Hermann Fegelein — Why Hitler Executed His Own Brother-in-Law

When the men came looking for Hermann Fegelein in the final days of April 1945, they were not searching for an ordinary deserter.

They were searching for an SS general.

A decorated cavalry commander.

Heinrich Himmler’s personal representative at Adolf Hitler’s headquarters.

The husband of Gretl Braun, sister of Eva Braun.

A man who had spent more than a decade climbing through one of the most ruthless political machines in modern history—and who had become so closely connected to Hitler’s private circle that he appeared almost untouchable.

And yet, according to the accounts that survived the collapse of Nazi Germany, when Fegelein was finally located in Berlin, he was no longer behaving like a man confident in his position.

He was away from the Führerbunker.

He was wearing civilian clothes.

His bags appeared to be prepared for departure.

Later accounts described money, valuables and false papers among his possessions. Some said a woman was with him. Some said he had been drinking heavily.

Whatever the precise details, one thing was obvious.

Hermann Fegelein had understood something before many of the people still sitting underground beneath the Reich Chancellery were willing to admit.

The Third Reich was finished.

Berlin was being crushed.

The Soviet army was closing in street by street.

The government he had served was shrinking from a continent-spanning dictatorship into a collection of frightened men arguing inside concrete rooms.

And Fegelein apparently wanted out.

There was only one problem.

His entire career had been built upon his ability to attach himself to powerful men.

Now the most powerful men around him were destroying one another.

And before the night was over, the connections that had protected Hermann Fegelein for years would become the very reason he could not escape.

---

Decades later, people would remember Fegelein mainly for the bizarre circumstances of his death.

But his story did not begin in a bunker.

It began with horses.

Hermann Fegelein was born in Bavaria in 1906 into a family deeply connected to riding. His father became a riding instructor and operated an equestrian establishment near Munich, and young Hermann grew up in a world of stables, saddles, competitions and disciplined horsemanship.

Long before he commanded armed men, he learned how to command a horse.

It seems almost harmless when separated from what came later.

A young rider.

A family business.

An ambitious man searching for a future in a Germany struggling with political violence, economic crisis and humiliation after the First World War.

But Munich in those years was also becoming one of the centers of the Nazi movement.

And Fegelein possessed one quality that would prove more important than almost anything else in his life.

He was very good at recognizing opportunity.

The riding world brought him into contact with politically connected men.

His family’s facilities became useful to Nazi organizations.

Fegelein entered the Nazi Party orbit, served in the SA, and then joined the SS after Hitler came to power.

The transition suited him.

The SS was expanding rapidly.

It needed men.

It needed institutions.

It needed training facilities.

And Heinrich Himmler, its increasingly powerful chief, had a particular interest in developing SS equestrian organizations.

Fegelein had exactly what the moment required.

Horses.

Experience.

Ambition.

And an instinct for patronage.

Within a few years, the man associated with a family riding school was moving upward through the SS hierarchy.

He became closely involved in SS cavalry.

He helped administer its riding establishment in Munich.

He participated in the equestrian world surrounding the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

Promotions followed.

Titles followed.

Access followed.

Fegelein was learning one of the central rules of the Nazi system.

Competence mattered.

Ideological obedience mattered.

But knowing who could promote you mattered just as much.

And Hermann Fegelein had found Heinrich Himmler.

That relationship would change his life.

Himmler was not merely Fegelein’s superior.

He became his patron.

Fegelein benefited from assignments, promotions and access that brought him steadily closer to the upper levels of the SS.

To outsiders, his rise could look extraordinary.

To people inside the system, it made perfect sense.

The Nazi hierarchy was filled with rival bureaucracies, personal entourages and competing power networks. Advancement often depended upon belonging to the right circle at the right moment.

Fegelein understood circles.

He understood rooms.

He understood the importance of being remembered by the man sitting at the head of the table.

But there was another side to his rise.

And it was far darker than the polished riding schools and ceremonial uniforms of prewar Germany.

Because once the war began, Hermann Fegelein’s cavalry career moved east.

And the horses stopped being part of sport.

---

In 1939, Germany invaded Poland.

Two years later came the invasion of the Soviet Union.

The war in the East was not planned as an ordinary military conflict. Nazi leadership treated it as an ideological and racial war in which enormous categories of civilians were designated enemies.

