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| Heinrich Himmler | |
| Birth | October 7 1900 3:30 p.m. (Munich, Germany) |
| Death | May 23 1945 11:14 p.m. (31a Ülzenerstraße Lüneburg, Germany) |
| Party | National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) |
| Political positions | |
Himmler became a leading organizer of the Holocaust. As founder and officer-in-charge of the Nazi concentration camps and the Einsatzgruppen death squads, Himmler held final command responsibility for implementing the industrial-scale extermination of between 6 and 12 million people. This was aimed particularly at Jews and Slavs, but also against those of many other nationalities, races and conditions considered by him to be suitable for killing, or Sonderbehandlung ("special treatment") as gas chamber murder was euphemistically known within the SS.
Early life
Born near Munich, Bavaria, Germany, into a middle-class family, he was the son of Gebhardt Himmler, a schoolmaster, and his wife Anna Heyder as the middle of three brothers; the eldest Gebhardt Jr. (b.1898), the youngest Ernst (b.1905). After leaving Landshut High School in 1918, Himmler was appointed an Officer Cadet and joined the 11th Bavarian Regiment for service in World War I. Shortly before he was due for commissioning as an officer the war ended, and he was discharged from the military without seeing combat. The following year, Himmler began studying agronomy at the Technische Hochschule in Munich. During his time as a student, he became active in the Freikorps, private armies of ex-German Army men resentful of Germany's loss of the First World War. Himmler joined the Reichkriegsflagge (Imperial War Flag) and, in 1923, applied to join the Nazi Party, which were recruiting Freikorps members as potential members of the new Nazi stormtrooper units known as the Sturmabteilung. He took part in the ill-fated Beer Hall Putsch in November 1923.
Rise in the SS
Himmler joined the SS in 1925 and by 1927 had been appointed as Deputy Reichsführer-SS; a role he began to take very seriously. Upon the resignation of SS Commander Erhard Heiden, Himmler was appointed as the new Reichsführer-SS in January 1929. At the time Himmler was appointed to lead the SS, it numbered only 280 members and was considered a mere battalion of the much larger SA. Himmler himself was considered only an SA-Oberführer, but after 1929 he simply referred to himself as the "Reichsführer-SS".
By 1933, when the Nazi Party rose to power in Germany, Himmler's SS numbered 52,000 members, and the organization had developed strict membership requirements ensuring 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 to replace the SA brown shirts in the fall of 1933. Shortly thereafter, he was promoted to SS-Obergruppenführer und Reichsführer-SS and became an equal to the senior SA commanders, who by this time loathed the SS and the power it held.
Himmler and another of Hitler's right hand men, Hermann Göring, agreed that the SA and its leader Ernst Röhm were beginning to pose a real threat to the German Army and the Nazi leadership of Germany. Röhm had strong socialist views and believed that, although Hitler had successfully gained power in Germany, the "real" revolution had not yet begun, leaving some Nazi leaders believing Röhm was intent on using the SA to administer a coup.
With some persuasion from Himmler and Göring, Hitler began to feel threatened by this prospect and agreed that Röhm had to die. He delegated the task of Röhm's demise to Himmler and Göring who, along with Reinhard Heydrich, Kurt Daluege and Walter Schellenberg, carried out the execution of Röhm and numerous other senior SA officials on June 301934, 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 the SS absorbed all of Germany's local law enforcement agencies into the new Ordnungspolizei, considered a headquarters branch of the SS. Germany's secret police forces were also under Himmler's authority in the form of the Sicherheitspolizei, which would in 1939 expand into the much larger Reichsicherheitshauptamt. 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, Roma, priests, homosexuals, communists and those persons of any other cultural, racial, political or religious affiliation deemed by the Nazis to be either Untermenschen (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 22th, 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.
Poznań speech
On 4 October 1943, Himmler referred explicitly to the extermination of the Jewish people during a secret SS meeting in the Polish city of Poznań (Posen in German). 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. Himmler collected volunteers from all over Europe, including Danes, Norwegians, Swedes, Dutch, Belgians, French, Spaniards, and, after the invasion, Ukrainians, Latvians, Lithuanians, and Estonians. Himmler attracted the non-Germanic volunteers by declaring a pan-European crusade to defend the traditional values of Old Europe from the "Godless Bolshevik Hordes".
In 1942, Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler´s right hand was killed in Prague after an attack by Czech assassins. Himmler immediately carried out reprisal killing all male population in the area.
In 1944, Himmler was granted still further power as the result of a bitter rivalry between the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) and the Abwehr, the intelligence arm of the Wehrmacht.
The involvement in the July 20, 1944, plot against Hitler of many of the Abwehr leaders, including its head, Admiral 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.
In late 1944, Himmler became commander of army group Upper Rhine, which was fighting the oncoming United States 7th Army and French 1st Army in the Alsace region on the west bank of the Rhine. Himmler held this post until early 1945 when he was switched to command army group Vistula facing the Red Army to the East. As Himmler had no practical military experience as a field commander, he was quickly relieved of his field commands and appointed Commander of the Home Army. At the same time, he was appointed as the German Interior Minister and 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.
Peace negotiations, capture, and death
In Winter 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. 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 in the West, in nearby Plön. Somehow, Hitler's orders concerning him never reached Dönitz. After Hitler's death, Himmler joined the short-lived Flensburg government headed by Dönitz but was dismissed on May 6, 1945 by its leader in a move he hoped would gain him favour with the Allies.
