Heinrich Himmler
Heinrich Himmler, a former chicken farmer with a degree in agronomy, became the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany as Reichsführer-SS, controlling the SS, the Gestapo, and all German police forces. He was the primary architect and executive of the Holocaust, overseeing the construction of the extermination camps, the Einsatzgruppen mass shootings, and the logistics of deporting eleven million people. A man of pedantic administrative efficiency combined with fanatical racial ideology, he ran the SS as a state within a state, controlling vast economic enterprises using concentration camp slave labour. In 1944 he briefly commanded Army Group Vistula on the Eastern Front, with predictably catastrophic results. He fled at war's end in disguise but was captured by British forces on 23 May 1945 and killed himself with cyanide before he could be tried at Nuremberg.
- Lived: 1900 CE – 1945 CE
- Nationality: German
- Roles: SS commander, police chief, mass murderer
