Heinrich Himmler

Heinrich Himmler (1900-1945), German Nazi leader, head of the black-shirted Schutzstaffel SS troops and of the dreaded Gestapo, or German secret police. He was the second most powerful Nazi and designed many of the National Socialist programs. His loyalty to Hitler (until near the end), combined with his organizational skills and ambition, and his sadistic nature, made him one of the most notorious war criminals of World War II. As chief of police for all of Germany, Himmler was responsible for establishing concentration camps and for devising methods for the Holocaust, the mass murder of 6 million Jews. During the War he built up the military strength of his SS, which became an army separate from the regular army.

Background

Himmler was born near Munich on Nov. 7, 1900. Retrospective psychoanalysis of his childhood and youth, using his diaries, shows him to have been systematic, rigid, controlled, and blocked of affect. His character structure was of the obsessive-compulsive schizoid type, meaning withdrawn emotionally from the external world and existing in a repressed internal psychic world. He used his diary to guard against feelings rather than to express them. The period 1919-22 was marked by acute identity diffusion. His sexual, social, vocational, and religious identities were in flux. The diary shows gender role confusion, a desire to emigrate from Germany, vacillation between animal husbandry and a bourgeois vocation, and strong conflict on the issue of dueling, which contravened his Roman Catholic faith. Himmler, as an adolescent, was a conventional rather than pathological anti-Semite. He acquired virulent anti-Semitism after 1919 because of his identification with Hitler as a leader and the new faith of National Socialism. He became a professional bureaucrat par excellence. As Reichsführer S.S. he carried out the most sadistic orders without any show of feeling. The psychic process of dehumanization and extermination may be conceptualized as regression to the analsadistic phase of psychic development on the part of both inmates and S.S. guards of the extermination camps. Thus the flat, cold, emotionally colorless, adolescent Himmler became a writing desk murderer as an adult - a characterological consistency that relates the child to the man.

He attended the Technical College in Munich and served during World War I as a clerk in the Eleventh Bavarian Infantry. He joined the Hitler ranks in 1919, and was one of the first members of the Nazi Party. In 1923, Himmler was appointed business manager in Bavaria, and in 1929 he became commander of the SS troops.

Third Reich: 1933-39

Gestapo chief

When Hitler came to power in January 1933, Himmler controlled the 50,000-man "Protection Squad" or "Schutzstaffel, called the SS. In March Himmler became the Polizeipräsident in Munich. In late 1933 the political police in Prussia were made the "Preussiche Geheime Staatspolizei" (the Gestapo), under control of the Ministry of Interior. In 1933-34 Himmler was appointed in all German States as the chief of political police. On 20 April 1934, he took over also the Gestapo. On 17 June 1936 he was appointed chief of German police in the Ministry of Interior; he appointed Reinhard Heydrich chief of the Gestapo and SD, the security police (Sicherheitspolizei) and opened 17 concentration camps for political prisoners (these were different from the death camps opened after 1941).

The downfall of the SA in 1934 was a result of a power struggle between the SA, which had a more radical vision than Hitler would tolerate, and a coalition of Himmler, Göring, the Army and big business. The Army army's feared the SA would become a people's army or militia and perhaps replace it. Himmler prepared the list of Ernst Röhm's associates who were executed or imprisoned in the "blood purge" of June 30, 1934, and as a reward was placed at the head of the Prussian police. .

SS industries

Himmler created a powerful "state within a state" as the the SS acquired more than forty businesses with some 150 plants and factories. They, paid for the Holocaust and financed the training and equipping of thirty-eight SS divisions.

At first he was underfunded because his enemies in the party controlled the money. As late as 1938, only 3,500 of 14,000 SS officers received monthly pay; the rest were volunteers. Himmler turned to the concentration camps--not yet killing camps--to raise money. Prisoners could be ransomed for a large sum; others had to pay for their keep. Factories were set up in the camps as the prisoners became slave laborers for commercial enterprises owned by the SS. For example the Gesellschaft fur Textil- und Lederverwertung GmbH (Society for Textile and Leather Work, Ltd.), in Ravensbruck, the women's concentration camp, produced uniforms. The possessions were salvaged and resold from the Jews who were killed in the gas chambers. SS officials took bribes from Jews and employers of Jews.

