Branch: Waffen SS
Born: 7 October 1900 in Munich, Bavaria, Germany.
Died: 23 May 1945 in Lüneburg, Lower Saxony, Germany.
Ranks:
Reichsführer-SS
1929
SS-Oberst-Gruppenführer
SS-Obergruppenführer
1933
SS-Gruppenführer
1930
Decorations:
Commands:
Other: Personnel
Articles:
Heinrich Luitpold Himmler was born on 7 October 1900 in Munich,
Bavaria, Germany and became Reichsführer of the SS, a
military commander, and a leading member of the National Socialist
Party. As Chief of the German Police and the Minister of the
Interior from 1943, Heinrich Himmler oversaw all internal
and external police and security forces, including the Gestapo
(Secret State Police). Serving as Reichsführer and later
as Commander of the Replacement (Home) Army and General Plenipotentiary
for the entire Reich's administration (Generalbevollmächtigter
für die Verwaltung), Heinrich Himmler was one of the
most powerful men in Nazi Germany and one of the persons most
directly responsible for the Holocaust
As overseer of the concentration camps, extermination camps,
and Einsatzgruppen (literally: task forces, often used as
killing squads), Heinrich Himmler coordinated the killing
of some six million Jews, between 200,000 and 500,000 Roma,
many prisoners of war, and possibly another three to four
million Poles, communists, or other groups whom the Nazis
deemed unworthy to live, including homosexuals, people with
physical and mental disabilities, Jehovah's Witnesses, and
members of the Confessing Church. Shortly before the end of
the war, he offered to surrender both Germany and himself
to the Western Allies if he were spared prosecution. After
being arrested by British forces on 22 May 1945, he committed
suicide the following day before he could be questioned.
Early life
Heinrich Himmler was born in Munich to a conservative, Roman
Catholic, Bavarian middle-class family. His father was Joseph
Gebhard Himmler, a secondary-school teacher and principal
of the prestigious Wittelsbacher Gymnasium his mother was
Anna Maria Himmler (née Heyder), a devout Roman Catholic.
He had an older brother, Gebhard Ludwig Himmler, who was born
in July 1898, and a younger brother, Ernst Hermann Himmler,
born in 1905.
Heinrich was named after his godfather, Prince Heinrich of
Bavaria of the royal family of Bavaria, who was tutored by
Gebhard Himmler. In 1910, Heinrich Himmler attended Gymnasium
in Landshut, where he studied classic literature. Heinrich
Himmler's father the principal sent him to spy on other pupils.
His father even called him a born criminal. It was at Landshut
that the young Heinrich Himmler made friends with Karl Gebhardt,
a friendship that would last to the end of World War II. While
he struggled in athletics, he did well in his schoolwork.
Initially at the behest of his father, Heinrich Himmler kept
a diary from age 10 and continued to do so even after his
father stopped checking it.
Heinrich Himmler was a teenager at the outbreak of World War
I, and his diaries from the war years show that he took a
keen interest in it. From Easter 1915 onwards, Heinrich trained
with the Cadet Corps, and later implored his father to use
his royal connections to obtain an officer candidate position
for him. This his father did, though initially without success,
and Heinrich began training with the reserve battalion of
the 11th Bavarian Regiment in January 1918.Since he was not
athletic, Heinrich Himmler struggled throughout his military
training. During this timeframe, his older brother Gebhard
served on the western front and saw combat where he received
the Iron Cross. In November 1918, the war ended with Germany's
defeat, finishing any real chance for Heinrich Himmler to
continue a military career. On 18 December, he was discharged
and returned to Landshut.
After the war, Heinrich Himmler completed his grammar-school
education, and assisted the Freikorps in their crushing of
the Bavarian Soviet Republic. However, again he missed out
on a military career when the Freikorps were incorporated
into the Reichswehr. From 1919 to 1922, Heinrich Himmler studied
agronomy at the Munich Technische Hochschule (now Technical
University Munich) following a short-lived apprenticeship
on a farm and a subsequent illness.Still not having given
up his desire to have a military career, his field of study
enabled Heinrich Himmler to maintain contacts with former
army officers there to prepare for civilian employment.
Heinrich Himmler was anti-Semitic by the time he went to university,
though not yet radically so. He remained a devoted Catholic
while a student, but enjoyed drinking with members of his
fraternity, the League of Apollo and joined a Reichswehr reserve
unit. In 1920 when Count Arco was sentenced to death, Heinrich
Himmler was immediately ready to work with right-wing elements
to enact a rescue operation, and was disappointed that no
violence took place once the death sentence was commuted to
imprisonment. In 1920 after the Reichswehr reserves were disbanded,
he joined the Einwohnerwehr and a rifle club. His second year
at university saw Heinrich Himmler redouble his efforts at
embarking upon a military career. Although Heinrich Himmler
was not successful, he was able to extend his involvement
with the paramilitary scene in Munich. It was at this time,
via his rifle club, that he first met
Ernst
Röhm.
Despite an active social life, Heinrich Himmler struggled
to gain the acceptance he craved, and he was unable to fully
connect with people. While he was able to form good friendships
with women, he had little success in terms of relationships
and partly in self-defence clung to antediluvian, prudish
views regarding men, women, sex and marriage. He was critical
of himself and his perceived social inadequacies, and made
great efforts to compensate for them, in part by learning
to control his emotions with his innate strength of will.
Nevertheless, these interpersonal problems, and his attempts
to counterbalance them, would plague Heinrich Himmler his
whole life, and were the key reasons for his enthusiasm as
to the military and paramilitary.
In 1923, Heinrich Himmler took part in
Adolf
Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch, serving under
Ernst
Röhm. In 1926, he met his future wife in a hotel
lobby while escaping a storm. Margarete Siegroth (née
Boden) was seven years his senior, divorced, and Protestant.
