Heinrich Himmler was born October 7, 1900, as the son of a secondary school instructor and strict Roman Catholic who lived in Luneberg, Germany. By the end of World War I, Himmler had completed secondary school instruction at a school in Landshut and went on to receive a diploma in agriculture from the Munich Technical High School in 1922. Turning 18 when Germany was at an all time low following World War I, Himmler despised the Weimar Republic, expressed hatred for anyone who was anti-Germany, and joined militant right-wing organizations.
Ironically, Himmler worked as a salesman for a firm of fertilizer manufacturers before joining a para- military organization in the Munich Beer-Hall Putsh in November of 1923. In 1925 Himmler joined the Nazi party, 1927 he worked as a Poultry farmer but his future would be imbued following his appointment in January 1929 as leader of the SS, an elite guard of Hitler that was under the control at that point by the SA stormtroopers.
Himmler quickly moved up the ranks, and once Hitler became Chancellor in 1933 Himmler became the head of the Munich police. From this position he organized the first concentration camp at Dachau and began to organize the Nazi political police throughout Germany.
In April of 1934 he was named assistant chief of the Prussian Gestapo, the secret police, and in June of 1934, Himmler successfully crushed the para-military SA, headed by Ernst Röhm, making the SS the dominant organization in Germany.
In June of 1936, a power-thirsting Himmler got full control of Gestapo, and became Reichsführer of the SS. From this point he constructed the SS into an armed force in Germany second only to the army itself. Before World War II it constrained itself to providing security services for Hitler and the state, and by initiating campaigns to remove "lower" races from a society composed of the "superior" Aryans.
Himmler - a man often seen as the very personification of evil. Heinrich Himmler was not only head of Hitler's SS police and Gestapo, but was also in charge of the death camps in the East. The account of Himmler's life and his impact on the rise and fall of the Nazi state make a gripping and horrifying story. But more than this, it is a profound moral and intellectual inquiry into the nature of evil in the human character.
Although Adolf Hitler held the ultimate responsibility for what became the Holocaust, it was Heinrich Himmler who essentially laid the plans and devised the schemes that led to the killings of six million Jews.
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