Heinrich Himmler
Heinrich Himmler ran the SS for sixteen years and organised the machinery of the Holocaust. Born in Munich in 1900 to a Catholic schoolmaster who had tutored a Bavarian prince, he trained as an agronomist, kept chickens commercially, and was a fastidious, unimpressive man whose diaries are full of anxieties about his own health. He joined the Nazi party in 1923, took over the SS in 1929 when it numbered a few hundred as Hitler's bodyguard, and built it into a state within the state — a million men, its own intelligence service, its own military divisions, its own economic enterprises and its own concentration camp system. He acquired the political police of every German state and merged them with the SS in 1934, which put the Gestapo under his control, and organised the murders of the Night of the Long Knives that removed the SA leadership. He was a believer in a way that others in the leadership were not — in Germanic racial mysticism, in a headquarters castle at Wewelsburg, in expeditions to Tibet, in herbal medicine and in the reincarnation of Henry the Fowler. The extermination programme was administered by his organisation from 1941, and his speech to SS officers at Posen in October 1943, which was recorded, is the clearest surviving statement of what the leadership knew and what it told itself. He tried to negotiate with the Allies in April 1945 and was expelled by Hitler. He was captured in disguise and bit a cyanide capsule. His organisation had grown from a bodyguard of two hundred men into the instrument of a continental extermination, which is the whole of what he built. His remains were buried in an unmarked grave whose location was never recorded.
- Lived: 1900 CE – 1945 CE
- Nationality: German
- Roles: ss_commander, police_chief, mass_murderer
