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Heinrich Luitpold Himmler (7 October 1900 – 23 May 1945) was Reichsführer of the SS, a military commander, and a leading member of the Nazi Party. As Chief of the German Police and later the Minister of the Interior, Himmler oversaw all internal and external police and security forces, including the Gestapo. Serving as Reichsführer and later as Commander of the Replacement (Home) Army and General Plenipotentiary for the entire Reich's administration (Generalbevollmächtigter für die Verwaltung), Himmler rose to become the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany. As
overseer of the concentration
camps, extermination
camps, and Einsatzgruppen
(literally: task forces, often used as killing squads), Himmler
coordinated the killing of some six million Jews,
between 200,000 and 500,000 Roma, many prisoners of war,
and possibly another three to four million Poles, communists,
or other groups whom the Nazis deemed unworthy to live or simply "in the way",
including homosexuals,
people with physical and mental disabilities, Jehovah's
Witnesses and
members of the Confessing
Church. Shortly before the end of the war, he offered to
surrender both Germany and himself to the Western Allies if he were spared prosecution.
After being arrested by British forces, he committed suicide before he could be
questioned. Heinrich Himmler was born in Munich to a Roman Catholic Bavarian middle class family. His father was Joseph Gebhard Himmler, a secondary school teacher and principal of the prestigious Wittelsbacher Gymnasium. His mother was Anna Maria Himmler (maiden name Heyder), a devout Roman Catholic. He had an older brother, Gebhard Ludwig Himmler, who was born on 29 July 1898, and a younger brother, Ernst Hermann Himmler, born on 23 December 1905. Heinrich was named after his godfather, Prince Heinrich of Bavaria of the royal family of Bavaria, who was tutored by Gebhard Himmler. In 1910, Himmler attended Gymnasium in Landshut, where he studied classic literature. Himmler's father, the principal, sent him to spy on and punish other pupils. His father even called him a born criminal. While he struggled in athletics, he did well in his schoolwork. Also, at the behest of his father, Himmler kept a diary from age 10 until age 24. He enjoyed chess, harpsichord, stamp collecting, and gardening. Throughout Himmler's youth and into adulthood, he was never at ease in interactions with women. Himmler's diaries (1914 – 1918) show that he was extremely interested in war news. He implored his father to use his royal connections to obtain an officer candidate position for him. His parents eventually gave in, allowing him to train (upon graduation from secondary school in 1918) with the 11th Bavarian Regiment. Since he was not athletic, he struggled throughout his military training. In 1918 the war ended with Germany's defeat, thus ending Himmler's aspirations of becoming a professional army officer. From 1919 to 1922 Himmler studied agronomy at the Munich Technische Hochschule following a short lived apprenticeship on a farm and subsequent illness. In his diaries he claimed to be a devout Roman Catholic, and wrote that he would never turn away from the Roman Church. However, he was a member of a fraternity, and later the Thule Society, and felt both associations to be at odds with the tenets of the Church. Biographers have defined Himmler's theology as Ariosophy, his own religious dogma of racial superiority of the Aryan race and Germanic Meso-Paganism, developed partly from his interpretations of folklore and mythology of the ancient Teutonic tribes of Northern Europe. During this time he was again obsessed with the idea of becoming a soldier. He wrote that if Germany did not soon go to war, he would go to another country to seek battle. In 1923, Himmler took part in Adolf Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch, serving under Ernst Röhm. In 1926 he met his future wife in a hotel lobby while escaping a storm. Margarete Siegroth (née Boden) was seven years his senior, divorced, and Protestant. On 3 July 1928, the two were married. During this time Himmler worked unsuccessfully as a chicken farmer. They had their only child, Gudrun, on 8 August 1929. Himmler adored his daughter, and called her Püppi (English: "dolly"). Margarete later adopted a son, in whom Himmler showed no interest. Heinrich and Margarete Himmler separated in 1940 without seeking divorce. At that time Himmler became friendly with a secretary, Hedwig Potthast, who left her job in 1941 and became his mistress. He fathered two children with her — a son, Helge (born 1942), and a daughter, Nanette Dorothea (born 1944). Himmler
was also very interested in agriculture and the "back to the land"
movement. He and his wife had romantic ideals of making a farming life.
