Herman Fegelein had been missing from the Führerbunker for almost two days, and Hitler was growing suspicious. On the morning of April 27, 1945, the Führer asked for his SS liaison officer and was told the man was nowhere to be found. Fegelein had missed six military briefings without explanation. Hitler ordered his security chief, General Rattenhuber, to locate him immediately.
The accepted history, repeated in books and films for decades, holds that Fegelein was a corrupt, arrogant womanizer who deserted his post at the Führerbunker out of fear, was found drunk with his mistress, dragged back, and summarily executed by firing squad in the gardens of the Reich Chancellery on Hitler’s orders. His body was never recovered. But almost none of that story is true. The real account is far more complicated.
Fegelein was born in October 1906 in Ansbach, Bavaria, the son of a retired cavalry officer and riding school owner. He joined the Nazi Party in 1930 under the patronage of an early party founder, and entered the SS in 1933. He had no formal officer training, yet he rose rapidly, largely because Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler took an unusual interest in him. Himmler repeatedly shielded Fegelein from investigation and prosecution, intervening personally to stop courts-martial and SS inquiries into Fegelein’s theft and corruption.
As commander of an SS cavalry regiment and later a brigade, Fegelein participated in mass murder behind the Eastern Front. In September 1941, he reported to Himmler that his units had killed more than fourteen thousand Jews and over a thousand partisans. His brigade burned villages and murdered civilians in operations in 1943. Fegelein earned the Knight’s Cross, commanded the SS Cavalry Division Florian Geyer, and in June 1944 married Gretl Braun, sister of Eva Braun.
He also became Himmler’s liaison officer at Hitler’s headquarters and was present at the Rastenburg bomb plot in July 1944, where he was slightly wounded. By April 1945, the war was collapsing. Soviet forces were closing on Berlin. On the night of April 24, Himmler arranged a meeting with Fegelein for the following morning.
At dawn on April 25, Fegelein left Berlin by car on an unofficial mission, heading to meet Himmler at his headquarters outside the capital. Fegelein knew exactly what Himmler was doing behind Hitler’s back: negotiating a separate surrender with the Western Allies through the Swedish diplomat Count Folke Bernadotte. After the meeting, Fegelein traveled to SS headquarters at Fürstenberg, where he spoke with SS operations chief Hans Jüttner. Asked what was happening in the Führerbunker, Fegelein remarked that Hitler and his staff were planning to kill themselves, adding that the place had become a madhouse.
He made clear he had no intention of dying there if he could avoid it. The Soviets had cut the road back to Berlin, so Fegelein could not return by car. He could easily have fled north to join Himmler near Admiral Dönitz’s headquarters, or escaped to a neutral country. Instead, he informed Himmler of his situation.
Himmler immediately sent a Junkers Ju 52 transport plane to bring Fegelein back to Berlin. Fegelein landed late on the evening of April 25 but skipped the midnight situation briefing. The next day, he missed two more. He was effectively living in a secret apartment in the Charlottenburg district, shared with his mistress, a woman whose identity has never been firmly established.
On April 27, after Fegelein failed to return as promised, Rattenhuber sent a team of four men to the apartment to persuade him to come back voluntarily. The captain leading the team found Fegelein drunk, unshaven, in civilian clothes, with the woman. Fegelein tried to convince the officer to desert with him. The team gave up and returned to the Reich Chancellery.
Martin Bormann, Hitler’s powerful party secretary, berated Rattenhuber for sending such a junior officer. A second, larger team was sent with a half-track. They broke into the apartment and found Fegelein helping the woman pack a small leather bag. Fegelein agreed to accompany them, but by the time his captors looked for the woman, she had slipped out through a window and disappeared down a fire escape.
When the bag was opened in the Führerbunker, it contained jewelry, diamonds, rubies, opals, three gold watches, cash, and two passports, each bearing the photograph of Fegelein’s mistress under different names. One passport was British. The discovery convinced Bormann that Fegelein was a traitor in league with an enemy agent. Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller was ordered to the apartment to arrest the woman if she returned.
Meanwhile, Fegelein’s adjutant had confessed that Fegelein had changed into civilian clothes and planned to hide until the Russians passed, then slip through their lines to rejoin Himmler. A court-martial was convened under SS Major General Wilhelm Mohnke. But the trial never took place. Fegelein, reportedly extremely drunk, objected to the court, rambled that he answered only to Himmler, refused counsel and self-defense, wept, vomited, and urinated on the floor in the corner of the room.
He tore off his rank insignia himself. Mohnke and the other judges suspended the proceedings, as the military code required the accused to be of sound mind and body to stand trial. Fegelein was handed back for detention. On the afternoon of April 28, word reached Hitler of Himmler’s secret surrender negotiations, deliberately leaked by the British.
Hitler initially did nothing, but under pressure from Bormann and Joseph Goebbels, he flew into a rage, denouncing Himmler and ordering his arrest. Hitler could not reach Himmler, but he could reach Himmler’s liaison officer. Most historians agree that Hitler ordered Fegelein’s execution that afternoon. Eva Braun, whose sister Gretl had recently given birth to Fegelein’s daughter, begged Hitler to spare her brother-in-law, but the pleas failed.
According to one account, Hitler subjected Fegelein to a savage verbal attack. It is unclear whether the order was given in a fury after the news of Himmler’s betrayal or later in a quieter moment, but by 11:00 p. m. on April 28, Fegelein was dead, about an hour before Hitler married Eva Braun inside the bunker.
The circumstances of the execution remain obscure. One account holds that Fegelein was shot in the neck in the garden of the Foreign Ministry, near a statue of a young girl among flowering trees. Another claims the shooting took place inside a cellar of the Reich Chancellery, and a third places it in the crypt of the Trinity Church where the Gestapo had been interrogating him. His body was never identified.
A common story that his corpse was buried in a bomb crater is essentially impossible, as the guards who killed him would have had no reason to risk their lives digging a grave under Soviet artillery fire. More likely, the body was left where it fell and later collected by German burial teams working under Soviet supervision. The identity of Fegelein’s mistress remains the central mystery of the entire affair. Witnesses gave conflicting descriptions.
Some believed she was Scottish, others thought Danish or Irish. One account suggests she was married to a Hungarian diplomat and performed translation work for Goebbels at a propaganda radio station. In the 1950s, a former British psychological warfare official told historian James P. O’Donnell that the woman had been a British agent codenamed “Mata O’Hara,” a joke mixing the name of World War One spy Mata Hari with the Irish surname O’Hara.
A candidate who fits several details has never been proven. The woman vanished from Berlin at the height of the crisis and was never found. Fegelein’s own intentions in returning to Berlin have been debated. Evidence suggests he was executing a plan of his own, likely involving reunion with his mistress, a cache of cash and valuables, sensitive documents belonging to him and Himmler, and a rendezvous with that mysterious Junkers 52 seen waiting at an emergency airstrip in the Tiergarten on April 28.
The documents, along with gold and other materials, were later recovered by the Gestapo from Fegelein’s quarters. Whether he was preparing to flee to Himmler’s headquarters in the north or to escape to a neutral country remains uncertain. What is known is that Herman Fegelein was executed as a traitor in the final days of the war, after returning to Berlin of his own accord, under Himmler’s orders, and that the story told in films and standard histories omits the complexity of those final days: his secret meetings, his mistress, her disappearance, the aborted court-martial, and the still-unexplained airplane waiting near the Brandenburg Gate.
More than eighty years later, the full truth of his death, and the identity of the woman at his side, remains unresolved.