Hermann Fegelein

• 1. Introduction

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  Hermann Fegelein was a Waffen-SS general and the brother-in-law of Eva Braun, and his death in April 1945 is told in more than one way. Traudl Junge, one of Hitler's secretaries, was inside the Berlin bunker that week. She said Fegelein was taken to the garden of the Reich Chancellery and "shot like a dog".

  The phrase is blunt, but it says little about the man behind it. Before that night he left a long record in riding halls, in occupied Poland and across the Soviet Union. Much of it was written in his own reports, and later historians have checked those reports against other evidence.

  How did a riding instructor's son rise so quickly? What did his horsemen do in Poland and the Soviet Union? And why do the surviving accounts of his final night disagree about who judged him, who killed him and whether Hitler wanted him dead?

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• 2. The Riding School

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  Ansbach, in Bavaria, is where Hermann Fegelein was born on the 30th of October 1906, the son of a retired Oberleutnant named Hans Fegelein. His father ran an equestrian school in Munich, and the boy worked there. He grew into a capable rider and took part in jumping events.

  At that school he met Christian Weber, an original member of the Nazi Party. Weber later sponsored Fegelein's entry into the Schutzstaffel, the SS.

  In 1925, after two terms at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Fegelein joined Cavalry Regiment 17. On the 20th of April 1927 he entered the Bavarian State Police in Munich as an officer cadet. By 1929 he was out. He had been caught stealing examination answers from a teaching superior's office. The official explanation was "family reasons". Fegelein later claimed he had left on his own account, to serve the Nazi Party and the SS better.

  The Reitinstitut Fegelein, the family riding institute, had opened in 1926. His father made it available to the SS as a meeting place, and the SA and SS equestrian units used its horses and training grounds. Fegelein joined the Nazi Party in 1930 with membership number 1,200,158, and the SA the same year. On the 10th of April 1933 he moved to the SS as member number 66,680. He instructed at the institute, led the SS equestrian group based there, and by the mid-1930s had taken over running the school from his father.

  Berlin hosted the Olympic Games in 1936, and from November 1935 Fegelein oversaw the preparation of the courses and facilities for the equestrian events. He also tried out for the German team. He could not beat the riders of the Kavallerieschule Hannover, the Hanover cavalry school, which went on to win every equestrian gold medal.

  Success came in other forms. Fegelein won the Deutsches Spring- und Dressurderby in 1937, and his brother Waldemar won it in 1939. On the 25th of July 1937 Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler created the SS Main Riding School in Munich, the Haupt-Reitschule München, from his father's stud farm. Fegelein became its commander and was promoted to SS-Standartenführer that same day. Weber helped pay for the very expensive horses. In 1938 the school hosted the Braunes Band von Deutschland, the Brown Ribbon of Germany, an annual race that Fegelein won.

  He still dreamed of the 1940 Summer Olympics. With help from his friend Karl von Eberstein, a Higher SS and Police Leader, he arranged for all the Bavarian State Police horses to pass to his school if mobilization came. He feared they would otherwise go to the Wehrmacht. When mobilization did come, in September 1939, he took command of a regiment of mounted SS men and went to Poland.

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• 3. The Death's-Head Horsemen

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  The SS Totenkopf Reiterstandarte, the Death's-Head Horse Regiment, reached Poland in September 1939, shortly after the Polish campaign ended. Fegelein commanded it. The Ordnungspolizei, the order police, took charge of the unit and split it into small groups posted across the Poznań district.

  On the 15th of November Himmler ordered the regiment to grow from four squadrons to thirteen and renamed it the 1st Death's Head Cavalry Regiment. New men came from ethnic Germans in the General Government and beyond. Many of the officers, Fegelein among them, had never been to officer training school, so instruction for the recruits was rudimentary. It was rigorous all the same, and the men formed a strong bond.

  On the 7th of December 1939 the unit joined the order police in the Intelligenzaktion, the killing of Polish intellectuals, aristocrats and clergy that Hitler had ordered. In the Kampinos Forest that day, Fegelein's men took part in the mass shooting of 1,700 such people.

  A week later, on the 15th of December, the regiment was divided into two Standarten. Fegelein led the first, under Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger, the Higher SS and Police Leader East. Weapons, food and uniforms ran short, morale slid and men fell ill. Theft and corruption spread, especially among the regimental staff in Warsaw.

  In March and April 1940 the unit fought a group of about 100 former Polish soldiers in the Kammienna, Konsky and Kielce area. They killed roughly half, and the rest escaped. On the 8th of April the unit killed 250 Polish men in nearby villages. Fegelein's report called his troops' conduct "clean and decent". In reality, many of his men killed and robbed civilians with no order to do so.

