HEINRICH HIMMLER HIS LIFE AND CRIMES
BY
ANGELA
O CONNOR
RIVERSDALE COMMUNITY COLLEGE
4L
Heinrich Himmler was born in Munich on 7 October 1900. His father was a
pious, authoritarial Roman Catholic schoolmaster who had once been a teacher to
the Bavarian Crown Prince. Himmler was
educated at a secondary school in Landshut . He served as an officer cadet in the Eleventh Bavarian Regiment at
the end of World War 1. He later obtaining a diploma in agricultural studies
from Munich Technical High school where he studied from 1918 to 1922.
After working briefly as a salesman for a firm
of Fertilizer manufacturs , the young Himmler joined a para-military,
nationalist organization and he participated in the Munich Beer hall putscsch
of November 1923 as standard-bearer at the side of Ernst Rohm, Secretary to Gregor Strasses and his deputy
district leader in Bavaria Swabia and the palatinate. He was also acting
propaganda leader of the NSDAP from 1925 to 1930.
After marrying in 1927 Himmler
returned to poultry farming for a time
but was singularly unsuccessful in the business of raising chickens . In January 1929 he was appointed
head of Hitler's personal bodyguard, the black - shirted Schutzstaffel (SS), at
that time a small body of 200 men which was subsequently to become under his
leadership an all -embracing empire within the Nazi state.
Elected in 1930 tino the Reichstag as
Nazi deputy for Weser- Ems, Himmler concentrated on extending SS
membership-which reached 52,000 by 1933 and securing its independence from
control by Rohm's SA, to which it was initially subordinated. He organized the
Security Service (SD) under Reinhard Heydrich, originally an ideological
intelligence service of the party, and together the two men ensured that the
Nazi consolidated their power over Bavaria in 1933.
In March 1933,Himmler was appointed
Munich Police President and shortly afterwards he became Commander of the political police throughout Bavaria. In
September 1933 he was made commander of all political police units outside
Prussia and thought formally under
Goering became head of the
Prussian Police and Gestapo on 20
April 1934 . The turning-point In
Himmler's career was his masterminding of the purge of 30 June 1934 which
smashed the power of the SA and paved the way for the emergence of the SS as an
independent oranization charged with 'safeguarding the…. embodiment of the
National Socialist idea'l and translation the racism of the regime into
a\dynamic principle of action.
By 17 June 1936 Himmler had
successfully completed his bid to win control of the political and criminal
police throughtout the Third Reich , becoming head of the Gestapo in addition
to his position as Reichsfuhrer of the
SS. A very able organizer and administrator, meticulous calculating and
efficient, Himmler's astonishing capacity for work and irrepressible power-
lust showed itself in his accumulation of official posts and his perfectioning
of the methods of organized State terrrrorism against political and other
opponents of the regime.
In 1933 he had set up the first
concentration camp in Dachau and in the next few years, with Hitler's
encouragement, greatly extended the range of person who qualified for
internment in the camps . Himmmler's encouragement, greatly extended the range
of persons who qualified for internment in the camps. Himmler's philosophical
mysticism his cranky obsessions with mesmerism, the occult , herbal remedies
and homeopathy went hand with a narrow-minded fanatical racialism and
commitment to the 'Aryan' myth. In a speech in Janaury 1937 Himmler declared
that 'there is no more living proof of hereditary and roacial laws than in a concentration.
You find the hyrocephalics, squinters, deformed indivduals, semi-jew: a
considerable number of inferior people.' The mission of the German people was
'the struggle for the extermination of any-humans, all over the world who are
in league against Germany.
Himmler's decisive innovation was to
transform the race question from 'a negative concept based on matter-of-course
anti-semitism ' into 'an organizational task for building up the SS racism was
to be safeguarded by the reality of the race society ,by the concentration camp
presided over by Himmler's Deaths Head Formations in Germany, just as during
World War One he theories of 'Aryan' supremacy would be established by the systematic of Jews and
slavs in Poland and Russia . Himmler's romantic dream of a race of blue-eyed,
blonde heroes was to be achieved by cultivating an elite according to 'laws of
selection' based on criteria of physiognomy, /mental and physical tests,
character and spirit. His aristocratic concept of leadership aimed at
consciously breeding a racially organized order which would combine charismatic
authority with bureaucratic discipline. The SS man would represent a new human
type -warrior , administrator, 'scholar' and leader, all in one -whose messianic mission was the
undertaker a vast colonization of the East . This synthetic aristocracy,
trained in a semi-close society and superimposed on the Nazi system as a whole,
would demonstrate the value of its blood through 'creative action' and
achievement.
From the outset of his career as
Reichsfuhrer of the SS, Himmler had
introduced the principle of racial selection and special marriage laws
which would ensure the systematic coupling of people of 'high value'. His
promotion of illegitimacy by establishing the State-registered human study farm
known as lebensborn , where young girls selected for their perfect Nordic
traits could procreate with SS men and their off spring were better cared for than
in maternity homes for married mothers, reflected Himmler's obsession with
creating a race of 'supermen' by means of breeding . Himmler's notorious
procreation order of 28 October 1939 to the entire SS that ' would be the
subline task of German women and girls of good blood acting not frivolously but
from profound moral seriousness to become mothers to children of soldiers
setting off to battle' and his demands that war heroes should be allowed a
second marriage expressed the same preoccupation.
