He reported back to Berlin that he had about 3, members of the KPD under his control. On hearing the news, Heinrich Himmler returned home and joined the Freikorps Landshut and became aide to the commanding officer. However, before he could see action, Friedrich Ebert , the president of Germany , arranged for 30, Freikorps, under the command of General Burghard von Oven , to take Munich.
On 1st May, , the Freikorps entered the city and over the next two days Oven's troops easily defeated the Red Guards. Once again Himmler was denied the active service he craved. In he began studying agriculture at Munich Technical College. The following year he spent time working on a farm at Fridolfing.
During this time he took a vow of chastity. In a diary entry he contrasted two types of people, "the melancholic, stern, among which I include myself", and the easy-going, hot-blooded sort who followed their desires without too much thought or sense of responsibility. Himmler did find himself attracted to one woman, named Inge Barco. He was horrified when he discovered she was Jewish. Like many people in Germany at the time, he held strong anti-Semitic views: "She is a quiet girl, not vain or toffee-nosed, places some value on good manners.
No one would know she was a dancer. She is Viennese, but a Jewess, has however absolutely nothing of the Jew in her manner, at least so far as one can judge. At first I made several remarks about Jews, I ruled her out as one She is no longer innocent as she freely admits. But she has given her body only from love. With the other leaders in prison, Gregor Strasser became the most significant figure in the Nazi Party.
He joined forces with his brother, Otto Strasser , to establish the Berliner Arbeiter Zeitung , a left-wing newspaper, that advocated world revolution. It also supported Lenin and the Bolshevik government in the Soviet Union. Later that year, Strasser was elected to the Bavarian Legislature.
Louis L. Snyder , has argued: "In this capacity he proved to be an able organizer, an indefatigable if weak speaker, a shrewd politician, and a lover of action Using his parliamentary immunity to protect him from libel suits and holding a free railway pass, he turned his energy to seeking the highest post in the National Socialist Party. He would push Hitler aside and replace him. Strasser regarded himself as a proud intellectual who had far more to offer the party than the emotional and unstable Hitler.
In July, , Himmler became Strasser's secretary. Himmler not only shared his own passionate convictions, enjoying immersing himself in paperwork and bringing order to files, as he had at the student organisation, but he had learned to type after a fashion on a machine the family used at home, and he had his motorbike which enabled him to visit the remoter branches of the district. Otto Strasser later described his first impressions of Himmler: "A remarkable fellow.
Comes from a strong Catholic family, but does not want to know anything from the Church. Looks like a half-starved shrew. But keen I tell you, incredibly keen. He has a motorbike. He is under way the whole day - from one farm to another - from one village to the next. Since I've had him our weapons have really been put into shape. I tell you, he's a perfect arms-NCO. He visits all the secret depots. Himmler served as secretary to Gregor Strasser and was a member of the socialist wing of the party.
During this period he met Ernst Hanfstaengel who later wrote about him in his book, Hitler: The Missing Years : "He had a pale, round, expressionless face, almost Mongolian, and a completely inoffensive air.
Nor in his early years did I ever hear him advocate the race theories of what he was to become the most notorious executive. He studied to become a veterinary surgeon, although I doubt if he had ever become fully qualified. It was probably only part of the course he had taken as an agricultural administrator, but, for all I know, treating defenceless animals may have tended to develop that indifference to suffering which was to become his most frightening characteristic.
He also served as propaganda leader of the Nazi Party. He immediately saw her as his ideal woman. His brother, Gebhard Himmler, claimed he was particularly attracted to her blonde hair and her blue eyes.
If you are enjoying this article, please feel free to share. It has been claimed by Hugh Thomas that Himmler had great difficulty in finding girlfriends: "The simple truth was that despite the moral bluster of the diaries, he lacked confidence. His timidity was probably largely based on his awareness of his looks. However, any potential sense of inadequacy was translated into contempt for those who did not share his limitations Rather than consider his want of sexual success as undermining his masculinity, he grandly assumed the role of heroic defender of both men's and women's purity.
The girls are so far gone they no longer know what they are doing. It is the hot unconscious longing for the whole individual, for the satisfaction of a really powerful natural urge. For this reason it is also dangerous for the man, and involves so much responsibility. Depraved as they are of their will power, one could do anything with these girls and, at the same time one has to struggle with oneself.
Otto Strasser claims that Marga, aged thirty-four, and therefore eight years older than Himmler, seduced him. Himmler told Strasser that she was the first woman with whom he had sexual relations.
