SS
Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler was head of the entire
Nazi police force including SD and the Gestapo, he was
Minister of the Interior and commander of the Waffen SS
and the Home Army. One of Hitler's most sinister henchmen,
he was also in charge of the death camps in the East. The
account of Himmler's life and his impact on the rise and
fall of the Nazi state make a gripping and horrifying
story.
Although held the ultimate responsibility for what
became the Holocaust, it was Heinrich Himmler who
essentially laid the plans and devised the schemes that
led to the killings of six million Jews.
Heinrich Himmler was born October 7, 1900, as the son of a
secondary school instructor and strict Roman Catholic. By
the end of World War I, Himmler had completed secondary
school instruction and went on to receive a diploma in
agriculture from the Munich Technical High School in 1922.
Himmler worked as a salesman for a firm of fertilizer
manufacturers before joining a paramilitary organization
in 1923. In 1925 he joined the Nazi party, 1927 he worked
as a Poultry farmer but his future would be imbued
following his appointment in January 1929 as leader of the
SS, an elite guard of Hitler.
Himmler quickly moved up the ranks, and once Hitler became
Chancellor in 1933 Himmler became the head of the Munich
police. From this position he organized the first
concentration camp at Dachau and began to organize the
Nazi political police throughout Germany.
In April of 1934 he was named assistant chief of the
Prussian Gestapo, the secret police, and in June of 1934,
Himmler successfully crushed the paramilitary SA, headed
by Ernst Röhm, making the SS the dominant organization in
Germany.
Two years later, a power-thirsting Himmler got full
control of the SS, and became SS Reichsführer.
From a number of letters and speeches of Himmler it
becomes clear, that he referred to the annihilation of the
Jews in Europe - the Holocaust - as a task which he had to
carry out on the behalf of the highest authority in the
Third Reich - Adolf Hitler.
In 1941, Himmler summoned Rudolf Hoess, SS Commandant of
the largest killing center ever created, the death camp
Auschwitz. He told him that "the Führer had given
the order for a Final Solution of the Jewish
Question" and that "we, the SS, must carry out
that order".
In 1943, Himmler became Interior Minister, and in July of
1944, he attained the rank of chief of the army's home
organization - now second only to Adolf Hitler.
But Himmler's empire was already crumbling from within and
under attack from without. Weakened on all fronts, he was
attacked after 1944 by Martin Bormann, who tried to
revitalize the party organization as a rival of the SS.
Bormann emerged victorious in April 1945, when Hitler
ordered Himmler's arrest because he had tried to propose
peace to the Allies.
The chief of the SS sought to win asylum for himself and
200 leading Nazis in the final days of World War II by
offering cash and the freedom of 3,500 Jews, according to
British intelligence documents released last year.
According to the documents, details of which have been
held in the secret files of Britain's MI5 intelligence
agency, the concentration camp inmates were to be sent to
Switzerland in two trainloads. The offer was made by
Himmler and orchestrated by his intelligence chief, Walter
Schellenberg.
But the arrangement was aborted after the first trainload
of 1,700 left Germany - Hitler ordered the plan halted
immediately.
Heinrich Himmler fled Berlin after the German surrender in
the disguise of a discharged Gestapo agent with moustache
shaved and wearing an eye patch.
After being captured by the Allies, Himmler committed
suicide by biting a vial of cyanide that he had hidden in
his mouth. The doctors attempted to remove the poison from
his stomach by causing him to vomit, but with no success.
After a 12-minute long death throws, he died.
Three
days later, the British buried anonymously his remains
somewhere in a forest near Lüneburg ..
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