On 3 July 1928, the two were married. During this time Heinrich
Himmler worked unsuccessfully as a chicken farmer. On 8 August
1929, the couple had their only child, Gudrun. Heinrich Himmler
adored his daughter, and called her Püppi (English: dolly).
Margarete later adopted a son, in whom Heinrich Himmler showed
no interest. Heinrich and Margarete Heinrich Himmler separated
in 1940 without seeking divorce. At that time, Heinrich Himmler
became friendly with a secretary, Hedwig Potthast, who left
her job in 1941 and became his mistress. He fathered two children
with her: a son, Helge (born 1942), and a daughter, Nanette
Dorothea (born 1944).
Heinrich Himmler was also very interested in agriculture and
the back to the land movement. He and his wife had romantic
ideals of making a farming life. He joined the Artamanen society,
a sort of idealistic back-to-the-land youth group, but mixed
with racist ideology. He became one of the leaders of this
movement. Through this movement, he also apparently met Rudolf
Höss, who would later preside over Auschwitz, and Richard
Walther Darré, who would later work in the RuSHA (race
and resettlement office) of the SS. Darre's views on restoring
racial purity to Germany, by breeding programs, were a deep
influence on Heinrich Himmler's view of the SS as a core of
breeding men.
For the most part, Heinrich Himmler abstained from drinking
alcohol and smoking. He frequently had stomach pains which
started in 1917, for which he received massage therapy from
his personal masseur Felix Kersten starting in 1939.
Diary entries for 1921 and 1922 furnish evidence of increasing
difficulties in his relationships with others, and in 1922
particularly from the summer onwards, when Heinrich Himmler
became seriously politicised in the atmosphere after Walther
Rathenau's assassination, a murder he fully supported they
betray a broadening concern with the 'Jewish question'. Heinrich
Himmler's political radicalisation was also propelled by the
curtailment of his education by Germany's economic climate,
which compounded his military-career failure with the barring
of doors which studying for a doctorate would have opened.
Finally, in the summer of 1922, the reality of post-war Germany
had caught up with him.
Heinrich Himmler took a poorly paid office-job for a year
until September 1923, and several weeks later partook in the
event that would set him on a life of politics: the Beer Hall
Putsch, in which he was the flag bearer of
Ernst
Röhm's paramilitary faction. Heinrich Himmler was
questioned about his role in the putsch, but there was insufficient
evidence to prosecute.He would not accept these failures in
his personal, professional and political life, and took refuge
in thoughts that he was in the right, that he was the misunderstood
outsider. His irritable and opinionated arrogance also deepened
in the course of these difficult years: Heinrich Himmler became
increasingly and blatantly more aggressive, and his tendency
to interfere in other people's affairs became more domineering,
even to the point of hiring a private investigator to gather
information on his elder brother's ex-fiancée.
In 1923-24, Heinrich Himmler began searching for a world view,
moving away from Catholicism and furthered his interest in
the occult and anti-Semitism. Germanic mythology, reinforced
by occult ideas, would eventually become a kind of substitute
religion for him.After the failed putsch, he read about
Adolf
Hitler through two books.
The beginning of 1924 saw Heinrich Himmler as an unemployed,
failed putschist living back at home with his parents. He
charged himself with agitating for the National Socialist
Party, something that he committed to as a career from mid-1924
working under Gregor Strasser, though Heinrich Himmler maintained
his paramilitary activities. Possibly as a reward for his
work, the commencement of 1925 saw Heinrich Himmler in charge
of Nazi affairs for Lower Bavaria, and for integrating the
area's membership with the NSDAP under
Adolf
Hitler when the party was re-founded in February 1925,
though Heinrich Himmler was not swept into
Adolf
Hitler's inchoate Führer cult. In April 1926 he met
Joseph
Goebbels for the first time. Still with Strasser, Heinrich
Himmler was made his deputy in January 1927 after Strasser
had been appointed the NSDAP's propaganda chief in November
1926. His role at Munich HQ was blessed from the outset with
considerable freedom of action that increased still further
after 1928. As deputy propaganda chief, Heinrich Himmler's
unquenchable thirst for control, his extraordinary arrogance,
and his inability to tolerate criticism, opposition or minor
deviations from his instructions did not make him a popular
figure with Party subordinates and the rank and file. His
attitude to superiors, on the other hand, was nothing short
of obsequious.
Rise in the SS
Heinrich Himmler joined the SS in 1925 as an SS-Führer
(SS-Leader). His NSDAP number was 14,303 and his SS number
was 168. Heinrich Himmler's first leadership position was
that of SS-Gauführer (District Leader) in Bavaria. In
1927, he became Deputy-Reichsführer-SS, with the rank
of SS-Oberführer, and upon the resignation of SS commander
Erhard Heiden, in 1929, Heinrich Himmler was appointed Reichsführer-SS
(Reichsführer was, at that time, simply a title for the
National Commander of the SS). The SS only had 280 members
and was merely an elite battalion of the much larger Sturmabteilung
(SA). Over the next year, Heinrich Himmler began a major expansion
of the organisation and, in 1930, he was promoted to the rank
of SS-Gruppenführer.
By 1933, the SS numbered 52,000 members. The organisation
at that time enforced strict membership requirements ensuring
that all members were of
Adolf
Hitler's Aryan Herrenvolk (Aryan master race). Applications
had been scrutinised for Nordic qualities, in Heinrich Himmler's
words, like a nursery gardener trying to reproduce a good
old strain which has been adulterated and debased we started
from the principles of plant selection and then proceeded
quite unashamedly to weed out the men whom we did not think
we could use for the build-up of the SS. (Few dared mention
that by his own standards, Heinrich Himmler did not qualify
as an ideal Nordic.)
