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 the Minister of the Interior from 1943, Himmler oversaw all internal and external police and security forces, including the Gestapo (Secret State Police). 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 was one of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany and one of the persons most directly responsible for the Holocaust.

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, 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 on 22 May 1945, he committed suicide the following day before he could be questioned.

Heinrich Himmler was born in Munich to a conservative, 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 (née Heyder), a devout Roman Catholic. He had an older brother, Gebhard Ludwig Himmler, who was born in July 1898, and a younger brother, Ernst Hermann Himmler, born in 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 other pupils. His father even called him "a born criminal". It was at Landshut that the young Himmler made friends with Karl Gebhardt, a friendship that would last to the end of World War II. While he struggled in athletics, he did well in his schoolwork. Initially at the behest of his father, Himmler kept a diary from age 10 and continued to do so even after his father stopped checking it. He enjoyed chess, harpsichord, stamp collecting, and gardening.

Himmler was a teenager at the outbreak of World War I, and his diaries from the war years show that he took a keen interest in it. From Easter 1915 onwards, Heinrich trained with the Cadet Corps, and later implored his father to use his royal connections to obtain an officer candidate position for him. This his father did, though initially without success, and Heinrich began training with the reserve battalion of the 11th Bavarian Regiment in January 1918. Since he was not athletic, Himmler struggled throughout his military training. During this time frame, his older brother Gebhard served on the western front and saw combat where he received the Iron Cross. In November 1918, the war ended with Germany's defeat, finishing any real chance for Himmler to continue a military career. On 18 December, he was discharged and returned to Landshut.

After the war, Himmler completed his grammar school education, and assisted the Freikorps in their crushing of the Bavarian Soviet Republic. However, again he missed out on a military career when the Freikorps were incorporated into the Reichswehr. From 1919 – 1922, Himmler studied agronomy at the Munich Technische Hochschule (now Technical University Munich) following a short lived apprenticeship on a farm and a subsequent illness. Still not having given up his desire to have a military career, his field of study enabled Himmler to maintain contacts with former army officers there to prepare for civilian employment.

Himmler was antisemitic by the time he went to university, though not yet radically so. He remained a devoted Catholic while a student, but enjoyed drinking with members of his fraternity, the "League of Apollo" and joined a Reichswehr reserve unit. In 1920 when Count Arco was sentenced to death, Himmler was immediately ready to work with right wing elements to enact a rescue operation, and was disappointed that no violence took place once the death sentence was commuted to imprisonment. In 1920 after the Reichswehr reserves were disbanded, he joined the Einwohnerwehr and a rifle club. His second year at university saw Himmler redouble his efforts at embarking upon a military career. Although Himmler was not successful, he was able to extend his involvement with the paramilitary scene in Munich. It was at this time, via his rifle club, that he first met Ernst Röhm.

Despite an active social life, Himmler struggled to gain the acceptance he craved, and he was unable to fully connect with people. While he was able to form good friendships with women, he had little success in terms of relationships and — partly in self - defense — clung to antediluvian, prudish views regarding men, women, sex and marriage. He was critical of himself and his perceived social inadequacies and made great efforts to compensate for them, in part by learning to control his emotions with his innate strength of will. Nevertheless, these interpersonal problems, and his attempts to counterbalance them, would plague Himmler his whole life, and were the key reasons for his enthusiasm as to the military and paramilitary.

His membership of a fraternity, and later the Thule Society, left Himmler feeling 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. Himmler 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. On 8 August 1929, the couple had their only child, Gudrun. 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. Darre's views on restoring racial purity to Germany, by breeding programs, were a deep influence on Himmler's view of the SS as a core of breeding men.

For the most part, Himmler abstained from drinking alcohol and smoking. He frequently had stomach pains which started in 1917, for which he received massage therapy from his personal masseur Felix Kersten starting in 1939.

Himmler joined the SS in 1925 as an SS - Führer (SS - Leader). His NSDAP number was 14,303 and his SS number was 168. Himmler's first leadership 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 (Reichsführer was, at that time, simply a title for the National Commander of the SS). The SS only 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.

By 1933, the SS numbered 52,000 members. The organization at that time enforced strict membership requirements ensuring that all members were of Hitler's Aryan Herrenvolk ("Aryan master race"). Applications had been scrutinized for Nordic qualities, in Himmler's words, "like a nursery gardener trying to reproduce a good old strain which has been adulterated and debased; we started from the principles of plant selection and then proceeded quite unashamedly to weed out the men whom we did not think we could use for the build up of the SS." (Few dared mention that by his own standards, Himmler did not qualify as an ideal Nordic.)

