Heinrich Himmler was Reichsfuhrer-SS,
head of the Gestapo and
the Waffen-SS, Nazi Minister of the Interior from 1943 to 1945 and organizer
of the mass murder of Jews in the Third Reich.
Himmler (born October 7, 1900; died May 23, 1945) was born
in Munich, Germany. The son of a pious, authoritarian Roman Catholic
schoolmaster who had once been tutor to the Bavarian Crown Prince, Himmler
was educated at a secondary school in Landshut. He served as an officer
cadet in the Eleventh Bavarian Regiment at the end of World War I, later
obtaining a diploma in agriculture from Munich Technical High School where
he studied from 1918 to 1922.
After working briefly as a salesman for a firm of fertilizer
manufacturers, the young Himmler joined a para-military, nationalist organization
and participated in the Munich Beer-Hall
putsch of November 1923 as standard-bearer at the side of Ernst
Rohm, Secretary to Gregor Strasser and his deputy district leader
in Bavaria, Swabia and the Palatinate, he was also acting propaganda leader
of the NSDAP from 1925
to 1930.
After marrying in 1927, Himmler returned to poultry
farming for a time but was singularly unsuccessful in the business of
raising chickens. In January 1929, he was appointed head of Hitler's personal bodyguard, the black-shirted Schutzstaffel
(SS), at that time a small body of 200 men which was subsequently
to become under his leadership an all-embracing empire within the Nazi
State.
Elected in 1930 to the Reichstag as Nazi deputy for
Weser-Ems, Himmler concentrated on extending SS membership--which reached
52,000 by 1933--and securing its independence from control by Rohm's SA,
to which it was initially subordinated. He organized the Security
Service (SD) under Reinhard
Heydrich, originally an ideological intelligence service of the Party,
and together the two men ensured that the Nazis consolidated their power
over Bavaria in 1933.
In March 1933, Himmler was appointed Munich Police President
and shortly afterwards he became Commander of the political police throughout
Bavaria. In September 1933 he was made Commander of all political police
units outside Prussia and, though formally under Goering,
became head of the Prussian Police and Gestapo on 20 April 1934. The turning-point
in Himmler's career was his masterminding of the purge of 30 June 1934
which smashed the power of the SA and paved the way for the emergence
of the SS as an independent organization charged with "safeguarding
the . . . embodiment of the National Socialist idea" and translating
the racism of the regime into a dynamic principle of action.
By June 17, 1936, Himmler had successfully completed
his bid to win control of the political and criminal police throughout
the Third Reich, becoming head of the Gestapo in addition to his position
as Reichsfuhrer of the SS. A very able organizer and administrator, meticulous,
calculating and efficient, Himmler's astonishing capacity for work and
irrepressible power-lust showed itself in his accumulation of official
posts and his perfecting of the methods of organized State terrorism against
political and other opponents of the regime.
In 1933, he had set up the first concentration
camp in Dachau and
in the next few years, with Hitler's encouragement, greatly extended the range of persons who qualified for
internment in the camps. Himmler's philosophical mysticism, his cranky
obsessions with mesmerism, the occult, herbal remedies and homeopathy
went hand in hand with a narrow-minded fanatical racialism and commitment
to the Aryan' myth. In a speech in January 1937, Himmler declared that
"there is no more living proof of hereditary and racial laws than
in a concentration camp. You find there hydrocephalics, squinters, deformed
individuals, semi-Jews: a considerable number of inferior people."
The mission of the German people was "the struggle for the extermination
of any sub-humans, all over the world who are in league against Germany,
which is the nucleus of the Nordic race; against Germany, nucleus of the
German nation, against Germany the custodian of human culture: they mean
the existence or non-existence of the white man; and we guide his destiny."
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." Racism
was to be safeguarded by the reality of a race society, by the concentration
camps presided over by Himmler's Deaths Head Formations in Germany, just
as during World War II the theories of "Aryan" supremacy would
be established by the systematic extermination of Jews and Slavs in Poland
and Russia. Himmler's romantic dream of a race of blue-eyed, blond heroes
was to be achieved by cultivating an elite according to "laws of
selection" based on criteria of physiognomy, mental and physical
tests, character and spirit. His aristocratic concept of leadership aimed
at consciously breeding a racially organized order which would combine
charismatic authority with bureaucratic discipline. The SS man would represent
a new human type--warrior, administrator, "scholar" and leader,
all in one - whose messianic mission was to undertake a vast colonization
of the East. This synthetic aristocracy, trained in a semi-closed society
and superimposed on the Nazi system as a whole, would demonstrate the
value of its blood through "creative action" and achievement.
