Himmler, Heinrich 1900-45
German Nazi leader and chief of police

Born in Munich and educated at the Landshut High School, he joined the army. In 1919 he studied at the Munich Technical College. He joined the Nazi Party in 1925. In 1929 Hitler made him head of the SS (Schutzstaffel, protective force), which he developed from Hitler's personal bodyguard into a powerful party weapon. With Reinhard Heydrich, he used it to carry out the assassination of Ernst R�hm (1934) and other Nazis opposed to Hitler. Inside Germany and later in Nazi war-occupied countries, he unleashed through his Gestapo (secret police) an unmatched political and anti-Semitic terror of espionage, wholesale detention, mass deportation, torture, execution and massacre. His systematic liquidation of whole national and racial groups initiated the barbarous crime of genocide. In 1943 he was given the post of Minister of the Interior to curb any defeatism. After the attempt on Hitler's life by the army in July 1944, he was made Commander-in-Chief of the home forces. His offer of unconditional surrender to the Allies (but excluding Russia) having failed, he disappeared but was captured by the British near Bremen. He committed suicide at L�neburg by swallowing a cyanide phial concealed in his mouth, and thereby escaped being tried as the initiator of the horror of the gas oven and the concentration camp, and as the butcher of over seven million people.

Bibliography: Peter Padfield, Himmler: Reichsfuhrer-SS (1990)