Heinrich Himmler

Heinrich Himmler
Birth	October 7, 1900 (Munich, Germany)
Death	May 23, 1945 (31a Ülzenerstraße Lüneburg, Germany)
Party	National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP)
Political positions	Reich Leader of the SS in the NSDAP (1929–1945) Reich & Prussian Minister of the Interior of Germany (August 1943–1945) Chief of German police (June 1936–1945) Chief of Army Equipment and Commander of the Replacement Army of Germany (July 1944–1945) Reich Commissioner for the Strengthening of Germanism in the NSDAP (October 1939–1945) President of the Society "Fountain of Life" of the NSDAP (September 1936–1945) President of "The Ancestral Heritage Research & Teaching Society" of the NSDAP Nazi Party Commissioner for All Racial Matters General for Administration) of Germany (August 1943–1945).

Heinrich Luitpold Himmler (October 7, 1900–May 23, 1945) was one of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany, being second in power to Adolf Hitler. As Protective Squadron commander (Reichsführer-SS) he controlled the SS and the Secret State Police (Gestapo). The founder and officer-in-charge of the Nazi concentration camps and the death squads, Himmler held final command responsibility for annihilating those deemed unworthy to live by the Nazi regime.

Shortly before the end of the World War II, he offered to surrender all of Germany to the Allies if he was spared from prosecution as a Nazi leader. Later in 1945, after Germany had lost the war, Himmler committed suicide with cyanide when he became a captive of the British Army.

Biography

Himmler was born in 1900 in Munich to a Bavarian middle-class family. His father was Joseph Gebhard Himmler, a secondary-school teacher and principal in Munich. His mother was Anna Maria Himmler (maiden name Heyder), a devout Roman Catholic. Heinrich had two brothers. His father and mother were reportedly extraordinarily strict.

Heinrich was named after his godparent, Prince Heinrich of Wittelsbach of the royal family of Bavaria. In 1910, he began attending elite secondary schools in Munich and Landshut, where studies revolved around classic literature. While he struggled in athletics, he did well in his schoolwork. At his father's urging, Heinrich kept an extensive diary from age 10 until 24. He enjoyed chess, harpsichord, stamp collecting, and gardening.

When World War I began in 1914, Himmler's diaries showed a keen interest in news of the war. He implored his father to help him get an officer's candidate position. His parents acquiesced, and after his graduation from school in 1918 he began training with the eleventh Bavarian Regiment. Far from athletic, he struggled throughout his military training. Later in that same year, the war ended with Germany's defeat and the Treaty of Versailles severely limited Germany's military, thus ending Himmler's his aspirations of becoming a professional army officer.

From 1919 to 1922 Himmler studied agronomy at Munich Technical Institute. He wrote as a devout Catholic, and said that he would never turn away from the Church. At the same time, he was a member of a fraternity that he felt to be at odds with the tenets of his religion. He also demonstrated an interest in folklore and the mythology of the ancient the Teutonic tribes of Northern Europe.

During this time Himmler began to reject some tenets of Christian doctrine and was very critical of sermons given by priests. However, he felt that the teachings of the Church were of the utmost importance to Aryans, and he believed that that supreme Deity had chosen the German people to rule the world. During this time he became obsessed with the idea of becoming a soldier. He wrote that if Germany did not find itself at war soon, he would go to another country to seek battle. He joined various righ-wing paramilitary organizations, including Ernst Röhm's Reichskriegsflagge (“Imperial War Flag”), In November 1923, Himmler took part in Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch under Ernst Röhm.

In 1926, Himmler met his wife in a hotel lobby while escaping a storm. Margarete Siegroth (née Boden) was blonde-haired and blue-eyed, seven years older than Himmler, divorced, and Protestant. She was physically the epitome of the Nordic ideal, though not exceptionally attractive. On July 3, 1928, the two were married and had their only child, Gudrun, on August 8, 1929. Himmler adored his daughter, and called her Püppi (dolly). The couple later adopted a son, in whom Himmler reportedly showed little interest. Himmler by this time was far too engulfed in militaristic ideology by this time to serve as a competent husband. Their marriage was difficult, and they separated in 1940 without seeking a divorce. He started to become friendly with a staff secretary, Hedwig Potthast, who left her job in 1941 and became his mistress. He fathered two illegitimate children with her — a son, Helge (1942), and a daughter, Nanette Dorothea (1944).