They married in July Margarete sold her share of the clinic and used the proceeds to buy a plot of land in Waldtrudering , near Munich , where they put up a prefabricated house. Peter Padfield has pointed out: "Margarete ran a clinic she had opened with her father's money in Berlin. Apparently she distrusted conventional medicine; she was more interested in homeopathy, hypnosis, the old herbal remedies of the country.
Despite having set herself up in Berlin, a sink of decadence according to his ideas, she apparently shared all his views of the good life of the land, so much so that she was prepared to sell her clinic and buy a smallholding to work with him. She was named after a character in a novel written by Himmler's favourite writer, Werner Jansen. Heinrich Himmler was a devout follower of Adolf Hitler and believed that he was the Messiah that was destined to lead Germany to greatness.
Hitler, who was always vulnerable to flattery, decided in January, , that Himmler should become the new leader of his personal bodyguard, the Schutzstaffel SS. At that time it consisted of men. Himmler personally vetted all applicants to make sure that all were good "Aryan" types. Himmler later remembered that: "In those days we assembled the most magnificent Aryan manhood in the SS-Verfugungstruppe.
We even turned down a man if he had one tooth filled. I was considerably taller than him and had already been awarded the Iron Cross first and second class, and I had been an officer in one of the best and oldest regiments of the German Army - the Hessian Lifeguard Infantry Regiment in Darmstadt.
On the other hand Himmler had no war decorations and had nothing in common with the front soldier; his whole bearing was rather sly and unmilitary, but he was very well read and tried to engage our interest with his acquired knowledge, and to enthuse us with the tasks of the SS. It has been claimed that the reason for this was that Himmler wanted to please senior officers in the German Army.
Others have suggested that it was his links with bankers and industrialists that was important. Walter Dornberger also met him during this period. Under a brow of average height, two grey-blue eyes looked at me, behind glittering pince-nez, with an air of peaceful interrogation. The trimmed moustache below the straight, well-shaped nose traced a dark line on his unhealthy, pale features. The lips were colourless and very thin.
Only the conspicuous receding chin surprised me. The skin of his neck was flaccid and wrinkled. With a broadening of his constant set smile, faintly mocking and sometimes contemptuous about the corners of the mouth, two rows of excellent white teeth appeared between the thin lips. His slender, pale, almost girlishly soft hands, covered with veins, lay motionless on the table throughout our conversation Himmler possessed the rare gift of attentive listening.
Sitting back with legs crossed, he wore throughout the same amiable expression. His questions showed that he unerringly grasped what the technicians told him out of the wealth of their knowledge.
The talk turned to war and the important questions in all our minds. He answered calmly and candidly. It was only at rare moments that, sitting with his elbows resting on the arms of the chair, he emphasised his words by tapping the tips of his fingers together.
He was a man of quiet unemotional gestures. A man without words. Hugh Thomas has argued: "The pattern of a lifetime was established. He was a man of no outstanding intellectual gifts other than his memory, and no physical attraction, who set out to dominate the lives and minds of others.
He was goaded by an unpleasant combination of ambition and officiousness that he disguised as high moral purpose. That he succeeded so well, then in a modest way, but later on a scale which brought disaster to mankind, must be attributed partly to hereditary make-up, and partly to the indoctrination of his father, which left him with exaggerated ideas of his own importance.
It has been claimed that he was impressed by Heydrich's "Nordic" appearance. The Nazi Party decided to have its own intelligence and security body and so Himmler was asked to create the SD Sicherheitsdienst. On 1st August, , Heydrich became the head of the organization and it was kept distinct from the uniformed SS Schutzstaffel. It has been claimed that Heydrich got the job because of his experience in Naval intelligence.
However, Mark M. Boatner III has argued that Himmler had made his decision "not realizing he had been in signals, not naval intelligence. Himmler established the Security Service to investigate the claims. At first Heydrich had few resources to carry out his work. According to Andrew Mollo , the author of To The Death's Head: The Story of the SS : "On a kitchen table, with a borrowed typewriter, a pot of glue, scissors and some files, Heydrich, now leader of the Security Service Leiter des Sicherheitsdienstes , aided by his landlady and some out-of-work SS men, began to gather information on what the Nazis referred to as the 'radical opposition'.
Top of the list were the political churches, Freemasons, Jews and Marxists. A titillating side-line was homosexuality and 'mattress affairs' both inside and out of the Nazi Party. Heydrich then toured the SS regional commands throughout Germany, and on his return began to recruit men of his own age and background into the SD. In contrast to the typical Nazi 'Lumpenpack' Heydrich sought bright young university graduates whose career prospects had been dimmed by depression.
It was these young intellectuals from good families who were to give the SD its peculiar character. Several writers have tried to explain the relationship between Heydrich and Himmler.
