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Heinrich Himmler

Himmler was Hitler's professional butcher. He set out to destroy whole nations whose continued national life was distasteful to Adolf Hitler. Outwardly Heinrich Himmler seemed to be the mildest of men and to merit his nick-name of "Our Gentle Heinrich." Himmler looked like an old-fashioned school teacher. Skinny in appearance, he sported a Charlie Chaplin moustache, had straw-colored hair, not much chin, and wore strong glasses. Early and late he was at his job. As head of the dreaded Schutz Staffel he was the most feared and the most hated of all German leaders, and he was harder to see than Hitler. He was a vegetarian, drank no coffee and no liquor except wines. He collected stamps, and to the world presented a picture of purity and innocence.

Born in Munich in 1900, the son of a Catholic schoolteacher, he became an ensign-bearer in the Eleventh Bavarian Infantry Regiment at 17, but saw no active service at the World War front. The War over, he joined Fhrer Hitler's struggling German Labor Party at 19, was noted more for his regular attendance at Munich beer-hall powwows than for any great forcefulness. To his parents he was a problem child; in his Party he had the reputation of a hellraiser. In the famed-and abortive-beer-hall Putsch of 1923 he marched along with the boys (as the Party's flag-bearer), but the Republican police considered him so unimportant that they did not bother to arrest him. While Hitler was serving time in Landsberg Prison and Göring was recovering from his wounds in Sweden, the youthful Heinrich was a student of experimental agriculture at the University of Munich.

When the Führer was released from jail, young, jobless Himmler joined up with the slowly forming Storm Troops. The Führer decided to form, within the Storm Troopers, a carefully chosen elite group of men to be known as the Schutzstaffel ("Protective Corps"), and in 1929 Himmler was made leader of the SS. Under Heinrich Himmler, the SS, which was established as Hitler's elite military force, stamped out dissent and propagated the Nazi vision of establishing a pure, "Aryan" race in Germany and in conquered territories. Millions who didn't fit into the Nazis' world view, including political prisoners, gypsies, Jews, and mentally or physically challenged persons, were summarily killed or perished in labor and concentration camps.

The key figure in setting Nazi racial policy - after Hitler himself - was Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsführer SS (Reich Leader of the SS [Schutzstaffel, literally "Protection Squad"]). As Reichsfuhrer and SS chief, he personally set up the Lebensborn (Fountain of Life) program in 1935 to turn the German population into a superrace through selective breeding. Thousands of carefully selected German women were encouraged to have intercourse with SS men, who were presumed to be among the racial as well as the political elite.

In 1936, Hitler appointed Himmler Chief of the German Police. During the course of the Nazi regime, Heinrich Himmler succeeded in bringing about an almost complete merger of the regular German police forces with the police and intelligence components of the SS. This merger was reflected in Himmler's own titleLeader of the SS and Chief of the German Police (Reichsfuehrer SS and Chef der Deutschen Polizei). Thereafter, Himmler designated various of his subordinates to head the SS and police activities in specified areas of Germany and in German-occupied territory.

The SS and police played a central role in what would be termed "the Final Solution." In 1938 Himmler launched massive arrests and sent the men to Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen. In July 1938, the camps were readied to receive more Jews. That was quite a few months before Kristallnacht. The SA, the Stormtroopers, Brownshirts, started local assaults on Jewish businesses and synagogues. On October 28, 1938, 17,000 Polish Jews, or "Stateless Jews," men, women and children, were driven with a few belongings into "no man's land" between Germany and Poland near Silesia.

Heinrich Himmler was responsible for overseeing the implementation of the "final solution." In 1941, Heinrich Himmler gave orders to extend the so-called "euthanasia" program to concentration camp inmates who were sick or otherwise unable to work. Selection for this extermination campaign was rarely discriminating; seemingly healthy criminals, political prisoners, and Jewish inmates were also killed by gassing or lethal injection at the Sonnenstein, Bernberg, and Hartheim euthanasia facilities.

In the spring of 1941, the SS organized four mobile killing squads (Einsatzqruppen) for the occupied Soviet Union and Baltic regions. These specifically trained murder units followed invading troops to capture and eliminate "Jews, communists, and other Soviet officials." Hitler, distrustful of the will of his generals to carry out his intended "war of annihilation," appointed Heinrich Himmler to carry out "special tasks" on the eastern front. The burning of corpses at Auschwitz began on Aug. 15, 1940. Heinrich Himmler, commander of Hitler's SS, visited the camp on March 1, 1941, and decreed a vast expansion that would clear the surrounding countryside for a second large camp called Birkenau, subcamps and factories of I. G. Farben, Bayer and other industrial giants, to be staffed by forced labor. Shortly afterward, Auschwitz commander Höss later recalled, Himmler told him, "the Führer has ordered the final solution of the Jewish question."

Heinrich Himmler, in notes for a speech to a hundred SS Generals, delivered October 4, 1943, spoke of the extermination of Jews. This handwritten note uses the euphemism "Judenevakuierung", meaning evacuation of the Jews. However, in sound recordings of the speech, Himmler defined "evacuation" as "extermination." All human experimentation in the concentration camps needed to be approved by Heinrich Himmler. Interestingly enough, Himmler himself favoured homoeopathy.

The slave labor and extermination camps succeeded in extirpating the moral being of the destroyers as well as those they destroyed. Heinrich Himmler told SS officers that they had to become "superhumanly inhuman," that is, to cease being human if they were to carry out the "great task that occurs but once in two thousand years."

