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Heinrich Luitpold Himmler (October 7, 1900 – May 23, 1945) was the commander of the German Schutzstaffel (SS) and one of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany. As Reichsführer-SS, he controlled the SS and the Gestapo, and was the leading organizer of the Holocaust. As founder and officer-in-charge of the Nazi concentration camps and the Einsatzgruppen death squads, Himmler was responsible for implementing the industrial scale murder of between six and twelve million people. Among the victims were Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, Communists, Slavs, and Catholic priests.

Early life

Born near Munich, Bavaria, Germany, into a middle-class family, he was the son of a Bavarian schoolmaster and attended Landshut High School. After leaving school, Himmler was appointed an Officer Cadet in 1918 and joined the 11th Bavarian Regiment for service in World War I. Shortly before he was due for commissioning as an officer the war ended, and he was discharged from the military without seeing combat.

In 1919, a year after World War I had ended, Himmler began studying agronomy at the Technische Hochschule in Munich. During his time as a student, he was an active member of several student clubs. Template:Fn At the same time, he became active in the Freikorps, private armies of right-wing, ex-German Army men resentful of Germany's loss of the First World War. Himmler joined the Reichkriegsflagge (Imperial War Flag) and, in 1923, applied to join the Nazi Party, which were recruiting Freikorps members as potential members of the new Nazi stormtrooper units known as the Sturmabteilung.

Early Nazi Party

In 1923 Himmler was a Feldwebel (Sergeant) in the Reichkriegsflagge, carrying the Imperial German Battle Ensign in the so-called Beer Hall Putsch, the Nazi Party's failed attempt at a revolution in overthrowing the government of Bavaria.

Between 1923 and 1925, with the Nazi party seemingly a failed cause, Himmler devoted himself to other interests, putting his agricultural diploma to work by becoming a poultry farmer. His time as a chicken farmer was unsuccessful, however, and he returned to the Nazi Party in late 1926. In 1927 he married Margaret Boden.

The Nazi Party quickly put Himmler to work as the Vice District Leader and Deputy Gauleiter of Upper-Bavaria and also as secretary to Oberste SA-Führer Franz Pfeffer von Salomon. Himmler was subsequently commissioned as an SA-Sturmführer in 1926, and later that year he was appointed an Oberführer, becoming SS-Gauführer (District Leader) in a small SA sub-unit known as the Schutzstaffel or SS. In 1927, Himmler became the vice commander of the SS when he accepted the assignment as Deputy Reichsführer-SS.

Rise in the SS

Between 1927 and 1929, Himmler devoted himself increasingly to his duties as Deputy Reichsführer-SS. Upon the resignation of SS Commander Erhard Heiden, Himmler was appointed as the new Reichsführer-SS in January 1929. At the time Himmler was appointed to lead the SS, it numbered only 280 members and was considered a mere battalion of the much larger SA. Himmler himself was considered only an SA-Oberführer, but after 1929 he simply referred to himself as the "Reichsführer-SS".

By 1933, when the Nazi Party rose to power in Germany, Himmler's SS numbered 52,000 members, and the organization had developed strict membership requirements ensuring all members were of Adolf Hitler's "Aryan" "Herrenvolk" (i.e., master race). Now a Gruppenführer in the SA, Himmler next began a massive effort to separate the SS from SA control; he introduced black SS uniforms to replace the SA brown shirts in the fall of 1933. Shortly thereafter, he was promoted to SS-Obergruppenführer und Reichsführer-SS and became an equal to the senior SA commanders, who by this time loathed the SS and the power it held.

Himmler and another of Hitler's right hand men, Hermann Göring, agreed that the SA and its leader Ernst Röhm were beginning to pose a real threat to the German Army and the Nazi leadership of Germany. Röhm had strong socialist views and believed that, although Hitler had successfully gained power in Germany, the 'real' revolution had not yet begun, leaving some Nazi leaders believing Röhm was intent on using the SA to administer a coup.

With some persuasion from Himmler and Göring, Hitler began to feel threatened by this prospect and agreed that Röhm had to die.

Hitler delegated the task of administering Röhm's demise to Himmler and Göring who, along with Reinhard Heydrich, Kurt Daluege and Walter Schellenberg, carried out the execution of Röhm and numerous other senior SA officials in what became known as The Night of the Long Knives on June 30, 1934. The very next day, Himmler's title of Reichsführer-SS became an actual rank, and he was appointed to the position, while the SS became an independent organization of the Nazi Party.

Consolidation of power

In 1936 Himmler gained further authority as the SS absorbed all of Germany's local law enforcement agencies into the new Ordnungspolizei, considered a headquarters branch of the SS. Germany's secret police forces were also under Himmler's authority in the form of the Sicherheitspolizei, which would in 1939 expand into the much larger Reichsicherheitshauptamt. The SS was also developing its military branch, known as the SS-Verfügungstruppe, which would later become known as the Waffen-SS.

Himmler and the Holocaust

After the Night of the Long Knives, the SS-Totenkopfverbände was given the task of organizing and administering Germany's regime of concentration camps and, after 1941, the extermination camps in occupied Poland. The SS, through its intelligence arm the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), was charged with finding Jews, Roma, priests, homosexuals, communists and those persons of any other cultural, racial, political or religious affiliation deemed by the Nazis to be either Untermenschen (sub-human) or in opposition to his regime, and placing them in concentration camps. Himmler opened the first of these camps near Dachau (see picture) on March 22nd, 1933. He became one of the main architects of the Holocaust, using elements of mysticism and a fanatical belief in the racist Nazi ideology to justify the mass murder and genocide of millions of victims.

The Second World War

Before the invasion of Russia in 1941, Himmler began preparing his SS for a war of extermination against the forces of "Judeo-Bolshevism". Himmler, always glad to make parallels between Nazi Germany and the Middle Ages, compared the invasion to the Crusades. Himmler collected volunteers from all over Europe, including Danes, Norwegians, Dutch, Frenchmen, Spaniards, and, after the invasion, Ukrainians, Latvians, Lithuanians, and Estonians. Himmler indoctrinated these non-German volunteers by declaring a pan-European crusade to defend the traditional values of Old Europe from the "Godless Bolshevik Hordes".

In 1944, Himmler was granted still further power as the result of a bitter rivalry between the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) and the Abwehr, the intelligence arm of the Wehrmacht.

The involvement in the July 20, 1944, plot against Hitler of many of the Abwehr leaders, including its head, Admiral Canaris, prompted Hitler to disband the Abwehr and make the SD the sole intelligence service of the Third Reich. This increased Himmler's already considerable personal power.

In late 1944, Himmler became commander of army group Oberrhein (Upper Rhine), which was fighting the oncoming United States 7th Army and French 1st Army in the Alsace region on the west bank of the Rhine. Himmler held this post until early 1945 when he was switched to command an army group facing the Red Army to the East. As Himmler had no practical military experience as a field commander, he was quickly relieved of his field commands and appointed Commander of the Home Army. At the same time, he was appointed as the German Interior Minister and was considered by many to be a candidate to succeed Hitler as the Führer of Germany. However, it became known after the war that Hitler never really considered Himmler as a successor even before his betrayal, believing that the authority that was his as head of the SS had caused him to be so hated that he would be rejected by the Party.

Peace negotiations, capture, and death

By 1945, Himmler was dead.