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 (Wehrmacht Heer) 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), along with the purge of the entire SA leadership and other political adversaries (including, Gregor Strasser and Kurt von Schleicher). These actions took place from 30 June to 2 July 1934, in what became known as the Night of the Long Knives. The great beneficiaries of the action were the SS and the German Army. They both celebrated the demise of their mutual rival, Röhm's SA. Officially, from 20 July 1934 forward, 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 Sicherheitsdienst (SD: security service), 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, thus gaining 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 SD 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 organization. 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 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 a translation of an excerpt from a transcription of an audio recording that exists of the speech:

I also want to refer here very frankly to a very difficult matter. We can now very openly talk about this among ourselves, and yet we will never discuss this publicly. Just as we did not hesitate on 30 June 1934, to perform our duty as ordered and put comrades who had failed up against the wall and execute them, we also never spoke about it, nor will we ever speak about it. Let us thank God that we had within us enough self - evident fortitude never to discuss it among us, and we never talked about it. Every one of us was horrified, and yet every one clearly understood that we would do it next time, when the order is given and when it becomes necessary. 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

As Reich Commissioner for the Consolidation of German Nationhood, Himmler was deeply involved in the Germanization program for the East, particularly Poland. Its purpose was to remove all non - Germanic peoples from German Lebensraum and to reclaim any Volkdeutsche (ethnic Germans) living there for Germany, as laid out in the Generalplan Ost. He declared that no drop of German blood would be lost or left behind for an alien race. Himmler continued his plans to colonize the east despite evidence that Germans did not want to relocate there, and that the activities hindered the war effort; several high ranking Nazi officials found the latter point obvious.

The plans began with the Volksliste, the classification of people deemed of German blood into those Germans who had collaborated before the war; those still regarding themselves as German, but who had been neutral; partially Polonized but Germanizable; and those Germans who had been absorbed into Polish nationality. Any person classified as German who resisted was to be deported to a concentration camp. Himmler oversaw cases of obstinate Germans, and gave orders for concentration camps, or separation of families, or forced labor, in efforts to break down resistance.

His declaration that "it is in the nature of German blood to resist" led to the paradoxical conclusion that Balts or Poles who resisted Germanization measures were regarded as more suitable material than more compliant ones.

This included the kidnapping of Eastern European children by Nazi Germany. Himmler urged:

"Obviously in such a mixture of peoples, there will always be some racially good types, Therefore, I think that it is our duty to take their children with us, to remove them from their environment, if necessary by robbing, or stealing them. Either we win over any good blood that we can use for ourselves and give it a place in our people, or we destroy that blood."

The "racially valuable" children were to be culled, removed from all contact with Poles, and raised as Germans, with German names. Himmler declared, "We have faith above all in this our own blood, which has flowed into a foreign nationality through the vicissitudes of German history. We are convinced that our own philosophy and ideals will reverberate in the spirit of these children who racially belong to us." Acceptable children were to be adopted by German families. Children who passed muster at first but were later rejected were used as slave labor or killed. Himmler ordered that parents who were registered on the Volksliste should lose their children if the parent impeded their Germanization.

The colony of Hegewald was set up in the Reichskommisariat Ukraine at his command. His original plans to recruit settlers from Scandinavia and the Netherlands were unsuccessful, and so it was settled with such ethnic Germans as had not been deported by the Soviet Union.

For the Nazi leaders, the land which would provide sufficient Lebensraum for Germany was the Soviet Union. At the Nuremberg trial, SS - Obergruppenfuhrer Erich von dem Bach testified that at a conference in Wewelsburg in 1941 Himmler told SS leaders that to make room for the Germans, Germany would have to exterminate 30 million Slavs in the Soviet Union.

On July 13, 1941, three weeks after the invasion of the Soviet Union, Himmler told the group of Waffen SS men:

This is an ideological battle and a struggle of races. Here in this struggle stands National Socialism: an ideology based on the value of our Germanic, Nordic blood. ... On the other side stands a population of 180 million, a mixture of races, whose very names are unpronounceable, and whose physique is such that one can shoot them down without pity and compassion. These animals, that torture and ill treat every prisoner from our side, every wounded man that they come across and do not treat them the way decent soldiers would, you will see for yourself. These people have been welded by the Jews into one religion, one ideology, that is called Bolshevism... When you, my men, fight over there in the East, you are carrying on the same struggle, against the same subhumanity, the same inferior races, that at one time appeared under the name of Huns, another time — 1000 years ago at the time of King Henry and Otto I— under the name of Magyars, another time under the name of Tartars, and still another time under the name of Genghis Khan and the Mongols. Today they appear as Russians under the political banner of Bolshevism.