War Years

In 1943 Himmler was appointed minister of the interior and strengthened his grip on the civil service and the courts. The SS grew rapidly as Himmler sought a new human type, men keeping their various professional competences but each becoming a part of the intricate fabric of the SS. To its police activities the SS added protection of the German Volk in Poland and elsewhere, their "blood" and their unity, and also the protection of the Nazi leadership. For Himmler the paradoxical mystical motif of his understanding was the SS's great struggle against what Himmler called the two pillars of evil, the Jews and the Slavs.

Holocaust

On January 20th, 1942, Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler's second-in-command, chaired the Wannsee Conference to plan the systemnatic roundup and execution of all Jews the nazis could reach. The Conference ensured inter-agency co-operation and set strategy and financing. Among Heydrich's directives, Adolf Eichmann, chief of Gestapa IVB4, the SS's Jewish office, was charged with arranging deportation financing. Eichmann forced Jews into paying for their own deportation. In February 1942 Himmler and another aide Oswald Pohl reorganised SS administrative and economic offices to form the SS Wirtschaft-und Verwaltungshauptamt (Economic and Administrative Head Office, or WVHA). The Inspectorate of Concentration Camp became part of the WVHA, and Himmler promoted Pohl to Obergruppenfuhrer und General der Waffen-SS, making him the third highest-ranking officer in the SS. Eighteen weeks after Wannsee, a Czechoslovak commando team with British support assassinated Heydrich, advancing Pohl to the second slot under Himmler. Meanwhile Himmler had special powers in Poland, where he feuded with the official supposedly in charge Hans Frank.

SS Army

Himmler had dreams of his own army, which were strenuously opposed by the regular army. He managed to field three division on the eastern front in 1941-42; their ferocity impressed Hitler and the SS was allowed to recruit volunteers directly from devoted Nazi youth groups. The Wehrmacht, howver, intensely disliked the SS troops, so Himmler had to use his negotiating skills directly with Hitler to remove his SS formations from army control.

In July 1944 after the failed Army plot against Hitler's life, Himmler reached the apex of his power. As commander in chief of the German Home Forces, he was the most powerful man in Germany next to Hitler. Everyone between the ages of 12 and 70 was subject to his will through the draft. Concentration camps and torture and death chambers increased in number.

Finale

As the Allied forces penetrated into Germany from east and west, Himmler opened negotiations for a separate peace with the U.S. and Britain. This move failed, however, and Himmler fled in disguise as Hitler disowned him. On May 21, 1945, Himmler was captured by the British near Bremen. Two days later, Himmler committed suicide by swallowing a phial of poison concealed in his mouth.

See also

• Adolf Hitler
• Bergen-Belsen, concentration camp
• Holocaust
• National Socialism
• SS

Bibliography

• Breitman, Richard. The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution. 1991. 352 pp.
• Burleigh, Michael. The Third Reich (2000)
• Dederichs, Mario. Heydrich: The Face of Evil (2006)
• Evans, Richard J. The Third Reich in Power: 1933-1939., 2005. 800 pp.
• Goldin, Milton. "Financing the SS" History Today, (Jun 1998), Vol. 48, Issue 6 full text in Academic Search Premier
• Gutman, Israel, ed. Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, 4 vol (1989)
• Manvell, Roger, and Heinrich Fraenkel. Heinrich Himmler: The SS, Gestapo, His Life and Career (2007)
• Padfield, Peter. Himmler: Reichsführer-SS. 1990. 656 pp.
• Smith, Bradley F. Heinrich Himmler: A Nazi in the Making, 1900-1926. (1971)
• Wachsmann, Nikolaus. "Looking into the Abyss: Historians and the Nazi Concentration Camps." European History Quarterly 2006; v 36; pp247+ online

---