Der Sekretär

Jochen von Lang, a reporter and editor of the German magazine Die Stern, has produced a straightforwardly factual account of the career of Martin Bormann, the faceless bureaucrat whose inexorable rise in Nazi party ranks seemed to place him for a moment at the pinnacle of Nazi power. Despite the book's overblown title, von Lang depicts Bormann for the most part as a pedestrian, yet ruthlessly ambitious man, in the end as much manipulated as he was manipulator; Indeed, there is something pathetic about Bormann's end: having at last inherited Hitler's party rank, he found he did not have the…