  In May and June 1940 Fegelein served in the Battle of Belgium and France with the SS-Verfügungstruppe, which was later renamed the Waffen-SS. He received the Iron Cross 2nd Class on the 15th of December 1940.

  Then came the court. On the 23rd of April 1941 he faced court-martial charges over 1940, when he and his men were caught stealing money and luxury goods to send home to Germany. The allegations reportedly included "murder motivated by greed", with arrests and executions ordered in the Gestapo prison in Warsaw. He was also accused of an unlawful relationship with a Polish woman, who became pregnant and was forced to have an abortion. Reinhard Heydrich tried several times to investigate. Each time Himmler stopped him, and he quashed the court-martial by direct order.

  Himmler's readiness to bury such accusations would matter again once the regiment crossed into the Soviet Union in 1941.

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• 4. Into the Soviet Union

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  The invasion of the Soviet Union began on the 22nd of June 1941. The next day Fegelein's unit was attached to the 87th Infantry Division to cover a gap in the 9th Army's line near Białystok. Its motorized elements reached the right flank on the 24th. The mounted elements could not keep pace, so the exhausted horses were left behind. Men rode to the front in lorries, and the horse-drawn artillery was towed by any vehicle available.

  The first troops to arrive crossed the Narew near Wizna and fought the Soviets, but could not break through. They were ordered back and sent further north. On the 26th of June the 87th Division's infantry captured Osowiec Fortress, and Fegelein's cavalry went off on reconnaissance to the south-east. The next day Himmler pulled the SS cavalry out of the division's command. He did not want SS units under Wehrmacht control or used in anything but a reserve role.

  Fegelein's reports insisted that his unit was combat ready and inflated its part in the operation. Historian Henning Pieper believes he did this to look like a leader who deserved promotion and honours. Ten of his men received the Iron Cross, Second Class, and Fegelein received the Iron Cross, First Class.

  The fighting had shown how poorly cavalry suited fast, shifting modern warfare. Fegelein asked Himmler to combine the 1st and 2nd SS cavalry regiments into a brigade with extra support units. As a stopgap, Himmler put him in charge of both regiments.

  On the 5th of July Himmler addressed the 1st Cavalry. He told the men that anyone unwilling to take part in coming "special tasks" could transfer to another unit. Nobody asked to go, at least partly because Himmler never said the tasks included shooting unarmed civilians en masse.

  On the 19th of July Himmler placed Fegelein's regiments under Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski for the "systematic combing" of the Pripyat swamps. The result was the Pripyat Marshes massacres, an operation to round up and kill Jews, partisans and civilians in the Byelorussian SSR. Kurt Knoblauch passed Himmler's orders to Fegelein at a meeting on the 28th of July at Liakhovichi, where the units were now quartered. The instructions were to "cleanse" the area of partisans and Jewish collaborators, and to drive Jewish women and children away.

  Fegelein read those orders his own way. Enemy soldiers in uniform would be taken prisoner, and anyone found out of uniform would be shot. Jewish men would be shot, apart from a few skilled workers such as doctors and leather workers. He divided the ground along the Pripyat River. The 1st Regiment took the northern half and the 2nd Regiment the south, and each filed daily reports of the dead and the prisoners. On the 31st of July Himmler announced that the two regiments would merge into the SS Cavalry Brigade, and on the 5th of August he gave Fegelein command of it.

  By telegram on the 1st of August Himmler complained that the numbers killed were far too low. Days later came regimental order no. 42, which demanded the death of every Jewish male over the age of 14. Women and children were to be driven into the swamps to drown. The water proved too shallow, and some areas had no swamps at all, so they were shot instead. Fegelein's units were among the first in the Holocaust to wipe out entire Jewish communities.

  His final report, dated the 18th of September 1941, claimed 14,178 Jews, 1,001 partisans and 699 Red Army soldiers killed, with 830 prisoners taken. It listed his own losses as 17 dead, 36 wounded and 3 missing. Pieper estimates that the real number of Jews killed was closer to 23,700.

  Fegelein received the Infantry Assault Badge on the 2nd of October. Four days later he again stood before a court, this time for peculation of captured goods, and again Himmler halted the case. In mid-October the brigade left Byelorussia for Toropets and then Rogachev, where it joined Army Group Centre. Guerrillas there were better organised and harder to find. Fegelein's report for the 18th of October to the 18th of November counted 3,018 partisans and Red Army soldiers killed and 122 prisoners. Fewer than 200 weapons were captured. Historians Martin Cüppers and Henning Pieper therefore conclude that most of the dead were unarmed civilians.

  The brigade's own losses in that month were seven dead and nine wounded.

