Gehlen

By 1944, many top generals in Adolf Hitler’s army understood the war was lost and that they had better make arrangements to ensure their safety. Read more

Martin Bormann

The RAF Attempt to Assassinate Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler believed in Vorsehung (providence). The German leader felt that if anything was going to happen to him, such as assassination, there was nothing he could do about it. Read more

Martin Bormann

Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess: Foe or Ally?

Throughout the reign of the Nazi Party in Germany during the 1930s and 1940s, Adolf Hitler’s inner circle comprised a diverse group of men from many walks of life. Read more

Martin Bormann

Hitler’s Death in the Führerbunker

By Flint Whitlock

His world was literally crashing down in flames around him.    Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich, which he had created out of nothing but his own will—an empire that he had once boasted would last for a millennium—was on fire and being torn apart by shot and shell, besieged on all sides. Read more

Martin Bormann

A Soviet Red Army Victory at Vienna

In mid-March 1945, the Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Red Army launched a major offensive with the aim of clearing Axis forces out of Hungary and forcing them back to the very borders of Hitler’s Greater German Reich. Read more

Martin Bormann

The Volkssturm: Last-Ditch Militia of the Third Reich

On October 18, 1944—the 131st anniversary of the Battle of the Nations’ victory over Napoleon in 1813—Reichsführer-SS (National Leader) Heinrich Himmler stepped up to a microphone to make a national radio address announcing the formation of the Nazi Party-controlled Volkssturm, or People’s Militia. Read more

Martin Bormann

Heinrich Himmler: The Rise and Fall of Hitler’s Third Reichsführer-SS

On the evening of May 23, 1945, in the northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein, five men in a British Army jeep were driving down a dark road. Read more

Martin Bormann

Albert Speer: Chief Architect of the Third Reich

On October 6, 1943, Dr. Albert Speer, Reich minister of armaments and war production for the Third Reich, gave a 50-minute address to the assembled top officials of Nazi Germany at Posen Castle in occupied Poland’s Reich Gau (Region) of Wartheland on the critical state of World War II at that point. Read more

Martin Bormann

The Italian Army in Russia: from Barbarossa to Stalingrad

The most successful Italian Army of World War II was a political creation of dictator Benito Mussolini. Read more

Martin Bormann

“Do You Recognize My Voice?”: The Question That Ended Operation Valkyrie

At 12:40 PM on a hot, sultry July 20, 1944, German Führer and Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler, 55, was seated on a wicker stool in a conference hut at his principal Eastern Front headquarters at Wolf’s Lair, Rastenburg, East Prussia, for the mid-day wartime map meeting. Read more

Martin Bormann

Bavarian Berchtesgaden and Its Bunkers

The swinging beams of searchlights and the wail of air raid sirens had preceded the crash of the guns. Read more

Martin Bormann

The Nazi Aircraft Carrier Program: Erich Raeder vs. Hermann Göring

On June 6, 1944, as the massive Allied naval armada made its way from ports in England across the English Channel to launch the projected D-day invasion at Normandy, a German fleet sortie swept down from its home ports on the North Sea and from occupied Norway. Read more

Martin Bormann

Hans Baur: Hitler’s Pilot Flew Führer Across Europe and History

Adolf Hitler’s wartime Armaments Minister Albert Speer was right when he termed the Führer’s pilot from 1932 to 1945, Lt. Read more

Martin Bormann

The Largest Plot to Kill Hitler? – Operation Valkyrie

For Nazi Party Führer (Leader) and German Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler, July 20th, 1944 dawned as a routine working day at his principal wartime military headquarters, the Wolfsschanze (Fort Wolf) in the East Prussian forest of Rastenburg, some three hundred air miles from Berlin, in what is today Poland. Read more

Martin Bormann

Eva Braun’s Final Days

With his dream of Nazi domination of the world shattered, Adolf Hitler went underground in April 1945. Beneath the smoldering ruins of the Nazi capital city of Berlin, he lived out his last delusional days in the Führerbunker, a somber subterranean prison of steel and concrete. Read more