Reich Leader (Reichsfuehrer) of the SS, head of the Gestapo and the Waffen-SS, minister of the interior from 1943 to 1945, and, next to Adolf Hitler, the most powerful man in Nazi Germany
Himmler was born in Munich into a middle-class Catholic family; his father was a schoolteacher with authoritarian views. Educated at a secondary school in Landshut, Himmler joined the army in 1917 as an officer cadet, but he never saw service at the front. Later he studied agriculture and economics at the Munich School of Technology. He worked briefly as a salesman and as a chicken farmer in the 1920s. During this period he developed a close contact with the embryonic Nazi party. Himmler took part in the Hitler Putsch of 1923 at the side of Ernst Roehm, joined Rohm's terrorist organisation, the Reichskriegsflagge (Reich War Flag), and held various positions in the Gau (region) of Bavaria. In 1926 Himmler became assistant propaganda leader of the Nazi party. He joined the SS in 1925 and in 1929 became its head. This personal bodyguard of Hitler, which at that time numbered some two hundred men, became under Himmler's leadership a key element in the power structure of the Nazi State. Himmler was elected a Nazi Reichstag deputy in 1930, and immediately after the Nazi seizure of power in January 1933 was appointed police president in Munich and head of the political police throughout Bavaria. This gave him the power base to extend SS membership, organise the SD (Sicherheitsdienst; Security Service) under Reinhard Heydrich, and secure their independence from Rohm's SA (Sturmabteilung; Storm Troopers). In September 1933 Himmler was appointed commander of all the political police units throughout the Reich (except Prussia). The following year, Hermann Goering appointed him deputy head of the Gestapo in Prussia. Himmler was instrumental in crushing the abortive SA putsch of June 1934, which eliminated Rohm and the SA as potential rivals for power and opened the way to the emergence of the SS as an independent force. The next stage in Himmler's ascendancy came in 1936, when he won control of the entire police force throughout the Third Reich, with the title of Reichsfuehrer-SS and Head of the German Police. He created a state within a state, using his power to terrorise all opponents of the regime as well as his personal enemies. Himmler established the first concentration camp at Dachau in 1933, and the further organisation and administration of the camps continued to be the work of the SS. The war gave Himmler the opportunity to implement the other side of his program, that is, the elimination of Jews and Slavs as "sub-humans." This made Himmler one of the greatest mass murderers in history. In October 1939 he was appointed Reichskommissar fur die Festigung des deutschen Volkstums (Reich Commissar for the Strengthening of German Nationhood) and was also given absolute authority in the newly annexed part of Poland. This entailed responsibility for the replacement of Poles and Jews by Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans) from the Baltic States. By the time of the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, Himmler controlled all the organs of police and intelligence power, and through the SS he dominated the concentration and extermination camps in Poland. His Waffen-SS with its thirty-five divisions almost constituted a rival army to the Wehrmacht. He also controlled the political administration in the occupied territories. When he was made minister of the interior in 1943, Himmler gained jurisdiction over the courts and the civil service as well. He used these powers to exploit Jews and Slavs as slave labourers, to gas millions of Jews, and to institute pseudo-medical experiments on "asocial individuals" (Jews, Gypsies, and criminals), to determine their resistance to extremes of cold and decompression. Toward the end of the war, aware of the inevitable German defeat, Himmler made a number of gestures, apparently hoping to ingratiate himself with the Allies. He sanctioned negotiations in Budapest that would have allowed the release of Hungarian Jews in return for trucks supplied by the Allies. In November 1944, he tried to conceal the evidence of mass murder in the extermination camps and permitted the transfer of several hundred camp prisoners to Sweden. He also tried to initiate peace negotiations with the Allies through Count Folke Bernadotte, head of the Swedish Red Cross. Himmler ordered a cessation of the mass murder of Jews at this time, and proposed surrendering to Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower in the west while continuing the struggle in the east. This proposal infuriated Hitler, who stripped Himmler of all his offices. Even Adm. Karl Donitz, who succeeded Hitler in the last days of the war as head of the German government, spurned Himmler's services. After the German surrender, Himmler assumed a false identity and tried to escape, but he was captured by British troops. He committed suicide on May 23, 1945, before he could be brought to trial as one of the major war criminals.
