Even in the most dramatic Hollywood film it would be hard to come up with a villain more
evil than Heinrich Himmler. Responsible for the deaths of millions, Himmler was one of Hitler’s
top officials for almost two decades, until the day he decided to betray Hitler and the Nazis in
an effort to save himself. Hello and welcome back to Nutty History. Today we’re going to be talking
about the life of Heinrich Himmler and why he attempted to betray Hitler and the Third Reich.
Heinrich Luitpold Himmler was born in Munich on October 7,
1900, into a devoutly Roman Catholic family. He showed an interest in current events from an early
age and was particularly interested in religion. He enlisted in the Bavarian regiment in late 1917,
but never ended up going into combat during WWI. After the war he returned to school to complete
his education. At this point, antisemitism was already alive and well in Germany. While
Himmler did interact with some Jewish classmates, including at his fraternity, his close circle of
friends was antisemitic, and it wasn’t long before Himmler joined the antisemitic nationalist group,
the Bund Reichskriegsflagge, also known in English as the Imperial War Flag Society.
During this time in his life Himmler tried to pursue a career in the military. When he
was unsuccessful, he took a low-paying job that he kept until joining the Nazi party in 1923.
This period also gave Himmler an opportunity to further his discriminatory feelings towards
Jewish people. His diaries show dangerous and offensive comments and discussions, and he read
many antisemitic pamphlets, myths and occult tracts that fed his misdirected belief system.
By the time he joined the Nazi party, he was well primed to spread their messages of hate and lies.
Many people in the world go searching for a purpose, and, if they come to anything with an
open heart and mind then that can be a beautiful thing, but Himmler was angry and resentful of
where his life had led him so far, and the Nazi party and their antisemitic stances helped fuel
and direct the rage inside him. When Himmler joined the Nazi party in 1923, he helped take part
in the Beer Hall Putsch, which was an attempt by Hitler and the Nazi party to seize control
of Munich. The attempt at power was unsuccessful, but it resulted in Himmler losing his job and the
support of many of his friends and family. Instead of this being an opportunity for reflection,
Himmler allowed this to propel him further down a hole of darkness, and double down on the attitudes
and beliefs held by the Nazi party. If there had been any chance of Himmler seeing the light, the
opportunity for change was now long gone. Himmler abandoned his religion and instead devoted himself
to Nazi teachings, which were all based around pure race pride propaganda. He quickly climbed
the ranks of the party and was soon traveling all over the country to give speeches and hand out
propagandist literature. In 1924 Himmler joined the SS aka the Schutzstaffel as a leader, which
had initially been formed to be Hitler’s personal protection, but eventually evolved to be an elite
unit of the SA. In 1926 Himmler was assigned to be district leader of Lower Bavaria, and a short
while later he was also appointed to be deputy propaganda chief. Given extensive freedom to do as
he pleased, Himmler started to gather information on the number of Jewish citizens and enemies
of the Nazi party in the population, and soon approached Hitler with his vision of making the
SS into a racially “pure” elite unit. Hitler was so impressed by his initiative that he appointed
him Deputy Reichsfuhrer-SS. Soon after Himmler became a member of the Nazi adjacent group,
Artaman Keague, where he met the men who would go on to become the commander of the Auschwitz
concentration camp and the Reich Minister of Food and Agriculture. Himmler had found his family.
In 1929 Himmler was promoted to Reich Leader, and in the years leading up to WWII he helped the SS
grow into the thousands. As the Nazi party grew, they continued to strive after their vision of an
ideal “pure race”. Ironically, Himmler himself didn’t even fit into the ideal he espoused.
However, he pursued these ideals vigorously. During his time as leader, he introduced
something called the “marriage order” into the SS, which demanded that members prove their and
their partner’s “aryan descent” all the way back to 1800. If anyone was unable to prove their
so-called purity then they would be dismissed from the SS. Members who did satisfy the requirements
were expected to have four children, to produce a pool of what Nazis saw as “genetically superior”
people. The program was largely unsuccessful, with most men producing only one child or no
children at all. In March of 1933, just a few short months after the Nazis came into power,
the first concentration camp was established at Dachau. Himmler appointed fellow Nazi, Theodor
Eicke, to run the camp. Eicke laid the groundwork for the way camps would be run throughout the war.