Rise in the SS

File:HimmlerOberfhr.jpg

Photo of Heinrich Himmler with the early uniform of theSS(black cravat and bonnet) in the rank of -oberführer.

Early SS career

In 1925, Himmler joined the Schutzstaffel (“Protective Echelon”), the elite corps of the Nazi Party, better known as the SS. In 1927 he was appointed deputy commanding general if the SS a role he took very seriously. Upon the resignation of SS commander Erhard Heiden, Himmler was appointed to lead the SS unit in January 1929. At that time, the SS had only 280 members, and was considered an elite battalion of the much larger Stormtroopers (SA).

By 1933, when the Nazi Party gained power in Germany, Himmler's SS numbered 52,000 members. The organization had also developed strict membership requirements ensuring that all members were of the "Aryan master race." Now holding the rank of commander (Gruppenführer) in the SA, Himmler, along with his deputy Reinhard Heydrich, began a drive to separate the SS from SA control. He introduced black SS uniforms to replace the SA brown shirts in the autumn of 1933. Shortly thereafter, he was promoted to commander of the largest SS group (Obergruppenführer und Reichsführer-SS) and became the equal of senior SA commanders, who by this time loathed the SS and the power it held.

File:Vlcsnap-5522132.png

Heinrich Himmler (left) together with, from left to right: Reinhard Heydrich, Karl Wolff and an unidentified assistant at the Obersalzberg, May 1939.

SA leader Ernst Röhm had strong "socialistic" and populist viewsm believing that the sole arms-bearing corp of the state should be the Sturmabteiling, leaving some Nazi leaders believing Röhm was intent on using the SA to administer a coup. Himmler, Hermann Göring, and General Werner von Blomberg agreed that the SA now constituted a threat and convinced Hitler that Röhm had to die. He delegated the task of Röhm's demise to Himmler and Göering who, along with Reinhard Heydrich, Kurt Daluege, and Walter Schellenberg, ordered the execution of Röhm on June 30, 1934, in what became known as "The Night of the Long Knives." The next day, the SS became an independent organization of the Nazi Party.

Consolidation of power

Himmler had become head of the Munich police soon after Hitler came to power in 1933. Germany's political police forces came under his authority in 1934, when he organized them into the secret-police force (Gestapo). He established the the Nazi regime's first concentration camp at Dachau, as well as Germany's entire concentration camps complex. (Once war began, new internment camps not formally classified as "concentration camps" would be established, over which Himmler and the SS would not exercise control.

In 1936, Himmler gained further authority when all of Germany's uniformed law enforcement agencies were amalgamated into the new regular German police force (Ordnungspolizei), whose main office became a headquarters branch of the SS and Himmler was accorded the title Chief of the German Police. Himmler also gained ministerial authority over Germany's non-political detective forces (Kripo). With the outbreak of World War II, Himmler formed the Reich Security Main Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt). The SS was also developing combat divisions which would later become known as the Armed SS (Waffen-SS).

Himmler's war on the Jews

File:Himmler visits Dachau 1936.jpg

SS Chief Heinrich Himmler (front right, facing prisoner) on a personal visit to the Dachau Concentration Camp in 1936.

Under Himmler's direction the SS-Totenkopfverbände ("Death's Head Formations") were given the task of organizing and administering Germany's regime of concentration camps. Starting in 1941, they also began to run the extermination camps in occupied Poland. The SS, through its intelligence arm (Sicherheitsdienst), was also charged with finding Jews, Gypsies, communists, and other persons of any other cultural, racial, political, or religious affiliation deemed by the Nazis to be either "sub-human" (Untermensch) or in opposition to the regime, and placing them in concentration camps. Himmler had opened the first of the concetration camps near Dachau on March 22, 1933.

