Heinrich Himmler
Heinrich Himmler was reluctant to open his mouth. A British doctor in Lüneburg leaned in to examine it on the 23rd of May 1945, and the prisoner jerked his head away. Then he bit down on a hidden potassium cyanide pill and collapsed onto the floor. He was dead within 15 minutes. The man who died on that floor had been the 4th Reichsführer of the SS, one of the most powerful figures in Nazi Germany and one of the main architects of the Holocaust. Yet little in his beginnings pointed to this. He was a sickly schoolboy with lifelong stomach complaints, awkward in social situations, who trained daily with weights to become stronger. He kept a diary from the age of 10. How did a studious farm-school graduate who never saw combat come to command concentration camps, death squads, and a private army of dozens of divisions? Why did Hitler, who called him der treue Heinrich, the loyal Heinrich, end up branding him the worst traitor he had ever known? And what did Himmler believe he was building with the elite he weeded and bred like a gardener selecting plants?
In September 1927, Himmler told Hitler of his vision to transform the SS into a loyal, powerful, racially pure elite unit, and Hitler made him Deputy Reichsführer-SS. When SS commander Erhard Heiden resigned in January 1929, Himmler assumed the top position with Hitler's approval. Over the next year he grew the SS from about 290 men to about 3,000; by 1933 it numbered 52,000 members. Himmler's organised, bookish intellect served him as he set up department after department. In 1931 he appointed Reinhard Heydrich chief of a new intelligence service, later renamed the Sicherheitsdienst, and the two men built a working relationship of mutual respect. Strict membership rules governed who could join. Applicants were vetted for Nordic qualities, in Himmler's words like a nursery gardener trying to reproduce a good old strain that had been debased. Few dared mention that by his own standards Himmler did not meet his own ideals. He pushed his racial vision into private life through the marriage order of December 1931. SS men wishing to marry had to produce family trees proving Aryan descent back to 1800, and each was issued a Sippenbuch recording his genetic history. Himmler expected every SS marriage to produce at least four children, yet the results disappointed him. Fewer than 40 per cent of SS men married, and each produced only about one child.
On the 20th of April 1934, Göring handed Himmler control of the Prussian secret police, the Gestapo, and Hitler named him chief of all German police outside Prussia. This broke a long-standing German practice that law enforcement was a state and local matter. Two days later Himmler made Heydrich chief of the Gestapo. The two men then took over the political police of state after state, until soon only Prussia remained outside their grasp. Himmler and Heydrich urged Hitler to forge a national police force overseen by the SS, against the rival ambitions of Interior Minister Frick. On the 17th of June 1936, Hitler decreed the unification of all police forces in the Reich and named Himmler Chief of German Police and a State Secretary in the Ministry of the Interior. Nominally Himmler still answered to Frick, but in practice the police had become a division of the SS. He folded the uniformed forces into the Ordnungspolizei under Kurt Daluege, created the Kriminalpolizei as an umbrella for criminal investigation, and merged it with the Gestapo into the Sicherheitspolizei under Heydrich. In September 1939, after war broke out, he gathered these strands into the Reich Security Main Office and again put Heydrich in command.
In March 1933, less than three months after the Nazis came to power, Himmler set up the first official concentration camp at Dachau. Hitler had said he did not want it to be just another prison. Himmler appointed Theodor Eicke, a convicted felon and ardent Nazi, to run it, and Eicke devised a system used as a model for future camps. Its features included isolation from the outside world, elaborate roll calls and work details, force and executions to exact obedience, and a strict code for the guards, whose uniforms bore the Totenkopf insignia on the collars. By the end of 1934 Himmler took control of the camps under the SS, creating a division called the SS-Totenkopfverbände. A Hitler decree of December 1937 allowed the incarceration of anyone the regime deemed undesirable. The camps swelled to hold Jews, Gypsies, communists, and anyone branded Untermensch, sub-human. By the outbreak of war in September 1939, six camps held some 27,000 inmates, and death tolls were high. Himmler the student of agriculture applied the principles of selective breeding to people. He believed he could engineer the German populace through eugenics to be Nordic in appearance within decades of the war's end. He pushed this into a Race and Settlement Main Office, with Walther Darré as its first chief, monitoring the racial integrity of SS membership.
On the 20th of January 1942, top Nazi officials gathered at Wannsee, a suburb of Berlin, for a meeting Heydrich had arranged to outline the final solution to the Jewish question. Heydrich calculated the number of Jews to be killed at 11 million and told the attendees that Hitler had placed Himmler in charge of the plan. Those able to work would be worked to death; the rest killed outright. The killing tested even the man who ordered it. In August 1941, Himmler attended the shooting of 100 Jews at Minsk, the first time he had seen dead people, and as he looked into the grave his coat and perhaps his face were splashed by a victim's brains. He went green and pale and swayed, and Karl Wolff led him away. Nauseated, Himmler concluded that other methods of killing should be found. On his orders, by early 1942 the camp at Auschwitz had been greatly expanded with gas chambers using the pesticide Zyklon B. He visited on the 17th and the 18th of July 1942, watched a mass killing in Bunker 2, and toured a building site nearby. After Heydrich was assassinated in Prague in June 1942, Himmler took over the Reich Security Main Office and stepped up the pace, ordering three extermination camps built at Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka under the name Aktion Reinhard. By the end of the war at least 5.5 million Jews had been killed, with most estimates closer to 6 million.