Both men were too complicated to conform to such simple analysis. Both were driven characters with deep-seated childhood complexes of inadequacy and they operated within a shifting minefield of power rivalries; neither was what he seemed Himmler and Heydrich were a partnership and after more than a decade of success that virtually moulded the Nazi revolution they knew each other's strengths and weaknesses and each his position vis-a-vis the other as intimately as the partners in a marriage; as in a marriage no doubt the relationship changed and shifted subtly from time to time.
Michael Burleigh , the author of The Third Reich: A New History claimed that the SS was "Himmler's mind projected on an institutional canvas, while the operational style largely derived from Heydrich Himmler's more outre obsessions should not distract from his manifestly astute grasp of how this highly chaotic and protean political system worked.
Routinely out-manoeuvring his foes, his empire spread between the interstices of state, Party and army, throughout Germany, and then across the whole of occupied Europe. His manner may have been distracted and unassuming, but the coldness, moralising, prying and suspicion kept him in absolute control of subordinates, whose own utter ruthlessness was accompanied by human frailties which Himmler lacked.
Richard Evans argues that Heydrich "became perhaps more universally and cordially feared and disliked than any other leading figure in the Nazi regime" and had the qualities that Himmler needed: "Unsentimental, cold, efficient, power-hungry and utterly convinced that the end justified the means, he soon won Himmler over to his ambitious vision of the SS and its Security Service as the core of a comprehensive new system of policing and control They went on to take over the political police service in one federated state after another, with the backing of the centralizing Reich Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick.
Walter Schellenberg who was able to observe both men at work has pointed out that Heydrich was the "hidden pivot around which the Nazi regime revolved He was far superior to all his political colleagues and controlled them as he controlled the vast intelligence machine of the SD. Even with me he expressed no kind word, no word of tenderness".
Himmler was subordinate to the Sturm Abteilung SA. This brought him into conflict with the Ernst Roehm. Himmler continued to build up his power base by establishing his own secret civilian security organization, the Sicherheitsdienst SD and placed Reinhard Heydrich at its head. In Himmler sold the house and poultry farm in Waldtrudering and moved into a flat close to Hitler's apartment.
He also purchased a large villa at Gmund on the Tegernsee , a lake south-east of Munich enclosed by mountains. Marga Himmler established herself there with Gudrun, whom they called "Puppi". The following year they adopted a boy named Gerhard von Ahe. On 27th February, , someone set fire to the Reichstag.
Several people were arrested including a leading, Georgi Dimitrov , general secretary of the Comintern , the international communist organization. Dimitrov was eventually acquitted but a young man from the Netherlands, Marianus van der Lubbe , was eventually executed for the crime. As a teenager Lubbe had been a communist and Hermann Goering used this information to claim that the Reichstag Fire was part of a KPD plot to overthrow the government.
Adolf Hitler gave orders that all leaders of the German Communist Party should "be hanged that very night. KPD candidates in the election were arrested and Goering announced that the Nazi Party planned "to exterminate" German communists.
Himmler was placed in charge of the operation, whereas Theodor Eicke became commandant of the first camp and eventually took overall control of the system. He appointed Rudolf Diels as his deputy. The Gestapo The purge was complete, not only in the police but also in the magistrature and among the State officials. A law was passed that The organization was gradually enlarged and reorganzed so that it could "deal with political police tasks in parallel with or instead of normal police authorities".
Now the whole police apparatus was firmly in SS hands. In May , Himmler met Oswald Pohl and told him he was looking for an officer to take over the administrative and financial side of the SS. At first Pohl rejected the offer as he was happy in the navy and headed a staff of over hundred men at Kiel. Pohl later wrote: "Himmler became very insistent and wrote me one letter after another urging that I take over the administrative organisation of the SS.
In December and January , he invited me to Berlin and Munich, and showed me the whole SS administrative set-up and the many complex problems that were involved. It was only in February , after I saw what a big job was in store for me, that I finally accepted. Pohl joined Himmler's personal staff as chief of the administrative section. I started by installing administrative commands in various key cities, and I selected personnel who would be fit for their jobs.
I inaugurated schools that taught these administrative officials for a few weeks before they were dispatched to take over my branch offices all over Germany. I achieved a sound administration in the SS, with orderly bookkeeping and financial sections. Adrian Weale , the author of The SS: A New History : "Before January , much of the SS's funding had come from membership dues, with occasional subsidies from party headquarters for special projects, but as it began to take over state functions, it increasingly became eligible for state funding.