Himmler was one of the main architects of Jewish the Holocaust, using elements of mysticism and a fanatical belief in the racist Nazi ideology to justify the mass murder and genocide of millions of victims. Himmler had similar plans for the Poles and for many other people in Eastern Europe.

Unlike Hitler, Himmler personally inspected several concentration and war camps. In August 1941, he was present at a mass shooting of Jews in Minsk, Belarus. The gore and inefficiency of this massacred led to a search for a more hygienic and organized way to put large numbers of victims to death, which culminated in the use of the gas chambers.

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

I am now referring to the evacuation of the Jews, to the extermination of the Jewish people. This is something that is easily said: "The Jewish people will be exterminated," says every Party member, "this is very obvious, it is in our program—elimination of the Jews."... Most of you here know what it means when 100 corpses lie next to each other, when 500 lie there or when 1,000 are lined up. To have endured this and at the same time to have remained a decent person—with exceptions due to human weaknesses—had made us tough. This is an honor roll in our history which has never been and never will be put in writing... If the Jews were still part of the German nation, we would most likely arrive now at the state we were at in 1916/17.

The Second World War

Even before the invasion of Russia in 1941, Himmler began preparing his SS for a war of extermination against the forces of "Judeo-Bolshevism." He compared the invasion to the Crusades and mobilized volunteers from Nazi-occupied territories all over Europe. After the invasion more volunteers joined from the former Soviet countries: Ukrainians, Latvians, Lithuanians, and Estonians, attracted to Himmler's vision of a pan-European crusade to defend the traditional values of Old Europe from the "Godless Bolshevik Hordes." As long as they were employed against the hated Soviet troops, many of these recruits from the former Soviet territories performed fanatically, expecting no mercy if captured. When employed against the Western Allies, however, they tended to surrender eagerly.Waffen SS recruitment in Western and Nordic Europe was largely unsuccessful.

In 1942, Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler's right hand man, was killed in Prague after an attack by Czech special forces. Himmler immediately carried out a reprisal, killing the entire male population in the village of Lidice.

In 1943, Himmler was appointed German Interior Minister. However, his attempts to use this office to gain even more power incurred displeasure from Hitler. However, the involvement of German Military Intelligence in the July 20, 1944 plot against Hitler led him to make Himmler's SD the sole intelligence service of the Third Reich. This increased Himmler's already considerable personal power. It also soon emerged that General Friedrich Fromm, Commander-in-Chief of the Replacement Army, was implicated in the conspiracy. Fromm's removal, coupled with Hitler's great suspicion of the army, led the way to Himmler's appointment as Fromm's successor. Himmler harmed his own cause, however, when following his appointment as head of the Replacement Army (Ersatzheer), he tried to use his authority in both military and police matters by transferring soldiers to his Armed Protective Squad.

In late 1944, Himmler became Commander-in-Chief of army group Upper Rhine, which was fighting the oncoming United States 7th Army and theFrench 1st Army in the Alsace region on the west bank of the Rhine. Himmler held this post until early 1945 when, Russian advances led, Hitler to place 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 absolute ruler (Führer) of Germany, although it now appears that Hitler never considered Himmler as a successor.

Peace negotiations, capture, and death

Heinrich Himmler in 1945.

By the spring of 1945, Himmler had lost faith in German victory. He came to the realization that if the Nazi regime was to have any chance of survival, it would need to seek peace with Britain and the United States. Toward this end, he contacted Count Folke Bernadotte of Sweden at Lübeck, near the Danish border, and began negotiations.

When Hitler discovered this, Himmler was declared a traitor and stripped of all his titles and ranks the day before Hitler committed suicide. Hitler's successor as Chancellor of Germany was Joseph Goebbels. At the time of Himmler's denunciation, he held the positions of Commanding General of the SS, Chief of the German Police, Realm Commissioner of German Nationhood, Realm Minister of the Interior, Supreme Commander of the People's Storm (Volkssturm), and Supreme Commander of the Home Army.

Unfortunately for Himmler, his negotiations with Count Bernadotte failed. Since he could not return to Berlin, he joined Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, who by then was commanding all German forces within the northern part of the western front, in nearby Plön. Dönitz immediately sent Himmler away, explaining that there was no place for him in the German government.

