Herman von Strab

Herman von Strab was the Imperial planetary governor of Armageddon during the Second War for Armageddon, later remembered as a traitor to the Imperium. He held the title of Overlord of Armageddon, the office that placed the world’s hives, industry and defence forces under one civil and military authority. His name is bound to the opening of the Second War in 941.M41, when the Ork warlord Ghazghkull Thraka arrived in the Armageddon System.

According to the recorded account, von Strab dismissed the space hulk that carried Ghazghkull’s Waaagh as uninhabited salvage and ignored repeated warnings of the danger it posed. Commissar Sebastian Yarrick sent the distress call that brought Imperial aid, and von Strab is said to have banished him to Hades Hive for defying his orders. The Orks made planetfall on the Feast of the Emperor’s Ascension, and a warp storm then isolated the system from reinforcement. Von Strab was disgraced for his conduct of the defence, and accounts of his personal fate in the years that followed are sparse. His authority is also referred to in the record of the Jopall Indentured, whose junior officers are said to have posed as liaisons from his Personal Guard, and in the tension between Armageddon’s governing class and the Death Korps of Krieg, who held the hive perimeter during the war.

During the Third War for Armageddon, which began in 998.M41, von Strab is recorded as having allied with Ghazghkull and taken Hive Acheron by treachery. Penal Legion troops are said to have hunted him down and killed him, and he is therefore regarded as dead. His standing is that of a cautionary figure in Armageddon’s history: the governor whose misjudgement preceded the war, set against Yarrick, whose warnings were vindicated and who shaped the Armageddon Steel Legion and the planetary defence forces into the counter-attacking force of later campaigns. The two wars, fifty-seven years apart, bind him to Armageddon on the map and to the Second and Third Wars on the timeline.