Heinrich Himmler

Text Reference, World History, The Human Odyssey.

Born in 1900, Heinrich Himmler was the son of a middle-class schoolteacher. While a student in agriculture at a technical institute in Munich, he joined the Nazi Party. For a while, he worked as a fertilizer salesperson. He then tried, unsuccessfully, to make a living raising chickens. All the while, he remained in the Nazi Party. In 1929, Adolf Hitler made him leader of the SS.

The SS had been formed in 1925 as Hitler's bodyguard. To Hitler, Himmler was an ideal leader, because he was totally obedient to the Fuehrer. Like Hitler, Himmler believed that the racial struggle between Aryans and Jews was the key to world history. To Himmler, the SS should become the elite group of Nazism that would fulfill the dream of Aryan supremacy.

Himmler was a cold, calculating, efficient bureaucrat whose ruthlessness made him an ideal head of the SS. Beginning in 1929, Himmler began to recruit new members for the SS on the basis of his ideas of racial purity. Recruits were pure German types with blond hair, blue eyes, and good physiques. To maintain his racial elite, Himmler insisted that SS men marry only racially pure Aryan women.

As the SS continued to grow, Himmler sought new sources of power through his control of the police. By 1936, he had become chief of the regular police. He then set up new divisions in the SS. The Gestapo was a secret police force that rounded up the regime's enemies. The Security Service was a network of spies. The Death's Head Formations were responsible for running the concentration camps. The Waffen-SS was a group of combat soldiers--the SS's own army. The Einsatzgruppen were responsible in conquered countries for rounding up and shooting Jews and other "racial undesirables." Himmler had become leader of a total system of terror. During the war, Hitler made Himmler overseer of Nazi plans for reorganizing Europe along racial lines. Himmler acted ruthlessly. He said: "What happens to the Russians, what happens to the Czechs, is a matter of utter indifference to me....Whether or not 10,000 Russian women collapse from exhaustion while digging a tank ditch interests me only in so far as the tank ditch is completed for Germany."

At the end of the war, with the Nazi Empire in collapse, Himmler sought escape by taking on a false identity. He was captured by the British and ended his life by swallowing a poison vile he had hidden in his mouth.