Heinrich Himmler: A Life from Beginning to End by Hourly History

 

First Published: May 14, 2023

RATING: INTERESTING

Heinrich Himmler was named after Heinrich, a prince of Bavaria, who his father tutored. The prince was Heinrich's godfather.Prince Heinrich of Bavaria (24 June 1884 – 8 November 1916) was a member of the Bavarian Royal House of Wittelsbach and a highly decorated Army officer in the First World War.

Heinrich Himmler was raised in Landshut. Landshut is a city straddling the River Isar in Bavaria, southern Germany.

During the First World War when Himmler turned seventeen, he enlisted and was assigned to the 11th Bavarian Infanty Regiment. Because of his father's royal connections and good academic record, he secured a spot, but the war ended before he completed his training or saw any active front-line combat.

Heinrich was in love with Maja Loritz, who was the daugher of his landlady at university. Maja Loritz was an early, unrequited crush of a young Heinrich Himmler around 1919 when he was a student in Munich. She was the daughter of the woman who ran the boarding house or daily eatery where Himmler ate his meals.

In 1923 Himmler joined the Nazi party. Shortly after joining, he participated in the failed Beer Hall Putsch in Munich on November 9, 1923, an event that marked the early expansion of his involvement in radical right-wing politics.

In 1926 he was named the official party organiser for Lower Bavaria. He joined the SS. He was appointed commander of the SS in 1929. 

He married Margarete Boden (9 September 1893 – 25 August 1967) .  Himmler met his future wife, Margarete Boden, in 1927. They met during one of his lecture tours and remained thereafter in written contact. Heinrich and Margarete married in July 1928.

They had a child in 1929, Gudrun. 

One recruit for the SS, Reinhard Heydrich, was the dieas Aryan, and Himmler named him his deputy. Reinhard Tristan Eugen Heydrich (7 March 1904 – 4 June 1942) was a high-ranking SS and police official in Nazi Germany as well as one of the principal architects of the Holocaust.

Himmler created the Ahnenerbe to trace back the supposed roots of the Germanic race.  The Ahnenerbe was a pseudoscientific organization founded by the Schutzstaffel in Nazi Germany in 1935. Established by Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler on July 1, 1935 as an SS appendage devoted to promoting racial theories espoused by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, the Ahnenerbe consisted of academics and scientists from a broad range of academic disciplines who fostered the idea that Germans descended from an Aryan race which was racially superior to other racial groups.

In 1939 he threw Operation Himmler to trigger the beginning of the war. Operation Himmler, also called Operation Konserve, consisted of a group of 1939 false flag operations planned by Nazi Germany to give the appearance of Polish aggression against Germany. The Germans then used propaganda reports of the events to justify their invasion of Poland, which started on 1 September 1939. Operation Himmler included the Germans staging false attacks on themselves—directed at innocent people, such as civilians and concentration camp prisoners. The operation arguably became the first act of the Second World War in Europe.

Himmler also established the Einsatzgruppen with the intention of killing anyone deemed undesirable. The Einsatzgruppen were mobile SS and police death squads of Nazi Germany responsible for the mass murder of over a million civilians during World War II.

Himmler had health problems, so he had daily massages, and his therapist was Felix Kersten (30 September 1898 – 16 April 1960). 

Towards the end of the war, Kersten arranged a meeting between Himmler and Norbert Masur, a member of the Swedish branch of the World Jewish Congress, in Hartzwalde, a few miles from Ravensbrück concentration camp. As a result, Himmler agreed to spare the lives of the remaining 60,000 Jews left in Nazi concentration camps days before their liberation by the Allies.

Hitler heard of Himmler's dealings behind his back, so he was stripped off all authority.

At the end of he war HImmler tried to flee, but he was arrested. While in custody he took a cyanyde capsule and killed himself.