Heinrich Himmler

Himmler became a leading organizer of the Holocaust. As founder and officer-in-charge of the Nazi concentration camps and the Einsatzgruppen death squads, Himmler held final command responsibility for implementing the industrial-scale extermination of between 6 and 12 million people. Heinrich had an older brother, Gebhard Ludwig Himmler (b.

Heinrich was named after his godparent, Prince Heinrich of Wittelsbach of the royal family of Bavaria, who was tutored by Gebhard Himmler. In 1910, Himmler began attending elite Gymnasia secondary schools in Munich and Landshut, where studies revolved around classic literature.

In 1914 World War I began, and Himmler's diaries from the time show that he was extremely interested in news pertaining to it.

In 1919 to 1922 Himmler studied agronomy at Munich Technische Hochschule after a short-lived apprenticeship on a farm and subsequent illness. Himmler at this time was pursuing a chaste lifestyle when he became interested in a young girl who was the daughter of the owner of a place where he would eat. Himmler viewed women through the scope of their role as it pertains to the needs of men, as this following diary excerpt demonstrates:

Himmler also underwent religious turmoil during his studies at Munich Technische Hochschule. Yet he was a member of a fraternity which he felt to be at odds with the tenets of the church, other biographers uncovered Himmler's theology was that of Ariosophy, his own religious dogma of racial superiority of the hypothetical "Aryan race" and Germanic neopaganism partly from his interests in folklore and mythology of the ancient Teutonic tribes of Northern Europe. Himmler turned into a disbeliever in Christian doctrine as he was also very critical of sermons given by priests, but felt that the teachings of the church were of the utmost importance and valued by the "Aryans" that he felt a "supreme deity" chose the German people to rule the world. During this time Himmler became obsessed with the idea of becoming a soldier.

In November of 1923, Himmler took part in Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch under Ernst Röhm. Himmler started to become friendly with a staff secretary, Hedwig Potthast, who left her job in 1941 and became his mistress.

Rise in the SS

Early SS (1927 ~ 1934)

Himmler joined the SS in 1925, and by 1927 had been appointed deputy reichsführer-SS, a role he began to take very seriously. Upon the resignation of SS Commander Erhard Heiden, Himmler was appointed as the new Reichsführer-SS in January 1929. At the time when Himmler was appointed leader of the SS, it had only 280 members, and was considered a mere battalion of the much larger SA. Himmler himself was only considered to be an SA-Oberführer, but after 1929 he simply referred to himself as the "Reichsführer-SS".

By 1933, when the Nazi Party rose to power in Germany, Himmler's SS numbered 52,000 members, and the organization had developed strict membership requirements ensuring all members were of Adolf Hitler's "Aryan Herrenvolk" ("Aryan master race"). Now a Gruppenführer in the SA, Himmler, along with his deputy Reinhard Heydrich, next began a massive effort to separate the SS from SA control;

Himmler and another of Hitler's right-hand men, Hermann Göring, agreed that the SA and its leader Ernst Röhm were beginning to pose a real threat to the German Army and the Nazi leadership of Germany.

With some persuasion from Himmler and Göring, Hitler began to feel threatened by this prospect and agreed that Röhm had to die. He delegated the task of Röhm's demise to Himmler and Göring who, along with Reinhard Heydrich, Kurt Daluege and Walter Schellenberg, ordered the execution of Röhm (carried out by Theodor Eicke) and numerous other senior SA officials, as well as some of Hitler's personal enemies (like Gregor Strasser and Kurt von Schleicher) on June 30, 1934, in what became known as "The Night of the Long Knives". The next day, Himmler's title of Reichsführer-SS became a rank to which he was appointed, and the SS became an independent organization of the Nazi Party.

Consolidation of power

In 1936 Himmler gained further authority as all of Germany's uniformed law enforcement agencies were amalgamated into the new Ordnungspolizei, whose main office became a headquarters branch of the SS as Himmler was accorded the title Chief of the German Police. Himmler, however, was never able to gain operational control over the uniformed police. It was only in 1943, when Himmler was appointed Minister of the Interior, that the transfer of ministerial power was complete. Indeed, his full title was Reichsfuhrer SS and Chief of the German Police in the Ministry of the Interior (abbreviated as RFSSuCdDPidMI), which clearly indicates the limits of his brief, and though Himmler tended to omit the idMI in correspondence, his powers remained as they were. Germany's political police forces came under Himmler's authority in 1934, when he organised them into the Gestapo as well as Germany's entire concentration camps complex. Once war began, though, new internment camps not formally classified as concentration camps would be established, over which Himmler and the SS would not exercise control. With his 1936 appointment, Himmler also gained ministerial authority over Germany's non-political detective forces, known as Kripo, which he attempted to combine with the Gestapo into the Sicherheitspolizei, placed under the command of Reinhard Heydrich, and thus gain operational control over Germany's entire detective force. Following the outbreak of World War II, Himmler formed the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Security Main Office) wherein Gestapo, Kripo and the SD became departments.