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. Eisenhower refused to have anything to do with Himmler, who was subsequently declared a major war criminal.

Himmler's corpse after his suicide by poison in Allied custody, 1945.

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. Attempting to evade arrest, he disguised himself as a sergeant-major of the Secret Military Police, using the name Heinrich Hitzinger, shaving his moustache and donning an eye patch over his left eye, in the hope that he could return to Bavaria. He had equipped himself with a full set of false documents, but someone whose papers were wholly "in order" was so unusual that it aroused the suspicions of a British Army unit in Bremen. He was arrested on May 22 and, in captivity, was soon recognized.

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. These cyanide tablets were fitted in caps in SS officers' teeth (which they snapped open and swallowed the tablet) before the Holocaust began, so that they would always have the choice of suicide if anything went wrong. His last words were "Ich bin Heinrich Himmler!" ("I am Heinrich Himmler!"). Shortly afterwards, Himmler's body was secretly buried in an unmarked grave on the Lüneburg Heath. The precise location of Himmler's grave remains unknown.

Legacy

As Reichsführer-SS, Heinrich Himmler controlled the state Protective Squad and the Secret Police and, as such, he was second in power to Adolf Hitler in the Nazi hierarchy. Besides using the infamous death squads to round up, murder, and oppress people, Himmler is also remembered as the founder and commander of the infamous Nazi concentration camps, where he held final responsibility for annihilating "subhumans" (actually the Jews, political prisoners, ethnic minorities of Europe, and those who dod not fit the Aryan mold) who were deemed unworthy to live.

Historians are divided on the psychology, motives, and influences that drove Himmler. Many see him as a willing tool of Hitler, carrying Hitler's views to their logical conclusion. 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—and not totally within Hitler's control—and to what extent he was simply the executor of Hitler's direct orders. A related issue is whether anti-semitism and racism were primary motives for him, as opposed to self-aggrandisement and the accumulation of power.

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." It was this unconditional loyalty that was the driving force behind Himmler's unlikely career.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Breitman, Richard. Himmler and the Final Solution: The Architect of Genocide, Pimlico/Random House, 2004. ISBN 1-84413-089-4
• Haiger, Ernst. "Fictions, Facts, and Forgeries: The `Revelations' of Peter and Martin Allen about the History of the Second World War." The Journal of Intelligence History, Vol 6 No. 1 Summer 2006 [published 2007], pp. 105-117
• Hale, Christopher. Himmler's Crusade: The True Story of the 1938 Nazi Expedition Into Tibet, Transworld Publishers, 2003. ISBN 0-593-04952-7
• Padfield, Peter. Himmler: Reichsführer-SS, Cassel & Company, 2001. ISBN 0-304-35839-8
• Pringle, Heather. The Master Plan: Himmler's Scholars and the Holocaust, Hyperion, 2006. ISBN 0786868864

External links

• List of Himmler speeches A very detailed list of Himmler speeches including online sources and material in the U.S. National Archives. Article numbers in the Archives are listed for professional scholars.
• About Heinrich Himmler

The Hitler Cabinet – 30 January 1933 to 30 April 1945

Adolf Hitler | Franz von Papen | Konstantin von Neurath | Joachim von Ribbentrop | Wilhelm Frick | Heinrich Himmler | Lutz Graf Schwerin von Krosigk | Alfred Hugenberg | Kurt Schmitt | Hjalmar Schacht | Hermann Göring | Walther Funk | Franz Seldte | Franz Gürtner | Franz Schlegelberger | Otto Georg Thierack | Werner von Blomberg | General Keitel | Freiherr von Eltz-Rübenach | Julius Heinrich Dorpmüller | Wilhelm Ohnesorge | R. Walther Darré | Herbert Backe | Joseph Goebbels | Bernhard Rust | Fritz Todt | Albert Speer | Alfred Rosenberg | Hanns Kerrl | Hermann Muhs | Otto Meißner | Hans Lammers | Martin Bormann | Karl Hermann Frank | Rudolf Hess | Ernst Röhm

 

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