He joined the Artamanen society, a sort of
idealistic back-to-the-land youth group, but mixed with racist ideology. He became one of
the leaders of this movement. Through this movement he also apparently
met Rudolf Höss, who would later preside over Auschwitz,
and Richard Walther
Darré, who would later work in the RuSHA (race and resettlement
office) of the SS. Himmler joined the SS in 1925; his first position was that of SS-Gauführer (District Leader) in Bavaria. In 1927, he became Deputy Reichsführer SS, with the rank of SS-Oberführer, and upon the resignation of SS commander Erhard Heiden, in 1929, Himmler was appointed Reichsführer-SS. At that time, the SS then had 280 members and was merely an elite battalion of the much larger Sturmabteilung (SA). Over the next year, Himmler began a major expansion of the organization and, in 1930, he was promoted to the rank of SS-Gruppenführer (Reichsführer was, at that time, simply a title for the National Commander of the SS). By 1933, the SS numbered 52,000 members. The organization enforced strict membership requirements ensuring that all members were of Hitler's Aryan Herrenvolk ("Aryan master race"). Himmler and his deputy Reinhard Heydrich began an effort to separate the SS from SA control. Black SS uniforms replaced the SA brown shirts in July 1932 and by 1934 enough quantities were manufactured for general use by all. In 1933, Himmler was promoted to SS-Obergruppenführer. This made him an equal of the senior SA commanders, who by this time loathed the SS and envied its power. Himmler,
Hermann Göring, and General Werner von
Blomberg agreed
that the SA and its leader Ernst Röhm posed a threat to the
German Army and the Nazi leadership. Röhm had socialist and populist views, and believed that
the real revolution had
not yet begun. He felt that the SA should become the sole arms bearing
corps of the state. This left some Nazi, military and political leaders
believing Röhm was intent on using the SA to undertake a coup.
Persuaded by Himmler and Göring, Hitler agreed that Röhm had
to be eliminated. He delegated this task to Reinhard
Heydrich, Kurt Daluege,
and Werner Best,
who ordered Röhm's execution (carried out by Theodor Eicke)
and other senior SA officials, plus some of Hitler's personal enemies,
(like Gregor Strasser and Kurt von
Schleicher), on 30 June 1934, in what became known as the Night of the
Long Knives.
The next day, the SS became an independent organization responsible
only to Hitler, and Himmler's title of Reichsführer-SS became the
highest formal SS rank. On 20 April 1934, Göring formed a partnership with Himmler and Heydrich. Göring transferred authority over the Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei), the Prussian secret police, to Himmler, who was also named chief of all German police outside Prussia. On 22 April 1934, Himmler named Heydrich the head of the Gestapo. Heydrich continued as head of the SD, as well. On 17 June 1936, Himmler was named Chief of German Police after Hitler announced a decree that was to "unify the control of Police duties in the Reich". Traditionally, law enforcement in Germany had been a state and local matter. In this role, Himmler was nominally subordinate to Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick. However, the decree effectively merged the police with the SS, making it virtually independent of Frick's control. Himmler gained authority as all of Germany's uniformed law enforcement agencies were amalgamated into the new Ordnungspolizei (Orpo: "order police"), whose main office became a headquarters branch of the SS. Despite his title, Himmler gained only partial control of the uniformed police. The actual powers granted to him were some that were previously exercised by the ministry of the interior. It was only in 1943, when Himmler was appointed Minister of the Interior, that the transfer of ministerial power was complete. With the 1936 appointment, Himmler also gained ministerial authority over Germany's non-political detective forces, the Kriminalpolizei (Kripo: crime police), which he merged with the Gestapo into the Sicherheitspolizei (SiPo: security police) under Heydrich's command, and thus gain operational control over Germany's entire detective force. This merger was never complete within the Reich, with Kripo remaining mainly under the control of its own civilian administration and later the party apparatus (as the latter annexed the civilian administration). However, in occupied territories not incorporated into the Reich proper, SiPo consolidation within the SS line of command proved mostly effective. In September 1939, following the outbreak of World War II, Himmler formed the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA: Reich Main Security Office) wherein the SiPo (Gestapo and Kripo) along with the Sicherheitsdienst (SD: security service) became departments under Heydrich's command therein. Himmler oversaw the entire concentration camp system. Once World War II began, however, new internment camps, which were not formally classified as concentration camps, were established over which Himmler and the SS did not exercise control. In 1943, following the outbreak of popular word-of-mouth criticism of the regime as a result of the Stalingrad disaster, the party apparatus, professing disappointment with the Gestapo's performance in deterring such criticism, established the Politische Staffeln (political squads) as its own political policing organ, breaking the Gestapo's monopoly in this field. The SS
during these years developed its own military branch, the SS-Verfügungstruppe (SS-VT), which later
evolved into the Waffen-SS.
