On the evening of April 28, 1945, with Soviet artillery pounding the ruins of Berlin, Hermann Fegelein was led into the garden of the Foreign Ministry, stripped of his rank and decorations. Minutes later, an SS sergeant shot him in the back of the neck. By eleven o’clock that night, the man once known as Hitler’s SS liaison officer lay dead among the rubble, his body left where it fell, never to be identified or recovered. The official story, repeated in countless history books and films, held that Fegelein was a coward and a womanizer who deserted his post, was dragged drunk from his mistress’s apartment, and executed in the Chancellery garden by Hitler’s direct order.
The truth, pieced together from testimonies, interrogation reports, and the accounts of those who survived the bunker, was far more complicated. Fegelein had once been one of the most protected men in the Third Reich, and his death was bound up with secret negotiations, a mysterious woman, and the final unraveling of Hitler’s inner circle. Fegelein was born in October 1906 in Ansbach, Bavaria, the son of a retired cavalry officer and riding school owner. He practically grew up in the saddle.
In the 1920s, he befriended Christian Weber, one of the founders of the Nazi Party, and through his father’s riding school, he came into contact with the SA and, later, the early SS. After a brief stint in the Reichswehr and the Bavarian police, he was dismissed in 1929 for stealing exam answers from an instructor’s office. With Weber’s patronage, he joined the Nazi Party in 1930 and the SS in April 1933. Despite having no formal officer training, Fegelein rose quickly.
He took over his father’s riding school, which Himmler converted into the main SS riding academy, and by the late 1930s, Fegelein was a colonel, a decorated equestrian, and a favored protégé of the Reichsführer-SS. His military career was built on brutality. In December 1939, his regiment executed 1,700 Polish intellectuals in the Kampinos Forest. In 1940, he was investigated for theft of money and goods in Poland, but Himmler intervened to stop the proceedings.
During the invasion of the Soviet Union, Fegelein commanded a cavalry brigade that operated behind the front lines in the Pripet Marshes. On September 18, 1941, he reported to Himmler that his units had killed 14,178 Jews, 1,001 partisans, and 699 Soviet soldiers, and captured 830 more. He was investigated again for stealing confiscated property, and again Himmler quashed the case. In 1943, his division, the 8th SS Cavalry Division Florian Geyer, destroyed 125 villages during an anti-partisan operation, killing 4,018 people and deporting 18,860.
A follow-up operation destroyed 96 more villages. The killing continued until Fegelein was severely wounded in September 1943 and reassigned to training duties. In June 1944, he was promoted to SS-Gruppenführer and appointed Himmler’s liaison officer at Hitler’s headquarters. He was present at the Wolf’s Lair when the bomb exploded on July 20, 1944, and received a special wound badge for it.
Three weeks earlier, on June 3, 1944, he had married Gretl Braun, the sister of Eva Braun, a marriage widely believed to have been a calculated move to strengthen his position within Hitler’s inner circle. He was also careful to cultivate a good relationship with Martin Bormann. By late April 1945, the war was collapsing. Soviet forces were closing in on Berlin, and Hitler had retreated to the Führerbunker beneath the Chancellery.
Himmler, however, was not in the bunker. He was at his headquarters in Hohenlychen, a sanatorium he used as a command post, suffering from stomach cramps brought on by stress. Unknown to Hitler, Himmler was conducting secret surrender negotiations with the Western Allies through the Swedish diplomat Count Folke Bernadotte. On the night of April 24, Himmler arranged a meeting with Fegelein for the following morning.
At dawn on April 25, as the Soviet ring tightened around Berlin, Fegelein left the city by car, driving to see his superior. Himmler had also sent his personal physician, Dr. Gebhardt, to Berlin to make one final attempt to persuade Hitler to leave the capital, and he wanted Fegelein to lead a battalion of SS guards back into the city, ostensibly to defend it and, if necessary, to escort Hitler out. But events were moving too fast.
After the meeting at Hohenlychen, where Fegelein surely learned of Himmler’s secret dealings, he stopped at the SS headquarters in Fürstenberg and spoke with Hans Jüttner, the head of the SS Operations Office. Jüttner later testified that Fegelein made bitter comments about the bunker. “The Valhalla nonsense is for a Bayreuth festival, not for me,” he said, referring to Wagner’s opera. “The place has become a madhouse.
” He had no intention of dying in the bunker if he could avoid it. But when he tried to return to Berlin by car on the morning of April 25, the Soviets had cut the road. He was stuck. He could have joined Himmler in the north or made a run for Sweden or Switzerland.
Instead, he reported his situation to Himmler, who immediately sent a Junkers Ju 52 transport plane to fly him back to Berlin. The aircraft was delayed for hours by enemy air activity and landed late that evening. Having returned to the besieged city, Fegelein did not attend the midnight situation conference at the bunker. He vanished.
Fegelein had been living in a secret apartment kept at 10–11 Bleibtreustrasse in Charlottenburg, under the name of a friend, where he had installed a long-time mistress. He had told no one about it except Otto Güntsche, Hitler’s adjutant, and only then in a drunken moment, giving him the phone number for emergencies. On April 27, two days after his return, Hitler noticed that Fegelein had missed several situation conferences and demanded that he be found. The head of Hitler’s personal security, General Rattenhuber, tracked down the address through the switchboard operator, Rochus Misch, and called the apartment.
Fegelein answered. He said he had a terrible hangover and promised, on his honor as an officer, to report to the bunker within two hours. He never showed up. Rattenhuber sent a four-man patrol to the apartment, led by Captain Helmut Frick, with orders to persuade Fegelein to return voluntarily.