Himmler's war on the Jews

After the Night of the Long Knives, the SS-Totenkopfverbände was given the task of organizing and administering Germany's regime of concentration camps and, after 1941, the extermination camps in occupied Poland.

Posen speech

On 4 October 1943, Himmler referred explicitly to the extermination of the Jewish people during a secret SS meeting in the city of Posen. The following are excerpts from a transcription of an audio recording that exists of the speech:

The Second World War

Before the invasion of Russia in 1941, Himmler began preparing his SS for a war of extermination against the forces of "Judeo-Bolshevism". Himmler, always glad to make parallels between Nazi Germany and the Middle Ages, compared the invasion to the Crusades.

In 1942, Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler's right hand man, was killed in Prague after an attack by Czech special forces.

In 1943, Himmler was appointed German Interior Minister. Himmler sought to use his new office to reverse the party apparatus' annexation of the civil service, and in the process fulfill his long cherished dream of gaining real power over the non-Gestapo police. Himmler made things much worse still when following his appointment as head of the Ersatzheer (Replacement Army) (see below) he tried to use his authority in both military and police matters by "bestowing" automatic SS membership on all policemen and then "transferring" them to the Waffen SS. With Himmler about to hang himself Bormann could not give him the rope fast enough, initially acquiesing in the lunacy, until furious protests broke out, then destroying the scheme with a vengeance leaving Himmler much discredited, and his and the SS' relations with the police badly compromised.

The involvement in the July 20, 1944, plot against Hitler of leaders of the Abwehr (German military intelligence), including its head, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, prompted Hitler to disband the Abwehr and make the SD the sole intelligence service of the Third Reich. This increased Himmler's already considerable personal power. Fromm's removal, coupled with Hitler's great suspicion of the army led the way to Himmler's appointment as Fromm's successor, a position he predictibly abused to enormously expand the Waffen SS even further to the detriment of the rapidly deteriorating Wehrmacht.

Unfortunately for Himmler, the investigation soon revealed the involvement of many SS Officers in the conspiracy, including some senior ones, which played into the hands of Bormann's power struggle against the SS, as very few party cadre officers were implicated.

In late 1944, Himmler became Commander-in-Chief of army group Upper Rhine, which was fighting the oncoming United States 7th Army and French 1st Army in the Alsace region on the west bank of the Rhine. Himmler held this post until early 1945 when, after the Wehrmacht's failure to halt the Red Army's Vistula-Oder offensive, Hitler placed Himmler in command of the newly formed Army Group Vistula. As Himmler had no practical military experience as a field commander, this choice proved catastrophic and he was quickly relieved of his field commands, to be replaced by General Gotthard Heinrici.

As the war was drawing to a German defeat, Himmler was considered by many to be a candidate to succeed Hitler as the Führer of Germany. However, it became known after the war that Hitler never really considered Himmler as a successor, even before his betrayal, believing that the authority that was his as head of the SS had caused him to be so hated that he would be rejected by the Party.

Peace negotiations, capture, and death

In the winter of 1944-45, Himmler's Waffen-SS numbered 910,000 members, with the Allgemeine-SS (at least on paper) hosting a membership of nearly two million. However, by the spring of 1945 Himmler had lost faith in German victory, probably partially due to his discussions with his masseur Felix Kersten and Walter Schellenberg. Himmler hoped the British and Americans would fight their Soviet allies with the remains of the Wehrmacht. When Hitler discovered this, Himmler was declared a traitor and stripped of all his titles and ranks the day before Hitler committed suicide. At the time of Himmler's denunciation, he held the positions of Reich Leader-SS, Chief of the German Police, Reich Commissioner of German Nationhood, Reich Minister of the Interior, Supreme Commander of the Volkssturm, and Supreme Commander of the Home Army.

