Heinrich Himmler was an ordinary, inconspicuous fellow who could be considered a decent bank or other official, or rather not noticed at all on the street.
It is a historical paradox that the greatest monsters usually do not look like monsters. Take Heinrich Himmler, leader of the SS, head of the Gestapo and the man who organized the mass murder of Jews during World War II. He was such an ordinary, almost inconspicuous guy, who could be considered a decent bank or other clerk by sight, or rather not noticed at all on the street.
In this case, our intuition would hardly fail us. It is almost certain that, had it not been for the rise of the Nazis in the 1920s and their assumption of unrestricted power over much of Europe, Himmler would quite likely have lived out his life as a farmer and rancher. But what was his path to the highest levels of the Nazi hierarchy? And who was he really?
Heinrich Himmler’s Youth
Heinrich Luitpold Himmler was born on 7 October 1900 in Munich into a middle-class family of a devout and also strict Roman Catholic teacher. His first name, Heinrich, came from his godfather, Prince Heinrich of Bavaria, a member of the Bavarian royal family who was raised by Himmler’s father. He attended the gymnasium in Landshut, where his father was deputy headmaster at the time. While he did well at school, he was not very good at athletics and sports in general. Moreover, he had been in poor health since his youth, suffering from lifelong stomach problems and other ailments. Other boys at school later remembered him as a studious and rather clumsy person in social situations.
Himmler’s diary, which he kept intermittently from the age of ten, shows that he took a lively interest in current events, fights and “serious discussions about religion and sex”.
A year after the start of the Great War, which later became known as the First World War, in 1915, he began training with the cadet corps in Landshut. His father used his contacts with the royal family to get Himmler accepted as an officer candidate, and in December 1917 he enlisted in the reserve battalion of the 11th Bavarian Regiment. However, in November 1918, while Himmler was still in training, the war ended with the defeat of Germany, denying him the opportunity to become an officer or see combat. And so Himmler returned home.
Himmler, a frustrated Nazi
Himmler was already anti-Semitic when he went to university, but not in any exceptional or radical way. He remained a devout Catholic during his studies and spent most of his free time with members of his fencing club, the “Apollo League”, whose president was Jewish. Himmler maintained a polite demeanor with him and the other Jewish members of the fraternity, despite his growing anti-Semitism.
During his second year at university, Himmler tried unsuccessfully to pursue a military career. Although unsuccessful, he managed to expand his involvement in the paramilitary scene in Munich, and it was during this time that he first met Ernst Röhm, the first member of the Nazi Party and co-founder of the SA. Not too surprisingly, Himmler also became more interested in the “Jewish question” and more and more anti-Semitic remarks appeared in his diary entries. His reading lists, as he also recorded in his diary, were dominated by anti-Semitic pamphlets, German myths and occult tracts. Finally, on August 1, 1923, he too joined the Nazi Party.
As a member of Röhm’s paramilitary unit, Himmler participated in the Beer Putsch, an unsuccessful attempt by Hitler and the Nazi Party to seize power in Munich; he was interrogated by the police but not even charged for lack of evidence. However, he lost his job and, moreover, could not find employment. So, to his displeasure, he had to move in with his parents in Munich. From these mounting setbacks he became increasingly irritable, aggressive and opinionated, eventually alienating friends and family members. He abandoned Catholicism and turned to the occult and anti-Semitism. For him, Germanic mythology, reinforced by occult imagery, became a substitute religion. And although he was not initially swept away by Hitler’s charisma or the cult of Führer worship, he later admired and even worshipped him. So he found, figuratively, a family and a different faith, which became everything to him and which he would cling to for the rest of his life.
Himmler’s rise
After some time, Himmler began working under Gregor Strasser as party secretary and propaganda assistant, joining both the SA and the newly formed SS.
The SS at the time were more of a bunch of thugs, designed for Hitler’s personal protection at rallies, however when in September 1927 Himmler told Hitler of his vision to transform the SS into a loyal, strong and racially pure elite unit, Hitler was so impressed that he appointed him straight to the rank of SS-Oberführer, the deputy Reichsführer of the SS. And Himmler’s career skyrocketed.