Behind the advancing German armies came SS formations, police units and mobile killing squads.

Their language often sounded administrative.

“Security.”

“Pacification.”

“Anti-partisan operations.”

“Combing actions.”

But behind those words lay shootings, deportations, burned communities and mass murder.

Fegelein commanded SS cavalry forces operating in this world.

In the summer of 1941, his SS Cavalry Brigade participated in operations in the Pripyat Marshes, a vast region of wetlands, villages and forests across occupied Soviet territory.

Official reports described movements through difficult terrain.

They listed villages.

They counted populations.

They recorded “actions.”

But the arithmetic told the real story.

Thousands of Jewish civilians were murdered.

Entire communities were targeted.

Men who posed no battlefield threat were shot.

The killing expanded to include women and children as Nazi mass murder escalated across the occupied Soviet territories.

Fegelein was not standing outside that machinery.

He was part of its command structure.

The distance between the elegant riding schools of Munich and the killing fields of Eastern Europe might seem enormous.

For Fegelein, the transition happened inside the same career.

The uniform remained.

The promotions continued.

Only the purpose changed.

That is one of the most disturbing details of his rise.

The system did not punish brutality.

It rewarded results.

Operations that destroyed civilian populations could be rewritten as military achievements.

Mass killing could disappear inside reports filled with bureaucratic language.

Fegelein continued moving upward.

Decorations followed.

Prestige followed.

His reputation as an energetic cavalry commander grew.

And while thousands of victims disappeared into pits, fields and forests, the officers responsible for the machinery were discussing medals.

That was the world Fegelein had chosen.

And it worked for him.

For a while.

He eventually commanded larger cavalry formations.

He fought on the Eastern Front.

He was wounded more than once.

His chest accumulated decorations.

His rank increased.

The former rider from Bavaria was becoming an SS general.

But his greatest promotion would not come from the battlefield.

It would come from proximity.

In late 1943 and early 1944, Fegelein was moved into a position that placed him close to Hitler himself.

He became Himmler’s liaison representative at Hitler’s headquarters.

On paper, that sounded administrative.

In reality, it meant access to the inner circle of the dictatorship.

Fegelein had reached a place few Germans would ever see.

He had climbed from the riding school to the rooms where the highest leaders of the Reich made decisions.

And then he made another move.

One that appeared to make his position almost impossible to destroy.

He married into Eva Braun’s family.

---

On June 3, 1944, Hermann Fegelein married Margarete “Gretl” Braun.

Gretl was Eva Braun’s younger sister.

Eva had been Hitler’s longtime companion, although the relationship was carefully concealed from much of the German public.

The wedding was not a quiet family ceremony.

It was a political event inside the most exclusive social circle in Nazi Germany.

It took place in Salzburg.

Hitler was connected to the ceremony.

Himmler was there.

Martin Bormann was there.

The marriage was followed by celebrations in the Obersalzberg world surrounding Hitler’s mountain retreat.

For Fegelein, the symbolism was extraordinary.

Himmler was his patron.

Hitler stood above the entire regime.

Bormann controlled access to Hitler with increasing ruthlessness.

And now Fegelein was married to the sister of Hitler’s companion.

If Nazi Germany had operated like an ordinary corporation, Fegelein had just married into the chairman’s family while working as the representative of one of the most powerful executives in the organization.

His network seemed complete.

Military prestige.

SS rank.

Himmler’s protection.

Bormann’s acquaintance.

The Braun family connection.

Access to Hitler.

He had built a career out of recognizing which direction power was moving.

And in the summer of 1944, he appeared to have positioned himself near almost every important source of it.

There was just one detail nobody at the wedding could escape.

Three days after Fegelein married Gretl Braun, Allied troops stormed the beaches of Normandy.

Germany was now being squeezed from east and west.

The music at the wedding had barely faded before the military situation began deteriorating at terrifying speed.

A month later, on July 20, German officers tried to kill Hitler with a bomb.

Fegelein was present in the headquarters complex and escaped with relatively minor injuries.

Again, he survived.

Again, his position strengthened.

Again, it seemed as though fortune favored him.

But the bomb attack changed Hitler.

Suspicion hardened into obsession.

Anyone could be a traitor.

Generals could be traitors.

Old comrades could be traitors.

Even men who had served him for decades could suddenly become enemies.

