Thunder Point

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Whether Reichsleiter Martin Bormann, Head of the Nazi Party Chancellery and Secretary to Adolf Hitler, the most powerful man in Germany after the Führer, actually escaped from the Führer Bunker in Berlin in the early hours of May 2, 1945, or died trying to cross the Weidendammer Bridge has always been a matter of conjecture. Josef Stalin believed him to be alive; Jacob Glas, Bormann’s chauffeur, swore that he saw him in Munich after the war; and Eichmann told the Israelis he was still alive in 1960. Simon Wiesenthal, the greatest Nazi hunter of them all, always insisted he was alive, and then there was a Spaniard who had served in the German SS who insisted that Bormann had left Norway in a U-boat bound for South America at the very end of the war…

The city seemed to be on fire, a kind of hell on earth, the ground shaking as shells exploded, and as dawn came, smoke drifted in a black pall. In the eastern half of Berlin, the Russians were already formally in control, and refugees, carrying what they could of their belongings, moved along Wilhelmstrasse close to the Reich Chancellery in the desperate hope of somehow reaching the West and the Americans.

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