The 3rd of June, 1944, three days before the Allied infantry and
armored divisions begin landing on the Normandy coast in France.
Despite the increasingly common food shortages and bombings of major cities,
Adolf Hitler together with his companion Eva Braun attend the wedding which would
last three days and become the last big social event for the high-ranking Nazi representatives.
Gretl Braun, Eva’s sister, who would later become the Führer’s sister in law,
marries a high-ranking and quickly advancing SS officer who together with his unit had committed
unspeakable atrocities on civilians in Poland and the area of Soviet Byelorussia and Ukraine,
killing thousands of innocent Jewish men, women and children. His name is Hermann Fegelein.
Hermann Fegelein was born on the 30th of October 1906 in Ansbach, then part of the German Empire.
As a young boy, Fegelein used to work at his father’s equestrian school in Munich
and would later become a proficient rider and participate in jumping events.
In 1925 Hermann joined the 17th Bavarian Cavalry Regiment which he left in 1928.
The same year he joined the Bavarian State Police in Munich as the officer cadet.
Fegelein ‘s superiors regarded him as someone for whom it was not always easy to steer his ambition
in a healthy direction. His police career came to an abrupt end in the summer of 1929 after it
became known that he had broken into a superior's room to steal an examination answer sheet.
Fegelein later stated that he had left the police on "his own account"
to better serve the Nazi Party and the SS to which he turned completely in the following years.
Hermann Fegelein came into contact with Nazism thanks to his father
who several times made his riding institute available to the SS
as a meeting place. Nazi equestrian units also used his father’s training facilities and horses.
In August 1930 Fegelein joined the Nazi Party and the SA
and in 1933 he joined the SS. The same year Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party came into power
and Germany became a dictatorship. This was the right time for people like Hermann Fegelein
who was an opportunist and careerist with no morals and no boundaries.
After he took over the administration of his father’s riding institute,
he soon caught the eye of Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, and oversaw the preparation
of the courses and facilities for the equestrian events of the 1936 Summer Olympics held in Berlin.
Hermann Fegelein was called "Heinrich Himmler's golden boy".
His boyish face and combination of flattery and manipulation made him Himmler's protégé.
The Reichsführer Himmler treated Fegelein like a son and promotions soon followed.
In 1937 Hermann Fegelein was appointed a commander of the SS Main Riding School
in Munich which was created on the order of Heinrich Himmler.
The Second World War started on the 1st of September 1939 with the invasion of Poland.
The campaign in Poland ended on the 6th of October with Germany and the Soviet Union
dividing and annexing the whole of the country. Fegelein and his Death's-Head Horse Regiment,
which he commanded, arrived in Poland shortly after. On the 15th of November 1939,
the 1st Death's Head Cavalry Regiment was created on the order of Heinrich Himmler by expansion of
the regiment from four to thirteen squadrons. Additional members were recruited from Ethnic
Germans living in Nazi occupied Poland. The unit was placed under the command of the order
police which operated either independently or in conjunction with the Einsatzgruppen,
paramilitary death squads of Nazi Germany. In Poland, they were officially supposed
to fight gangs and partisans. Instead, Fegelein and his unit took part in killing the civilians,
mostly the Polish intelligentsia such as teachers, priests, physicians, and other
prominent members of Polish society. These enemies of the Reich had been identified before the war
and after they were murdered, they were buried in mass graves. Fegelein's unit also participated in
the mass shooting of 1,700 such people in the Kampinos Forest on the 7th of December 1939.
These mass murder operations claimed the lives of 100,000 Poles.
On the 15th of December, the 1st Death's Head Cavalry Regiment
was split into two units. Fegelein’s regiment was short of supplies such as food and weapons
and incidents of corruption and theft occurred. After they were caught stealing money and luxury
goods for transportation back to Germany, Fegelein faced court-martial charges. He was also charged
for murder motivated by greed and having had a sexual relationship with a Polish woman.
During the Second World War, sexual relationships between German soldiers and Polish women were
officially banned as the Poles were considered an “inferior race”. When Fegelein found out that
his lover was pregnant, he forced her to have an abortion. Even though Reinhard Heydrich, the chief
of the Reich Security Main Office and a principal architect of the Holocaust attempted several
times to investigate the allegations against Fegelein, Heinrich Himmler dismissed all of them.
The German invasion of France, Belgium, Luxembourg,
and the Netherlands started on the 10th of May 1940 and became known as the Battle of France.
These countries, along with France were conquered within 6 weeks. To further humiliate France,
Hitler ordered the document of armistice to be signed in the same railcar in which the
representatives of then defeated Germany signed the armistice at the end of the First World War.
Fegelein took part in the French Campaign and was awarded the Iron Cross 2nd Class in December 1940.
On Sunday, the 22nd of June 1941 started Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion
of the Soviet Union, and Hermann Fegelein and his unit were deployed on the Eastern Front.
Because the horses were exhausted, the man were transported to the front combat zone in lorries
and the horse-drawn artillery equipment was towed using any available vehicles.