Frick had neither the rank nor the authority to arrest him. When Frick arrived, Fegelein was drunk, unshaven, out of uniform, and accompanied by an unidentified young woman. He tried to convince Frick to desert with him. After thirty minutes, Frick gave up.
Bormann, increasingly suspicious and powerful, berated Rattenhuber for sending such a junior officer. A second team was dispatched, this time under Lieutenant Colonel Högl, in an armored half-track. When they arrived, they broke down the door and found Fegelein helping the woman pack a small leather suitcase. Fegelein, drunk but now dressed in his uniform and freshly shaven, agreed to accompany Högl back to the bunker.
The woman slipped out through a window and escaped down a fire escape. When Bormann emptied the suitcase in the map room of the bunker, it contained a fortune in jewelry, diamonds, rubies, opals, gold watches, one of which belonged to Eva Braun, more than 100,000 Reichsmarks and thousands of Swiss francs, road maps of Berlin and its suburbs, and two passports. Both bore the photograph of the woman who had just escaped, but under different names. One was British.
To the men gathered around the table, the meaning was clear. Fegelein was involved with an enemy agent. Bormann declared him a traitor and ordered the Gestapo chief, Heinrich Müller, to search for the woman. Fegelein himself was handed over to Müller and taken to the Gestapo’s headquarters in the crypt of the Holy Trinity Church, where he was interrogated.
The Gestapo also recovered a briefcase from Fegelein’s quarters in the Chancellery containing sensitive documents concerning Fegelein and Himmler, describing what appeared to be initiatives toward the Western Allies. Fegelein had intended to hand this briefcase to Hitler’s chief driver, Erich Kempka, on the evening of April 27, asking him to hide it. Kempka, who had seen Fegelein earlier that day, reported that the general had requested two cars with drivers, allegedly for reconnaissance purposes, and had driven from the Chancellery to the Kurfürstendamm area before dismissing the drivers and proceeding on foot. Fegelein’s adjutant, arrested and interrogated by the Gestapo, revealed that Fegelein had planned to wait until the Russians crossed the city, then slip through their lines and join Himmler.
He changed into civilian clothes and urged his adjutant to do the same, but the adjutant refused. On April 28, word reached the bunker that the British had deliberately broadcast news of Himmler’s secret surrender negotiations via Reuters and the BBC. Hitler initially said nothing. But Bormann and Goebbels worked on him, and after hours, Hitler flew into a rage, denouncing Himmler and ordering his arrest.
Admiral Dönitz, who received the order in the north, chose not to act. Instead, Hitler vented his fury on Fegelein, Himmler’s liaison officer. According to one of Hitler’s secretaries, Traudl Junge, Hitler ordered Fegelein shot. Eva Braun, her eyes red from crying, begged Hitler to spare her brother-in-law for the sake of her sister Gretl, who had just given birth to Fegelein’s daughter in Bavaria.
The plea was in vain. A military court had been convened on April 27, but it collapsed when Fegelein, stripped of his rank by Hitler’s order, vomited in the corner of the room, wet himself, tore off his insignia, and cursed the judges as “a bunch of German scoundrels. ” Fegelein, who had been sober enough to shave and dress for his arrest, was playing a part. The details of the execution remain murky.
According to Junge, Fegelein was led into the garden near the Foreign Ministry and shot in the neck by an SS non-commissioned officer under the orders of Lieutenant Colonel Peter Högl, the second-in-command of Hitler’s personal security. Other accounts place the execution in a cellar or in the crypt of the Holy Trinity Church. Rochus Misch later claimed to know exactly who pulled the trigger but refused to name him, suggesting that the man survived the war. Whatever the exact circumstances, Fegelein was dead by 11:00 p.
m. on April 28, 1945, about an hour before Hitler married Eva Braun in the bunker. His body was never found. It was most likely left where it fell and later buried by German cleanup crews in a mass grave.
The identity of Fegelein’s mistress was never established. Members of Hitler’s circle described her as beautiful, tall, blond, speaking German with an accent, and fluent in several languages. Some thought she was Scottish, others Danish or Irish. She reportedly did translation work for Goebbels at the Deutschland Sender radio station.
Richard Crossman, a British Labour politician who had led the German section of the Political Warfare Executive, told the historian James P. O’Donnell in 1955 that her code name was “Mata O’Hara,” a joke combining the name of the World War I spy Mata Hari with an Irish surname. A possible candidate was Rosaleen James, also known as Nora O’Mara, a British woman who posed as an Irish nationalist and worked as a translator in Berlin. She surfaced in Paris in June 1945 and was interrogated by MI5, but no charges were ever brought against her.
The case was quietly dropped, unlike every other British traitor who was investigated and punished. Whether she was Fegelein’s mistress remains unproven. Fegelein almost certainly had an escape plan. He had returned to Berlin on Himmler’s orders, likely to collect the documents and portable wealth from his quarters and to retrieve his mistress.
He tested the route between the Chancellery garage and the apartment with two cars, probably to determine whether an unarmored convoy could move safely through the city. A Ju 52 was seen waiting at the emergency landing strip in the Tiergarten on April 28, and it has never been satisfactorily explained. It may have been sent by Himmler to extract his loyal subordinate. The money, the jewelry, the British passport, the maps, and the woman herself all pointed to a planned escape together.
Perhaps the woman’s intelligence service had brokered a deal to save Fegelein in exchange for rescuing her. But Fegelein drew too much attention to himself, and the plan collapsed. More than eighty years later, the death of Hermann Fegelein remains one of the strangest mysteries of the fall of Berlin. He was not simply a corrupt womanizer who tried to run.
He was a man caught between his patron’s betrayal, his mistress’s secret, and his own desperate bid to survive a dying regime. He walked to his death in a garden, stripped of his honors, and the truth of what he knew went with him.