Even though nominally under the authority of Himmler, the Waffen-SS
developed a fully militarized structure of command and operationally
were incorporated in the war effort parallel to the Wehrmacht.
Many contemporary commentators refuse to recognize the Waffen SS as an
honorable military organisation. Its units were involved in notorious
incidents of murdering civilians and unarmed prisoners. This was one of
many reasons that the International
Military Tribunal declared
the SS to be a criminal organization. After the Night of the Long Knives, the SS-Totenkopfverbände organized and administered Germany's regime of concentration camps and, after 1941, extermination camps in occupied Poland as well. The SS, through its intelligence arm, the Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst, or SD), dealt with Jews, Gypsies, communists and those persons of any other cultural, racial, political or religious affiliation deemed by the Nazis to be either Untermensch (sub-human) or in opposition to the regime, and placed them in concentration camps. Himmler opened the first of these camps at Dachau on 22 March 1933. He was the main architect of the Holocaust, using elements of mysticism and a fanatical belief in the racist Nazi ideology to justify the murder of millions of victims. Himmler had similar plans for the Poles; intellectuals were to be killed, and he believed most other Poles were to be only literate enough to read traffic signs. On 18 December 1941, Himmler's appointment book shows he met with Hitler. The entry for that day poses the question "What to do with the Jews of Russia?", and then answers the question "als Partisanen auszurotten" (exterminate them as partisans"). In contrast to Hitler, Himmler inspected concentration camps. As a result of these inspections, the Nazis searched for a new and more expedient way to kill, which culminated in the use of the gas chambers. Himmler
wanted to breed a master race of Nordic Aryans in
Germany. His experience as a chicken farmer had taught him the
rudiments of animal breeding which he proposed to apply to humans. He
believed that he could engineer the German populace, through eugenic
selective breeding, to be entirely "Nordic" in appearance within
several decades of the end of the war. On
4 October 1943, Himmler referred explicitly to the extermination of the
Jewish people during a secret SS meeting in the city of Poznań (Posen).
The following is an excerpt from a transcription of an audio recording that exists of the speech: I
am now referring to the evacuation of the Jews, to the extermination of
the Jewish People. This is something that is easily said: 'The Jewish
People will be exterminated', says every Party member,
'this is very obvious, it is in our program — elimination of the
Jews, extermination, a small matter.' And then they turn up, the
upstanding 80 million Germans, and each one has his decent Jew. They
say the others are all swine, but this particular one is a splendid
Jew. But none has observed it, endured it. Most of you here know what
it means when 100 corpses lie next to each other, when there are 500 or
when there are 1,000. To have endured this and at the same time to have
remained a decent person — with exceptions due to human
weaknesses — has made us tough, and is a glorious chapter that has
not and will not be spoken of. Because we know how difficult it would
be for us if we still had Jews as secret saboteurs, agitators and
rabble rousers in every city, what with the bombings, with the burden
and with the hardships of the war. If the Jews were still part of the
German nation, we would most likely arrive now at the state we were at
in 1916 and '17 . . . . —Heinrich Himmler, 4 October 1943 In 1939
Himmler masterminded Operation
Himmler (also
known as Operation Konserve or Operation Canned Goods), arguably the
first operation of World War II in Europe. It was a false flag project
to create the appearance of Polish aggression against Germany, which
was subsequently used by Nazi propaganda to justify the invasion of
Poland. Before the invasion of the
Soviet Union in
1941 (Operation
Barbarossa), Himmler prepared 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.
He collected volunteers from all over Europe, especially those of
Nordic stock who were perceived to be racially closest to Germans,
like the Danes, Norwegians, Swedes and Dutch.
After the invasion, Ukrainians, Latvians, Lithuanians,
and Estonian volunteers
were also recruited, attracting the non-Germanic volunteers by
declaring a pan-European crusade to defend the traditional values of
old Europe from the "Godless Bolshevik hordes". Thousands
volunteered and many thousands more were conscripted.
In the Baltic states many natives were willing
to serve against the Red Army due to their loathing of their oppression
after the occupation by the Soviet Union. These
men were conscripted into the Waffen-SS.