On the 4th of October 1943, in a secret meeting with top SS officials in Poznań, Himmler did what he insisted would never be done in public. He referred explicitly to the extermination, the Ausrottung, of the Jewish people. I also want to refer here very frankly to a very difficult matter, he told them. We can now very openly talk about this among ourselves, and yet we will never discuss this publicly. He spoke of enduring the sight of 100 corpses, 500, a thousand, and called remaining a decent person through it a glorious chapter that has not and will not be spoken of. Two days later, on the 6th of October, he repeated the theme to the party elite, the Gauleiters and Reichsleiters. Hitler authorised these speeches for a reason. Because the Allies had signalled they would pursue charges for German war crimes, Hitler sought to bind his subordinates to the genocide. By making every party leader complicit, he ensured none could later deny knowledge of the killings.
From an early age Himmler was drawn to mysticism and the occult, and he tied this to his search for proof of Aryan and Nordic superiority from ancient times. In 1923 and 1924, while searching for a world view, he abandoned Catholicism, and Germanic mythology reinforced by occult ideas became a religion for him. He promoted a cult of ancestor worship among the SS as a way to keep the race pure. In 1935 he founded the Ahnenerbe, a pseudoscientific research society that searched the globe for proof of the ancient origins of the Germanic race. Himmler treated Christianity as an enemy to be overcome. In 1937 he declared that the SS lived in an era of ultimate conflict with Christianity, and that its mission was to give the German people non-Christian ideological foundations for the next half century. He opposed Christian sexual morality and the principle of Christian mercy, seeing both as obstacles to his planned battle with subhumans. He reshaped ritual to fit the order. The stylised lightning-bolt logo, chosen in 1932, was a pair of runes from a set of 18 Armanen runes created by Guido von List in 1906. Himmler placed particular importance on the death's-head rings, which were never to be sold and were to be returned to him upon the owner's death. He devised an SS naming ceremony to replace baptism, altered marriage ceremonies, and instituted celebrations of the summer and winter solstices.
On the 25th of January 1945, despite his lack of military experience, Hitler appointed Himmler commander of the hastily formed Army Group Vistula, a decision that appalled the German General Staff. Himmler set up his command at Schneidemühl, using his special train, the Sonderzug Steiermark, as headquarters. The train had only one telephone line and inadequate maps. He seldom left it, worked about four hours a day, insisted on a daily massage before work, and a lengthy nap after lunch. General Heinz Guderian, meeting him on the 9th of February, decided Himmler was trying to conceal his incompetence. When the counter-attacks failed to stop the Soviet advance, Hitler held Himmler personally liable, and replaced him with General Gotthard Heinrici on the 20th of March. The faithful Heinrich began looking for a way out. In March 1945 he considered negotiating a peace settlement on his own, using his masseur Felix Kersten as an intermediary with Count Folke Bernadotte of the Swedish Red Cross. On the 21st of April he met a Swedish representative of the World Jewish Congress, and about 20,000 people were released in the White Buses operation. On the 23rd he met Bernadotte at the Swedish consulate in Lübeck, called himself the provisional leader of Germany, and asked that Germany be allowed to surrender to the Western Allies, not the Soviets. On the evening of the 28th of April, a Reuters report aired over the radio describing these talks. Hitler flew into a rage at the worst treachery he had ever known, ordered Himmler's arrest, and in his last will and testament expelled him from the Nazi Party. Rejected even by Hitler's successor, Karl Dönitz, Himmler carried a forged paybook under the name Sergeant Heinrich Hizinger when former Soviet prisoners of war detained him at a checkpoint in Bremervörde.
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Who was Heinrich Himmler in Nazi Germany?
Heinrich Himmler was a German Nazi politician and military leader who served as the 4th Reichsführer of the SS from 1929 to 1945. He was one of the most powerful figures in Nazi Germany and one of the main architects of the Holocaust.
What role did Heinrich Himmler play in the Holocaust?
Heinrich Himmler was a principal enforcer of Nazi racial policies, responsible for operating concentration and extermination camps and for forming the Einsatzgruppen death squads. He played a central role in the genocide of an estimated 5.5 to 6 million Jews, and at the Wannsee meeting on the 20th of January 1942 Hitler placed him in charge of the plan.
How did Heinrich Himmler build up the SS?
Heinrich Himmler grew the SS from about 290 men to about 3,000 within a year of taking command, and to 52,000 members by 1933. He vetted applicants for Nordic qualities, imposed a marriage order requiring proof of Aryan descent back to 1800, and built an elaborate bureaucracy of SS departments.
How did Heinrich Himmler die?
Heinrich Himmler died on the 23rd of May 1945 by suicide in British custody near Lüneburg. He bit into a hidden potassium cyanide pill during a medical exam and was dead within 15 minutes, and his body was buried in an unmarked grave whose location remains unknown.
Why did Hitler turn against Heinrich Himmler?
Hitler turned against Heinrich Himmler after learning he had tried to open peace talks with the western Allies in March 1945, news of which was broadcast over the radio on the 28th of April. Hitler, who had called him der treue Heinrich, the loyal Heinrich, dismissed him from all his posts, ordered his arrest, and expelled him from the Nazi Party in his last will and testament.
What did Heinrich Himmler believe about religion and the occult?
Heinrich Himmler abandoned Catholicism and treated Germanic mythology reinforced by occult ideas as a religion. He declared in 1937 that the SS lived in an era of ultimate conflict with Christianity, founded the pseudoscientific Ahnenerbe society in 1935, and introduced SS naming ceremonies and solstice celebrations to replace Christian rites.
What was Heinrich Himmler's early life like?
Heinrich Himmler was born in Munich on the 7th of October 1900 into a conservative middle-class Catholic family. He was a studious but socially awkward schoolboy with lifelong stomach complaints, kept a diary from the age of 10, and studied agriculture at the Technische Hochschule München from 1919 to 1922.
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