Heinrich Himmler and his deputy
Reinhard
Heydrich began an effort to separate the SS from SA control.
Black SS uniforms replaced the SA brown shirts in July 1932
and by 1934 enough quantities were manufactured for general
use by all. In 1933, Heinrich Himmler was promoted to SS-Obergruppenführer.
This made him an equal of the senior SA commanders, who by
this time loathed the SS and envied its power.
Heinrich Himmler,
Hermann
Göring, and General
Werner
von Blomberg agreed that the SA and its leader
Ernst
Röhm posed a threat to the German Army (Wehrmacht
Heer) and the National Socialist leadership.
Ernst
Röhm had socialist and populist views, and believed
that the real revolution had not yet begun. He felt that the
SA should become the sole arms-bearing corps of the state.
This left some Nazi, military and political leaders believing
Ernst
Röhm was intent on using the SA to undertake a coup.
Persuaded by Heinrich Himmler and
Hermann
Göring,
Adolf
Hitler agreed that
Ernst
Röhm had to be eliminated. He delegated this task
to
Reinhard
Heydrich, Kurt Daluege, and Werner Best, who ordered
Ernst
Röhm's execution (carried out by Theodor Eicke),
along with the purge of the entire SA leadership and other
political adversaries (including, Gregor Strasser and Kurt
von Schleicher). These actions took place from 30 June to
2 July 1934, in what became known as the Night of the Long
Knives.The great beneficiaries of the action were the SS and
the German Army. They both celebrated the demise of their
mutual rival,
Ernst
Röhm's SA. Officially, from 20 July 1934 forward,
the SS became an independent organisation responsible only
to
Adolf Hitler,
and Heinrich Himmler's title of Reichsführer-SS became
the highest formal SS rank
On 20 April 1934,
Hermann
Göring formed a partnership with Heinrich Himmler
and
Reinhard
Heydrich.
Hermann
Göring transferred authority over the Gestapo (Geheime
Staatspolizei) the Prussian secret police to Heinrich Himmler,
who was also named chief of all German police outside Prussia.
On 22 April 1934, Heinrich Himmler named
Reinhard
Heydrich the head of the Gestapo.
Reinhard
Heydrich continued as head of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD:
security service), as well.
On 17 June 1936, Heinrich Himmler was named Chief of German
Police after
Adolf
Hitler announced a decree that was to unify the control
of Police duties in the Reich. Traditionally, law enforcement
in Germany had been a state and local matter. In this role,
Heinrich Himmler was nominally subordinate to Interior Minister
Wilhelm Frick. However, the decree effectively merged the
police with the SS, making it virtually independent of Frick's
control.
Heinrich Himmler gained authority as all of Germany's uniformed
law enforcement agencies were amalgamated into the new Ordnungspolizei
(Orpo: order police), whose main office became a headquarters
branch of the SS. Despite his title, Heinrich Himmler gained
only partial control of the uniformed police. The actual powers
granted to him were some that were previously exercised by
the ministry of the interior. It was only in 1943, when Heinrich
Himmler was appointed Minister of the Interior, that the transfer
of ministerial power was complete.
With the 1936 appointment, Heinrich Himmler also gained ministerial
authority over Germany's non-political detective forces, the
Kriminalpolizei (Kripo: crime police), which he merged with
the Gestapo into the Sicherheitspolizei (SiPo: security police)
under
Reinhard
Heydrich's command, thus gaining operational control over
Germany's entire detective force. This merger was never complete
within the Reich, with Kripo remaining mainly under the control
of its own civilian administration and later the party apparatus
(as the latter annexed the civilian administration). However,
in occupied territories not incorporated into the Reich proper,
SiPo consolidation within the SS line of command proved mostly
effective. In September 1939, following the outbreak of World
War II, Heinrich Himmler formed the Reichssicherheitshauptamt
(RSHA: Reich Main Security Office) wherein the SiPo (Gestapo
and Kripo) along with the SD became departments under
Reinhard
Heydrich's command therein.
Heinrich Himmler oversaw the entire concentration camp system.
Once World War II began, however, new internment camps, which
were not formally classified as concentration camps, were
established over which Heinrich Himmler and the SS did 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 Politische Staffeln (political squads) as its own political
policing organ, breaking the Gestapo's monopoly in this field.
The SS during these years developed its own military branch,
the SS-Verfügungstruppe (SS-VT), which later evolved
into the Waffen-SS. Even though nominally under the authority
of Heinrich Himmler, the Waffen-SS developed a fully militarised
structure of command and operationally were incorporated in
the war effort parallel to the Wehrmacht. Many contemporary
commentators refuse to recognise the Waffen-SS as an honourable
military organisation. Its units were involved in notorious
incidents of murdering civilians and unarmed prisoners. This
was one of many reasons that the International Military Tribunal
declared the SS to be a criminal organisation.
Heinrich Himmler and the Holocaust
After the Night of the Long Knives, the SS-Totenkopfverbände
organised and administered Germany's regime of concentration
camps and, after 1941, extermination camps in occupied Poland
as well. The SS through its intelligence arm, the Security
Service (Sicherheitsdienst, or SD) dealt with Jews, Gypsies,
communists and those persons of any other cultural, racial,
political or religious affiliation deemed by the Nazis to
be either Untermensch (subhuman) or in opposition to the regime,
and placed them in concentration camps. Heinrich Himmler opened
the first of these camps at Dachau on 22 March 1933. He was
the main architect of the Holocaust, using elements of mysticism
and a fanatical belief in the racist Nazi ideology to justify
the murder of millions of victims. Heinrich Himmler had similar
plans for the Poles intellectuals were to be killed, and most
other Poles were to be only literate enough to read traffic
signs. On 18 December 1941, Heinrich Himmler's appointment
book shows he met with
Adolf
Hitler. The entry for that day poses the question What
to do with the Jews of Russia?, and then answers the question
als Partisanen auszurotten (exterminate them as partisans).