Many German academics, scientists, and technicians had been members of the Nazi Party, often because party membership brought benefits such as research grants and promotions. The Party often bestowed honorary rank as a reward. Heinrich Himmler personally awarded an honorary SS rank to von Braun in May 1940, which von Braun accepted only after he and his colleagues agreed that to turn it down might risk Himmler's wrath. In April 1943 Arthur Rudolph, chief engineer of the Peenemünde factory, learned of the availability of concentration camp prisoners, enthusiastically endorsed their use, and helped win approval for their transfer. Hitler's concern for V-2 development after July 1943 peaked the interest of Heinrich Himmler, the commander of the SS, who conspired to take control of the rocket program and research activities at Peenemünde as a means to expand his power base. When Dornberger and von Braun resisted his advances, the SS arrested von Braun, charging that he had tried to sabotage the V-2 program. Himmler cited as evidence remarks that von Braun had made at a party suggesting developing the V-2 for space travel after the war. Dornberger's intercession won von Braun's release, but Himmler had made his point.

Following the assassination attempt of 20 July 1944 Hitler further consolidated his control over military affairs, putting Heinrich Himmler, head of the Police and the SS, in command of the Replacement Army. Under Himmler the Replacement Army after November 1944 become a fighting organization. It still retained a training function but supplied more combat units as the war progressed. The regimental and division training staffs were upgraded to field staffs and engaged in active operations. Hitler was enraged by the growing disparity in the troop lists between "ration strength" and "combat strength" and, as a military dictator, expected that the issuance of threatening orders and the appointment of the brutal Heinrich Himmler as chief of the Replacement Army would eventually reverse this trend.

When the military invasion of Nazi Germany loomed, Hitler organized the "Volkssturm" under the command of Heinrich Himmler. Every male between the age of 16 and 60 were conscripted. However, pleas to allow the use of even younger boys were rejected as too barbarous. Even though younger children later fought, and many of these children under arms killed and were killed in combat, the Allied military rejected any suggestion that they should be subjected to military punishments for those acts.

As German leaders grappled with a failing military campaign, some resurrected the centuries-old concept of guerrilla tactics. Heinrich Himmler, as leader of the Schutzstaffel (SS) and commander in chief of the home army, undertook the responsibility to develop an organization, later named "Werewolf," to fight behind the front as a diversionary force, and subsequently lead a paramilitary resistance, once the regular military capitulated. Himmler placed SS Police General Pruetzmann in charge of this new secret organization, which successfully executed missions both behind enemy linesin the west, and in Berlin to counter the Russian advance.

Heinrich Himmler once said that it is "the curse of the great to have to walk over corpses." While the colorless Himmler, whose "life substance," in the words of Joachim Fest, "was so thinly spread that he had to borrow from outside," could hardly be called a great man himself, he spoke true of Hitler. Himmler, who hated hunting and whose dinner could be ruined by an account of the slaughtering, could sincerely say at one point: "Nature is so marvelously beautiful and every animal has a right to live," only to say at another time, "Whether the other peoples live in comfort or perish of hunger interests me only in so far as we need them as slaves for our culture." He often told the SS that "the Jewish people is to be exterminated"; yet in April 1945, just before the war ended, he warmly greeted a representative of the World Jewish Congress with the astonishing words, "Welcome to Germany, Herr Masur. It is time you Jews and we National Socialists buried the hatchet."

Himmler, whose name would be associated with Nazi infamy and forever remembered as a perpetrator of the Holocaust, was driven by two conflicting motives as the war wound down: He was a fanatic Nazi who worshipped Hitler, and a treacherous opportunist terrified of his future as the curtain of defeat descended on the Third Reich. Retribution for his sins, he knew, would be metted out by the victors. Himmler was considered Hitler's trusted acolyte. Yet, because he was convinced that Germany would lose the war and he would be among those held accountable for war crimes by the Allies, he began to entertain thoughts of high treason against his Fuhrer as early as mid-1942-possibly earlier when Hitler's panzers failed to reach Moscow and the United States was drawn into the war. He hoped for absolution from the Western Allies by offering to seize power from Hitler and negotiate peace in exchange for their license, if not their help, in continuing the struggle against the Soviet Union.

Otto Ohlendorf, one of the most notorious SS officials in Nazi Germany, was captured and interrogated extensively after the war. A lengthy interrogation of Ohlendorf by a British intelligence officer of 7 July 1945 concerned the final days of the war, particularly regarding Heinrich Himmler on May 6, 1945, after Hitler's Last Testament appointed Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz as the successor while expelling Himmler from the Nazi Party. Ohlendorf described the broad extent of Himmler's "degrading" and "unworthy" efforts to gain a post in the Doenitz government and Himmler's real anger on hearing that he was an "encumbrance" who would do the new government more harm than good. Ohlendorf said that Himmler until the very end believed that an agreement could be struck and that he hoped to be the Allies' "confidence man in Europe." After Himmler's capture by British forces on May 23rd, he still hoped for an interview with British Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery.

Heinrich Himmler, whom his fellow Nazis had ironically nicknamed "gentle Heinrich," had shaved his Hitlerian mustache, replaced his scholarly pince-nez with a black eye patch. He had become Herr Hitzinger. His papers were in perfect order. But perfect order was an anachronism, a noticeable incongruity, in conquered Germany. British guards on a bridge in Bëmervörde, noting and suspecting the perfection of Herr Hitzinger's papers, dumped him in a prison camp. After three days he declared to the camp commandant: "I am Heinrich Himmler." On 24 July 1945 Heinrich Himmler, Nazi archmurderer, killed himself by taking poison. A British Army detail, sworn to secrecy, buried the unembalmed body in a grave on the heath near Lüneburg. There was no coffin, no marking on the grave.