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• 5. Rzhev and the Don

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  Army Group Centre renewed its drive on Moscow in mid-November 1941, and Fegelein's SS Cavalry Brigade was held back as a reserve behind the 9th Army. Then Red Army counter-attacks stretched the German line thin. On the 28th of December the brigade was ordered to the front.

  Fegelein reported that his force matched one or two divisions. He actually had 4,428 men, of whom only 1,800 were fit for action. The brigade went into the south-eastern sector of the XXIII Army Corps, behind the 206th Infantry Division, in the Battles of Rzhev. Some squadrons lost as many as 60 per cent of their men.

  Pieper, who studied the brigade up to March 1942, ties these losses partly to Fegelein himself. The commander had no formal officer training, and Pieper says his faulty reading of the brigade's readiness sent it into fights it was untrained for between December 1941 and March 1942. Pieper adds that the deteriorating front would have drawn the brigade into combat sooner or later anyway. By the end of March, casualties stood at 50 per cent, far above the rate for army units in the same area.

  On the 1st of February 1942 Fegelein became an SS-Standartenführer in the Waffen-SS and moved from the reserve to active service. On the 5th of February, on his own initiative, he led an attack northwest of Chertolino in difficult weather. It secured an important road junction and the railway station. A night attack on the 9th of February encircled the Soviet forces at Chertolino and destroyed them, killing 1,800 Red Army soldiers. Yershovo fell on the 14th, and the enemy units in Rzhevsky District were wiped out. For this, Fegelein received the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross on the 2nd of March 1942.

  He was then given home leave. The SS Cavalry Brigade was disbanded in March 1942, and its remaining men and equipment became a battalion-sized unit under SS-Sturmbannführer August Zehender, called Kampfgruppe Zehender. On the 1st of May Fegelein became Inspector of Cavalry and Transportation in the SS-Führungshauptamt, the SS operational headquarters. In September he received the Eastern Front Medal and the War Merit Cross 2nd Class with Swords.

  He went back to the front on the 1st of December 1942, promoted that day to SS-Oberführer. His new command, Kampfgruppe Fegelein, sat in the great bend of the Don. Soviet snipers wounded him on the 21st and the 22nd of December. On the 22nd he was also awarded the 157th Oak Leaves to his Knight's Cross.

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• 6. Burned Villages

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  The 20th of April 1943 brought Fegelein command of the 8th SS Cavalry Division Florian Geyer. From May to July the division fought partisans in three operations, named Weichsel, Zeithen and Seydlitz. On the 17th of May it wiped out a partisan group southwest of Novoselki, and Fegelein personally blew up a bunker during the attack. A week later, on the 24th of May, it stormed another strongpoint and took no prisoners.

  Operation Weichsel ran from the 27th of May to the 10th of June 1943. Fegelein reported 4,018 people killed and 18,860 deported, with 21,000 cattle confiscated and 61 villages destroyed southwest of Gomel. Zeithen followed from the 13th to the 16th of June. The division destroyed 63 more villages and, under direct orders from Hitler, killed everyone suspected of being a partisan.

  Seydlitz lasted from the 26th of June to the 27th of July. In it Fegelein claimed 96 villages destroyed, 5,016 people killed, 9,166 deported and 19,941 cattle confiscated.

  The division then turned to defence against massed Soviet assaults. Between the 26th of August and the 15th of September it beat back five attacks of divisional strength and 85 of battalion strength. The worst fighting came on the 26th of August near Bespalovka, and again on the 28th, when the division stopped a Soviet breakthrough at Bol'shaya Gomol'sha. On the 8th of September Fegelein led a counter-attack that retook a height at Verkhniy Bishkin. On the 11th of September he received the Close Combat Clasp in bronze.

  On the 30th of September 1943 he was severely wounded and spent a few weeks in hospital. He received the German Cross in gold on the 1st of November. On the 1st of January 1944 he became chief of Amt VI, the office for rider and driver training in the SS-Führungshauptamt. That same period brought a second assignment from Himmler, placing him on Hitler's headquarters staff.

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• 7. Hitler's Table

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  Salzburg was the setting on the 3rd of June 1944 for Fegelein's marriage to Gretl Braun, the sister of Eva Braun. Hitler, Himmler and Martin Bormann served as witnesses. A two-day celebration followed at the Obersalzberg homes of Hitler and Bormann and at the Eagle's Nest. Historian Ian Kershaw and journalist William L. Shirer both believe he courted Gretl to advance his career.

  As Himmler's liaison officer and the SS representative at Hitler's headquarters, Fegelein moved easily in that company. Hitler's secretaries, Christa Schroeder and Traudl Junge, remembered him as socially popular, especially with women. He was funny and charming, and he was a known playboy with many affairs.