In contrast to
Adolf
Hitler, Heinrich Himmler inspected concentration camps.
As a result of these inspections, the Nazis searched for a
new and more expedient way to kill, which culminated in the
use of the gas chambers.
Heinrich Himmler wanted to breed a master race of Nordic Aryans
in Germany. His experience as a chicken farmer had taught
him the rudiments of animal breeding which he proposed to
apply to humans. He believed that he could engineer the German
populace, through eugenic selective breeding, to be entirely
Nordic in appearance within several decades of the end of
the war.
On 4 October 1943, Heinrich Himmler referred explicitly to
the extermination of the Jewish people during a secret SS
meeting in the city of Poznan (Posen). The following is a
translation of an excerpt from a transcription of an audio
recording that exists of the speech:
I also want to refer here very frankly to a very difficult
matter. We can now very openly talk about this among ourselves,
and yet we will never discuss this publicly. Just as we did
not hesitate on 30 June 1934, to perform our duty as ordered
and put comrades who had failed up against the wall and execute
them, we also never spoke about it, nor will we ever speak
about it. Let us thank God that we had within us enough self-evident
fortitude never to discuss it among us, and we never talked
about it. Every one of us was horrified, and yet every one
clearly understood that we would do it next time, when the
order is given and when it becomes necessary. 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, extermination, a small matter.' And then they turn
up, the upstanding 80 million Germans, and each one has his
decent Jew. They say the others are all swine, but this particular
one is a splendid Jew. But none has observed it, endured it.
Most of you here know what it means when 100 corpses lie next
to each other, when there are 500 or when there are 1,000.
To have endured this and at the same time to have remained
a decent person with exceptions due to human weaknesses has
made us tough, and is a glorious chapter that has not and
will not be spoken of. Because we know how difficult it would
be for us if we still had Jews as secret saboteurs, agitators
and rabble rousers in every city, what with the bombings,
with the burden and with the hardships of the war. If the
Jews were still part of the German nation, we would most likely
arrive now at the state we were at in 1916 and '17.
Germanisation
As Reich Commissioner for the Consolidation of German Nationhood,
Heinrich Himmler was deeply involved in the Germanisation
program for the East, particularly Poland. Its purpose was
to remove all non-Germanic peoples from German Lebensraum
and to reclaim any Volkdeutsche (ethnic Germans) living there
for Germany, as laid out in the general plan Ost. He declared
that no drop of German blood would be lost or left behind
for an alien race. Heinrich Himmler continued his plans to
colonise the east despite evidence that Germans did not want
to relocate there, and that the activities hindered the war
effort several high-ranking National Socialist officials found
the latter point obvious.
The plans began with the Volksliste, the classification of
people deemed of German blood into those Germans who had collaborated
before the war those still regarding themselves as German,
but who had been neutral partially Polonized but Germanizable
and those Germans who had been absorbed into Polish nationality.
Any person classified as German who resisted was to be deported
to a concentration camp. Heinrich Himmler oversaw cases of
obstinate Germans, and gave orders for concentration camps,
or separation of families, or forced labour, in efforts to
break down resistance.
His declaration that it is in the nature of German blood to
resist led to the paradoxical conclusion that Balts or Poles
who resisted Germanisation measures were regarded as more
suitable material than more compliant ones.
This included the kidnapping of Eastern European children
by Nazi Germany. Heinrich Himmler urged:
Obviously in such a mixture of peoples, there will always
be some racially good types, Therefore, I think that it is
our duty to take their children with us, to remove them from
their environment, if necessary by robbing, or stealing them.
Either we win over any good blood that we can use for ourselves
and give it a place in our people, or we destroy that blood.
The racially valuable children were to be culled, removed
from all contact with Poles, and raised as Germans, with German
names. Heinrich Himmler declared, We have faith above all
in this our own blood, which has flowed into a foreign nationality
through the vicissitudes of German history. We are convinced
that our own philosophy and ideals will reverberate in the
spirit of these children who racially belong to us. Acceptable
children were to be adopted by German families.Children who
passed muster at first but were later rejected were used as
slave labour or killed. Heinrich Himmler ordered that parents
who were registered on the Volksliste should lose their children
if the parent impeded their Germanisation
The colony of Hegewald was set up in the Reichskommisariat
Ukraine at his command. His original plans to recruit settlers
from Scandinavia and the Netherlands were unsuccessful, and
so it was settled with such ethnic Germans as had not been
deported by the Soviet Union.
For the Nazi leaders, the land which would provide sufficient
Lebensraum for Germany was the Soviet Union. At the Nuremberg
trial, SS-Obergruppenfuhrer Erich von dem Bach testified that
at a conference in Wewelsburg in 1941 Heinrich Himmler told
SS leaders that to make room for the Germans, Germany would
have to exterminate 30 million Slavs in the Soviet Union.
On July 13, 1941, three weeks after the invasion of the Soviet
Union, Heinrich Himmler told the group of Waffen SS men:
This is an ideological battle and a struggle of races. Here
in this struggle stands National Socialism: an ideology based
on the value of our Germanic, Nordic blood. ... On the other
side stands a population of 180 million, a mixture of races,
whose very names are unpronounceable, and whose physique is
such that one can shoot them down without pity and compassion.