Employed against Soviet troops, they performed acceptably. Waffen
SS recruitment in Western and Nordic Europe collected much less
manpower, though a number of Waffen-SS Legions were founded, such as the Wallonian contingent led by Léon
Degrelle, whom Himmler planned to appoint chancellor of a restored Burgundy within the Nazi orbit once
the war was over. In 1942, Reinhard
Heydrich, Himmler's right hand man, was assassinated near Prague after an attack by Czech special forces supplied by British
Intelligence and
the Czechoslovak rebellion.
Himmler immediately carried out reprisal, killing the entire
population, including women and children, of the village of Lidice. In
1943, Himmler was appointed Reich Interior Minister, replacing Frick,
with whom he had engaged in a turf war for over a decade. For instance,
Frick had tried to restrict the widespread use of "protective custody"
orders that were used to send people to concentration camps, only to be
begged off by Himmler. While Frick viewed the concentration camps as a
tool to punish dissenters, Himmler saw them as a way to terrorize the
people into accepting Nazi rule. Himmler's
appointment effectively merged the Interior Ministry with the SS.
Nonetheless, Himmler sought to use his new office to reverse the party
apparatus's annexation of the civil service and tried to challenge the
authority of the party gauleiters.
This aspiration was frustrated by Martin Bormann,
Hitler's private
secretary and
party chancellor. It also incurred some displeasure from Hitler
himself, whose long standing disdain for the traditional civil service
was one of the foundations of Nazi administrative thinking. Himmler
made things much worse still when following his appointment as head of
the Reserve Army (Ersatzheer) he tried to use his authority in
both military and police matters by transferring policemen to the
Waffen-SS. With
Himmler threatening his power base, Bormann could not give him the
opportunity fast enough, initially acquiescing in the policies, until
furious protests broke out. Then, Bormann came out against the scheme,
leaving Himmler discredited, especially with the party, whose
gauleiters now saw Bormann as their protector. It was determined that
leaders of German Military
Intelligence (the Abwehr),
including its head, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris,
were involved in the 20 July 1944
plot to
assassinate Hitler. This prompted Hitler to disband the Abwehr and make Himmler's Security
Service (Sicherheitsdienst,
or SD) the sole intelligence service of the Third Reich.
This increased Himmler's personal power. General Friedrich Fromm,
Commander-in-Chief of the Reserve (or Replacement) Army (Ersatzheer),
was implicated in the conspiracy. Fromm's removal, coupled with
Hitler's suspicion of the army, led the way to Himmler's appointment as
Fromm's successor, a position he abused to expand the Waffen SS even
further to the detriment of the rapidly deteriorating German armed
forces (Wehrmacht).
Unfortunately
for Himmler, the investigation soon revealed the involvement of many SS
officers in the conspiracy, including senior officers, which played
into the hands of Bormann's power struggle against the SS because very
few party cadre officers were implicated. Even more importantly, some
senior SS officers began to conspire against Himmler himself, as they
believed that he would be unable to achieve victory in the power
struggle against Bormann. Among these defectors were Ernst
Kaltenbrunner, Heydrich's successor as chief of the
Reichssicherheitshauptamt, and Gruppenführer Heinrich
Müller, the chief of the Gestapo.
In late
1944, Himmler became Commander-in-Chief of the newly formed Army Group
Upper Rhine (Heeresgruppe
Oberrhein). This army group was formed to fight the advancing U.S. 7th Army and French 1st Army in the Alsace region along the west bank
of the Rhine.
The U.S. 7th Army was under the command of General Alexander Patch and the French 1st Army was
under the command of General Jean de Lattre
de Tassigny. On 1 January 1945, Himmler's army group launched Operation North
Wind (Unternehmen
Nordwind) to push back the Americans and the French. In late
January, after some
limited initial success, Himmler was transferred east. By 24 January,
Army Group Upper Rhine was deactivated after going over to the
defensive. Operation North Wind officially ended on 25 January. Elsewhere
the German Army (Wehrmacht Heer)
had failed to halt the Red Army's Vistula-Oder
offensive, so Hitler gave Himmler command of yet another newly
formed army group, Army Group
Vistula (Heeresgruppe
Weichsel)
to stop the Soviet advance on Berlin. Hitler placed Himmler in command
of Army Group Vistula despite the failure of Army Group Upper Rhine and
despite Himmler's total lack of experience and ability to command
troops. This appointment may have been at the instigation of Martin Bormann,
anxious to discredit a rival, or through Hitler's continuing anger at
the "failures" of the general staff. As
Commander-in-Chief of Army Group Vistula, Himmler established his
command centre at Schneidemühl. He used his special train (sonderzug), Sonderzug Steiermark,
as his headquarters. Himmler did this despite the train having only one
telephone line and no signals detachment. Eager to show his
determination, Himmler acquiesced in a quick counter attack urged by
the general staff. The operation quickly bogged down and Himmler
dismissed a regular army corps commander and appointed Nazi Heinz Lammerding.
