Heinrich Himmler
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| Heinrich Himmler | |
| Image:HLHimmler.jpg | |
| Birth | October 7 1900 3:30 PM (Munich, Germany) |
| Death | May 23 1945 11:14 PM (31a Ülzenerstraße Lüneburg, Germany) |
| Party | National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) |
| Political positions |
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Template:Audio (October 7, 1900 – May 23, 1945) was the commander of the German Schutzstaffel (SS) and one of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany. As Reichsführer-SS, he controlled the SS and the Gestapo. He also became a leading organizer of the Holocaust. As founder and officer-in-charge of the Nazi concentration camps and the Einsatzgruppen death squads, Himmler was responsible for implementing the industrial scale extermination of between six and 12 million people. Among the victims were Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, homosexuals, Communists, Liberals, Freemasons, Jehovah's witnesses and Blacks.
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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 right-wing, 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.
Early Nazi Party activity
Image:Freikorpshimmler.jpg In 1923 Himmler was a Feldwebel (Sergeant) in the Reichkriegsflagge, carrying the Imperial German Battle Ensign in the so-called Beer Hall Putsch, the Nazi Party's failed attempt at a revolution in overthrowing the government of Bavaria.
Between 1923 and 1925, with the Nazi party seemingly a failed cause, Himmler devoted himself to other interests, putting his agricultural diploma to work by becoming a poultry farmer. His time as a chicken farmer was unsuccessful, however, and he returned to the Nazi Party in late 1926. In 1927 he married Margaret Boden.
The Nazi Party quickly put Himmler to work as the Vice District Leader and Deputy Gauleiter of Upper-Bavaria and also as secretary to Oberste SA-Führer Franz Pfeffer von Salomon. Himmler was subsequently commissioned as an SA-Sturmführer in 1926, and later that year he was appointed an Oberführer, becoming SS-Gauführer (District Leader) in a small SA sub-unit known as the Schutzstaffel or SS. In 1927, Himmler became the vice commander of the SS when he accepted the assignment as Deputy Reichsführer-SS.
Rise in the SS
Image:HimmlerOberfhr.jpg Between 1927 and 1929, Himmler devoted himself increasingly to his duties as Deputy Reichsführer-SS. 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 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.
Abortion and Homosexuals
In 1936 Himmler, now Chief of the SS, created the "Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion." [1]
Himmler and the Holocaust
Image:Himmler visits Dachau 1936.jpg 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 22nd, 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 (named Posen by the Germans). 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
Image:Hans Frank.jpg 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 and probably the only Nazi of whom Himmler was both jealous and afraid, died in Prague after an attack of Czech assassins. It is disputed, if Himmler wasn´t involved in Heydrich´s death.
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
Image:Himmler45.jpg By 1945, Himmler's Waffen-SS numbered 800,000 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 SchellenbergTemplate:Fn. 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.
Image:Himmler Dead.jpg 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 member of the Gendarmerie 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 22nd. 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 Himmerl!" (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).
David Irving also claimed Himmler was beaten and killed by the British interrogators. He also claimed his nose was broken by the beating.
Most historians discount these claims.
Historical view
Feared by many, but respected by some of his colleaguesTemplate:Fn, several historians have argued Himmler was made more by those who worked under him (especially Heydrich) than by his own designs, although others note how he visited the concentration camps much more frequently than his job would have required, urging the SS men to increase atrocities and personally witnessing many mass shootings unlike Hitler, who is not known to have ever visited one of the camps.
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 second niece of Heinrich Himmler, is married to an Israeli, the son of Holocaust survivors who survived the Warsaw Ghetto [2].
Quotes from Himmler
"Ultimately, our (the 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 my loyalty"
References
- Template:Fnb 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"
- Template:Fnb ibid.
- Template:Fnb ibid.
External Links
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