Two accounts of Bardon are in circulation and they should not be mixed.
The documented one is thin. He was born on 1 December 1909 at Opava in Austrian Silesia, in a German-speaking family, in a town now in the Czech Republic. He performed as a stage magician under the name Frabato. He wrote three books of instruction, Initiation into Hermetics, The Practice of Magical Evocation and The Key to the True Kabbalah, which are unusual in the literature for being a graded practical curriculum, beginning with concentration, breath, and the equilibrium of the four elements, and refusing to advance the reader who has not done the earlier work. He was arrested by the Czechoslovak authorities and died on 10 July 1958 in Brno, in police custody, of pancreatitis.
The novelised one comes from Frabato the Magician, written by his secretary Otti Votavova and published after his death. It is a novel, and its publisher describes it as one: the battles with a Dresden black lodge, the escape from Germany in the last days of the Weimar Republic, and the claim that Bardon was an incarnation of Hermes Trismegistus are its material, not the historical record. Some of it may draw on things he said; none of it is independently supported. It is nonetheless the source of most of what is repeated about his life, including by people who believe they are reporting fact.