These methods included isolation, excessive force, and executions to achieve obedience. What
initially started as camps for opponents of Nazi politics eventually grew into anyone Hitler deemed
to be an undesirable member of society. Of course, this meant Jewish people were held captive,
but this also included communists, Romani people, people who were any race or religion deemed to be
outside the “aryan ideal”, as well as those who had disabilities and differing sexual orientations
than heterosexual. Basically, anyone the Nazis determined to be “sub-human”. By the time WWII
officially started there were already 27,000 people imprisoned in six different workcamps.
In 1933, Himmler’s reach grew immensely. On March 9, he was named provisional president
of police in Munich, and just three weeks later he was also appointed Commander of the Bavarian
Political Police. Not long after this Himmler gained command of each state political police
department in Germany and formed all of them into a single agency: The Secret State Police,
also known as the Gestapo. From there, Himmler reign of terror grew even more powerful.
In 1936, Hitler promoted Himmler to Chief of German Police, where he continued to
centralize the criminal police forces into the Reich Criminal Police Office. He then
joined together the Security Police and the SD into the Reich Security Main Office which was
responsible for implementing the Holocaust in 1941 to 1942. At this time Himmler also created
a centralized concentration camp system. Through his position as leader, Himmler helped facilitate
the decimation of millions of Jewish citizens, political prisoners, homosexuals, and activists.
When it came to WWII actually getting started, Himmler played a major role.
Under the title Operation Himmler, German soldiers dressed up in Polish uniforms and initiated border
skirmishes that were then used in Nazi propaganda as justification for invading Poland. Once the war
began, Hitler authorized death squads, which were overseen by Himmler and Heydrich,
another high-ranking Nazi official. Along with killing thousands in short time periods, the death
squads were also responsible for rounding up Jews and other prisoners to be taken to concentration
camps. As the war progressed, Himmler’s power only grew, and he oversaw the deaths of millions
by firing squad, gas chambers, starvation, and exhaustion. Photos exist of an expressionless
Himmler walking through concentration camps and admiring his handiwork. Hitler’s goal was to
decimate every Jew in Europe. This goal was known as the “final solution to the Jewish question”.
The plan was to work them to death. The number of Jewish people in Europe was
estimated to be 11 million, and the man placed in charge of that plan was Heinrich Himmler.
By the end of the war an estimated six million Jews had been decimated. After witnessing a
firing squad consume 100 Jewish people in Minsk, Himmler expressed concern that his SS
officers might be disturbed by their act of using firearms, and so Himmler believed a less visible
method of killing needed to be established. His solution was gas chambers using the pesticide
Zyklon B. While there were many people responsible for the decimation of six million Jewish souls,
as well as countless Romani people, and anyone outside of a Nordic look or background,
Himmler is without a doubt one of the main instigators of the Holocaust. He was Hitler’s
right-hand man, and he clearly took great pleasure in his roles within the Nazi party.
Throughout the war Himmler continued his work overseeing the concentration camps, as well as
his work within police units. In January of 1945, Himmler was appointed commander of the Army Group
Vistula, which was formed in an attempt to stop the Soviet’s approach into Pomerania.
Himmler, totally out of his depth in the military, was unable to complete his objective,
and was thus immediately out of Hitler’s favor. Himmler was replaced, and he fled to
the Hohenlychen Sanatorium. No longer in Hitler’s good graces, Himmler decided to strike out on
his own. He started a correspondence with Count Folke Bernadotte, head of the Swedish
Red Cross. The two arranged to meet via letters under the pretense of peace talks.
Before Himmler met with a Swedish representative, he met for the last time with Hitler. During this
meeting he swore loyalty to Hitler, and then immediately ran off to meet with Norbert Masur,
a Swedish representative of the World Jewish Congress, to try to deflect some of the blame
away from himself. He claimed that many Jewish prisoners had died due to the typhus epidemic,
and falsely claimed that survival rates at two of his camps were high. On April 23, 1945, Himmler
signed a proposal that Germany would surrender to Western Allies. He did this entirely on his own,
without any prior agreement from the Nazi party. When Hitler heard of Himmler’s deception through
a news broadcast, he ordered Himmler’s immediate arrest. At this time Hitler also wrote his last
will and testament, which declared Himmler a traitor, stripped him of all his titles, and
expelled him from the Nazi Party. Knowing his time had come, Himmler attempted to escape, but was
soon captured by the Soviets. His true identity was uncovered, and, after an interrogation he was
taken to a doctor for a medical exam. Now during the exam Himmler bit into a potassium cyanide pill
he had concealed in his mouth and was dead within minutes. He was buried in an unmarked
grave. He was never held accountable for the millions of lives he cut short.