These animals, that torture and ill-treat every prisoner from
our side, every wounded man that they come across and do not
treat them the way decent soldiers would, you will see for
yourself. These people have been welded by the Jews into one
religion, one ideology, that is called Bolshevism... When
you, my men, fight over there in the East, you are carrying
on the same struggle, against the same sub humanity, the same
inferior races, that at one time appeared under the name of
Huns, another time 1000 years ago at the time of King Henry
and Otto I under the name of Magyars, another time under the
name of Tartars, and still another time under the name of
Genghis Khan and the Mongols. Today they appear as Russians
under the political banner of Bolshevism.
Anti-Polish measures
For a time, the Polish population would be permitted to remain
as slave labor. Heinrich Himmler forbade that this group,
not suitable for Germanisation, receive anything above a fourth-grade
education. The removal of the racially valuable types would
deprive the population of leaders, and ensure that they were
available for labor.
He also prescribed that as many ethnic groups as possible
be recognized in order to foment disunity.
By this I mean that it is very much in our interest not only
not to unite the people of the East but the reverse to splinter
them into as many parts and subdivisions as possible. We should
also aim for a situation in which, after a longer period of
time has passed, the concept of nationality disappears among
the Ukrainians, Górale, and Lemki.
This is partly reflected in his views on blood and soil, where
he came the closest of all Nazis to supporting the views of
Alfred Rosenberg. His interest in Richard Walther Darré
stemmed from Darré's views on repopulating eastern
regions with Germans.
This also reflected National Socialist policy on non-Germans.The
Posen speech also calls for the merciless use of all Slavonic
forced labor on this ground:
What happens to a Russian, to a Czech, does not interest me
in the slightest. What the nations can offer in good blood
of our type, we will take, if necessary by kidnapping their
children and raising them with us. Whether nations live in
prosperity or starve to death interests me only in so far
as we need them as slaves for our culture otherwise, it is
of no interest to me. Whether 10,000 Russian females fall
down from exhaustion while digging an anti-tank ditch interest
me only in so far as the anti-tank ditch for Germany is finished.
We shall never be rough and heartless when it is not necessary,
that is clear. We Germans, who are the only people in the
world who have a decent attitude towards animals, will also
assume a decent attitude towards these human animals. But
it is a crime against our own blood to worry about them and
give them ideals, thus causing our sons and grandsons to have
a more difficult time with them. When someone comes to me
and says, I cannot dig the anti-tank ditch with women and
children, it is inhuman, for it will kill them, then I would
have to say, you are a murderer of your own blood because
if the anti-tank ditch is not dug, German soldiers will die,
and they are the sons of German mothers. They are our own
blood.
He also called for sexual relations between German women and
Polish slave labourers to be punished by death for the man
and a concentration camp for the woman.
World War II
In 1939, Heinrich Himmler masterminded Operation Heinrich
Himmler (also known as Operation Konserve or Operation Canned
Goods), arguably the first operation of World War II in Europe.
It was a false flag project to create the appearance of Polish
aggression against Germany, which was subsequently used by
Nazi propaganda to justify the invasion of Poland.
Before the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 (Operation
Barbarossa), Heinrich Himmler prepared his SS for a war of
extermination against the forces of Judeo-Bolshevism. Heinrich
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, especially those
of Nordic stock who were perceived to be racially closest
to Germans, like the Danes, Norwegians, Swedes, Icelanders,
and the Dutch. After the invasion, Ukrainians, Latvians, Lithuanians,
and Estonian volunteers were recruited, attracting the non-Germanic
volunteers by declaring a pan-European crusade to defend the
traditional values of old Europe from the Godless Bolshevik
hordes. Thousands volunteered and later many thousands more
were conscripted.
Racial restrictions were relaxed to the extent that Tatars,
Arabs, Albanians from Kosovo, Central Asian and Bosnian Muslims,
and even Indians and Mongols were recruited.
In the Baltic states, many natives were willing to serve against
the Red Army due to their loathing of their oppression after
the occupation by the Soviet Union. These men were conscripted
into the Waffen-SS. Employed against Soviet troops, they performed
acceptably. Waffen-SS recruitment in Western and Nordic Europe
collected much less manpower, though a number of Waffen-SS
Legions were founded, such as the Wallonian contingent led
by Léon Degrelle, whom Heinrich Himmler planned to
appoint chancellor of an SS State of Burgundy within the Nazi
orbit once the war was over.
Between 140,000 and 500,000 Soviet prisoners of war died or
were executed in Nazi concentration camps, most of them by
shooting or gassing.
In 1942,
Reinhard
Heydrich (Heinrich Himmler's right hand man) was assassinated
in Prague after an attack by British Special Operations Executive
(SOE), trained soldiers, Jozef Gabcík and Jan Kubiš
of Czechoslovakia's army-in-exile. Heinrich Himmler ordered
brutal reprisals. Over 13,000 people were arrested, and the
village of Lidice was razed to the ground the male inhabitants
there and in the village of Ležáky were murdered.
At least 1,300 people were executed by firing squads after
Reinhard
Heydrich's death.
Interior Minister
In 1943, Heinrich Himmler was appointed Reich Interior Minister,
replacing Frick, with whom he had engaged in a turf war for
over a decade. For instance, Frick had tried to restrict the
widespread use of protective custody orders that were used
to send people to concentration camps, only to be begged off
by Heinrich Himmler. While Frick viewed the concentration
camps as a tool to punish dissenters, Heinrich Himmler saw
them as a way to terrorise the people into accepting Nazi
rule.
Heinrich Himmler's appointment effectively merged the Interior
Ministry with the SS. Nonetheless, Heinrich Himmler sought
to use his new office to reverse the party apparatus's annexation
of the civil service and tried to challenge the authority
of the party gauleiters.
