Himmler Born: Architect of the Holocaust Enters World

Heinrich Himmler joined the Nazi Party in 1923 with member number 14,303. By 1945, he controlled the SS, the Gestapo, the concentration camp system, the Waffen-SS, and the entire apparatus of the Holocaust. He was the most powerful man in the Third Reich after Hitler himself, and the most directly responsible for its worst crimes. Born in Munich on October 7, 1900, to a middle-class Catholic family, Himmler was a sickly child who kept meticulous diaries documenting his reading, his diet, and his social interactions. He trained briefly as an army cadet during World War I but the war ended before he saw combat. He studied agronomy at the Technical University of Munich and joined the Nazi Party through its early paramilitary organizations. Hitler appointed him Reichsfuhrer-SS in 1929, when the SS had barely 280 members. Himmler built it into an empire within an empire: a racial elite corps, an intelligence service, a military force, and eventually the institutional machinery of genocide. He was meticulous about paperwork, obsessive about racial ideology, and genuinely believed he was performing a historical service by eliminating Jews, Roma, and others the regime classified as undesirable. He established the concentration camp system, beginning with Dachau in 1933. He organized the Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing units that murdered approximately 1.5 million people in occupied Eastern Europe. He oversaw the planning and implementation of the Final Solution, the systematic murder of six million European Jews in extermination camps. He visited Auschwitz-Birkenau personally. As the war turned against Germany, he attempted to negotiate a separate peace with the Western Allies through Swedish intermediary Count Folke Bernadotte, hoping to save himself. When Hitler learned of the betrayal, he stripped Himmler of all offices. Himmler was captured by British forces on May 21, 1945, disguised as a common soldier. Two days later, during a medical examination, he bit down on a cyanide capsule hidden in his teeth. He was 44.