His headquarters was also forced to retreat to Falkenburg.
On 30 January, Himmler issued draconian orders: Tod und Strafe für
Pflichtvergessenheit — "death
and punishment for those who forget their obligations", to encourage
his troops. The worsening situation left Himmler under increasing
pressure from Hitler; he was unassertive and nervous in conferences. In
mid February the Pomeranian offensive by his forces was
directed by General Walther Wenck,
after intense pressure from General Heinz Guderian on Hitler. By early March,
Himmler's headquarters had moved west of the Oder River,
although his army group was still named after the Vistula.
At conferences with Hitler, Himmler echoed Hitler's line of increased
severity towards those who retreated. On 13 March, Himmler abandoned
his command and, claiming illness, retired to a sanatorium at
Hohenlychen. Guderian visited him there and carried his resignation as
Commander-in-Chief of Army Group Vistula to Hitler that night. On 20
March, Himmler was replaced by General Gotthard
Heinrici. In the
winter of 1944 – 45, Himmler's Waffen-SS numbered 910,000 members, with
the Allgemeine-SS (at
least on paper) hosting a membership of nearly two million. However, by
early 1945 Himmler had lost faith in German victory, likely due in part
to his discussions with his masseur Felix Kersten and with Walter
Schellenberg. He
realized that if the Nazi regime were to survive, it needed to seek
peace with Britain and the United States. He also believed that Hitler
had effectively incapacitated himself from governing by remaining in
Berlin to personally lead the defence of the capital against the
Soviets. To this end, he contacted Count Folke Bernadotte of Sweden at Lübeck,
near the Danish border. He represented himself as the provisional
leader of Germany, telling Bernadotte that Hitler would almost
certainly be dead within two days. He asked Bernadotte to tell General Dwight
Eisenhower that
Germany wished to surrender to the West. Himmler hoped the British and
Americans would fight the Soviets alongside the remains of the
Wehrmacht. At Bernadotte's request, Himmler put his offer in writing. On the
evening of 28 April, the BBC broadcast a Reuters news
report about Himmler's attempted negotiations with the Western Allies.
When Hitler was informed of the news, he flew into a rage. A few days
earlier, Hermann
Göring had
asked Hitler for permission to take over the leadership of the
Reich — an act that Hitler, under the prodding of Bormann,
interpreted as a demand to step down or face a coup. However, Himmler
hadn't even bothered to request permission. The news also hit Hitler
hard because he had long believed that Himmler was second only to Joseph Goebbels in
loyalty; in fact, Hitler often called Himmler "der treue Heinrich" (the
loyal Heinrich). After Hitler calmed down, he told those who were still
with him in his bunker that Himmler's act was the worst act of
treachery he'd ever known. Himmler's
treachery, combined with reports the Soviets were only 300 meters
(about a block) from the Chancellery, prompted Hitler to write his last will and
testament. In the Testament, completed the day before he committed
suicide, he declared Himmler and Göring to be traitors.
He also stripped Himmler of all of his party and state offices:
Reichsführer-SS, Chief of the German Police, Commissioner of
German Nationhood, Reich Minister of the Interior, Supreme Commander of
the Volkssturm,
and Supreme Commander of the Home Army. Finally, he expelled Himmler
from the Nazi Party and ordered his arrest. Himmler's
negotiations with Count Bernadotte failed. He joined Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz,
who by then was commanding all German forces within the northern part
of the western front, in nearby Plön.
Dönitz sent Himmler away, explaining that there was no place for
him in the new German
government.
However, the negotiations helped secure the release of some 15,000
Scandinavian prisoners from the remaining concentration camps. Himmler
next turned to the Americans as a defector,
contacting Eisenhower's headquarters and proclaiming he would surrender
all of Germany to the Allies if he were spared from prosecution.
He asked Eisenhower to appoint him "minister of police" in Germany's
post war government. He reportedly mused on how to handle his first
meeting with the Supreme
Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) commander and
whether to give the Nazi salute or shake hands with him.