This aspiration was frustrated by
Martin
Bormann,
Adolf
Hitler's private secretary and party chancellor. It also
incurred some displeasure from
Adolf
Hitler himself, whose long-standing disdain for the traditional
civil service was one of the foundations of Nazi administrative
thinking. Heinrich Himmler made things much worse still when
following his appointment as head of the Reserve Army (Ersatzheer,
see below) he tried to use his authority in both military
and police matters by transferring policemen to the Waffen-SS.
With Heinrich Himmler threatening his power base,
Martin
Bormann could not give him the opportunity fast enough,
initially acquiescing in the policies, until furious protests
broke out. Then,
Martin
Bormann came out against the scheme, leaving Heinrich
Himmler discredited, especially with the party, whose gauleiters
now saw
Martin
Bormann as their protector.
20 July plot
It was determined that leaders of German Military Intelligence
(the Abwehr), including its head, Admiral
Wilhelm
Canaris, were involved in the 20 July 1944 plot to assassinate
Adolf Hitler.
This prompted
Adolf
Hitler to disband the Abwehr and make Heinrich Himmler's
Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst, or SD) the sole intelligence
service of the Third Reich. This increased Heinrich Himmler's
personal power.
General
Friedrich
Fromm, Commander-in-Chief of the Reserve (or Replacement)
Army (Ersatzheer), was implicated in the conspiracy.
Friedrich
Fromm's removal, coupled with
Adolf
Hitler's suspicion of the army, led the way to Heinrich
Himmler's appointment as
Friedrich
Fromm's successor, a position he abused to expand the
Waffen-SS even further to the detriment of the rapidly deteriorating
German armed forces (Wehrmacht).
Azeri SS volunteer formation which fought on Germany's side,
during the Warsaw Uprising, August 1944. Unfortunately for
Heinrich Himmler, the investigation soon revealed the involvement
of many SS officers in the conspiracy, including senior officers,
which played into the hands of
Martin
Bormann's power struggle against the SS because very few
party cadre officers were implicated. Even more importantly,
some senior SS officers began to conspire against Heinrich
Himmler himself, as they believed that he would be unable
to achieve victory in the power struggle against Bormann.
Among these defectors were Ernst Kaltenbrunner,
Reinhard
Heydrich's successor as chief of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt,
and Gruppenführer Heinrich Müller, the chief of
the Gestapo.
Commander-in-Chief
In late 1944, Heinrich Himmler became Commander-in-Chief of
the newly formed Heeresgruppe Oberrhein. This Heeresgruppe
was formed to fight the advancing U.S. 7th Army and French
1st Army in the Alsace region along the west bank of the Rhine.
The U.S. 7th Army was under the command of General Alexander
Patch and the French 1st Army was under the command of General
Jean de Lattre de Tassigny.
On 1 January 1945, Heinrich Himmler's army group launched
Operation North Wind (Unternehmen Nordwind) to push back the
Americans and the French. In late January, after some limited
initial success, Heinrich Himmler was transferred east. By
24 January, Heeresgruppe Oberrhein was deactivated after going
over to the defensive. Operation North Wind officially ended
on 25 January.
Elsewhere, the German Army (Wehrmacht Heer) had failed to
halt the Red Army's Vistula-Oder offensive, so
Adolf
Hitler gave Heinrich Himmler command of yet another newly
formed army group, Heeresgruppe Weichsel to stop the Soviet
advance on Berlin.
Adolf
Hitler placed Heinrich Himmler in command of Army Group
Vistula despite the failure of Heeresgruppe Oberrhein and
despite Heinrich Himmler's total lack of experience and ability
to command troops. This appointment may have been at the instigation
of Martin Bormann, anxious to discredit a rival, or through
Adolf Hitler's
continuing anger at the failures of the general staff.
As Commander-in-Chief of Army Group Vistula, Heinrich Himmler
established his command centre at Schneidemühl. He used
his special train (sonderzug), Sonderzug Steiermark, as his
headquarters. Heinrich Himmler did this despite the train
having only one telephone line and no signals detachment.
Eager to show his determination, Heinrich Himmler acquiesced
in a quick counter-attack urged by the general staff. The
operation quickly bogged down and Heinrich Himmler dismissed
a regular army corps commander and appointed Nazi Heinz Lammerding.
His headquarters was also forced to retreat to Falkenburg.
On 30 January, Heinrich Himmler issued draconian orders: Tod
und Strafe für Pflichtvergessenheit death and punishment
for those who forget their obligations, to encourage his troops.
The worsening situation left Heinrich Himmler under increasing
pressure from
Adolf
Hitler he was unassertive and nervous in conferences.
In mid-February, the Pomeranian offensive by his forces was
directed by General
Walther
Wenck, after intense pressure from General
Heinz
Guderian on
Adolf
Hitler. By early March, Heinrich Himmler's headquarters
had moved west of the Oder River, although his army group
was still named after the Vistula. At conferences with
Adolf
Hitler, Heinrich Himmler echoed
Adolf
Hitler's line of increased severity towards those who
retreated.
On 13 March, Heinrich Himmler abandoned his command and, claiming
illness, retired to a sanatorium at Hohenlychen.
Heinz
Guderian visited him there and carried his resignation
as Commander-in-Chief of Heeresgruppe Weichsel to
Adolf
Hitler that night. On 20 March, Heinrich Himmler was replaced
by General Gotthard Heinrici.
Peace negotiations
In the winter of 1944 to 45, Heinrich 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 early 1945 Heinrich Himmler had lost faith in German victory,
likely due in part to his discussions with his masseur Felix
Kersten and with Walter Schellenberg. He realised that if
the National Socialist Regime were to survive, it needed to
seek peace with Britain and the U.S. He also believed by the
middle of April 1945 that
Adolf
Hitler had effectively incapacitated himself from governing
by remaining in Berlin to personally lead the defence of the
capital against the Soviets.