Thousands were arrested in the aftermath.

Executions followed.

And as Germany’s battlefield position worsened, Hitler increasingly demanded loyalty not merely as a political virtue but as proof of personal devotion.

Leaving became betrayal.

Negotiating became betrayal.

Admitting defeat became betrayal.

Reality itself could be interpreted as betrayal.

Fegelein survived 1944.

But the world that had allowed him to thrive was beginning to consume itself.

By January 1945, Soviet forces were driving toward Berlin.

The Western Allies were crossing into Germany.

Cities were ruined.

Fuel was scarce.

Entire armies existed more convincingly on maps than on battlefields.

Yet inside Hitler’s headquarters, orders continued to be issued.

Arrows were drawn.

Divisions were moved with pencils.

Counterattacks were demanded from units that barely existed.

And Hermann Fegelein remained close to the center.

For a man who had always understood power, the view from inside must have been impossible to misunderstand.

There was almost no power left.

---

By April 1945, Berlin had become a battlefield.

Soviet artillery shook the city.

Buildings burned.

Civilians crowded into basements and subway stations.

Teenagers and old men were being pushed into desperate defensive positions.

The leadership of the Reich retreated underground beneath the Reich Chancellery.

Inside the Führerbunker, the atmosphere grew increasingly unreal.

There were military briefings.

Meals.

Whispered conversations.

Arguments.

Telephone calls to formations that could no longer move.

Messages from commanders who could no longer reach Berlin.

Above them, the Soviet ring tightened.

Every hour reduced the distance between Hitler and the soldiers who were coming to capture the German capital.

Fegelein moved through this world as Himmler’s liaison.

But Himmler himself was no longer in the bunker.

That mattered.

Because Heinrich Himmler had begun looking for a future beyond Hitler.

For years, Nazi propaganda had presented loyalty as sacred.

The SS motto itself centered on loyalty.

Himmler had built an empire around obedience.

He had demanded absolute submission from millions of men beneath him.

Now, with Germany collapsing, the head of the SS secretly explored the possibility of dealing with the Western Allies.

He hoped, fantastically, that he might negotiate separately with them.

Perhaps he imagined himself playing a role in a post-Hitler Germany.

Perhaps he believed the Western Allies could be persuaded to turn against the Soviet Union.

Whatever his expectations, Himmler had crossed the line that Hitler considered unforgivable.

He was acting without Hitler’s permission.

And Hermann Fegelein was Himmler’s man inside Hitler’s headquarters.

That fact had once made him powerful.

Now it made him dangerous.

Fegelein seemed to understand the danger before Hitler fully understood Himmler’s betrayal.

Sometime during the chaos of the final days, Fegelein disappeared from the bunker.

His absence was noticed.

That alone was serious.

Berlin was surrounded.

Hitler had made clear that his closest entourage was expected to remain.

Senior officers could not simply decide to leave.

And Fegelein was no ordinary officer.

He was Himmler’s representative.

He was married to Gretl Braun.

He belonged to the inner circle.

A search was ordered.

The men looking for him knew where to go.

Fegelein had an apartment in Berlin.

And when they found him, the image was devastating.

Not an SS general directing a defensive position.

Not a liaison officer waiting beside the telephone.

Not a decorated commander preparing to die at his post.

A man in civilian clothing.

A man apparently preparing to escape.

Later accounts would disagree over some details, but several described luggage, money and valuables ready for departure.

Some described false passports.

Some said he was intoxicated.

Some placed a woman with him.

The precise inventory mattered less than the message.

Hermann Fegelein had left.

The man whose uniform had carried him from Munich riding circles to the upper ranks of the SS appeared ready to abandon it.

Imagine the reversal.

For years, the uniform had been his passport into power.

Now civilian clothes offered the better chance of survival.

For years, association with Himmler had opened doors.

Now the name Himmler could get him killed.

For years, marriage into Eva Braun’s family had increased his security.

Now it meant everyone in the bunker knew exactly who he was.

He had spent his adult life making himself impossible to overlook.

At the worst possible moment, he needed to become invisible.

And he could not.

Fegelein was taken back.

Then came the news that destroyed whatever protection he still possessed.

Hitler learned what Himmler had been doing.

---

On April 28, reports reached Hitler confirming that Heinrich Himmler—the man once praised as the loyal head of the SS—had attempted to negotiate with the Western Allies.

