Heinrich Himmler headed the elite Nazi Party military unit known as the Schutzstaffel (SS), or protection staff, even before Adolf Hitler's seizure of power in Germany in 1933. A ruthless and efficient bureaucrat, Himmler bore responsibility for the SS as well as the Gestapo, or secret police, both of which implemented genocidal Nazi policy across Europe until 1945. He escaped a death sentence from the International Military Tribunal at the postwar Nuremberg Trials by committing suicide a few weeks after the Reich's collapse.
Himmler was born in Munich in 1900, the son of the former tutor to a Bavarian prince. While still in his teens, he joined Imperial Germany's army during the final year of World War I but because of his frail health was never sent to the front. Nevertheless, he became an enthusiastic member of a veterans' organization after Germany's defeat, one of a number of groups whose right-wing extremism gave rise to the National Socialist (Nazi) Party. He also studied agriculture at the technical university in Munich and in 1922 took a job as an agricultural assistant in Schleissheim. Here Himmler first became active in the Nazi Party and rose rapidly through its ranks after becoming acquainted with Hitler around 1924. By 1926, he was the party's deputy propaganda director.
Himmler, with his education in agricultural science, helped formulate party policy that asserted an "Aryan," or Nordic superiority over the rest of the European peoples, including Jews. Himmler argued that the selective breeding of animals could be applied to humans as well. In January 1929, he was made commander of the small SS force, the party's unit of amateur bodyguards, and soon launched a recruitment drive. He instituted training procedures for the SS that turned it into a fearsome paramilitary unit. Known for his personal loyalty to Hitler, Himmler advanced quickly through the Nazi chain of command after the seizure of power in early 1933. He was made police chief of Munich in 1933 and head of the Gestapo ("Geheime Staatspolizei," or state secret police) soon afterward. As Reichsfhrer of the SS, Himmler was the official in charge of the staff who ran the concentration camps, where six million Jews died in a dozen years. This position made Himmler history's most notorious organizer of mass murder.
Himmler remained fascinated by notions of Aryan superiority and after 1937 was given another bureaucratic duty with the directorship of the Reich's Office of Racial Purity. This division screened all Germans and classified them racially, and Himmler was known to spend hours examining hundreds of passport photos with a magnifying glass; his own physical type, however, hardly conformed to the Aryan ideal, for he was average in height, dark, and weak-chinned. With the Office of Racial Purity and his SS troops, Himmler was in charge of "Germanizing" occupied Eastern Europe, which included a program that gave Polish infants to childless German couples. Himmler advanced to the cabinet post of Minister of the Interior in August 1943; not long after he issued the order for the Warsaw Ghetto to be cleared of all remaining Jews. The widespread annihilation by SS troops, in which the restricted Jewish quarter was burned and bombed, was believed to have resulted in the deaths of at least 56,000 Jews and Poles.
After several top Nazis conspired to kill Hitler in the unsuccessful July 1944 plot, Himmler was given responsibility for prosecuting those responsible, who were summarily executed. He was named supreme commander of all home armies after that summer and directed the mobilization of civilian defense forces in the war's final days. But Himmler also contacted Allies in an effort to negotiate a secret armistice that would insure his own personal safety; when Hitler learned of the treachery, he expelled Himmler from all offices and the party. After Hitler's suicide, Himmler fled to Flensburg, near the border with Denmark, where a rump Nazi government survived, but Himmler was rebuffed by the others as a political liability. He tried to cross British lines in disguise and was captured at Bremervoerd on May 21, 1945. He ingested poison while in custody and died two days later.
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