By 17 June 1936, Himmler had successfully completed his bid to win control of the political and criminal police throughout the Third Reich. His official title became Reichsführer-SS.
Possibly because of his father, Himmler had been interested in ancient German history since his youth, and this had evolved into a fascination with the occult.
In 1933, when the Nazis came to power in Germany, Himmler began searching for a castle in the area where, in 9 A.D., Hermann der Cherusker had fought a decisive battle against the Romans, saving the German people from being conquered. As a result, the German tribes retained their culture and identity long after other tribes had been absorbed into the Roman Empire.
Thus, on 3 November 1933, Himmler visited Wewelsburg Castle and decided that day to lease it for one hundred years and to restore it so that it could be used as an educational and ceremonial center for the SS.
It was his intent to imbue the SS with a sense of racial superiority with the virtues of loyalty, camaraderie, duty, truth, diligence, honesty, and knighthood. His SS was to be the elite of the party, the elite of the German people, and, thus, the elite of the entire world.
By using the castle to indoctrinate SS members in his ideals, he hoped to breed a new man who was, in his words, “far finer and more valuable than the world had yet seen.”
Himmler’s romantic dream of a race of blue-eyed, blond heroes was to be achieved by cultivating an elite according to “laws of selection” based on criteria of physiognomy, mental and physical tests, character, and spirit. His aristocratic concept of leadership was aimed at consciously breeding a racially organized order
which would combine charismatic authority with bureaucratic discipline.
The SS man would represent a new human type—scholar, warrior, administrator, leader—whose messianic mission was to undertake a vast colonization of the East. This synthetic aristocracy, trained in a semiclosed society and superimposed on the Nazi system as a whole, would demonstrate the value of its blood through “creative action” and achievement.
From the outset of his career as Reichsführer of the SS, Himmler had introduced the principle of racial selection and special marriage laws that would ensure the systematic coupling of people of “high value.”
Himmler was obsessed with creating a race of supermen by means of breeding. To accomplish this, he established state-registered human stud farms, known as Lebensborn, where young girls selected for their perfect Nordic traits could procreate with SS men. Their offspring were better cared for than “common” babies in maternity homes for married mothers.
On 28 October 1939, he proclaimed to the entire SS that “it will be the sublime task of German women and girls of good blood, acting not frivolously but from a profound moral seriousness, to become the mothers of children of soldiers setting off to battle.” He next decreed that “war heroes” should be allowed a second marriage.
Personally, he suffered from psychosomatic illness—severe headaches and intestinal spasms. It was reported that he had almost fainted at the sight of a hundred Eastern Jews, including women, being executed for his benefit on the Russian front. As a result of this, he ordered a “more humane means” of execution. This resulted in the use of poison gas—Zyklon B, an insecticide—to eradicate Untermenschen in gas chambers.
Himmler was determined that: the SS was to be the resurrection of the ancient Order of the Teutonic Knights, with himself as grand master; the breeding of a new Herrenvolk aristocracy was to be based on traditional values of honor, obedience, courage, and loyalty; and the SS was to be the instrument of a vast experiment in modern racial engineering.
In October 1939, Hitler appointed Himmler as Reichskommissar für die Festigung deutschen Volkstums—Reich Commissar for the Strengthening of Germandom—and he was given absolute control over the newly annexed slice of Poland.
Responsible for bringing people of German descent back from outside the Reich into its borders, he set out to replace Poles and Jews with Volksdeutsche from the Baltic lands and various outlying parts of Poland.
Within a year, more than a million Poles and three hundred thousand Jews had been uprooted and driven eastward. With the characteristic self-pitying and ascetic ethos of self-abnegation that he inculcated into the SS, Himmler informed the SS-Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler Regiment, “Gentlemen, it is much easier in many cases to go into combat with a company than to suppress an obstructive population of low cultural level, or to carry out executions or to haul away people or to evict crying and hysterical women.”
It was Himmler’s success in indoctrinating the SS with an apocalyptic “idealism” beyond all guilt and responsibility, which rationalized mass murder as a form of martyrdom and harshness toward oneself.
In a speech to SS group leaders in Poznan on 4 October 1943, he said, “One principle must be absolute for the SS man: We must be honest, decent, loyal, and comradely to members of our own blood and to no one else. What happens to the Russians, what happens to the Czechs, is a matter of utter indifference to me.
“Such good blood of our own kind as there may be among the nations we shall acquire for ourselves, if necessary, by taking away the children and bringing them up among us. Whether the other peoples live in comfort or perish of hunger interests me only insofar as we need them as slaves for our Kultur. Whether or not ten thousand Russian women collapse from exhaustion while digging a tank ditch interests me only insofar as the tank ditch is completed for Germany.
“We shall never be rough or heartless where it is not necessary; that is clear. We Germans, who are the only people in the world who have a decent attitude to animals, will also adopt a decent attitude to these human animals, but it is a crime against our own blood to worry about them and to bring them ideals.
“I speak to you here with all frankness of a very grave matter. Among ourselves it should be mentioned quite frankly, and yet we will never speak of it publicly. I mean the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people.
“Most of you know what it means to see a hundred corpses lying together, five hundred, or a thousand. To have stuck it out and at the same time—apart from exceptions caused by human weakness—to have remained decent fellows, that is what has made us hard.
“This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and shall never be written.”
In May 1945, Himmler finally faced the fact that the war was lost. He shaved off his mustache and took off his SS uniform, replacing it with that of a Wehrmacht sergeant. He acquired forged Wehrmacht credentials, identifying him as Sergeant Heinrich Hitzinger, and, with a small group of aides, left Berlin and headed west.
Hitzinger was arrested on 21 May at an informal checkpoint. It had been set up by recently released Russian prisoners of war near Neuhaus, in territory occupied by the British. Two days later, the Russians turned over Hitzinger to the British.
Himmler confessed his true identity to the British duty officer, Captain Thomas Selvester, who didn’t believe him but nevertheless sent him to British 2nd Army Headquarters in Lüneburg. There, an intelligence officer confirmed his identity and ordered an immediate body cavity search by a medical officer.
When a physician named Wells put his finger in Himmler’s mouth, Himmler bit him. When the doctor removed his finger, Himmler turned his head and bit on a cyanide capsule. After fifteen minutes of agony, Himmler died.
He was buried that day in an unmarked grave in a farmer’s field. The burial detail was unaware of who they were burying, and the only person who knows where Heinrich Himmler is buried is the intelligence officer who confirmed his identity.
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