A novel by Andy Owen
History has always painted Martin Bormann as a shadow – a faceless bureaucrat who vanished into the rubble of Berlin in 1945. Bormann was much smarter than that. He was always one step ahead. He was the most intelligent and dangerous man in the Third Reich. He RAN it. Not Hitler.Bormann was the ultimate strategist. By 1943, as Germany’s fortunes turned irreversibly, Bormann understood what others could not – that the war was lost, but the power structures behind it did not have to be. While Hitler raged and dreamed, Bormann planned. Quietly. Methodically. Without sentiment. The Fourth Path was his plan.
Conceived in secrecy and built with ruthless foresight, it was a blueprint for continuity – the preservation of influence, money, people and ideology beyond defeat. Endorsed by SS chief Heinrich Müller, a man whose entire career was built on intelligence, counter-intelligence and survival, the plan was executed by Klaus von Schäfer: discreet, disciplined and lethal in his efficiency.
Routes were prepared. Assets were moved. Identities were constructed. Safe havens established. By the time Allied bombs fell on Berlin, the architecture of escape was already in place. History tells us that Martin Bormann died in the chaos of Berlin’s final days. That Heinrich Müller vanished, never to be seen again. History, as often proved, can be unsound. In the suffocating darkness of the Führerbunker, with Soviet forces closing in and the Reich collapsing above their heads, Bormann and Müller did not wait for fate. They actioned their well-constructed plan. Deception, doubles and calculated misdirection, bought them what they needed most. Time.
They escaped. What followed was not exile, but execution of a long-prepared design. The Fourth Path lived on, adapting to a new world, shielded by secrecy, money and Cold War politics. It thrived because it had been built by men who understood power not as ideology, but as structure.
This is not history rewritten for comfort. It is history re-examined through the eyes of those clever enough to have survived it.
