HEINRICH HIMMLER HIS LIFE AND CRIMES

BY

ANGELA O CONNOR

RIVERSDALE COMMUNITY COLLEGE

4L

Heinrich Himmler was born in Munich on 7 October 1900. His father was a pious, authoritarial Roman Catholic schoolmaster who had once been a teacher 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 1. He later obtaining a diploma in agricultural studies from Munich Technical High school where he studied from 1918 to 1922.

After working briefly as a salesman for a firm of Fertilizer manufacturs , the young Himmler joined a para-military, nationalist organization and he participated in the Munich Beer hall putscsch of November 1923 as standard-bearer at the side of Ernst Rohm, Secretary to Gregor Strasses 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 tino 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 Nazi 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 thought 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 oranization charged with 'safeguarding the…. embodiment of the National Socialist idea'l and translation the racism of the regime into a\dynamic principle of action.

By 17 June 1936 Himmler had successfully completed his bid to win control of the political and criminal police throughtout 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 perfectioning of the methods of organized State terrrrorism 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 person who qualified for internment in the camps . Himmmler'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 with a narrow-minded fanatical racialism and commitment to the 'Aryan' myth. In a speech in Janaury 1937 Himmler declared that 'there is no more living proof of hereditary and roacial laws than in a concentration. You find the hyrocephalics, squinters, deformed indivduals, semi-jew: a considerable number of inferior people.' The mission of the German people was 'the struggle for the extermination of any-humans, all over the world who are in league against Germany.

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 the race society ,by the concentration camp presided over by Himmler's Deaths Head Formations in Germany, just as during World War One he theories of 'Aryan' supremacy would be established by the systematic of Jews and slavs in Poland and Russia . Himmler's romantic dream of a race of blue-eyed, blonde 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 the undertaker a vast colonization of the East . This synthetic aristocracy, trained in a semi-close 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 study farm known as lebensborn , where young girls selected for their perfect Nordic traits could procreate with SS men and their off spring 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 ' would be the subline task of German women and girls of good blood acting not frivolously but from profound moral seriousness to become mothers to children of soldiers setting off to battle' and his demands that war heroes should be allowed a second marriage expressed the same preoccupation.

The small, diffident man who looked more like a humble bank clek than Germany's police dictaor, whose pedantic demeanour and 'exquisite courtesy fooled one English observer into starting that 'nobody I met in Germany is more normal, was a curious mixture of bizarrer gestures, man without nerves; he suffered from psyco-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 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 of rationalized modern extermination methods. The supreme techician of totalitarian police power who saw himself as a reincarnation of the pre-Christian Saxon, Henry the Fowler advancing eastwards against the Slavs – he organised 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 end and the same time the resurrection of the ancient band of warriors.

Order of the Teutonic Knights with himself as grand master, the breeding of a new Herrenvol aristocracy based on traditional values of honour, obedience, courage , and loyalty, and the instrument of vast experiment in modern racial engineering. Though this perivileged cast 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 the 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 German that would become the centre of a higher political entity.

By the end of the 1930's the possibility of forging this Greater Germanic Reich of the furture came closer to realization as Himmlerr reached the peak of his power. In October 1939 Hitler appointed him Reichskommissar fur die festigung des Deutschen Volkstums (Reich Commissa for the strenghthening of germandom) and he was given absolute control over the newly annexe 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 balticlands 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 characterisyic 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 the suppress an obstructive population of low cultural level, or to carry out executions or to evict crying and hysterical women.

It was Himmler's master stroke that he succeeded in the intoctrinating the SS with an apocalypting 'idealism' beyond

All guilt and resposibility, 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 comradel to members of our blood and and to no one eles. What happens to the russians, what happened 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 people 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 tank ditch interests me only it not necessary; that is clear. We Germans, who are the only people in the world who have decent attitudeto animals, will also adopt a decent attiude to those human animals, but it is crime against our own blood to worry about them and to bring them ideas. I shall speak to you here with all franknes 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 entermination of the jewish people … most of you know what it means to see a hundred corpses lying together, five hundred, or a thosand. 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 had made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and shall never be written

SHORT QUESTIONS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Q1, Gilbert, Martin. Second World War, Fontana/Collins, London,1990.

Q2, SKILLS

Studying for this topic, I was introduced to the skills of research.

1, I have learned to find my ways through the local libraries to find suitable books on the topic

Using internet search engines to find more information for my essay 3, I have learnt new skills on microsoft word . 4, I have also learnt to read and compare many different sources for my essay.