The accepted story of SS General Hermann Fegelein’s death—that he was a cowardly womanizer dragged from his mistress’s apartment and shot on Hitler’s orders in the Reich Chancellery garden—is almost entirely wrong. The real story is far more complex, involving a secret British agent, a hidden escape plan, and a bag of jewels and passports that changed everything. Fegelein was born in October 1906 in Ansbach, Bavaria, the son of a retired cavalry officer who ran a riding school. Through family connections to early Nazi Party founder Christian Weber, Fegelein joined the Nazi Party in 1930 and the SS in 1933.
By 1937, Himmler had converted his father’s riding school into the main SS cavalry school, with Fegelein in command. Despite a 1929 discharge from the Bavarian state police for stealing exam answers, Fegelein rose rapidly under Himmler’s protection. In December 1939, his regiment executed 1,700 Polish intellectuals in the Kampinos Forest. His units later carried out mass killings in the Pripet Marshes, reporting 14,178 Jews killed in September 1941 alone.
Repeated investigations into his corruption and theft were quashed by Himmler every time. Fegelein married Gretl Braun, sister of Eva Braun, in June 1944, a move widely seen as career advancement. He was wounded in the July 20, 1944 bomb plot against Hitler and continued his rapid rise, becoming Himmler’s SS liaison officer at the Führerbunker. On April 25, 1945, with Soviet forces closing on Berlin, Fegelein drove to meet Himmler at Hohenlychen.
Himmler was secretly negotiating surrender with the Western Allies. After their meeting, Himmler sent Fegelein back to Berlin by plane to command his personal guard battalion—and, likely, to keep reporting on Hitler’s condition as the Reich collapsed. Fegelein returned to Berlin that night but never showed up at the bunker. He disappeared for days.
On April 27, Hitler demanded to know where he was. It emerged that Fegelein had been staying at a secret apartment in Charlottenburg rented under a friend’s name, where he kept one of his mistresses. He had given the phone number only to Hitler’s adjutant Otto Günsche, and only while drunk. SS General Rattenhuber traced the call and reached Fegelein, who claimed he had a hangover and promised to return within two hours.
He never did. Rattenhuber sent a small squad led by Captain Helmut Frick, who found Fegelein drunk, unshaven, and in civilian clothes with an unidentified young woman. Frick had neither the rank nor the authority to arrest a lieutenant general, and his orders were only to persuade Fegelein to return voluntarily. Fegelein tried to persuade Frick to desert instead.
A second, more forceful team under Lieutenant Colonel Hergel broke into the apartment and found Fegelein helping the woman pack a small leather bag. Fegelein then shaved, put on his uniform, and agreed to accompany Hergel back to the Chancellery. The woman slipped out through a window and vanished. At the bunker, Martin Bormann emptied the bag onto a table.
Inside were precious jewelry, diamonds, rubies, opals, three gold watches—one belonging to Eva Braun—more than 100,000 Reichsmarks, 3,000 Swiss francs, road maps of Berlin, and two passports. Both bore the same woman’s photograph, but with different names. One was British. Bormann declared Fegelein a traitor who had been having an affair with a British agent, blaming him for information leaks at the Führerbunker.
The mystery woman, code-named “Mata O’Hara,” was never caught. Witnesses differ on her nationality—Scottish, Danish, Irish—but several described her as beautiful, tall, blonde, and speaking German with an accent. After the war, British politician Richard Crossman revealed that Political Warfare Executive had used an agent under that code name in Berlin, though he implied she was Anglo-Irish rather than English. A possible candidate, Roslyn James, also known as Nora O’Meara, worked as a translator for Goebbels’ propaganda station, matched the physical description, and was quietly cleared by MI5 in 1945—unlike every other British traitor investigated after the war.
Fegelein’s court-martial never took place. According to General Wilhelm Mohnke, who was to preside, Fegelein began behaving so disgracefully—objecting to the court’s composition, claiming he answered only to Himmler, weeping, vomiting, and urinating on the floor—that proceedings had to be suspended. Mohnke later said the conduct made a trial impossible under military law. Fegelein had torn off his own rank insignia.
When Hitler learned on April 28 that Himmler was secretly negotiating with the Western Allies, his fury finally sealed Fegelein’s fate. Witness accounts place Fegelein’s death that evening. He was reportedly taken to the garden of the Foreign Ministry and shot in the neck. His body was never recovered.
The exact circumstances remain disputed, and at least one witness who claimed to know the shooter’s identity refused to ever reveal it. Before his arrest, Fegelein had asked Hitler’s driver Erich Kempka for two staff cars for “reconnaissance purposes,” testing whether a small convoy could safely reach his mistress’s apartment. He also arranged to hand Kempka a bag of highly sensitive documents belonging to Himmler and himself, which he said must never fall into enemy hands. Evidence suggests Fegelein had planned to escape Berlin with his mistress, taking the documents, valuables, and passports to a Ju 52 waiting at the makeshift airstrip in the Tiergarten—possibly ordered by Himmler to extract him.
He reportedly called Eva Braun at least twice, urging her to leave the city with him. It is also possible the woman was connected to Himmler’s secret contacts with British intelligence, and that Fegelein was her ticket out of Berlin in exchange for his own survival. None of Fegelein’s plans succeeded. He died sometime before 11 p.
m. on April 28, 1945—roughly an hour before Hitler married Eva Braun in the bunker below. More than 80 years later, the full truth of Hermann Fegelein’s final days remains shrouded in mystery.