Fegelein’s Horsemen and Genocidal Warfare: The SS Cavalry Brigade in the Soviet Union by Henning Pieper (review)

The role of the SS Cavalry Brigade in the mass slaughter of Jews has been studied by Ruth Bettina Birn and Martin Cüppers in works examining the Kommandostab Reichsfüher-SS, and in my own book on the Equestrian SS. Fegelein’s Horsemen and Genocidal Warfare offers the first detailed study in English of the SS Cavalry Brigade as both an instrument of genocide and a combat unit in the occupied Soviet lands. Its dual role made the SS Cavalry Brigade unique. Its ideological function places it alongside the Einsatzgruppen and Order Police battalions that conducted bloodbaths in the East. Unlike those formations, however, the SS cavalry also fought in the Waffen-SS against regular Red Army forces. Contextualizing his work among theories and models of perpetrator motives and behavior, Pieper sheds light on the factors that shaped the unit’s actions and gave it a leading role in the “Holocaust by bullets.”

Pieper traces the history of the SS Cavalry Brigade to the prewar equestrian units of the General-SS. These regiments provided Heinrich Himmler with entrée into rural elite society, and included leaders who would later appear in the SS Cavalry Brigade and other SS organizations. For instance, the 1^st Reitersturm’s roster, Pieper declares, “almost reads like a ‘who’s who’ of later SS leadership”; among them was Gustav Lombard, who later commanded the 1^st SS Cavalry Regiment and is a key figure in this study (p. 16). The most famous SS rider was the talented show jumper Hermann Fegelein, a devout and ambitious Nazi who became a favorite of Himmler and a highly decorated member of the Waffen-SS. Fegelein led the SS Main Riding School in Munich, a headquarters for SS competition riders and a base for creating an SS cavalry force. Fegelein’s initiative and his close relationship with Himmler resulted in the formation of the future SS Cavalry Brigade for occupation duties in Poland.

Pieper regards the implementation of harsh occupation policies by SS cavalry in Poland and the “criminal ambitions of the officers” as essential prerequisites in the brutalization of the men of the mounted unit (p. 26). Without dismissing the role of ideology and other factors, Pieper analyzes the actions of the SS cavalry using Harald Welzer’s “frame of reference” theory to explain the process by which these men became brutalized as they adjusted to each new situation, each one a new frame of reference in a process of progressive brutalization. For instance, the unit’s two years in Poland, a period of intense “military drill, indoctrination, and participation in anti-Jewish and anti-Polish measures,” turned these SS riders into Waffen-SS political soldiers (p. 27). Training was led by ideologically driven and fanatical officers such as Fegelein, who lacked formal officer training, but who possessed a strong sense of honor that fostered unit cohesion, comradeship, and obedience. Men consistently followed orders requiring forced expulsions and executions of members of the Polish elite and of Jews. During its time in Poland, the unit became a brutal and efficient “instrument of terror,” a transformation that placed it in the vanguard of the Holocaust.

Shortly after the invasion of the Soviet Union, Himmler sent what would become the SS Cavalry Brigade into the occupied territories, ostensibly to confront partisans, a common euphemism for genocidal actions. As Pieper demonstrates, the Brigade rarely encountered genuine partisan units. The SS cavalry’s main mission was to “cleanse” the Pripet Marshes of so-called partisans, criminals, and inhabitants deemed “racially and humanly inferior” (p. 80). Himmler dispatched SS cavalry forces with orders to round up and kill Jewish men, initially excluding women and children. But during these early missions, the SS cavalry became a pacesetter of the Holocaust in Belorussia. Commanders such as Gustav Lombard, “a prime example of a radical officer who made the...