Heinrich Himmler
| Heinrich Himmler | |
|---|---|
| |
| Birth | 7 October 1900 (Munich, Germany) |
| Death | 23 May 1945 (31a Ülzenerstraße Lüneburg, Germany) |
| Party | National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) |
| Political positions |
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Heinrich Luitpold Himmler (October 7, 1900–May 23, 1945) was the commander of the Schutzstaffel (SS) and one of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany by being second in power to Adolf Hitler in the Nazi hierarchy. As Reichsführer-SS he controlled the SS and the Gestapo.
As founder and officer-in-charge of the Nazi concentration camps and the Einsatzgruppen death squads, Himmler held final command responsibility for annihilating "subhumans" who were deemed unworthy to live. Shortly before the end of the war, he offered to surrender all of Germany to the Allies if he was spared from prosecution as a Nazi leader. Later in 1945, Himmler committed suicide with cyanide when he became a captive of the British Army after Germany had lost World War II.
Biography
Himmler was born 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 an older brother, Gebhard Ludwig, and a younger brother, Ernst Hermann. Although Himmler's childhood was quite normal for the time, father and mother were extraordinarily strict.
Heinrich was named after his godparent, Prince Heinrich of Wittelsbach of the royal family of Bavaria. In 1910, Himmler 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 the behest of his father, Heinrich kept an extensive diary from age 10 until the age of 24. He enjoyed extracurricular activities of chess, harpsichord, stamp collecting, and gardening.
In 1914 World War I began, and Himmler's diaries show a keen interest in new pertaining to the war. He implored his father to help him obtain a position as an officer candidate. His parents acquiesced, and after his graduation from he school in 1918 he began training with the 11th Bavarian Regiment. Far from athletic, he struggled throughout his military training. Later in that same year, the war ended with Germany's defeat. The Treaty of Versailles, severely limiting Germany's military, ended his aspirations of becoming a professional army officer, and he was discharged without seeing battle.
In 1919 to 1922 Himmler studied agronomy at Munich Technische Hochschule. In his diaries he claimed to be a devout Catholic, and wrote that he would never turn away from the Church. However, he was a member of a fraternity which he felt to be at odds with the tenets of the church: biographers have defined Himmler's theology as Ariosophy, his own religious dogma of racial superiority of the Aryan race and Germanic Meso-Paganism, partly from his interests in folklore and mythology of the ancient Teutonic tribes of Northern Europe. Himmler turned into a disbeliever in Christian doctrine and was also very critical of sermons given by priests, but felt that the teachings of the church were of the utmost importance to Aryans, as he thought that a "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.
In November 1923, Himmler took part in Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch under Ernst Röhm. In 1926, he 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, daughter Gudrun, on 8 August 1929. Himmler adored his daughter, and called her Püppi (dolly). Margarete later adopted a son, in whom Himmler showed no interest. The marriage of Heinrich and Margarete was difficult, and they separated in 1940 without seeking a divorce. Heinrich was far too engulfed in militaristic ideology by this time to serve as a competent husband. Himmler 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
Early SS (1927–1934)
Himmler joined the SS in 1925, and in 1927 was appointed deputy reichsführer-SS, a role he took very seriously. Upon the resignation of SS Commander Erhard Heiden, Himmler was appointed Reichsführer-SS in January 1929. At that time the SS had 280 members, and was considered a mere battalion of the much larger SA. Himmler was only considered to be an SA-Oberführer, but after 1929 he referred to himself as "Reichsführer-SS."
By 1933, when the Nazi Party gained power in Germany, Himmler's SS numbered 52,000 members. The organization had developed strict membership requirements ensuring that 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; he introduced black SS uniforms (designed by Hugo Boss) to replace the SA brown shirts in the autumn of 1933. Shortly thereafter, he was promoted to SS-Obergruppenführer und Reichsführer-SS and became an equal of the senior SA commanders, who by this time loathed the SS and the power it held.