Hitler exploded.

Only days earlier, Hermann Göring had sent a message asking whether he should assume leadership under an earlier succession arrangement if Hitler had lost freedom of action.

Hitler treated that as treason.

Now Himmler had gone further.

The chief of the SS was attempting his own political maneuver while Hitler remained alive inside Berlin.

To Hitler, it was not merely disobedience.

It was personal betrayal.

And Himmler himself was beyond reach.

Fegelein was not.

That was the moment Fegelein’s entire career turned against him.

Every promotion Himmler had helped him obtain became evidence of closeness.

Every year of access became suspicious.

His position as liaison officer, once so valuable, now made him the most convenient living connection between Hitler and the absent Reichsführer-SS.

And then investigators had the other fact already in front of them.

Fegelein had tried to leave.

The combination was fatal.

Desertion.

Suspicion of knowledge about Himmler’s actions.

A regime collapsing into paranoia.

A dictator raging against betrayal.

Fegelein was brought under guard.

Accounts differ about exactly what happened next.

Some later witnesses described an attempted court-martial.

One version says Fegelein was so intoxicated that officers considered him incapable of properly participating in the proceedings.

Other accounts describe a tribunal that condemned him.

Some witnesses remembered a direct order from Hitler.

Others disagreed about precisely how the execution was authorized.

That uncertainty remains.

But on the essential point, the historical record converges.

Fegelein did not walk out of the Reich Chancellery a free man.

He was condemned.

And the man who had spent years navigating the personal loyalties of the Nazi leadership discovered the final rule of that world:

Loyalty ran upward.

Protection did not necessarily run downward.

The most extraordinary part may have been the woman who could theoretically have helped him.

Eva Braun.

Fegelein’s sister-in-law.

Gretl was pregnant and away from Berlin.

According to later accounts, Fegelein tried to appeal through Eva.

Think about what that meant.

Less than a year earlier, the Braun connection had been one of the greatest social victories of his career.

Now he needed the family connection for something much more basic.

His life.

But Eva Braun had voluntarily returned to Hitler’s side in Berlin.

She had refused to leave him.

And contemporary accounts indicate that she did not successfully intervene to save Fegelein.

The marriage card had failed.

The Himmler card had become poison.

The Bormann connection did nothing.

The decorations meant nothing.

The rank meant nothing.

There was nobody left to call.

Nobody powerful enough to protect him.

And somewhere inside that bunker complex, Hermann Fegelein must have finally understood what had happened.

The room had changed.

For most of his career, he had been exceptionally skilled at reading rooms.

He had known when to smile.

Whom to approach.

Which superior mattered.

Which relationship could produce another promotion.

Which uniform opened which door.

But there was no correct move left.

The men around him were no longer colleagues at a wedding.

They were guards.

The corridors that once connected him to power now led toward detention.

Himmler was absent.

Eva was not coming.

Hitler wanted traitors punished.

The Soviet artillery continued outside.

And for perhaps the first time in Fegelein’s career, there was no higher rung to grab.

Only the bottom.

---

Sometime around the night of April 28, Hermann Fegelein was taken into the Reich Chancellery garden or courtyard area.

What happened in the final minutes has been reconstructed from conflicting testimony.

There is no reason to invent a heroic speech for him.

There was nothing heroic about the situation.

He was not a resistance fighter being killed for opposing dictatorship.

He was not an innocent officer sacrificed by a system he had tried to reform.

He had served that system enthusiastically.

He had risen through it.

He had commanded formations involved in mass murder.

He had benefited from its patronage.

He had worn its decorations.

He had joined its elite.

And now, at the very end, the system applied its own brutality inward.

The executioners were not Soviet troops.

They were not Allied soldiers.

They were his own side.

Men from the apparatus he had served.

The irony was almost perfect.

For years, orders had traveled downward.

From Hitler.

From Himmler.

Through generals.

Through SS commanders.

Through men like Fegelein.

People below obeyed.

People at the bottom died.

Now Fegelein stood at the bottom of the chain.

An order had come down.

And there was nobody beneath him to absorb it.

The decorated SS general was shot.

No rescue arrived.

No last-minute telephone call reversed the decision.

No patron stepped through the door.

No family connection produced mercy.