Eisenhower refused to have anything to do with Himmler, who was
subsequently declared a major war criminal. Unwanted
by his former colleagues and hunted by the Allies, Himmler wandered for
several days around Flensburg near the Danish border.
Attempting to evade arrest,
he disguised himself as a sergeant major of the Secret Military Police,
using the name Heinrich Hitzinger, shaving his moustache and donning an
eye patch over his left eye, in
the hope that he could return to Bavaria. He had equipped himself with
a 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.
Himmler was arrested on 22 May by Major Sidney Excell and, in captivity, was soon
recognized. Himmler was scheduled to stand trial with other German
leaders as a war criminal at Nuremberg,
but on 23 May committed suicide in Lüneburg by means of a potassium
cyanide capsule
before interrogation could begin. His last words
were Ich bin
Heinrich Himmler! ("I
am Heinrich Himmler!"). Another version has Himmler biting into a
hidden cyanide pill embedded in one of his teeth, when searched by a
British doctor, who then yelled, "He has done it!" Several attempts to
revive Himmler were unsuccessful. Shortly afterwards, Himmler's
body was buried in an unmarked grave on the Lüneburg
Heath. The precise location of Himmler's grave remains unknown. In May
2008, a British police investigation "identified 29 forgeries that had been slipped into
12 files after 2000" which had been used to support
recent Himmler conspiracies and speculations. The Financial Times further reported that "the
forgeries were cited as sources by a historian who had written three
books about World War II."
Author Martin Allen was
widely reported to have a history of making sensationalistic
accusations and reliance on fabricated materials when writing about
other notable Nazis. "When challenged about a supposed letter from the Duke of Windsor to Hitler, Allen responded
that it had been given to his late father by Albert Speer,
later being found in the author's attic." Historians
are divided on the psychology, motives, and influences that drove
Himmler. Some see him as dominated by Hitler, fully under his influence
and essentially a tool carrying Hitler's views to their logical
conclusion. Others see Himmler as extremely anti-Semitic in his own right, and even more
eager than his boss to commit genocide.
Still others see Himmler as power-mad, devoted to the accumulation of
power and influence. According
to Robert S. Wistrich, 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 ...
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."
The wartime cartoonist Victor Weisz depicted Himmler as a giant octopus,
wielding oppressed nations in each of his eight arms.
Wolfgang Sauer, historian at University of
California, Berkeley,
felt that "although he was pedantic, dogmatic, and dull, Himmler
emerged under Hitler as second in actual power. His strength lay in a
combination of unusual shrewdness, burning ambition, and servile
loyalty to Hitler." Himmler
told his personal masseur Felix Kersten that he always carried with
him a copy of the Bhagavad Gita,
because it relieved him of guilt about implementing the Final Solution;
he felt that, like the warrior Arjuna,
he was simply doing his duty without attachment to his actions. Himmler's ideas were probably
influenced by Jakob Wilhelm
Hauer's concepts of duty derived from his interpretation of the
Gita. In an
extract of Norman Brook's War Cabinet Diaries, Winston
Churchill took
a view towards Himmler widely shared during the war, advocating his
assassination. According to Brook, responding to a suggestion that Nazi
leaders be executed, "this prompted Churchill to ask if they should
negotiate with Himmler ‘and bump him off later’, once peace terms had
been agreed. The suggestion to cut a deal for a German surrender with
Himmler and then assassinate him met with support from the Home Office.
‘Quite entitled to do so’, the minutes record [... Churchill] as
commenting." A
main focus of recent work on Himmler has been the extent to which he
competed for and craved Hitler's attention and respect. The events of
the last days of the war, when he abandoned Hitler and began separate
negotiations with the Allies, are obviously significant in this
respect. Himmler
appears to have had a distorted view of how he was perceived by the
Allies; he intended to meet with US and British leaders and have
discussions "as gentlemen". He tried to buy off their vengeance by
last-minute reprieves for Jews and important prisoners. According to
British soldiers who arrested him, Himmler was genuinely shocked to be
treated as a prisoner. In 2008,
Himmler was named "the greatest mass murderer of all time" by German
news magazine Der Spiegel,
reflecting his role as architect of the Holocaust. While reflecting his continued
public perception in modern Germany, statistical research on democide shows
this claim to be a severe overestimate, even when his personal
responsibility is considered collectively with Hitler and his other
lieutenants. |