Heinrich Himmler

Heinrich Himmler led the SS from 1929 to 1945 and built it into the most feared institution of Nazi Germany, controlling the police, the Gestapo, the concentration camps and the Waffen-SS. He was a principal architect of the Holocaust, the murder of an estimated 5.5 to 6 million European Jews, and oversaw the killing of millions of others. He took his own life in British custody in May 1945.

Born in Munich on 7 October 1900, Himmler grew up in a conservative Catholic household; his father taught school. He trained as an officer cadet in 1917–18 but the war ended before he saw combat. He studied agriculture in Munich, drifted towards the radical right and absorbed antisemitic, nationalist and occult ideas. He joined the Nazi Party in August 1923 and took part in the failed Beer Hall Putsch that November.

Working as a party organiser and propagandist, Himmler joined the SS, then a small bodyguard unit for Adolf Hitler, in 1925, and became its leader, Reichsführer-SS, in January 1929. He grew it from about 290 men to some 52,000 by 1933 and recast it as a racial elite: from 1931 SS men had to prove "Aryan" ancestry back to 1800 before marrying. With his deputy Reinhard Heydrich he built up the SS intelligence service, the SD.

After the Nazis took power, Himmler opened the first official concentration camp at Dachau in March 1933. He and Heydrich took over the political police of one German state after another, and in April 1934 Göring handed him the Prussian Gestapo. The SS carried out the killings of SA leaders and other opponents in the Night of the Long Knives in mid-1934, after which it became independent of the SA. In June 1936 Hitler named Himmler chief of all German police. The camps, first used for political prisoners, came to hold Jews, Roma, so-called asocials and others the regime wished to exclude.

In 1939 Himmler's men staged false-flag border incidents used to justify the invasion of Poland, and SS Einsatzgruppen followed the army to murder Polish elites and Jews. On the eve of Operation Barbarossa in June 1941 he commissioned Generalplan Ost, a scheme to clear tens of millions of Slavs from eastern Europe for German settlers; historians attribute some 14 million deaths to its implementation. In the occupied Soviet Union the Einsatzgruppen shot Jews in mass executions. Seeking a method less taxing for his men, Himmler presided over the shift to gassing in extermination camps, including Auschwitz, which he visited in July 1942 and where he watched a mass killing. After Heydrich's assassination he drove forward Operation Reinhard, the murder of the Jews of occupied Poland. The Roma were also targeted for destruction. In speeches at Posen in October 1943 he spoke openly to SS and party leaders of the "extermination" of the Jewish people.

Himmler became interior minister in 1943 and, after the 20 July 1944 plot against Hitler, took command of the Replacement Army and led sweeping arrests. Hitler then gave him military commands on the Upper Rhine and on the Vistula, where his incompetence soon led to his removal in March 1945. Seeing defeat coming, he opened secret contacts with the Western Allies through the Swedish Count Folke Bernadotte. When news of these talks broke on 28 April 1945, Hitler expelled him from the party and ordered his arrest.

Himmler tried to escape disguised as a sergeant under a false name, but was detained at a checkpoint on 21 May 1945. Brought to a British camp near Lüneburg, he admitted his identity and, during a medical examination on 23 May 1945, bit into a hidden cyanide capsule and died within minutes. He was buried in an unmarked grave whose location remains unknown.

Our 1938 map shows Nazi Germany before the war, and the 1945 map shows Europe at the regime's collapse.