It was in this area that Pohl really made his mark. Despite the supposedly revolutionary nature of the National Socialist government, expenditure still had to be justified, budgets formulated and fiscal probity maintained to the satisfaction of both the civil service and the party. Pohl, drawing on his long experience in naval administration, succeeded in achieving all of this. In addition, he established relationships between his office and the various departments and ministries on whom the SS depended for its budget: the party treasury, the Finance Ministry, the Ministry of the Interior; the Army Ministry and so forth.
By Adolf Hitler appeared to have complete control over Germany, but like most dictators, he constantly feared that he might be ousted by others who wanted his power. Albert Speer pointed out in his book, Inside the Third Reich : "After there quickly formed various rival factions that held divergent views, spied on each other, and held each other in contempt.
A mixture of scorn and dislike became the prevailing mood within the party. Each new dignitary rapidly gathered a circle of intimates around him. Thus Himmler associated almost exclusively with his SS following, from whom he could count on unqualified respect As an intellectual Goebbels looked down on the crude philistines of the leading group in Munich, who for their part made fun of the conceited academic's literary ambitions.
Goering considered neither the Munich philistines nor Goebbels sufficiently aristocratic for him and therefore avoided all social relations with them; whereas Himmler, filled with the elitist missionary zeal of the SS felt far superior to all the others. One of the consequences of this policy was that these men developed a dislike for each other.
Roehm was particularly hated because as leader of the Sturm Abteilung SA he had tremendous power and had the potential to remove any one of his competitors. Himmler asked Reinhard Heydrich to assemble a dossier on Roehm.
Industrialists such as Albert Voegler , Gustav Krupp , Alfried Krupp , Fritz Thyssen and Emile Kirdorf , who had provided the funds for the Nazi victory, were unhappy with Roehm's socialistic views on the economy and his claims that the real revolution had still to take place.
Adolf Hitler was also aware that Roehm and the SA had the power to remove him. Hermann Goering and Heinrich Himmler played on this fear by constantly feeding him with new information on Roehm's proposed coup.
Their masterstroke was to claim that Gregor Strasser , whom Hitler hated, was part of the planned conspiracy against him. Himmler along with his loyal assistants, Reinhard Heydrich , Kurt Daluege and Walter Schellenberg , drew up a list of people outside the SA that they wanted killed.
Snyder argues: "Hitler later alleged that his trusted friend Roehm had entered a conspiracy to take over political power.
On June, Hitler came to his final decision to eliminate the socialist element in the party. A list of hundreds of victims was prepared. On 29th June, During the next 24 hours other senior SA officers were arrested on the way to the meeting. Behind him were two detectives with pistols at the ready. I hear Lutze putting in a good word for him with Hitler. Then Hitler walks up to him, greets him, shakes hand with his wife and asks them to leave the hotel, it isn't a pleasant place for them to stay in, that day.
Now the bus arrives. He walks past Hitler with his head bowed, completely apathetic. Himmler ordered Theodor Eicke to carry out the task. According to Paul R. Maracin , The author of The Night of the Long Knives: Forty-Eight Hours that Changed the History of the World : "Ten minutes later, SS officers Michael Lippert and Theodor Eicke appeared, and as the embittered, scar-faced veteran of verdun defiantly stood in the middle of the cell stripped to the waist, the two SS officers riddled his body with revolver bullets.
According to Louis L. He described Hitler's sense of shock at the moral degeneracy of his oldest comrades. As a result of this purge the SS was now the principal instrument of internal rule in Germany.
Now that Himmler was leader of his own independent SS, he could expand the organization. By the end of it had , members. Eventually, Himmler came to the conclusion that the mass recruitment which had taken place was very damaging to the elite status of the SS and so in over , SS men were discharged on moral, racial and physical grounds. Himmler now introduced a complex five year enrolment procedure. Having been declared physically and racially suitable for SS membership, an eighteen-year-old youth became an applicant bewerber.
At the end of his probationary period he swore the oath of alliance to Adolf Hitler. At twenty-one he became liable for military service which lasted two years. It was only on his return to civilian life that he became a full SS man. The typical part-time member of the SS gave up one evening a week for ideological work and training. One afternoon, usually Wednesday or Saturday, was set aside for physical training and sport.
One weekend in each month an SS man had to spend Saturday afternoon and Sunday on military training, important elements of which were drill, crowd control and shooting.
This smart and disciplined para-military force enabled the Nazi Party to maintain a large auxiliary police force at nominal cost. The SS could be called out at short notice in case of a national emergency such as an anti-Nazi putsch, a demonstration or a trade union dispute. The SS were also used to help the police with crowd control and security arrangements for a visit by Hitler or any other prominent member of the Nazi Party.