Hermann Fegelein, thirty-eight years old, disappeared into the final violence of the regime he had helped sustain.

But history saved one final twist for the story.

The phrase usually attached to Fegelein today is that Hitler executed “his own brother-in-law.”

Technically, at the time Fegelein’s fate was being decided, Hitler and Eva Braun were still unmarried.

That changed almost immediately afterward.

During the night of April 28–29, with Soviet forces closing in and the Reich collapsing above them, Adolf Hitler finally married Eva Braun.

A civil ceremony was performed inside the bunker complex.

Documents were signed.

Witnesses were present.

The longtime hidden companion of the dictator became Eva Hitler.

And through that marriage, Gretl Braun became Hitler’s sister-in-law.

Which meant her husband, Hermann Fegelein, became Hitler’s brother-in-law by marriage.

Possibly only hours after he had been condemned or killed.

Fegelein had spent years climbing toward the family circle surrounding Hitler.

He finally reached the closest possible legal relationship to the dictator at almost exactly the moment when it could no longer save him.

It is difficult to imagine a more complete symbol of his career.

He had achieved proximity to absolute power.

And discovered, too late, that absolute power was disappearing.

---

The following day, Hitler dictated his political testament.

He denounced those he considered traitors.

He expelled Himmler from the Nazi Party and stripped him of his positions.

The man Fegelein had trusted as his greatest patron had been erased from Hitler’s political universe.

But Himmler was still alive.

Fegelein was not.

That is another cruel reversal.

The subordinate paid first.

Himmler had initiated the negotiations.

Himmler had tried to build a political exit.

Himmler had attempted to imagine a Germany after Hitler.

Yet Fegelein was the one within reach.

When a collapsing dictatorship looks for betrayal, physical proximity can become more dangerous than actual responsibility.

Fegelein had placed himself close to power because closeness had always brought opportunity.

In April 1945, closeness brought punishment.

On April 30, less than two days after Fegelein’s death, Hitler and Eva Braun went into Hitler’s private quarters.

They did not emerge alive.

Hitler died by suicide.

Eva died with him.

Their bodies were carried outside and burned as Soviet shells fell nearby.

The regime Fegelein had spent years climbing was disappearing almost by the hour.

Goebbels would be dead the next day.

Bormann would attempt to escape Berlin.

Himmler would flee, disguise himself and eventually fall into Allied hands before taking his own life in captivity.

Within days, Germany surrendered.

All the titles that had once sounded enormous—Reichsführer, Gruppenführer, Gauleiter, Minister, Führer—became artifacts of a dead dictatorship.

And outside Berlin, millions of people were beginning to see the scale of what that dictatorship had done.

Concentration camps were being liberated.

Mass graves were being uncovered.

Survivors were emerging from a system designed to destroy them.

Documents were falling into Allied hands.

The bureaucratic records of murder remained even as the men who had signed, transmitted and executed orders tried to disappear.

Fegelein never faced an Allied courtroom.

He never sat at Nuremberg.

He never answered publicly for what SS cavalry units under his leadership had done in the East.

His own regime killed him first.

That should not be mistaken for justice.

The victims of the SS did not receive justice because one SS general was shot by other SS men during an internal collapse.

Fegelein was killed because Hitler believed loyalty had been broken, not because Hitler suddenly cared about the civilians murdered under Nazi rule.

This was not moral accountability.

It was a dictatorship turning on itself.

And that distinction matters.

Because otherwise it is tempting to turn Fegelein’s death into a simple morality tale:

Bad man does terrible things.

Bad man eventually receives terrible punishment.

End of story.

History is less comforting.

For years, Hermann Fegelein succeeded.

That is the disturbing part.

The system rewarded him.

It promoted him.

It decorated him.

It brought him closer to powerful people.

It placed him at elite celebrations.

It allowed him to marry into the most protected social circle in Germany.

His fall came only when the system itself was collapsing.

Not when Jewish civilians were being murdered.

Not when villages were being emptied.

Not when SS reports reduced dead human beings to statistics.

Not when violence became policy.

He fell when powerful Nazis began betraying other powerful Nazis.

That is what makes his story more than a bizarre episode from Hitler’s bunker.

---

There was one more person who never saw Hermann Fegelein alive.

His child.

Gretl Braun was heavily pregnant during the final days of the war.

