Waldemar Fegelein, brother of Hermann Fegelein. Mass murderer.

Hermann Fegelein became quite famous in 2004 as a result of the film Downfall and now I think everyone has heard of him. Less well known is his brother Waldemar who was six years younger, born on 9 January 1912 in Ansbach, Bavaria.
The parents of the brothers ran a riding stables near Munich and were quite well off. The depression of the 1920s hit their client base and so the stables had to close for business. When the economy improved they were able to open it again.
Their father Hans permitted the Nazis to use his premises and facilities and so both sons came into contact with them from the late 1920s. One was Christian Weber, a Nazi almost from the very beginning to the very end, someone with a great deal of influence and certainly a contender if there were a competition for the second most corrupt person in the Third Reich. Hermann Fegelein was for a time stable boy for Christian Weber and both brothers were strongly influenced ideologically by him.
In February 1931, a mounted SS unit, which was later called the Reiter SS, was set up in Munich from 25 members of the former Bund Oberland . The Bund Oberland was a Freikorps unit. Hans Fegelein gave the unit its horses and permitted his facilities to be used for regular training. Here we see a receipt for two horses from his stables. To a large extent, it was Hermann Fegelein who drove the creation of the Reiter-SS. He was supported by his younger brother Waldemar , who also joined the SS, having joined the Nazi Party in 1933. In 1937 the equestrian estate of the Fegeleins became the main SS riding school and thus in this way was subordinated to the "special use" of Himmler.
Meanwhile, Waldemar Fegelein participated in equestrian events at the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games and in 1939, he won the German Jumping Derby in Hamburg on his horse "Nordrud".
Fegelein was a member of the SS Cavalry Brigade during WW2. He took part in the Polish campaign and was at the siege of Warsaw where his brother was wounded.
Cavalry is not much use in combat in most situations however it is good for crossing terrain which vehicles cannot cross. This made it particularly interesting for the mission which Himmler was about to give it. Fegelein’s unit was subordinate to the RFSS command staff, that is the command staff of the Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler which was created on 6 May 1941 in the run up to the invasion of the USSR. The object of this unit was nothing other than mass murder. It was to scour behind the lines looking for people it considered enemy and to kill them. Horse units were particularly useful in the swamps and forests of what had been eastern Poland and today’s Belarus. The Pripyet Marsh is the largest swamp in the world. By the end of 1941, at least 85,000 people had been killed by the RFSS command staff. One of these killers was Waldemar Fegelein. As temporary commander of the 1st SS Cavalry Regiment and its 1st Squadron, Fegelein personally directed the shooting of the population in several Jewish villages and towns. On 21 August 1941, for example, at Starobin, around 120km south of Minsk, close to the former Soviet – Polish border, he ordered his men to murder 21 Jewish men. The SS Cavalry Brigade murdered over 14,000 Jews between 1 - 12 August 1941 in the Prypiat marshes . On 7 August 1941, the brigade reported 7,819 Jews murdered in the Minsk area . As the strength of the partisans grew, particularly in the forests of what is today Belarus, the cavalry was more used to fight them and carry out punitive raids on local villages, particularly as the main Jewish population centres had been destroyed.
Later Fegelein commanded the SS Reiter Regiment 2 of the 8th SS Cavalry Division "Florian Geyer" and here rather than killing unarmed Jews or burning peaceful villages he had to fight armed Soviet troops.
As well as using horses, Fegelein, as the Regimental Commander flew at least 60 missions with a Fieseler Storch light aircraft that had been provided by the Division during Operation "Seydlitz. In the aftermath of the Soviet winter counteroffensive of 1941–42, substantial Soviet forces remained in the rear of the German Ninth Army. These forces maintained a hold in the forested swamp region between Rzhev and Bely. On 2 July 1942, Ninth Army under General Model launched Operation Seydlitz to clear the Soviet forces out. The Germans first blocked the natural breakout route through the Obsha valley and then split the Soviet forces into two isolated pockets. The battle lasted eleven days and ended with the elimination of the encircled Soviet forces. Reconnaissance from slow moving light aircraft such as the Feisler Storch was ideally suited to this sort of operation.

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