The accepted story of Hermann Fegelein’s death is one of the most repeated tales from the fall of the Third Reich: the arrogant, corrupt SS liaison officer, caught drunk with his mistress, dragged back to the Führerbunker, and shot on Hitler’s orders for desertion in the final days of the Battle of Berlin. His body was never found. Yet almost none of the accepted version holds up under scrutiny. The reality was far more complex, and the mystery surrounding his final days remains unresolved more than eighty years later.
Fegelein was born in October 1906 in Ansbach, Bavaria, the son of a retired cavalry officer who ran a riding school. He was practically born in the saddle. In the 1920s, he befriended Christian Weber, an early Nazi Party founder, and through that connection joined the party in 1930 and the SS in 1933. His rise was rapid.
He ran his father’s riding school, then headed the SS main equestrian school established by Heinrich Himmler in 1937, winning international competitions along the way. His military career began in earnest in 1939 when he commanded an SS cavalry regiment. It was a criminal career from the start. In December 1939, his unit executed 1,700 members of the Polish elite in the Kampinos Forest.
His regiment became notorious for corruption, and in 1940 he was investigated for stealing money and goods from Poland, but Himmler intervened and stopped the court-martial. Reinhard Heydrich tried to investigate him several times; Himmler protected him each time. During the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, Fegelein rose further. In September 1941, he reported to Himmler that his units had killed more than 14,000 Jews, along with over a thousand partisans and hundreds of Soviet soldiers.
He received the Iron Cross and, later, the Knight’s Cross for destroying a large Red Army position in February 1942. He commanded the SS cavalry division Florian Geyer, which burned hundreds of villages and killed thousands of civilians in anti-partisan operations. Despite repeated investigations for theft and corruption, Himmler’s protection never wavered. In June 1944, Fegelein was promoted to SS-Gruppenführer and appointed Himmler’s liaison officer at Hitler’s headquarters.
He was even wounded in the July 20 bomb plot against Hitler. In June 1944, Fegelein married Gretl Braun, the sister of Eva Braun. It was widely seen as a career move. He also worked to cultivate a good relationship with Martin Bormann, Hitler’s powerful private secretary.
He had a reputation as a womanizer and a drinker, and his contempt for the military justice system was matched only by his loyalty to those who protected him. The key to Fegelein’s end lies in what happened in late April 1945. At dawn on April 25, as Soviet forces closed around Berlin, Fegelein left the city by car on an unofficial mission. The official reason was a meeting with Himmler, who feared the Red Army’s advance and wanted to send his personal escort battalion to Berlin both to help defend it and to escort Hitler out if he could be persuaded to leave.
Himmler sent his personal physician to Berlin to make a final attempt to convince Hitler to flee. He also wanted Fegelein to command that escort unit. But events moved faster than the plan. At their meeting, Himmler was already conducting secret surrender negotiations with the Western Allies through the Swedish diplomat Count Folke Bernadotte.
Fegelein left Himmler’s headquarters fully aware of his chief’s treachery, and stopped at SS headquarters in Fürstenberg. There, according to testimony from the SS chief of staff Hans Jüttner, Fegelein made revealing comments about the bunker. He dismissed the idea of a heroic death, calling it nonsense for a Bayreuth festival, and said the Führerbunker had become a madhouse. He clearly had no intention of dying in it.
But he found he could not return to Berlin by car. The Soviets had cut the road that morning. He could have fled north to Himmler or tried for Sweden or Switzerland, but instead he reported his situation to Himmler. Himmler immediately sent a Junkers 52 transport plane to fly Fegelein back to Berlin.
It arrived late on the evening of April 25, delayed by enemy air activity. Fegelein then failed to attend the midnight situation briefing in the Führerbunker. On April 26, he missed two more briefings. By April 27, Hitler noticed he had missed six briefings without explanation and ordered the commander of his personal security, General Rattenhuber, to find him.
Fegelein had not been staying at the Reich Chancellery. He had set up one of his longtime mistresses in an apartment in Charlottenburg, about four miles from the bunker. He had told only one person about it, Hitler’s adjutant Otto Günsche, and that only because he was drunk at the time, giving Günsche the phone number for emergencies. Günsche now told Rattenhuber.
When Rattenhuber called the number, Fegelein answered, surprised to hear from the bunker. He claimed he was drinking and had a terrible hangover, and promised on his honor as an officer to return within two hours. He broke that promise. In the meantime, Hitler’s driver Erich Kempka later testified that Fegelein had come to the Reich Chancellery garage on the afternoon of April 27 and requested two cars with drivers for reconnaissance purposes.
