War hero

[Major Harkonnen]

Then came the time good times for Harkonnen. Fleet Admiral Günter Rall flipped and escaped to Liberty chasing some love of his life in the form of a Junker cruiser captain, then Fleet Admiral Alec Voelkel stepped up as the supreme commander of the Rheinwehr Hauptflotte. Voelkel was a nationalist himself, though not a party member, he sympathized with the freshly promoted Major Harkonnen, who in turn was more obedient towards him than to most of his superiors.

Eventually, Harkonnen personally arrested Rall, who ended up on Vierlande. Though the former Admiral was kept merely for a symbolic three day long interrogation, Voelkel saw that Harkonnen could be trusted with getting things done that other soldiers would not do for moral reasons.

He was there when the IMG-Rheinwehr conflict broke out (in fact, he was one of the catalysts thereof) or when the Standoff at Omega-3 resulted in a brief conflict between Bretonia and Rheinland.

"Good times, good times indeed" - he remarked as the flames spread around his ship, thinking of what were probably the sweetest memories of his life.

But as the conflicts forced both Fleet Admiral Voelkel and Meyer into resignation, Harkonnen was left all alone without any protégés and a handful of war crimes to answer for.

Not wanting to completely humiliate one of the icons of the Voelkel era when many soldiers still loyal to his memory were in the force, Harkonnen was not tried or dismissed, but moved to Munich instead, where minimal traffic went down at that point, so he couldn't do any more harm to the prestige of Rheinland, undergoing a face shift towards a peace loving, liberal nation instead of a war-mongering industrial giant.