From the outset of his career as Reichsfuhrer of the SS, Himmler had introduced the principle
of racial selection and special marriage laws which would ensure the systematic coupling
of people of "high value." His promotion of illegitimacy by establishing the State-registered
human stud farm known as Lebensborn, where young girls selected for their perfect Nordic
traits could procreate with SS men and their offspring were better cared for than in
maternity homes for married mothers, reflected Himmler's obsession with creating a race
of "supermen" by means of breeding. Himmler's notorious procreation order of 28 October 1939
to the entire SS that "it will be the sublime task of German women and girls of good blood acting not frivolously but from a profound moral seriousness to become mothers to children of
soldiers setting off to battle" and his demand that war heroes should be allowed a second
marriage expressed the same preoccupation.
The small, diffident man who looked more like a humble bank clerk than Germany's police
dictator, whose pedantic demeanour and 'exquisite courtesy' fooled one English observer
into stating that 'nobody I met in Germany is more normal', was a curious mixture of
bizarre, romantic fantasy and cold, conscienceless efficiency. Described as "a man of quiet unemotional gestures, a man without nerves," he suffered from psycho-somatic illness, severe headaches and intestinal spasms and almost fainted at the sight of a hundred eastern Jews (including women) being executed for his benefit on the Russian front. Subsequent to
this experience, he ordered as a "more humane means" of execution the use of poison gas in
specially constructed chambers disguised as shower rooms.
The petty-bourgeois eccentric whose natural snobbery led him to welcome old aristocratic
blood into the SS, revived a web of obsolete religious and cosmological dogmas linking new
recruits to their distant Germanic ancestors. He cultivated the
"return to the soil" and the
dream of German peasant-soldier farms in the East while at the same time proving himself a
diabolically skilful organizer of rationalized modern extermination methods.
The supreme
technician of totalitarian police power who saw himself as a reincarnation of the pre-Christian Saxon, Henry the Fowler, advancing eastwards against the Slavs--he organized the thousandth anniversary of Henry's death in 1936--Himmler perfectly expressed in his own personality the contradictions of National Socialism. For him, the SS was at one and the same time the resurrection of the ancient Order of the Teutonic Knights with himself as grand master, the breeding of a new Herrenvolk aristocracy based on traditional values of honour, obedience, courage and loyalty, and the instrument of a vast experiment in modern racial engineering. Through this privileged caste which was to be the hard core of German imperial dominion in Europe, the nucleus of a new State apparatus would emerge with its tentacles impinging on all spheres of life in the expanded Third Reich. By recruiting "Aryans" of different nationalities into his Waffen-SS Himmler envisaged the creation of "a German Reich of the German Nation" based on the feudal allegiance of its communities to the lordship and protection of the Fuhrer,
embodying a Germany that would become the centre of a higher political entity.
By the end of the 1930s the possibility of forging this Greater Germanic Reich of the future
came closer to realization as Himmler reached the peak of his power. In October 1939 Hitler
appointed him Reichskommissar fur die Festigung des Deutschen Volkstums (Reich Commissar
for the Strengthening of Germandom) and he was given absolute control over the newly annexed
slice of Poland. Responsible for bringing people of German descent back from outside the
Reich into its borders, he set out to replace Poles and Jews by Volksdeutsche from the
Baltic lands and various outlying parts of Poland. Within a year over a million Poles and
300,000 Jews had been uprooted and driven eastwards. With the characteristic self-pitying
and ascetic ethos of self-abnegation that he inculcated into the SS, Himmler informed the
SS-Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler Regiment: "Gentlemen, it is much easier in many cases to go
into combat with a company than to suppress an obstructive population of low cultural level,
or to carry out executions or to haul away people or to evict crying and hysterical women."
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. Nowhere was this more apparent than in Himmler's
notorious speech on 4 October 1943 to the SS Group Leaders in Poznan:
One principle must be absolute for the SS man: we must be
honest, decent, loyal, and comradely to members of our own blood and
to no one else. What happens to the Russians, what happens to the Czechs,
is a matter of utter indifference to me. Such good blood of our own
kind as there may be among the nations we shall acquire for ourselves,
if necessary by taking away the children and bringing them up among
us. Whether the other peoples live in comfort or perish of hunger interests
me only in so far as we need them as slaves for our Kultur. 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. We shall never be rough or heartless where it is not necessary;
that is clear. We Germans, who are the only people in the world who
have a decent attitude to animals, will also adopt a decent attitude
to these human animals, but it is a crime against our own blood to worry
about them and to bring them ideals. I shall speak to you here with
all frankness of a very grave matter. Among ourselves it should be mentioned
quite frankly, and yet we will never speak of it publicly. I mean the
evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people.. . .
Most of you know what it means to see a hundred corpses lying together,
five hundred, or a thousand. To have stuck it out and at the same time--apart
from exceptions caused by human weakness--to have remained decent fellows,
that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history
which has never been written and shall never be written.
[Ed. Classified British intelligence documents released by
London indicated Himmler sought to win asylum for himself and 200 leading
Nazis in the final days of World War II by offering cash and the freedom of
3,500 Jews held in concentration camps. According to the documents, the
concentration camp inmates were to be sent to Switzerland in two trainloads
(JTA, 9/21/99).]