Heinrich Himmler ordered Fegelein and his unit to kill partisans and later exterminate Jews in
the area of Soviet Byelorussia and Ukraine. Enemy soldiers in uniform were to be taken
prisoner, while those without a uniform were to be shot.
Jewish men, with the exception of a few skilled leather workers and doctors, would also be shot.
Because the number of Jews being killed was too low, Himmler issued an order calling for all
male Jews over the age of 14 to be shot and the women and children to be driven into the swamps
and drowned. Because the water in the swamps was too shallow and some areas had no swamps at all,
the women and children were shot as well. The killing of Jews was often disguised as “fighting
partisans”. Fegelein's final report on the operation stated that his unit killed some 16,000
people. The losses of Fegelein’s unit were 17 dead, 36 wounded, and 3 missing soldiers.
In October 1941 Fegelein was again brought before a court for stealing
but again the charges were dismissed on the order of Heinrich Himmler.
In December 1942, Hermann Fegelein was twice seriously wounded by a sniper but during the
following year, he and his division were again involved in operations against partisans,
killing civilians, destroying villages and confiscated cattle.
From January 1944, Fegelein belonged to Hitler's headquarters staff
to which he was assigned by Heinrich Himmler as his liaison officer and representative of
the SS. The members of the Hitler’s inner circled looked down on him and despised him. Albert Speer,
Hitler’s architect and the Minister of Armaments and War Production in Nazi Germany,
called Fegelein "one of the most disgusting people in Hitler's circle".
On the 20th of July, 1944 when Claus von Stauffenberg and other conspirators attempted
to assassinate Adolf Hitler, Hermann Fegelein was present at the Wolf's Lair headquarters.
The Führer survived and Fegelein received a minor wound to his left thigh from the bomb explosion.
Many of the conspirators appeared before the notorious People’s Courts for show trials, but
this practice was ended as it gave conspirators a platform to condemn the Nazi regime.
In the end more than 7,000 people were arrested, and 4,980 were executed,
often on the barest evidence. Fegelein used to show around the photographs of the hanged
men who had been executed as a result of this failed assassination attempt.
On the 3rd of June 1944 Fegelein married Gretl Braun who was one of the two sisters of Eva Braun,
Adolf Hitler’s longtime companion and briefly his wife.
Their wedding took place at the Mirabell Palace in Salzburg, far from the bombing and fighting, with
Hitler, Himmler, and Martin Bormann as witnesses. Eva Braun made all the wedding arrangements.
A wedding reception at the Berghof and party at the Eagle's Nest at Obersalzberg lasted
three days. It is believed that this marriage was politically motivated and for Fegelein it
was a way to advance his career. However, he was a known playboy and had many extramarital affairs.
After the war, Traudl Junge, Hitler’s last private secretary, said that Fegelein had
told her that the only things that mattered were "his career and a life full of fun."
In early 1945 the Third Reich was on the edge of collapse. On the 16th of January 1945,
Adolf Hitler moved into the Führerbunker under the Reich Chancellery Garden and on the 21st of April
1945 the Soviet Red Army reached the outskirts of Berlin. It was clear that the war was lost.
Because Fegelein had abandoned his post at the Führerbunker, Hitler sent for him. When the SS
found him in his Berlin appartment, Fegelein was drunk, wearing civilian clothes and preparing
to flee to Sweden or Switzerland. He was also carrying cash and jewelry, some of which belonged
to Braun. In his briefcase the SS found documents containing evidence of Himmler's attempted peace
negotiations with the Western Allies. Fegelein was arrested and taken back to the Führerbunker.
When Hitler found out about Himmler’s secret negotiations, he considered them a betrayal
and ordered Himmler’s arrest and Fegelein to be stripped of all rank and court-martialed.
According to the testimony of Hitler’s secretary Traudl Junge who was present in the bunker,
Eva Braun pleaded with Hitler to spare her brother-in-law
and tried to justify Fegelein's actions. Eva liked Hermann who was married to her sister
Gretl who was then in the late stages of pregnancy. However, nothing helped.
Junge claimed that on the 29th of April, 1945, Fegelein, then 38 years old,
was taken to the garden of the Reich Chancellery and was "shot like a dog".
According to the Journalist James P. O'Donnell, who conducted extensive interviews in the 1970s,
Hitler ordered Wilhelm Mohnke, one of his last remaining generals, to set up a tribunal.
According to his testimony, Hermann Fegelein was so drunk that he was crying and vomiting and even
urinated on the floor. Fegelein refused to accept that he had to answer to Hitler
stating that he was responsible only to Himmler. Because German military and civilian law both
require a defendant to be of sound mind and to understand the charges against him, Mohnke
closed the proceedings and turned the defendant over to security squad never seeing him again.
Fegelein’s wife Gretl survived the war and on the 5th of May 1945
gave birth to their daughter Eva Barbara Fegelein who committed suicide in April 1971 after her
boyfriend had died in a car accident. Gretl remarried and died in at the age of 72 in 1987.
There were no tears shed for Hermann Fegelein.