Heinrich Himmler was a failed farm manager before he ran the SS
Heinrich Himmler studied agriculture, never saw combat, and was out of work at 23. Six years later he led a Nazi bodyguard unit of about 290 men. He built it into a vast apparatus of police, camps and killing units, and became one of the chief architects of the Holocaust.
Himmler was born in Munich in 1900 into a conservative Catholic family; his father was a teacher and his godfather a Bavarian prince. Classmates remembered him as studious and socially awkward, and he suffered lifelong stomach problems. He enlisted as an officer candidate late in the First World War, but the war ended before he finished training, a missed chance that rankled. From 1919 to 1922 he studied agriculture in Munich.
His radicalisation was gradual. He was antisemitic at university, though not unusually so by the standards of the time, and was outwardly polite to Jewish members of his fencing club, whose president was Jewish. From 1922 his diary filled with antisemitic remarks, and his reading turned to pamphlets, Germanic myth and the occult. Hyperinflation ended his hopes of a doctorate. He joined the Nazi Party in August 1923 and took part in the failed Beer Hall Putsch, which cost him his office job and left him living with his parents, increasingly bitter and isolated. Around this time he abandoned Catholicism for a private faith built on Germanic mythology.
He made himself useful in the party's disarray after Hitler's arrest, touring Bavaria as a speaker and propagandist, and joined the SS in 1925. His talent was bureaucratic: he compiled lists of Jews, Freemasons and supposed enemies and built elaborate systems of control. In 1927 he pitched Hitler a vision of the SS as a loyal, racially defined elite; he became its head in January 1929 and within a year grew it from about 290 men to about 3,000. Through the Artaman League he met Rudolf Höss, later commandant of Auschwitz.
In power, Himmler controlled all German police, including the Gestapo, and the Waffen-SS. He ran the concentration and extermination camps and formed the Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing units, playing a central role in the murder of an estimated 5.5 to 6 million Jews and millions of others. Late in the war he secretly sought peace talks with the Western Allies; Hitler dismissed him, and he took his own life in British custody in May 1945.
Source: Heinrich Himmler