Himmler, Hermann Göring, and General Werner von Blomberg agreed that the SA and its leader Ernst Röhm posed a threat to the German Army and the Nazi leadership of Germany. Röhm had strong "socialistic" and populist views believing that, although Hitler had successfully gained power in Germany, the "real" revolution had not yet begun and that the Sturmabteiling should become the sole arms-bearing corp of the State, leaving some Nazi leaders believing Röhm was intent on using the SA to administer a coup.
With persuasion from Himmler and Göring, Hitler agreed 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 (carried out by Theodor Eicke) and 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. The actual powers granted to him with the appointment were those previously exercised in police matters by the ministry of the interior, and not even all of those. 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 Reichsführer SS and Chief of the German Police in the Ministry of the Interior, which clearly indicates the limits of his powers.
Germany's political police forces came under Himmler's authority in 1934, when he organized 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. In 1943, following the outbreak of popular word-of-mouth criticism of the regime as a result of the Stalingrad disaster, the party apparatus, professing disappointment with the Gestapo's performance in deterring such criticism, established the so-called Politische Staffeln as its own political policing organ, destroying the Gestapo's nominal monopoly in this field.
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. But the merger remained a dead letter within the Reich, with Kripo remaining firmly under the control of the civilian administration and later the party apparatus as the latter annexed the civilian administration. However, in occupied territories not incorporated into the Reich proper it mostly proved effective. Following the outbreak of World War II, Himmler formed the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Security Main Office) wherein Gestapo, Kripo, and the SD became departments. Attempts in 1940 to use the new RSHA structure to gain control over Kripo by giving RSHA regional officers command authority over Kripo offices in their jurisdictions were rebuffed. The SS was also developing its military branch, known as the SS-Verfügungstruppe, which would later become known as the Waffen-SS.
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. The SS, through its intelligence arm, the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), was charged with finding Jews, Gypsies, communists, and those persons of any other cultural, racial, political, or religious affiliation deemed by the Nazis to be either Untermensch (sub-human) or in opposition to the regime, and placing them in concentration camps. Himmler opened the first of these camps near Dachau (see picture) on March 22, 1933. He became one of the main architects of 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 East-Europa, for example, the Russians. All intellectuals were to be killed and other Poles were to be only literate enough to read traffic signs.
In contrast to Hitler, Himmler inspected several concentration and war camps. In August 1941, Himmler was present at a mass shooting of Jews in Minsk, Belarus and was said to have turned green in the face after brain matter from a victim splashed onto his coat; his assistant Karl Wolff had to jump forward and hold him steady. After that, the Nazis were searching for a "more hygienic" or "organized" way to kill, which culminated in the use of the gas chambers.
Himmler believed that it was actually possible to breed a master race of all blond-haired, blue-eyed Aryans in Germany as his previous experience as a chicken farmer had taught him the rudimentary basics of animal breeding. He believed that he could engineer the German populace, through selective breeding, to be entirely 'Nordic' in appearance within several decades of the end of the war.
Posen speech
On October 4, 1943, Himmler referred explicitly to the extermination of the Jewish people during a secret SS meeting in the city of Poznań. The following are excerpts from a transcription of an audio recording that exists of the speech:
I also want to mention a very difficult subject before you here, completely openly.
It should be discussed amongst us, and yet, nevertheless, we will never speak about it in public …
I am talking about the "Jewish evacuation": the extermination of the Jewish people.
It is one of those things that is easily said. "The Jewish people is being exterminated," every Party member will tell you, 'perfectly clear, it's part of our plans, we're eliminating the Jews, exterminating them, ha!, a small matter. …
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. He collected volunteers from all over Europe, including Danes, Norwegians, Swedes, Dutch, Belgians, French, Spaniards, and, after the invasion, Ukrainians, Latvians, Lithuanians, and Estonians, attracting the non-Germanic volunteers by declaring a pan-European crusade to defend the traditional values of Old Europe from the "Godless Bolshevik Hordes."
