Bormann was appointed to Hitler’s personal staff in 1928 and succeeded Hess as Party chancellor in 1941. Bormann was considered to be Hitler’s closest collaborator, but remained the most obscure of the top Nazis and disappeared at the end of World War II. He was sentenced to death in absentia at the Nuremberg trials in 1945 and was formally pronounced dead in 1973 after identification of a skeleton exhumed in Berlin.