Heinrich Himmler

German high-ranking Nazi

• Born: October 7, 1900
• Birthplace: Munich, Germany
• Died: May 23, 1945
• Place of death: Lüneburg, Germany

Cause of notoriety: During the reign of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, Himmler controlled the SS and the Gestapo and became the party’s leading organizer and overseer of the Holocaust.

Active: 1923-1945

Locale: Germany and Eastern Europe

Early Life

Heinrich Himmler (HIN-rihk HIHM-luhr) grew up in a comfortable and conservative Roman Catholic, middle-class family. He excelled in high school in Munich and in Landshut, Lower Bavaria, particularly in classical languages and history. However, physically he was frail, and he suffered from a series of health problems, including lung infections, typhoid fever, and chronic gastrointestinal ailments.

In 1918, Himmler finished an officer candidate course, but he did not see combat before World War I ended on November 11, 1918. After the war, he returned to Landshut to obtain his high school degree before earning a degree in agriculture at the Institute of Technology in Munich. Neither farm work nor employment with a fertilizer company satisfied Himmler, who was disillusioned with conditions in postwar Germany.

Nazi Career

In 1921, Himmler noted in his diary that within two years he would emigrate from Germany. Instead, he became involved in right-wing politics and participated in the November, 1923, Beer Hall Putsch—a failed attempt at a coup led by Adolf Hitler and others of the Weimar Republic. After the putsch, Himmler moved back to Landshut and continued his support of Hitler’s movement by becoming the deputy party leader in Lower Bavaria under Gregor Strasser, the head of the German National Socialist Workers’ Party (the formal name of the Nazi Party). In 1926, Himmler followed Strasser to Munich and became the deputy Nazi Party propaganda leader until 1930. During this period, he married Margarete Boden, with whom he had one daughter.

Although Himmler played a key role in organizing Nazi propaganda and election campaigns between 1926 and 1929, during this period he focused his attention primarily on the Schutzstaffel (SS), initially a small battalion serving the Nazi Party. Having already served as deputy leader of the SS both in Lower Bavaria and in Germany, Himmler was given control of the national SS in 1929. Between 1929 and 1933, he transformed the SS into an elite paramilitary organization within the Nazi Party, and he created the Sicherheitsdienst (SD, or security service) within the SS to carry out secret surveillance operations.

After Hitler assumed power in Germany in January, 1933, Himmler first gained control of the political police in Bavaria and established a concentration camp in Dachau, Bavaria, for political prisoners. By 1934, he had expanded his control over the political police in all other states in Germany, including Prussia, where Hermann Göring had created the Gestapo (the secret state police) the previous year. After the purge of Ernst Röhm, the leader of the Sturmabteilung (SA, or storm troopers), in 1934, the SS became an independent organization and was no longer subordinated to the SA.

In 1936, Himmler was given command of all German police forces, and he assumed the title of Reich leader of the SS and chief of the police. On the eve of World War II, Himmler and his deputy Reinhard Heydrich organized the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA, or Reich Main Security Office), which combined the Gestapo, criminal police, and SD into one department. The RSHA played a key role in the Holocaust during World War II.

Beginning in 1939, Himmler’s powers expanded dramatically. He was appointed Reich commissioner for the consolidation of ethnic Germans, which gave him control over ethnic Germans in Eastern Europe. Four years later, Himmler became Germany’s minister of interior, and after July, 1944, he was given control of the German Home Army. Between December, 1944, and March, 1945, he also commanded army groups on the Upper Rhine and the Vistula. Only during the last weeks of the war did Himmler break with Hitler by attempting to negotiate with the western Allies. On April 19, 1945, Hitler dismissed him from all of his SS and police offices. After being captured by the British, Himmler committed suicide at Lüneburg, Germany, on May 23, 1945.

Impact

Heinrich Himmler’s police and SS operations played a crucial role in consolidating Nazi power after January, 1933. The concentration camp established in Dachau became the training camp and model for other SS concentration camps. A number of the commanders and officers of extermination camps in Eastern Europe during the Holocaust received their training in Dachau. Before 1938, the majority of concentration camp victims were political prisoners and other Germans who had made critical remarks about Hitler. After 1939, however, the concentration camp system became a massive SS empire, inflicting pain and suffering on Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, political opponents, and social outsiders. Himmler’s control of the police, particularly the Gestapo, allowed him not only to persecute opponents but also to punish Jews who violated Nazi restrictions or the Nuremberg laws after 1935.

Himmler’s SS organization began a reign of terror in 1939 in Poland with the murder of Polish elites and selected Jews. Using SS Einsatzkommandos (special task units), the SS murdered thousands in the annexed areas of Poland. Moreover, by 1940, major Jewish ghettos were organized in Eastern Europe. In addition, beginning in 1939, Himmler’s SS officers also participated in the euthanasia program, which was responsible for the murder of several hundred thousand people with real and imagined handicaps. A much more massive murder campaign was initiated by SS and police units in Einsatzgruppen (special task forces) in Russia after the German invasion in June, 1941.

By the late summer of 1941, Himmler, with the approval of Hitler, had organized plans for the total elimination of Jews in Europe. By 1942, three major extermination camps in eastern Poland, staffed by veterans of the euthanasia program, implemented the Reinhard Action, which decimated the Jewish population of Poland. In addition, the massive complex at Auschwitz in Upper Silesia was responsible for the extermination of Jews from a variety of Western and Eastern European countries. Himmler’s SS and police apparatus murdered almost six million Jews and large numbers of non-Jews during World War II.

Bibliography

Breitman, Richard. The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991. The author argues that Himmler envisioned gas chambers as early as December, 1939, and that by March, 1941, key decisions for the “final solution” had been made.

Knopp, Guido. Hitler’s Henchmen. Translated by Angus McGeoch. Stroud, England: Sutton, 2000. Includes a chapter on Himmler based on interviews with Himmler’s contemporaries, which was used for a documentary film on Himmler available from the History Channel.

Padfield, Peter. Himmler, Reichsführer. London: Macmillan, 1991. A popular but reliable general biography based on secondary sources.

Smith, Bradely F. Heinrich Himmler: A Nazi in the Making, 1900-1926. Palo Alto, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 1971. Relying on Himmler’s diary, the author describes in detail Himmler’s youth and formative years, which reveals his petty obsession with minor details.

Waller, John H. The Devil’s Doctor: Felix Kersten and the Secret Plot to Turn Himmler Against Hitler. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2002. Includes a chapter titled “Himmler, the Man,” which is based on the observations of Felix Kersten, Himmler’s masseur.