Heinrich Himmler

Heinrich Himmler organised the Holocaust. Hitler authorised it; Himmler built and ran the apparatus that carried it out. He was the head of the SS from 1929 to 1945, the head of the German police from 1936, and from 1939 the head of the entire Reich security apparatus. The Einsatzgruppen, the death camps, the medical experiments, the slave labour programme, the racial selections, the Operation Reinhard killing of two million Polish Jews, all reported up to him. He visited the killing sites. He authorised the methods. He chose the men. He gave the speeches in which the killing was acknowledged as Reich policy and praised. He committed suicide in British custody on 23 May 1945, sixteen days after the German surrender, before he could be tried.

What he built

The SS in 1929, when Hitler appointed Himmler Reichsführer, was around 280 men, a sub-unit of the SA charged with bodyguard duties. By 1944 the SS was around 800,000 men with its own military formations, its own intelligence service, its own concentration camp inspectorate, its own racial research bureaucracy, its own industrial empire built on slave labour, its own foreign policy in occupied Europe, and its own internal court system. Himmler had assembled, almost from scratch, the parallel state apparatus through which the Holocaust would be conducted. Without that apparatus the killing could not have happened at the scale it did. Building it was Himmler’s contribution. He chose the personnel, set the recruitment criteria, designed the training, established the doctrine. The men who pulled the triggers in the Soviet Union in 1941, who ran the gas chambers at Birkenau in 1944, who organised the deportations from every occupied country, were Himmler’s men. He had recruited and trained them for the work over a decade.

What he visited

Himmler did not run the killing from a desk in Berlin. He visited the operations. On 15 August 1941, in Minsk, he watched a mass execution of around 100 Jewish prisoners conducted by an Einsatzgruppe B unit at his own request. He had asked specifically to see how a shooting operation actually worked. The unit commander Arthur Nebe arranged the demonstration. Himmler was reportedly physically affected by the experience, splattered with blood and brain matter from one of the victims, and gave a brief speech afterwards to the SS men present commending them for the difficult work. He directed Nebe to investigate more efficient killing methods that would be less psychologically taxing on the SS. The instruction led directly to the development of mobile gas vans and ultimately to the stationary gas chambers at Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka and Auschwitz-Birkenau.

He visited Auschwitz on 17 and 18 July 1942, when the camp was beginning its mass killing operation. He observed a gassing of a deportation transport from the Netherlands. He inspected the construction of the new gas chamber and crematorium complexes. He met with the commandant Rudolf Höss and approved the expansion plans. He returned in October 1942 for further inspection. He visited Sobibór, Bełżec and Treblinka at various points in 1942 and 1943. He toured the medical experiment facilities at Dachau and Ravensbrück. He met with Josef Mengele at Auschwitz and personally authorised the continuation of the twin experiments. He visited the deportation operation in Hungary in spring 1944. The killing was something he watched with his own eyes, repeatedly, over four years.

What he ordered

The operational paper trail of Holocaust authorisations runs through Himmler. He issued the order in July 1941 for the Einsatzgruppen operations to be extended to women and children, escalating what had been mass killings of Jewish men into the systematic murder of entire Jewish populations. He chaired the meeting in October 1941 at which the construction of the Bełżec death camp was decided. He gave verbal authorisation to Odilo Globocnik for the launch of Operation Reinhard in March 1942. He instructed the deportation of the German Jews to the eastern killing sites. He approved the medical experimentation programmes. He set the policies on which categories of prisoners would receive marginally better treatment and which would not. He ordered the death marches of January to May 1945, in which up to 375,000 prisoners died, after the Allied advance had made the camps untenable.

He also ordered the destruction of the evidence. From spring 1943 he commissioned Sonderkommando 1005, the operation under SS-Standartenführer Paul Blobel that exhumed and burned the bodies from the eastern killing sites to destroy the evidence ahead of the Soviet advance. He ordered the dismantling of the Operation Reinhard camps in autumn 1943 once their work was done, with the sites planted with trees. He ordered the Auschwitz crematoria demolished in November 1944 to January 1945 ahead of the Soviet liberation. He understood, throughout, that what he was running was an operation that would have to be hidden from history. He failed in the hiding because the apparatus he built also produced the documentation that survived.

The Posen speeches

The single document that places Himmler’s personal responsibility beyond question is the recording of the Posen speeches of 4 and 6 October 1943. He addressed assembled groups of senior SS officers and Reich civil servants in the city of Posen (Poznań) and described, openly, the Holocaust as a Reich operation he had been entrusted with. He praised his men for managing to kill on this scale while remaining decent men. He set out the moral framework: the SS had been asked by the Führer to do something that would, in any other context, be unthinkable, and they had done it for the German people. He said the chapter would never be written. The recordings survived. The full transcripts have been published. Himmler can be heard on tape acknowledging the killing, in his own voice, accepting his role in it, praising his subordinates for their part in it.

What he tried to do at the end

By spring 1945 Himmler had concluded that Germany was lost and that he might himself be a useful negotiating partner with the Western Allies. He authorised the white buses operation in April 1945, in which around 15,000 prisoners including around 7,000 Jewish survivors were evacuated from concentration camps to neutral Sweden via the Swedish Red Cross under Count Folke Bernadotte. The operation saved real lives. Himmler’s motive was transparent: he was building credit for himself with the Western Allies in the hope of a separate peace and personal immunity. He sent emissaries to Bernadotte in late April 1945 with offers of partial German surrender on the western front while continuing the war against the Soviet Union. The offers were refused. Hitler, when he learned of the contacts, denounced Himmler as a traitor in his political testament. The white buses were a partial atonement that Himmler did not understand as atonement, and that does not change what he had done.

The end

Himmler attempted to disappear into the chaos of the German collapse, shaved his moustache, removed his glasses, and obtained false identity papers in the name of Heinrich Hitzinger, an ordinary military police sergeant. He was stopped at a British checkpoint near Bremervörde on 22 May 1945. His cover collapsed within twenty-four hours. He admitted who he was on 23 May, in British military custody at Lüneburg, and immediately bit down on a cyanide capsule he had concealed in his teeth. He died within fifteen minutes. He was buried in an unmarked grave on the Lüneburg Heath. The location was kept secret to prevent it becoming a neo-Nazi pilgrimage site.

What he was

Himmler is the model case of the bureaucratic mass murderer. He had no taste for personal violence. He was uncomfortable when watching killings in person. He preferred to administer rather than to do. He combined this with an extraordinary capacity for organisational cruelty and an idiosyncratic mystical streak: SS rituals, the Wewelsburg castle as a planned spiritual centre, the obsessive interest in Aryan ancestry. The combination produced a man who could organise the murder of six million people while continuing to think of himself as a decent person performing a difficult duty for his country. The Holocaust would have been, on the documentary record, organisationally impossible without him. He is, after Hitler, the man on whom the operational case rests.

See also

Sources

  • Peter Longerich, Heinrich Himmler: A Life, Oxford University Press, 2012
  • Heinrich Himmler, Posen speeches, 4 and 6 October 1943
  • Bradley Smith and Agnes Peterson (eds), Heinrich Himmler: Geheimreden 1933 bis 1945, Propyläen, 1974
  • Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press, 2004
  • USHMM: Heinrich Himmler