To this end, he contacted Count Folke Bernadotte of Sweden
at Lübeck, near the Danish border. He represented himself
as the provisional leader of Germany, telling Bernadotte that
Adolf Hitler
would almost certainly be dead within two days. He asked Bernadotte
to tell General Dwight Eisenhower that Germany wished to surrender
to the West. Heinrich Himmler hoped the British and Americans
would fight the Soviets alongside the remains of the Wehrmacht.
At Bernadotte's request, Heinrich Himmler put his offer in
writing. On April 21, 1945, Heinrich Himmler met with Norbert
Masur, a Swedish representative of the World Jewish Congress,
in Berlin for a discussion concerning the release of Jewish
concentration camp inmates. During the meeting, Heinrich Himmler
stated that he wanted to bury the hatchet with the Jews.
On the evening of 28 April, the BBC broadcast a Reuters news
report about Heinrich Himmler's attempted negotiations with
the western Allies. When
Adolf
Hitler was informed of the news, he flew into a rage.
A few days earlier,
Hermann
Göring had asked
Adolf
Hitler for permission to take over the leadership of the
Reich an act that
Adolf
Hitler, under the prodding of Bormann, interpreted as
a demand to step down or face a coup. However, Heinrich Himmler
had not even bothered to request permission. The news also
hit
Adolf Hitler
hard because he had long believed that Heinrich Himmler was
second only to
Joseph
Goebbels in loyalty in fact,
Adolf
Hitler often called Heinrich Himmler der treue Heinrich
(the loyal Heinrich).
Adolf
Hitler ordered Heinrich Himmler's arrest and had Hermann
Fegelein (Heinrich Himmler's SS representative at
Adolf
Hitler's HQ in Berlin) shot. After
Adolf
Hitler calmed down, he told those who were still with
him in the bunker complex that Heinrich Himmler's act was
the worst act of treachery he'd ever known.
Heinrich Himmler's treachery combined with reports the Soviets
were only 300 m (330 yd) (about a block) from the Reich Chancellery
prompted
Adolf Hitler
to write his last will and testament. In the Testament, completed
the day before he committed suicide, he declared Heinrich
Himmler and
Hermann
Göring to be traitors. He also stripped Heinrich
Himmler of all of his party and state offices: Reichsführer-SS,
Chief of the German Police, Commissioner of German Nationhood,
Reich Minister of the Interior, Supreme Commander of the Volkssturm,
and Supreme Commander of the Home Army. Finally, he expelled
Heinrich Himmler from the National Socialist Party and ordered
his arrest.
Heinrich Himmler's negotiations with Count Bernadotte failed.
However, the negotiations helped secure the release of some
15,000 Scandinavian prisoners from the remaining concentration
camps in the White Buses operation. Heinrich Himmler joined
Grand Admiral
Karl
Dönitz, who by then was commanding all German forces
within the northern part of the western front, in nearby Plön.
Karl
Dönitz sent Heinrich Himmler away, explaining that
there was no place for him in the new German government.
Heinrich Himmler next turned to the Americans as a defector,
contacting Eisenhower's headquarters and proclaiming he would
surrender all of Germany to the Allies if he were spared from
prosecution. He asked Eisenhower to appoint him minister of
police in Germany's post-war government. He reportedly mused
on how to handle his first meeting with the Supreme Headquarters
Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) commander and whether to
give the Nazi salute or shake hands with him. Eisenhower refused
to have anything to do with Heinrich Himmler, who was subsequently
declared a major war criminal.
Capture and death
In the winter of 1944 to 1945, Heinrich 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 early 1945 Heinrich Himmler had lost faith in German victory,
likely due in part to his discussions with his masseur Felix
Kersten and with Walter Schellenberg. He realised that if
the National Socialist Regime were to survive, it needed to
seek peace with Britain and the U.S. He also believed by the
middle of April 1945 that
Adolf
Hitler had effectively incapacitated himself from governing
by remaining in Berlin to personally lead the defence of the
capital against the Soviets.
To this end, he contacted Count Folke Bernadotte of Sweden
at Lübeck, near the Danish border. He represented himself
as the provisional leader of Germany, telling Bernadotte that
Adolf Hitler
would almost certainly be dead within two days. He asked Bernadotte
to tell General Dwight Eisenhower that Germany wished to surrender
to the West. Heinrich Himmler hoped the British and Americans
would fight the Soviets alongside the remains of the Wehrmacht.
At Bernadotte's request, Heinrich Himmler put his offer in
writing. On April 21, 1945, Heinrich Himmler met with Norbert
Masur, a Swedish representative of the World Jewish Congress,
in Berlin for a discussion concerning the release of Jewish
concentration camp inmates. During the meeting, Heinrich Himmler
stated that he wanted to bury the hatchet with the Jews.
On the evening of 28 April, the BBC broadcast a Reuters news
report about Heinrich Himmler's attempted negotiations with
the western Allies. When
Adolf
Hitler was informed of the news, he flew into a rage.
A few days earlier,
Hermann
Göring had asked
Adolf
Hitler for permission to take over the leadership of the
Reich an act that
Adolf
Hitler, under the prodding of Bormann, interpreted as
a demand to step down or face a coup. However, Heinrich Himmler
had not even bothered to request permission. The news also
hit
Adolf Hitler
hard because he had long believed that Heinrich Himmler was
second only to
Joseph
Goebbels in loyalty in fact,
Adolf
Hitler often called Heinrich Himmler der treue Heinrich
(the loyal Heinrich).
Adolf
Hitler ordered Heinrich Himmler's arrest and had Hermann
Fegelein (Heinrich Himmler's SS representative at
Adolf
Hitler's's HQ in Berlin) shot. After
Adolf
Hitler calmed down, he told those who were still with
him in the bunker complex that Heinrich Himmler's act was
the worst act of treachery he'd ever known.