  Eva Braun was glad of his company. Hitler was distant at social events and never showed affection in public, so Fegelein gave her someone to dance and flirt with. He also worked to befriend Martin Bormann, Hitler's powerful private secretary, and regularly turned up at Bormann's drinking parties. He told Junge that the only things that mattered to him were "his career and a life full of fun."

  Others judged him harshly. Shirer and Kershaw call him cynical and disreputable. Albert Speer described him as "one of the most disgusting people in Hitler's circle". Historian Michael D. Miller sees an opportunist and careerist who ingratiated himself with Himmler. In return, Himmler gave him the best assignments, mostly connected to cavalry, and rapid promotion.

  Fegelein was at the Wolf's Lair in Rastenburg, East Prussia, on the 20th of July 1944, when the bomb meant for Hitler went off. The blast gave him a minor wound to the left thigh. In the days after the failed plot, he liked to show people photographs of the men who were hanged for it.

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• 8. The Last Days

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  On the 16th of January 1945, Hitler withdrew to his Führerbunker in Berlin. The city came under Soviet artillery fire for the first time on the 20th of April, his birthday. Red Army tanks were on the outskirts by the evening of the 21st. By the 27th, Soviet forces had surrounded Berlin and cut it off from the rest of Germany.

  That day Peter Högl, deputy commander of the Reichssicherheitsdienst, the Reich security service, was sent out from the Reich Chancellery to find Fegelein. Fegelein had left his post at the bunker because he did not want to "join a suicide pact". Högl's squad found him in his Berlin apartment, dressed in civilian clothes and preparing to flee to Sweden or Switzerland. He carried German and foreign cash and jewellery, some of it Braun's. Högl also found a briefcase of papers showing Himmler's attempts at peace talks with the Western Allies. Most accounts say Fegelein was drunk when he was arrested and returned to the bunker, where he was held in a makeshift cell until the evening of the 28th of April.

  That night Hitler learned of a BBC broadcast of a Reuters report about Himmler's contacts with the Western Allies through Count Folke Bernadotte. He flew into a rage and ordered Himmler's arrest. Suspecting a link to Fegelein's disappearance, he told Heinrich Müller to question Fegelein about Himmler's plans.

  According to Otto Günsche, Hitler's personal adjutant, Hitler then ordered Fegelein stripped of rank and sent to Kampfgruppe Mohnke to prove his loyalty in battle. Günsche and Bormann warned that he would simply desert again, and Hitler ordered a court-martial. Fegelein's wife was in the late stages of pregnancy. Hitler considered releasing him unpunished or assigning him to Mohnke's troops. Junge says Eva Braun pleaded with Hitler to spare her brother-in-law and tried to excuse what he had done.

  Rochus Misch, the last survivor of the Führerbunker, disputed parts of this in a 2007 interview with Der Spiegel. In his telling, Hitler ordered only a demotion, not an execution. Misch said he knew who killed Fegelein but would not name him.

  Journalist James P. O'Donnell interviewed SS-Brigadeführer Wilhelm Mohnke in the 1970s. Mohnke said Hitler told him to set up a tribunal, and he assembled a panel of Wilhelm Burgdorf, Hans Krebs, Johann Rattenhuber and himself. Fegelein, still drunk, would not accept that he answered to Hitler and said he was responsible only to Himmler. According to Mohnke, he was crying and vomiting, could not stand, and urinated on the floor.

  Mohnke faced a problem. German military and civilian law both required a defendant to understand the charges and be of sound mind. He was sure Fegelein was guilty of flagrant desertion, but the judges agreed the man was in no state for trial. Mohnke closed the proceedings and handed Fegelein to Rattenhuber's security squad. He never saw him again.

  A third version comes from the 1948-49 Soviet NKVD dossier on Hitler, compiled for Joseph Stalin from interrogations of Günsche and the valet Heinz Linge. It agrees on the arrest and on Hitler's first order, then departs from Mohnke's account. In it, a court headed by Mohnke, with Alfred Krause and Herbert Kaschula, tried Fegelein on the evening of the 28th of April and sentenced him to death. That evening a member of the Sicherheitsdienst shot him from behind.

  From that chain of events, author Veit Scherzer concluded that Fegelein lost all honours under German military law. He should therefore be counted as a de facto, but not a de jure, holder of the Knight's Cross, which he had won with Oak Leaves and Swords. The death sentence, by the source's account, cost him every order, award and badge.

  Fegelein's parents and his brother Waldemar survived the war. Gretl inherited some of Eva Braun's valuable jewellery and survived too. On the 5th of May 1945 she gave birth to a daughter, Eva Barbara Fegelein, named for her late aunt. Eva Barbara died by suicide in April 1971, after her boyfriend was killed in a car accident. Gretl moved to Munich, remarried in 1954 and died in 1987, aged 72.

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