Fegelein left in full uniform, and the cars returned shortly afterward without him. The drivers said he had gotten out near the Kurfürstendamm and proceeded on foot. Fegelein, an experienced officer, appeared to be testing whether a small convoy could move safely from the Chancellery to his mistress’s apartment. He also asked Kempka to meet him at 10 pm to receive a bag containing extremely important documents belonging to Himmler and himself that must never fall into enemy hands.
Rattenhuber first sent Captain Helmut Frick with four men to fetch Fegelein. Frick, a captain, had no authority to arrest a general, and his orders were to persuade Fegelein to return voluntarily. Fegelein opened the door unshaven, out of uniform, and seemingly very drunk, accompanied by an unknown young woman. He even tried to convince Frick to defect.
After thirty minutes, Frick gave up and returned empty-handed. Martin Bormann berated Rattenhuber for sending such a low-ranking officer. Rattenhuber then sent Lieutenant Colonel Hergel with five men in an armored half-track. Hergel’s men broke into the apartment and found Fegelein helping the woman pack a small leather case.
Fegelein angrily protested their entry but offered them drinks. The woman disappeared through an open window and down a fire escape. Hergel took the case. Meanwhile, Fegelein’s adjutant had been arrested and interrogated by the Gestapo.
He revealed that Fegelein had changed into civilian clothes and urged his adjutant to do the same, and that Fegelein’s plan was to wait until the Russians passed, then slip through their lines and join Himmler. That testimony reached the bunker and raised the alarm. When Hergel brought Fegelein back, Bormann emptied the leather case onto a table in the bunker’s map room. It contained a washbag full of valuable jewelry, including diamonds, rubies, and opals, three gold watches, one belonging to Eva Braun, more than 100,000 Reichsmarks, and 3,000 Swiss francs.
Far more damning were the two passports, both bearing the same photograph of the woman, but under different names. One was British. To the assembled Nazis, it was clearly a getaway kit. Bormann was furious, and declared Fegelein a traitor who had been involved with a foreign agent and responsible for the information leaks from the Führerbunker.
He sent Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller to arrest the woman if she returned. A court-martial was convened under SS-Brigadeführer Wilhelm Mohnke, but it never took place. Fegelein appeared drunk, incoherent, and hysterical, tearing off his own rank insignia, weeping, vomiting, and urinating on the floor. Mohnke concluded the prisoner was not fit to stand trial, and the proceedings were suspended.
Fegelein was handed over to the Gestapo and interrogated throughout April 28. The mystery of the woman remains. Several eyewitnesses described her: tall, elegant, beautiful, in her thirties, with blond hair tinged red, speaking German with an accent and fluent in several languages. Some thought she was Scottish, others Danish or Irish.
A British Labour politician, Richard Crossman, who had served in the Political Warfare Executive during the war, told historian James P. O’Donnell that her code name was Mata O’Hara, a joke combining the name of the famous First World War spy Mata Hari with an Irish surname. Crossman said she was Anglo-Irish and very loyal to Britain. O’Donnell later identified a possible match: a British woman named Roslyn James, also known as Norah O’Hara, who worked as a translator for Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda station and was in Berlin when the Soviets attacked.
She emerged in Paris in June 1945, was interrogated by MI5, and charged with nothing. The case was quietly dropped. The event that sealed Fegelein’s fate came on the afternoon of April 28, when Reuters and the BBC broadcast the news of Himmler’s secret surrender negotiations with the Western Allies. Hitler was initially stunned, then enraged.
He ordered Himmler’s arrest, an order Admiral Dönitz ignored. But Hitler could strike at Himmler’s liaison officer. Eva Braun begged Hitler to spare her brother-in-law, but her pleas were ignored. The evidence that Fegelein had been caught trying to flee Berlin with his mistress, not with his wife and newborn daughter, undermined any sympathy.
The exact circumstances of Fegelein’s execution remain obscure. According to Hitler’s secretary Traudl Junge, he was led into the gardens above the bunker, escorted by Lieutenant Colonel Peter Högl of the RSD, and shot in the neck by an SS sergeant. Högl reportedly fired the fatal shot himself. Other accounts place the execution in a cellar of the Reich Chancellery or in the crypt of the Holy Trinity Church, but the most practical location was the garden.
Fegelein was dead by 11 pm on April 28, about an hour before Hitler married Eva Braun in the bunker. His body was most likely left where it fell and later buried in a mass grave by German cleanup crews under Soviet supervision. It has never been found. Fegelein’s story is one of ambition, corruption, and self-preservation.
He rose through the ranks through connections and criminality, protected by Himmler and later by his marriage to Eva Braun’s sister. He returned to Berlin on Himmler’s orders to collect documents and portable wealth and to bring his mistress to safety. His execution was not the simple act of justice portrayed in the history books, but the final act of a collapsing regime, carried out in haste and confusion, leaving the full truth of his final days, and the identity of the woman who may have been the key to it all, forever lost.