SS headquarters in Berlin would summon SS men to duty with a printed postcard. An SS man's employee was forbidden by law to prevent or hinder his employee from responding to such a summons. On 17th June, , Hitler designated Himmler as head of the unified police system of the Third Reich.
He was also put in charge of the Gestapo. As Nazi power spread so did the fearsome reputation of the Gestapo. Backed by the system of concentration camps and by his right under the law to extract confessions by beating, the Gestapo man in the leather overcoat and dark, snap-brim hat became a figure of terror. The strict hierarchy was progressively modeled on that of the S.
The partitioning of powers was reinforced by the protection of secrecy. Discretion was one of the basic principles of S. It constituted one of the essential bases of the Gestapo which Himmler, as he had done with the S. Himmler was in overall control of the concentration camps in Germany. Himmler proved a master at organising such a force. In , Himmler was appointed commander of the unified police forces in Germany. This gave him all but unlimited power to know who was a threat to Hitler and the party.
To many he was untouchable. In , Himmler was put in charge of the Ministry of the Interior. His brilliance at organisation had terrible consequences for the Jews. Ironically, for a man associated with the spilling of so much blood, Himmler himself would nearly faint at the sight of blood.
The White Rose movement wanted peace to come and the war ended. Such declarations were punishable by death in war-torn Germany. The movement put up posters in Berlin stating what they believed in. Though the movement contained very few members — most of whom were related — the Gestapo found out who they were and arrested them. All were found guilty of treason and executed. Himmler and Heydrich. After the failure of the military putsch of July 20, , Hitler appointed Himmler Commander of the Replacement Army a position responsible for training and overseeing military personnel and gave him command of matters relating to prisoners of war.
In December , Himmler realized his old dream to have a command in the field, when Hitler appointed him commander-in-chief of Army Group Upper Rhine in southwestern Germany. Despite appearances to the outside, Himmler was not all-powerful in the Third Reich. His most significant and powerful rival during the last year of the war was Martin Bormann, Hitler's Secretary and chief of the Nazi Party Chancellery.
The Nazi Party apparatus, anchored in the political power of the Nazi Party District Leaders Gauleiter who also held positions in the State as Regional Defense Commissars, became more significant with the invasion of the Allied armies toward the end of the war. A skilled organizer and a capable manager who understood how to obtain and use power, Himmler was the ideological and organizational driving force behind the rise of the SS. Moreover, he understood his SS men and knew how to secure their loyalty to his own person and to the concept of the Nazi elite to which they belonged.
His ability to give his subordinates leeway to exercise initiative to implement Nazi policy was a significant factor in the murderous success of many SS operations. When he took over the SS, Himmler recognized the importance of internal security and determination of racial purity for the Nazi movement and successfully expanded the functions of the SS to meet these ideological and practical needs.
Himmler understood the importance of police power separated from legal constraint and state supervision; he persuaded Hitler—over the arguments of powerful rivals in the party and the state—that fusion of SS and police would forge the instrument for the Nazi regime to achieve its core, long-term ideological goals. It was Himmler whom Hitler entrusted with the planning and implementation of the "Final Solution.
I mean here…the annihilation of the Jewish people…. Most of you will know what it means when corpses lie side by side, or or 1,…. This page of glory in our history has never been written and will never be written….
We had the moral right, we were obligated to our people to kill this people which wanted to kill us. After the failure of the July 20, , attempt to assassinate Hitler, Himmler toyed with the idea of negotiating a separate peace with the western Allies while continuing to fight the Soviet Union.
During the winter of , he considered using concentration camp prisoners as a bargaining chip to initiate such negotiations. In part because the Allies would not negotiate with a man so implicated in Nazi crimes, and, in part because Himmler could not quite separate himself from Hitler or the belief that somehow the Germans would win the war, his half-hearted feelers came to nothing.
Eisenhower, the commander-in-chief of the Allied forces. News of the offer reached Hitler in encircled Berlin on the night of April , In one of his last official acts, Hitler stripped Himmler of all of his offices and ordered his arrest.
Despite having continuously assured his SS officers and men that he ultimately would take responsibility for all of their actions, the end of the war found Himmler dressed in Secret Field Police uniform with papers in the name of Heinrich Hitzinger. Captured by Russian soldiers on May 20, , he was turned over to the British, to whom he eventually confessed his identity.
While undergoing a body search on May 23, , Himmler killed himself by biting down on a cyanide capsule hidden in his mouth for that very purpose. We would like to thank Crown Family Philanthropies and the Abe and Ida Cooper Foundation for supporting the ongoing work to create content and resources for the Holocaust Encyclopedia. View the list of all donors.
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