Heinrich Himmler's treachery combined with reports the Soviets
were only 300 m (330 yd) (about a block) from the Reich Chancellery
prompted
Adolf Hitler
to write his last will and testament. In the Testament, completed
the day before he committed suicide, he declared Heinrich
Himmler and
Hermann
Göring to be traitors. He also stripped Heinrich
Himmler of all of his party and state offices: Reichsführer-SS,
Chief of the German Police, Commissioner of German Nationhood,
Reich Minister of the Interior, Supreme Commander of the Volkssturm,
and Supreme Commander of the Home Army. Finally, he expelled
Heinrich Himmler from the National Socialist Party and ordered
his arrest.
Heinrich Himmler's negotiations with Count Bernadotte failed.
However, the negotiations helped secure the release of some
15,000 Scandinavian prisoners from the remaining concentration
camps in the White Buses operation. Heinrich Himmler joined
Grand Admiral
Karl
Dönitz, who by then was commanding all German forces
within the northern part of the western front, in nearby Plön.
Karl
Dönitz sent Heinrich Himmler away, explaining that
there was no place for him in the new German government.
Heinrich Himmler next turned to the Americans as a defector,
contacting Eisenhower's headquarters and proclaiming he would
surrender all of Germany to the Allies if he were spared from
prosecution. He asked Eisenhower to appoint him minister of
police in Germany's post-war government. He reportedly mused
on how to handle his first meeting with the Supreme Headquarters
Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) commander and whether to
give the Nazi salute or shake hands with him. Eisenhower refused
to have anything to do with Heinrich Himmler, who was subsequently
declared a major war criminal.
Capture and death
Unwanted by his former colleagues and hunted by the Allies,
Heinrich Himmler wandered for several days around Flensburg
near the Danish border. 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 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. Heinrich Himmler was arrested on 22 May
by Major Sidney Excell and soon recognized while in captivity.
Heinrich Himmler was scheduled to stand trial with other German
leaders as a war criminal at Nuremberg, but on 23 May committed
suicide in Lüneburg by means of a potassium cyanide capsule
before interrogation could begin. His last words were Ich
bin Heinrich Himmler! (I am Heinrich Himmler!). Another version
has Heinrich Himmler biting into a hidden cyanide pill embedded
in one of his teeth, when searched by a British doctor, who
then yelled, He has done it! Several attempts to revive Heinrich
Himmler were unsuccessful. Shortly afterward, Heinrich Himmler's
body was buried in an unmarked grave on the Lüneburg
Heath. The precise location of Heinrich Himmler's grave remains
unknown.
Forgeries, fabrications and conspiracy theories
In a 2005 book, Martin Allen claimed that Heinrich Himmler
had secretly negotiated with the UK as early as 1943, and
that he may have been killed on Churchill's order to cover
up this fact. The book was based on forgeries of documents
at the National Archives. In May 2008 a British police investigation
identified 29 forgeries that had been slipped into 12 files
to support claims in Allen's three World War II books
Historical views
Historians are divided on the psychology, motives, and influences
that drove Heinrich Himmler. Some see him as dominated by
Adolf Hitler,
fully under his influence and essentially a tool carrying
Adolf Hitler's
views to their logical conclusion. Others see Heinrich Himmler
as extremely anti-Semitic in his own right, and even more
eager than his boss to commit genocide. Still others see Heinrich
Himmler as power-mad, devoted to the accumulation of power
and influence.
According to Robert S. Wistrich, Heinrich Himmler's decisive
innovation was to transform the race question from a negative
concept based on matter-of-course anti-Semitism into an organisational
task for building up the SS. It was Heinrich Himmler's master
stroke that he succeeded in indoctrinating the SS with an
apocalyptic idealism' beyond all guilt and responsibility,
which rationalised mass murder as a form of martyrdom and
harshness towards oneself.
The wartime cartoonist Victor Weisz depicted Heinrich Himmler
as a giant octopus, wielding oppressed nations in each of
his eight arms.
Wolfgang Sauer historian at University of California, Berkeley
felt that although he was pedantic, dogmatic, and dull, Heinrich
Himmler emerged under
Adolf
Hitler as second in actual power. His strength lay in
a combination of unusual shrewdness, burning ambition, and
servile loyalty to
Adolf
Hitler.
In an extract of Norman Brook's War Cabinet Diaries,Winston
Churchill took a view towards Heinrich Himmler widely shared
during the war, advocating his assassination. According to
Brook, responding to a suggestion that Nazi leaders be executed,
this prompted Churchill to ask if they should negotiate with
Heinrich Himmler and bump him off later, once peace terms
had been agreed. The suggestion to cut a deal for a German
surrender with Heinrich Himmler and then assassinate him met
with support from the Home Office. Quite entitled to do so,
the minutes record Churchill as commenting.
A main focus of recent work on Heinrich Himmler has been the
extent to which he competed for and craved
Adolf
Hitler's attention and respect. The events of the last
days of the war, when he abandoned
Adolf
Hitler and attempted to enter into separate negotiations
with the western Allies (an attempt which was rebuffed), are
obviously significant in this respect.
Heinrich Himmler appears to have had a distorted view of how
he was perceived by the Allies he intended to meet with U.S.
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 him, Heinrich Himmler was genuinely shocked to
be treated as a prisoner.
In 2008, Heinrich Himmler was named the greatest mass murderer
of all time by German news magazine Der Spiegel, reflecting
his role as architect of the Holocaust
Summary of SS service
Heinrich Himmler served in the SS for a total of twenty years,
sixteen of which as Reichsführer-SS. In contrast to other
contemporary Nazis, such as
Reinhard
Heydrich, Heinrich Himmler was presented few decorations
and never was awarded a combat medal.
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