In truth, the "volunteers" from the occupied Soviet territories were mostly collaborator policemen pressed en-masse into the Waffen SS once their territories of origin were overrun by the Red Army, though especially in the Baltic states many natives volunteered to serve in the Black Order of Himmler due to their loathing of communism. As long as they were employed against Soviet troops, they performed fanatically, expecting no mercy if captured. When employed against the Western Allies, they tended to surrender eagerly. Waffen SS recruitment in Western and Nordic Europe was abysmally unsuccessful, though a number of Waffen-SS Legions were founded, such as the Wallonian contingent led by Leon Degrelle, whom Himmler planned to appoint as Chancellor of a restored Burgundy controlled by the SS once the war was over.
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. This was very much a Pyrrhic victory. Himmler sought to use his new office to reverse the party apparatus' annexation of the civil service and tried to challenge the authority of the Party Gauleiters. This hopeless aspiration was easily frustrated by Martin Bormann, Hitler's secretary and party chancellor. It also incurred some displeasure from Hitler, himself, whose long-standing disdain for the traditional Civil Service was one of the foundations of Nazi administrative thinking. Himmler made things much worse still, when following his appointment as head of the Ersatzheer (Replacement Army), he tried to use his authority in both military and police matters by transferring soldiers 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 especially with the Party, whose Gauleiters now saw Bormann as their protector, since Himmler was urged on by his SS and Police Leaders to cement the authority of the SS in the Reich at the expense of the Party.
The involvement in the [July 20 Plot|July 20, 1944 plot]] against Hitler by 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. 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, 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. Even more importantly, a number of senior SS officers began to conspire against the Reichsführer SS, as they believed that he would be unable to achieve victory in the power struggle against Martin Bormann. Among these defectors were Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Heydrich's successor as Chief of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, and Gruppenführer Heinrich Müller, the Chief of the Gestapo.
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, 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 at the instigation of Bormann, who knew that Himmler had no ability at commanding troops. 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.
Controversial Speeches
In 1939, Himmler spoke of how it would be useful if every man (even if he was married) had a mistress. He said this because he believed that the nation would need more people as many men would be killed in War.
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. 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 to surrender in the West.
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. Hitler's successor as Chancellor of Germany was Joseph Goebbels who had argued with Himmler many times during his Nazi career. Hermann Goering was also considered as a traitor by Hitler. 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. 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. 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. He also reportedly mused on how to handle his first meeting with the SHAEF commander and whether to give the Nazi salute, or shake hands with him. Eisenhower refused to have anything to do with Himmler, who was subsequently declared a major war criminal.
In an extract from Norman Brook's War Cabinet Diaries, 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. 'Quite entitled to do so,' the minutes record it (eg, Churchill) as commenting."
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, Germany. Himmler was arrested on May 22 by Sergeant Arthur Britton, 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 SS and the Gestapo and, as such, he was second in power to Adolf Hitler in the Nazi hierarchy. Besides using the Einsatzgruppen 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. Some see him as a willing dupe of Hitler, fully under his influence and seeing himself essentially as a tool, 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 in his own right, and not totally within Hitler's control, or was simply the executor of Hitler's direct orders. A related issue is the extent to which anti-semitism and racism were primary motives for him, over and above self-aggrandisement, accumulation of power and influence.
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. 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."
Wolfgang Sauer, historian at Berkeley felt that "although he was pedantic, dogmatic, and dull, Himmler emerged under Hitler as second in actual power. His strength lay in a combination of unusual shrewdness, burning ambition, and servile loyalty to Hitler."
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. The events of the last days of the war, when he abandoned Hitler and began separate negotiations with the Allies, are obviously significant in this respect.
Himmler appears to have had a completely distorted view of how he was perceived by the Allies; he intended to meet with American and British leaders and have discussions "as gentlemen." He tried to buy off their vengeance by last-minute reprieves for Jews and important prisoners. According to British soldiers who arrested Himmler, he was genuinely shocked to be treated as a prisoner.
ReferencesISBN 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
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