Historical Figure
Heinrich Himmler
1900–1945
German Nazi leader of the SS (1900–1945)
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Biography
Heinrich Luitpold Himmler was a German Nazi politician and military leader. He was the 4th Reichsführer of the Schutzstaffel from 1929 to 1945. He was a leading member of the Nazi Party, and one of the most powerful figures in Nazi Germany. He was also one of the main architects of the Holocaust, the genocide of the Jewish population of Europe.
In Their Own Words (5)
[T]he curse of the great to have to walk over corpses.
As cited in Joachim Fest The Face Of The Third Reich (1999), Part 2 , 1999
I don't want to hear anymore of your difficulties. For an SS officer there are no difficulties; his duty is always to remove difficulties himself as soon as they arise. How you do it is for you to figure out, not me.
Addressing Rudolf Höss (possibly in July 1942) during a visit to Birkenau prisoner-of-war camp (Kriegsgefangenenlager), where the inmates' and guards' deficient living conditions were pointed out, from Höss's autobiography written in a Polish prison, Death Dealer: The Memoirs of the SS Kommandant at Auschwitz (1996), pp. 286ff. , 1996
Anti-Semitism is exactly the same as delousing. Getting rid of lice is not a question of ideology, it is a matter of cleanliness. In just this same way anti-Semitism for us has not been a question of ideology but a matter of cleanliness.
Quoted in Harold Kaplan Conscience and Memory: Meditations in a Museum of the Holocaust (1994), p. 29 , 1994
It is a war of ideologies and a struggle of races. On one side stands National Socialism: ideology, founded on the values of our Germanic, Nordic blood. It is worth the world as we want to see: beautiful, orderly, fair, socially, a world that may be, still suffers some flaws, but overall a happy, beautiful world filled with culture, which is precisely Germany. On the other side stands the 180 million people, a mixture of races and peoples, whose names are unpronounceable, and whose physical nature is such that the only thing that they can do - is to shoot without pity or mercy. These animals, which are subjected to torture and ill-treatment of each prisoner from our side, which do not have medical care they captured our wounded, as do the decent men, you will see them for yourself. These people have joined a Jewish religion, one ideology, called Bolshevism, with the task of having now Russian, half [located] in Asia, parts of Europe, crush Germany and the world. When you, my friends, are fighting in the East, you keep that same fight against the same subhumans, against the same inferior races that once appeared under the name of Huns, and later - 1,000 years ago during the time of King Henry and Otto I, - the name of the Hungarians, and later under the name of Tatars, and then they came again under the name of Genghis Khan and the Mongols. Today they are called Russian under the political banner of Bolshevism.
Heinrich Himmler speaking in Stettin to soldiers of the SS (13 July 1941) , 1941
My honor is my loyalty.
Himmler formulated this as the watchword of the Schultzstaffel (SS), an organization that eventually became a vast organization ranging from the staff of the concentration camps to the Gestapo and SD, to the Waffen-SS, Hitler's personal soldiers. Above all else, Himmler and the rest of the Nazi leadership stressed the importance of loyalty to the Reich and the Fuehrer. As translated in Hannah Arendt The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Ch. 10 , 1951
Timeline
The story of Heinrich Himmler, told in moments.
Appointed Reichsfuhrer-SS. The SS is 290 men, a bodyguard unit for Hitler. Himmler turns it into one of the most powerful institutions in Nazi Germany. He selects highly competent subordinates. Reinhard Heydrich becomes his chief enforcer. By the late 1930s the SS controls the Gestapo, the concentration camps, and the intelligence services.
Commissions the drafting of Generalplan Ost, a day before the invasion of the Soviet Union. The plan calls for the removal, enslavement, or murder of tens of millions of people in Eastern Europe to make room for German settlers. An estimated 14 million people die in its implementation. He personally visits Auschwitz and Sobibor to observe operations.
The Wannsee Conference formalizes the Final Solution. Himmler's SS operates the extermination camps. He is directly responsible for the genocide of approximately 5.5 to 6 million Jews and millions of other victims. He keeps meticulous records. He gives a speech at Posen in 1943 praising the SS for carrying out mass murder with "decency."
Hitler learns Himmler has been secretly trying to negotiate surrender with the Western Allies since March. Hitler expels him from the party and orders his arrest. Himmler shaves his mustache, puts on an army private's uniform, and goes into hiding with a false identity card.
Captured by British forces at a checkpoint near Hamburg. During a medical examination, he bites down on a cyanide capsule hidden in a cavity in his teeth. Dead in 12 minutes. He is 44. His body is buried in an unmarked grave on Luneburg Heath.
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