Himmler next turned to the Americans as a defector, contacting the headquarters of 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 General 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 and he was subsequently declared a major war criminal.
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, Himmler disguised himself as a sergeant-major of the Secret Military Police, using the name Heinrich Hitzinger, shaving his moustache and doning an eye patch over his left eye [http://www.thirdreich.net/Himmler_by_Fest.html Heinrich Himmler - Petty Bourgeois and Grand Inquisitor by Joachim C Fest, 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 and he was arrested on May 22. In captivity he 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. His last words were, "Ich bin Heinrich Himmler!" (English: "I am Heinrich Himmler!")
Conspiracy theories
There would be later claims that the man who committed suicide in Bremen was not Himmler but a double. Statements allegedly attributed to ODESSA were said to have asserted Himmler escaped to the tiny and rustic farming village of Strones in the Waldviertel, a hilly forested area in the northwest part of Lower Austria just north of Vienna, birthplace of Alois Hitler, where he was running a reborn SS in exile .A recently-published book by American author, Joseph Bellinger, Himmler's Death, offers another "conspiracy theory" alternative to Himmler's death, stating that Heinrich Himmler was assassinated by his British interrogators in May 1945 along with other high-ranking officers of the SS and Werewolf Resistance Organization. Bellinger's book was first published in Germany by Arndt Verlag, Kiel. A similar book, Himmler's Secret War, by Martin Allen makes similar claims: it is, however, based on forged documents smuggled into the (British) National Archives (link to news report). Since a group of people had to get together both to forge the documents and smuggle them into the proper section of the archives (a process that involves an investment of time, money, research and expertise), the assertion that there was a conspiracy to spread confusion about the circumstances surrounding Himmler's death is credible, and Allen's participation in the conspiracy, possibly as a means of discrediting and distracting from Bellinger's book before it was published, cannot be discounted. Obviously, somebody has a vested interest in making sure that the official story is not challenged.
David Irving also claimed Himmler was beaten and killed by the British interrogators. He also claimed his nose was broken by the beating.
Some historians discount these claims, but the business surrounding the Allen book, as well as the secretiveness of British Archives, which are not subject to an American style Freedom of Information Act, has led others to reevalute the official story.
Historical views
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, in some cases (such as in the views propounded by David Irving) possibly without Hitler's direct orders or agreement. 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. " 1
The famous wartime cartoonist Victor Weisz saw Himmler as a terrible octopus, wielding oppressed nations in each of his 8 arms. 2.
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." 3.
In an extract in the Norman Brook War Cabinet Diaries 4, Winston Churchill took a view towards Himmler widely shared during the war, advocating his murder. 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 won support from the Home Office. 'Quite entitled to do so,' the minutes record it (eg, Churchill) as commenting." 5
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 US 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 when treated as a prisoner.
Surviving family
He was survived by his wife Marga and natural daughter Gudrun (Burwitz) (b. 1929), who still resides in Germany and by his illegitimate son Helge (b.1942) and daughter Nanette Doreathea (b.1944) from a relationship with his personal assistant Hedwig Potthast. Catharine Himmler, a great-niece of Heinrich Himmler, is married to an Israeli, the son of Holocaust survivors who survived the Warsaw Ghetto *.
Quotes from Himmler
- "Ultimately, our Nazis' greatest enemy is the Pope of Rome"
- "The best political weapon is the weapon of terror. Cruelty commands respect. Men may hate us. But, we don't ask for their love; only for their fear."
- "My Honour is Loyalty!" (in German: "Meine Ehre heißt Treue!", the motto of the SS.)
- "I am Heinrich Himmler!"(Himmler's last words before he died)
In Fiction
- In Douglas Niles's and Michael Dobson's alternative history novel Fox on the Rhine (ISBN 0812574664), in which Hitler was killed in the actual attempted Bomb Plot of 20 June, 1944, Himmler assumes command of the Third Reich by a series of assassinations of the conspirators planning to form a new government and, most prominently, of Hermann Göring, who was appointed the offical new Führer. Thus, Himmler, as the highest-ranking official remaining, takes up the position as leader of Nazi Germany, which enables him to execute Operation Carousel--a new offensive against the Allies. Himmler also features in Fox At The Front (ISBN 0641676964), the sequel to Fox On The Rhine.
- Himmler is played by Donald Pleasance in the movie The Eagle Has Landed, which is based off of the novel by Jack Higgins. (ISBN 0425177181) He is also featured in several other Jack Higgins novels, including the sequel to The Eagle Has Landed, The Eagle Has Flown.
References
- Heinz Höhne, The Order of the Death's Head: The Story of Hitler's SS, London: Pan Books Ltd. 1972 (ISBN 0330029630)
- Crocker, Harry, "Triumph: A 2,000 Year History of the Catholic Church"
- ibid.
- ibid.
- Peter Padfield: Himmler. Reichsführer-SS. Cassel & Co, London 2001, ISBN 0304358398.
- Katrin Himmler: Die Brüder Himmler. Eine deutsche Familiengeschichte. S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt a. M. 2005, ISBN 3-100-33629-1. (in german — Heinrich Himmler was a grand-uncle of the author)
External links
References
SS generals | Nazi leaders | War criminals | Neo-Pagans | Nazis who committed suicide | Military people who committed suicide | Natives of Bavaria | 1900 births | 1945 deaths
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"Heinrich Himmler"