Heinrich Himmler Thesis

Heinrich Himmler was a powerful man in WW II. He was the one with power under Hitler himself, a devoted loyalist to Hitler and the Nazi party. Heinrich Himmler is one of the main reasons for which the SS was formed. His power made him a dangerous man during WW II. He was born in 1900 and died in 1945. During this time he was responsible for the concentration camps and the SS during this horrible time of the Holocaust.

“Heinrich Himmler was born in Munich, October 7, 1900. He grew up in a staunchly middle-class,comfortable catholic german family. He had two brothers, an older brother Gebhard was born in 1898, about 2 years before Heinrich. His younger brother Ernst was born in 1905.”(Source card #2)“Himmler had graduated from a school in Landshut in July of 1919.

“He had a interest of being an officer on the front of WWI”(Source card #1) while being disappointed after training, WW I had been coming to and end with no hope of service. In August of 23, he had joined the Nazi party to which he devoted his career after he had quit his previous job in a manure-processing factory one month later. In November 9, 1923, Himmler marched with Hitler, Rohm,Hermann Goring, and other Nazi leaders in the Beer Hall Putsch against the German government.”(Source card #1) He had two marriages, the first one to “Margaret Boden in 1926, they married in July 3,1926”(source card#2)while his second “Hedwig Potthast in 1941”(Source card #1).

While married he had kids with both wives, the first daughter, “Gudrun Burwitz in 1929”, “In 1942 he had a son named Helge”(Source Card

#2) and two years later,he had a second daughter named Nanette Dorothea. He had many jobs including, “Reich leader of the dreaded SS of the Nazi party from 1929 until 1945”.(Source card # 1) “Hitler named him minister of the interior in 1943”(Source card #2),Chief of the Home Guard or Volkssturm in 1944”(Source card #2), and also had “Worked as secretary and personal assistant to Gregor Strasser in 1929.”(Source card #1)

Heinrich Himmler is responsible or involved with many things during the Holocaust, in which “he had opened the Dachau Concentration Camp in March of 1933, and “by the summer of 1936, he controlled the political and criminal police throughout the Third Reich.”(Source card #3) After deploying the SS in April 1931 to crush a revolt by the Berlin SA against Hitler’s leadership, Himmler created the Security Service in the summer of 1931.

The SD kept tabs on Hitler’s opponents within the Nazi party and gathered intelligence on leaders and activities of other political party as well as on government officials, both federal and local. On the last day of 1931, Himmler also established a Race and Settlement Office of the SS to evaluate applications of SS men seeking to marry under a new internal “Marriage Decree”. The “expertise” developed in this role of maintaining “racial purity” in the SS for which they would determine whether an individual was “German” or

not.

Himmler has always been devoted to the Nazi party,“in a speech to his SS Leaders on October 4,1943,he called the extermination of Jews “a case of glory in our history” and praised the “decent fellows” who were carrying it out”.(source card #3) Throughout his career “he has been called the “architect of genocide, in Nazi Germany, only Adolf Hitler held more power than Himmler.”(Source card #3) In the five years after Nazi seized power in January 1933, Himmler built an unassailable position for the SS by taking control of the German Police Forces. On March 9,1933, he was appointed Provisional President of Police in Munich.Three weeks later, he was named Commander of the bavarian Political Police.

After the failure of the July 20,1944,Putsch,Himmler toyed with the idea of negotiating a separate peace with the western Allies while continuing to fight the Soviet Union. During the winter of 1944-1945, he considered using concentration camp prisoners as a bargaining hop to initiate such negotiations. Despite having continuously assured his SS officers and men that he ultimately would take responsibility for all of their actions, the end of the war Himmler dressed in Secret Field Police Uniform with papers in the name of Heinrich Hitzinger.Captured by Russian Soldiers on May 20, 1945, he was turned over to the British, to whom he eventually confessed his identity. On May 23, 1945, while undergoing a body search, Himmler killed himself by biting down on a cyanide capsule hidden in his mouth for that very purpose, which has ended the life of Heinrich Himmler, one of the most powerful men in WW II.