While her husband was trapped in the ruins of the Nazi capital, she was away from Berlin.

Days after Fegelein was executed, she gave birth to a daughter.

The war in Europe was ending.

The dictatorship into which the child had almost been born as part of an extraordinarily privileged family network no longer existed.

Hitler was dead.

Eva Braun was dead.

Fegelein was dead.

The SS was collapsing.

Cities were occupied.

German soldiers were surrendering by the hundreds of thousands.

One week had erased a world that Fegelein had spent more than a decade constructing around himself.

That contrast is difficult to ignore.

In June 1944, Fegelein stood at a wedding surrounded by some of the most powerful people in Nazi Germany.

Less than eleven months later, the groom had been executed, one of the principal witnesses was dead by suicide, another had been denounced as a traitor and was fleeing, and the entire state that gave their titles meaning was disappearing.

Nothing about the wedding photograph could have shown how close the cliff already was.

Perhaps that is the most revealing image of Hermann Fegelein’s life.

Not the execution yard.

Not the bunker.

Not the uniform.

The wedding.

Because everyone standing there represented the illusion on which his career depended.

Himmler represented patronage.

Bormann represented access.

Eva’s family represented social protection.

Hitler represented ultimate authority.

Fegelein had attached himself to all of them.

He had done exactly what an opportunist inside such a system was supposed to do.

He had built upward.

Connection upon connection.

Favor upon favor.

Rank upon rank.

Until there seemed to be nowhere higher to climb.

But he had made one fatal assumption.

He believed power was permanent.

It was not.

And when power collapsed, every relationship reversed direction.

Being Himmler’s man became evidence against him.

Being close to Hitler meant he could not quietly disappear.

Being connected to Eva Braun meant his absence would be noticed.

Knowing the inner circle meant he knew too much.

Having enjoyed privilege made escape look even more suspicious.

The web that had lifted him became the net that caught him.

And there was no final favor left to request.

---

There is a temptation, when reading stories from the final days of Nazi Germany, to focus entirely on the strange atmosphere inside the bunker.

The desperate orders.

The betrayals.

The executions.

The marriages.

The suicides.

The surreal behavior of people who had once controlled much of Europe and were now trapped beneath a burning city.

But Hermann Fegelein’s story only makes sense when the beginning and ending are placed beside each other.

He did not suddenly encounter brutality in April 1945.

He had belonged to brutality for years.

He had simply experienced it from the protected side.

That is the deeper reversal.

When SS cavalry moved through occupied territory in 1941, the people facing them had no powerful patron who could telephone Himmler.

They had no family relationship that could protect them.

They had no medals.

No rank.

No private apartment waiting elsewhere.

No exit plan.

The machinery came for them, and the machinery did not negotiate.

Fegelein helped command that world.

Four years later, in Berlin, the machinery came for him.

Not for the same reason.

Not as an act of justice.

But with the same principle at its core.

Individual life mattered less than the demands of the regime.

The difference was that Fegelein had spent years believing his status placed him above that principle.

It did not.

The moment Hitler believed Fegelein had become expendable, everything disappeared at once.

Years of service vanished.

Military decorations vanished.

Social charm vanished.

Himmler’s patronage vanished.

His marriage vanished as protection.

His rank vanished as protection.

The uniform itself became something he apparently wanted to remove.

And in the final hours, there was only Hermann Fegelein, a prisoner of the hierarchy he had spent his life climbing.

That was the recognition waiting at the end of his career.

The organization had never loved him.

The powerful men around him had never created a permanent family.

They had created a system of usefulness.

As long as Fegelein was useful, doors opened.

When he became inconvenient, the doors locked.

And when he became dangerous, one final door opened onto the courtyard.

That is why Hermann Fegelein’s death remains so haunting.

Not because Hitler executed a relative.

Not because the bunker produced one more dramatic episode before the end.

But because Fegelein’s career exposed something essential about dictatorships built on fear, personal loyalty and violence.

People inside them often mistake access for security.

They mistake favor for friendship.

They mistake rank for immunity.

They mistake usefulness for love.

And when the structure begins to collapse, those illusions can disappear in a single night.

Hermann Fegelein spent years getting closer and closer to the center of Nazi power.

In the end, he discovered the terrible truth about standing beside a collapsing dictator:

The closer you are to absolute power, the less distance there is between privilege and the firing squad.