A principal architect of the Nazi racial state
At Posen in October 1943, he told SS officers that standing firm before 100, 500, or 1,000 corpses and staying 'decent' was 'a glorious chapter that has not and will not be spoken of.'
Heinrich Himmler was a central Nazi leader who expanded the SS and police into a bureaucratic apparatus for racial rule and mass murder. He directed the concentration-camp system, extermination policies, and killing formations in occupied Europe, making him one of the principal perpetrators of the Holocaust and the murder of millions of other victims. During the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, he approved and directed the German reprisal that treated the city and its population as targets for destruction, massacre, and deportation. After attempting unauthorized negotiations with the Western Allies as Germany’s defeat became unavoidable, he was dismissed by Hitler, captured by British forces, and died by suicide in custody.
Also known as: Heinrich Luitpold Himmler
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1923Joined the Nazi Party and took part in the Beer Hall Putsch.
- 1925Joined the Schutzstaffel, or SS.
- 1929–1945Led the SS as Reichsführer-SS.
- 1936–1945Served as Chief of German Police, controlling the police and apparatus of political repression.
- 1943–1945Served concurrently as Reich Minister of the Interior.
- 1944Directed the destruction of Warsaw and the massacre and deportation of civilians during the uprising.
- 1945Was dismissed over unauthorized peace contacts, then captured and died by suicide in custody.
Related historical events
- 1939–1945Axis-occupied Europe: collaboration and resistanceReichsführer-SSApproved the first extermination camp, Chełmno in the Wartheland.
- 1938–1944.03Hungary on the Axis side: from the Vienna Awards to the DonReichsführer-SSIn March 1944, as the occupation was prepared, instructed Eichmann to prepare the deportation of Hungary’s Jews.
- 1944.03–1945.02Hungary under German occupation: from Operation Margarethe to the siege of BudapestReichsführer-SSAccording to Höss, wanted the deportation of Hungary’s Jews speeded up.
- 1941.06–1944.11The Baltic states under German occupation: from the June Uprising through the Holocaust to the retreat of 1944Reichsführer-SSOrdered Jeckeln to destroy the Riga ghetto and in June 1943 ordered the remaining ghettos liquidated.
- 1941–1945The Great Patriotic WarOversight of SS and police in occupied Soviet territoryGiven security authority in occupied Soviet territory in July 1941, he oversaw SS and police mass murder of Jews and Soviet officials.
- 1944.08–10Warsaw Uprisingresponsible for the slaughter and destruction ordersFollowing German leadership's orders, he directed that the city and its population be eliminated together.
Reich Commissioner for the Consolidation of German Nationhood and resettlement planning in the East
By Hitler's order of 7 October 1939, Himmler was appointed Reich Commissioner for the Consolidation of German Nationhood (Reichskommissar für die Festigung deutschen Volkstums, RKF), responsible for the return and settlement of ethnic Germans living abroad (Volksdeutsche) and for preventing the "harmful influence" of populations deemed alien to the German Volkstum. The office was not merely migration administration: it was a project to reconstitute the population of occupied territories along racial lines.
The commissioner's office was heavily involved in Generalplan Ost, the long-term Nazi plan for the settlement and "Germanization" of captured territory in Eastern Europe, producing four of the plan's five drafts. That plan called for the conquest of the Baltic states, Poland, western Ukraine and Byelorussia, their resettlement by ten million German citizens, and the expulsion eastward, starvation or forced-labour deployment of the roughly 31 million people already living there; Himmler expected the project to take twenty to thirty years and to cost some 67 billion Reichsmarks.
The policy was enforced in the occupied territories as the war proceeded. In the Zamość region, mass expulsion operations against Polish civilians to make way for German settlers were carried out on Himmler's direct order between November 1942 and March 1943. Some 297 Polish villages were depopulated, about 116,000 people were forcibly removed, and roughly 30,000 of them were children. German authorities also detached children judged "racially valuable" from their families, gave them German names and placed them with German families for adoption. Such measures show that the wartime settlement, expulsion and Germanization apparatus was part of the same racial-ordering project as the killing, not a separate administrative sphere.