The small, diffident man who looked
more like a humble bank clek than Germany's police dictaor, whose pedantic
demeanour and 'exquisite courtesy fooled one English observer into starting
that 'nobody I met in Germany is more normal, was a curious mixture of bizarrer
gestures, man without nerves; he suffered from psyco-somatic illness , severe
headaches and intestinal spasms and almost fainted at the sight of a hundred
eastern Jews (including women) being executed for his benefit on the Russian
front. Subsequent to this experience, he ordered a ‘more humane means of
execution- the use of poison gas in specially constructed chambers disguised as
shower rooms.
The petty-bourgeois eccentric whose
natural snobbery led him to welcome old aristocratic blood into the SS, revived
a web of obsolete religious and cosmological dogmas linking new recruits to
their distant Germanic ancestors. He cultivated the ‘return to the soil’ and
the dream of German peasant-soldier farms in the East while at the same time
proving himself a diabolically skilful organizer of rationalized of
rationalized modern extermination methods. The supreme techician of
totalitarian police power who saw himself as a reincarnation of the
pre-Christian Saxon, Henry the Fowler advancing eastwards against the Slavs –
he organised the thousandth anniversary of Henry’s death in 1936 – Himmler
perfectly expressed in his own personality the contradictions of National
Socialism. For him, the SS was at one end and the same time the resurrection of
the ancient band of warriors.
Order of the Teutonic Knights with
himself as grand master, the breeding of a new Herrenvol aristocracy based on traditional values of
honour, obedience, courage , and loyalty, and the instrument of vast experiment
in modern racial engineering. Though this perivileged cast which was to be the
hard core of German imperial dominion in Europe, the nucleus of a new state
apparatus would emerge with its tentacles impinging on all spheres of life in
the expanded Third Reich. By recruiting ‘Aryans’ of the different nationalities
into his waffen-SS Himmler envisaged the creation of ‘a German Reich of the
German Nation’ based on the feudal allegiance of its communities to the
lordship and protection of the fuhrer, embodying a German that would become the
centre of a higher political entity.
By the end of the 1930's the
possibility of forging this Greater Germanic Reich of the furture came closer
to realization as Himmlerr reached the peak of his power. In October 1939
Hitler appointed him Reichskommissar fur die festigung des Deutschen Volkstums
(Reich Commissa for the strenghthening of germandom) and he was given absolute
control over the newly annexe slice of poland. Responsible for bringing people
of german descent back from outside the Reich into its borders, he set out to
replace poles and jews by volksdeutsche from the balticlands and various
outlying parts of poland. Within a year over a million poles and 300,000 Jews
had been uprooted and driven eastwards. With the characterisyic self-pitying
and ascetic ethos of self abnegation that he inculcated into the SS, himmler
informed the SS- Leibstandarte Adolf hitler regiment: Gentlemen, it is much
easier in many cases to go into combat with a company than the suppress an
obstructive population of low cultural level, or to carry out executions or to evict crying and hysterical women.
It was Himmler's master stroke that
he succeeded in the intoctrinating the
SS with an apocalypting 'idealism' beyond
All guilt and resposibility, which
rationalized mass murder as a form of martyrdom and harshness towards oneself.
Nowhere was this more apparent than in himmler's notorious speech on 4 october
1943 to the SS group leaders in poznan
One principle must be absolute for
the SS man: we must be honest, decent, loyal, and comradel to members of our blood and and to
no one eles. What happens to the russians, what happened to the Czechs, is a
matter of utter indifference to me. Such good blood of our own kind as there may
be among the nations we shall acquire for ourselves, if necessary by taking
away the children and bringing them up among us . Whether the other people live
in comfort or perish of hunger interests me only in so far as we need them as
slaves for our Kultur. Whether or not 10,000 Russian women collapse from
exhaustion while digging tank ditch interests me only it not necessary; that is
clear. We Germans, who are the only people in the world who have decent attitudeto animals, will also adopt a
decent attiude to those human animals, but it is crime against our own blood to
worry about them and to bring them ideas. I shall speak to you here with all
franknes of a very grave matter. Among ourselves it should be mentioned quite
frankly, and yet we will never speak of it publicly. I mean the evacuation of
the jews, the entermination of the jewish people … most of you know what it
means to see a hundred corpses lying together, five hundred, or a thosand. To
have stuck it out and at the same time-apart from exceptions caused by human
weakness - to have remained decent fellows, that is what had made us hard. This
is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and shall never
be written
SHORT QUESTIONS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Q1,
Gilbert, Martin. Second World War,
Fontana/Collins, London,1990.
Q2,
SKILLS
Studying
for this topic, I was introduced to the skills of research.
1, I
have learned to find my ways through the local libraries to find suitable books
on the topic
Using
internet search engines to find more information for my essay
3, I have learnt new skills on microsoft word
.
4, I have also learnt to read and compare many different sources for my essay.