Born October 7, 1900 in Munich, Heinrich Himmler was the son of a Catholic schoolmaster and held strong Catholic and rightwing views. He finished initial schooling in 1917. After brief training as a naval cadet he trained as an officer in the Bavarian Army, but the war ended as he reached the front. He participated in the counterrevolution of Kurt Eisner in Munich as part of Freikorps Lauterbach. During 1919-22 he obtained a degree in agriculture and continued his work with rightwing organizations. Following fellow student Ernst Röhm into the Nazi Party, he took part in the Hitler Putsch, evaded any arrest, and began to rise in the reconstituted Nazi Party after 1925. In 1929 he was named Reichsführer-SS, in charge of the 280-man military guard under the SA of Röhm. His ambitious expansion of the SS was further rewarded when he successively became head of all police outside of Prussia and later the secret police [Gestapo] in Prussia. In 1936 he took control of all police in Germany, having already founded Dachau Concentration Camp. His key role in the 1934 purge of Röhm and the SA made him one of the most powerful men in the III Reich. By the end of the war, he was second only to Hitler in the Nazi hierarchy and commanded an Army Group [Vistula], the Replacement Army and was Interior Minister. He carried out the unending war against Jews and other racial enemies of the Nazi regime with appalling results. The activities of death units on the Eastern front, the transportation and killing of large numbers of innocent victims in killing fields and concentration camps all came primarily at his initiative. During the war, his SS organization began to evolve into a shadow government and society, calculated to replace the civilian economy and government as well as the armed forces with the SS Order. At war's end, Himmler fled ignominiously with false papers and a common soldier's uniform, was caught by British troops and committed suicide at Lüneberg, May 23, 1945.
|