Heinrich Himmler

agriculture

Himmler graduated in agriculture in 1922 and briefly worked for a fertiliser company.

💡 Did you know? In the late 1920s he and his wife Margarete tried, unsuccessfully, to make a living as chicken farmers.

Heinrich Himmler

Himmler in the uniform of the Reichsführer-SS.

Reichsführer-SS

At the time the SS was a small bodyguard of Hitler's with about 280 men; under Himmler it grew to hundreds of thousands.

💡 Did you know? Until 1934 the SS was formally still subordinate to the SA; it only became independent after the SA leadership was purged in the “Night of the Long Knives”.

Dachau

Dachau became the model for all later camps: organisation, guards and punishment rules were copied from it.

💡 Did you know? By 1945 more than 200,000 people had been imprisoned in Dachau; over 41,000 died there.

the Interior Ministry

This gave him control of the police, the SS, the concentration camps and domestic administration all at once.

💡 Did you know? His predecessor Wilhelm Frick was sidelined to Prague as Reich Protector.

Posen

The speeches were recorded; in them Himmler called the mass murder “a page of glory never to be written”.

💡 Did you know? The recordings are among the clearest evidence that the Nazi leadership carried out the Holocaust deliberately.

Wewelsburg

For the rebuilding the SS set up its own concentration camp nearby; at least 1,285 prisoners died.

💡 Did you know? Today the site houses an exhibition about the SS and its crimes.

Lebensborn

In Lebensborn homes unmarried women could give birth anonymously; during the war the SS also abducted children from occupied countries to be “Germanised”.

💡 Did you know? Many of these children only learned decades later where they really came from.

the Einsatzgruppen

By the end of 1941 alone, the four Einsatzgruppen and other police units had murdered around half a million people, for example at Babyn Yar near Kyiv.

💡 Did you know? In August 1941 Himmler himself watched a mass shooting near Minsk: afterwards he pressed for methods that would be “easier” on the killers: gas vans and gas chambers.

Folke Bernadotte

Bernadotte was vice-president of the Swedish Red Cross and, with the “White Buses”, brought thousands of prisoners out of German camps.

💡 Did you know? When Hitler learned of the talks, he expelled Himmler from the party and all his offices.

Lüneburg

He had disguised himself with an eye patch and a sergeant's papers; during a medical examination he bit into a cyanide capsule.

💡 Did you know? The British buried him in a secret spot on Lüneburg Heath so that no grave could become a shrine.