Alfred-Ingemar Berndt

Alfred-Ingemar Berndt
Born
Alfred-Ingemar Berndt

(1905-04-22)22 April 1905
Died28 March 1945(1945-03-28) (aged 39)
Cause of deathKilled in action
SS service
Allegiance Nazi Germany
Service / branch Waffen-SS
Years of service1940–1945
RankSS-Obersturmbannführer
(reserve force)
UnitSS Division Wiking

Alfred-Ingemar Berndt (22 April 1905 – 28 March 1945) was a German Nazi journalist, writer and close collaborator of Reich Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda Joseph Goebbels.

Berndt joined the Nazi Party at the age of 18 and became a brownshirt at 20. A freelance journalist, he was deputy editor of Goebbels’s party newspaper before joining the staff of the Nazi Propaganda Ministry in 1936. Berndt wrote an eyewitness account of the 1940 German invasion of the Low Countries and France filled with distortions and falsehoods, he is also considered the propagandistic creator of the Rommel myth attached to German field marshal Erwin Rommel. A fervent Nazi, Berndt murdered a captured Allied pilot in cold blood in front of numerous witnesses. In early 1945, he was given command of a battalion of the 5th SS Panzer Regiment and was killed in a Soviet air raid on 28 March 1945 at Veszprém, Hungary.[1]

  1. ^ Mitcham 2008, pp. 104–105.