Unfortunately for Himmler, his negotiations with Count Bernadotte failed. After Hitler's death, Himmler joined the short-lived Flensburg Government headed by Dönitz but was dismissed on 6 May 1945 by its leader in a move Dönitz hoped would gain him favour with the Allies.

Himmler next turned to the Americans as a defector, contacting the headquarters of General Dwight Eisenhower and proclaiming he would surrender all of Germany to the Allies if he was spared from prosecution as a Nazi leader. In an example of Himmler's mental state at this point, he sent a personal application to Eisenhower stating he wished to apply for the position of "Minister of Police" in the post-war government of Germany. Eisenhower refused to have anything to do with Himmler, who was subsequently declared a major war criminal.

Unwanted by his former colleagues and hunted by the Allies, Himmler wandered for several days around Flensburg near the Danish border, capital of the Dönitz government. Himmler was scheduled to stand trial with other German leaders as a major war criminal at Nuremberg, but committed suicide in Lüneburg by swallowing a potassium cyanide capsule before interrogation could begin. His last words were "Ich bin Heinrich Himmler!" ("I am Heinrich Himmler!")

Conspiracy theories

There would be later claims that the man who committed suicide in Lüneburg was not Himmler but a double. Statements allegedly attributed to ODESSA were said to have asserted that Himmler escaped to the tiny and rustic farming village of Strones in the Waldviertel, a hilly forested area in the northwest part of Lower Austria just north of Vienna, the birthplace of Alois Hitler, where he was running a reborn SS in exile.

A recently-published book by American author, Joseph Bellinger, Himmler's Death, offers another "conspiracy theory" alternative to Himmler's death, stating that Heinrich Himmler was assassinated by his British interrogators in May 1945 along with other high-ranking officers of the SS and Werewolf Resistance Organization. Since a group of people had to get together both to forge the documents and smuggle them into the proper section of the archives (a process that involves an investment of time, money, research and expertise), the assertion that there was a conspiracy to spread confusion about the circumstances surrounding Himmler's death may be credible, as well as Allen's participation in the conspiracy, possibly as a means of discrediting and distracting from Bellinger's book before it was published.

David Irving also claimed Himmler was beaten and killed by the British interrogators.

Historical views

Historians are divided on the psychology, motives and influences that drove Himmler. A key issue in understanding Himmler is to what extent he was a primary instigator and developer of anti-Semitism and racial murder in Nazi Germany in his own right, and not totally within Hitler's control, or was simply the executor of Hitler's direct orders.

Himmler to some extent answered this himself saying if Hitler were to tell him to shoot his mother, he would do it and 'be proud of the Führer's confidence'. Most commentators agree that commitment to Hitler's murderous racism made Himmler the mastermind of ethnic cleansing and the Holocaust.

According to the Jewish Virtual Library, Himmler's decisive innovation was to transform the race question from "a negative concept based on matter-of-course anti-Semitism" into "an organizational task for building up the SS ... It was Himmler's master stroke that he succeeded in indoctrinating the SS with an apocalyptic "idealism" beyond all guilt and responsibility, which rationalized mass murder as a form of martyrdom and harshness towards oneself." 1

The famous wartime cartoonist Victor Weisz saw Himmler as a terrible octopus, wielding oppressed nations in each of his 8 arms.

Wolfgang Sauer, historian at Berkeley felt that "although he was pedantic, dogmatic, and dull, Himmler emerged under Hitler as second in actual power.

In an extract in the Norman Brook War Cabinet Diaries 4, Winston Churchill took a view towards Himmler widely shared during the war, advocating his assassination. According to Brook, responding to a suggestion that the Nazi leaders be executed, "this prompted Churchill to ask if they should negotiate with Himmler 'and bump him off later', once peace terms had been agreed. The suggestion to cut a deal for a German surrender with Himmler and then assassinate him with support from the Home Office. 5

A main focus of recent work on Himmler has been the extent to which he competed for, and craved, Hitler's attention and respect, along with other Nazi leaders.

Himmler appears to have had a completely distorted view of how he was perceived by the Allies; According to British soldiers who arrested Himmler, he was genuinely shocked when treated as a prisoner. Catharine Himmler, a great-niece of Heinrich Himmler, is married to an Israeli, the son of Holocaust survivors who survived the Warsaw Ghetto .

In fiction