World War II
Himmler was doing his job. Under his leadership, the SS grew from a single battalion of 290 men into one of the most powerful institutions in Nazi Germany. Over the course of his career, Himmler gained a reputation as a good organizer and chose very capable subordinates, such as Reinhard Heydrich. From 1943, he held the position of head of the Kriminalpolizei (Criminal Police) and Minister of the Interior, which allowed him to oversee all internal and external police and security forces (including the Gestapo). He also directed the Waffen-SS, a branch of the SS that served alongside the Wehrmacht in combat during World War II.
As the chief executor of Nazi racial policy, Himmler was responsible for the operation of concentration and extermination camps and the creation of the Einsatzgruppen death squads in German-occupied Europe. In this capacity, he played a major role in the genocide of approximately 5.5-6 million Jews and the deaths of millions of other victims during the Holocaust. The day before Operation Barbarossa was launched in June 1941, Himmler commissioned the drafting of Generalplan Ost, which was approved by Hitler in May 1942 and implemented by the Nazi regime, resulting in the deaths of approximately 14 million people in Eastern Europe.
And although he had no problem signing death warrants for millions, he disliked blood and the sight of violence made him nauseous. This defacto led to mechanised murder in the gas chambers.
Himmler gained personal experience of the “nastiness” of death in August 1941. It was then that mass executions of Jews and others were taking place in the area around Minsk, Belarus, in which he personally participated as one of the top SS officials. In his records he mentioned that during one of the executions the blood of a victim splashed on his coat, causing him to faint.
On the basis of this shocking experience, he subsequently decided that the elimination of the Jewish population had to be carried out in a more “humane” way. For this purpose, specially adapted vehicles were deployed, outwardly resembling removal vans, in which the victims were murdered by means of poison gas. These later grew into the construction of gas chambers for greater “efficiency”.
After that, the dead no longer frightened him. In the diaries we find notes about how he had a snack in Auschwitz before setting out to gas hundreds of prisoners, or about a two-hour massage in the morning, followed by a phone call to his wife and children, which was followed by an order to execute ten people.
Heinrich Himmler is a beast of contradictions. On the one hand, he was a ruthless executor of death sentences. On the other hand, he was very caring towards SS elites, family, friends and acquaintances.
(historian Matthias Uhl for Bild)
In his diaries, Himmler also often mentions his family, his wife Marga and his daughter Gudrun, called Püppi, but later his new love of his mistress Hedwig Potthast, whom he called Häschen (rabbit), prevailed. With her he had two more children, a boy and a girl.
And while he continued to effectively build his death factory, he slipped more and more into the magical world of the occult in his fantasies. It was from him that the Nazi archaeological and anthropological expeditions in the Himalayas in search of traces of the prairie civilization, or the organization of occult gatherings, originated.
The attempt to negotiate peace
By April 1944, even Himmler was aware that Germany had no chance of winning a war fought on two fronts. For this reason, unbeknownst to Adolf Hitler, he attempted to make contact with the Western Allies and reach a separate armistice to confront the Soviet Union together.
Later, evidence was found in secret British intelligence files in London that at the very end of the conflict Himmler had attempted to secure political asylum for himself and two hundred prominent Nazis. He offered 3,500 Jewish lives in exchange.
When Hitler learned of these clandestine efforts, he stripped Himmler of all party and state functions, expelled him from the Nazi Party, and placed him under house arrest.
Death without punishment
Shortly after the end of the war, he fled to the West like many other Nazis. Together with two of his aides and a forged document in the name of Heinrich Hitzinger, he was captured by British soldiers on 21 May 1945. But no one recognized him.
Two days later, without being forced, he confessed his true identity alone in the internment camp in Bertfeld. It can be assumed that he did so after he had decided to commit suicide. He committed suicide that very day with a cyanide capsule hidden in his tooth.
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