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40 Fascinating Facts About the Relatives of Nazis After WWII

Khalid Elhassan March 14, 2019 24 min

10. Martin Adolf Bormann Became a Catholic Priest

After the war, Bormann’s eldest son went on the lam, and was taken in by a devoutly Catholic Austrian farmer. Martin Adolf got religion, and his newfound faith opened his eyes to the horrors of the Third Reich. He entered a Jesuit seminary in 1948, and was ordained as a priest in 1958. After years of missionary work in the Congo, he left the priesthood in the 1970s, and married a former nun who had similarly renounced her vows. He became a theology teacher, and toured schools in Germany and Austria, lecturing about the evils of Nazism. In 2011, various former students accused him of having sexually and physically abused them in the 1960s. He denied it and died two years later.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.