Heinrich Himmler Biography Quotes 18 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Heinrich Luitpold Himmler was born on October 7, 1900, in Munich, in the Kingdom of Bavaria, Germany. His father, Gebhard Himmler, was a schoolmaster and later a headmaster, and his mother, Anna, managed the household; the family was Catholic and middle-class. Himmler grew up disciplined and studious, physically frail and often preoccupied with order and duty. During the First World War he trained as an officer cadet, but the conflict ended before he saw front-line service. After the war, amid the social turmoil of the Weimar Republic, he studied agronomy at the Technical University of Munich. He flirted with various nationalist and völkisch groups, including agrarian movements such as the Artaman League, and worked briefly as a farmer and poultry breeder.

Entry into the Nazi Movement
Himmler joined the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) in 1923. He supported the Beer Hall Putsch that year, and when the party was banned he drifted among right-wing circles before rejoining the NSDAP in 1925. He served as a party organizer in Bavaria and northern Germany, working closely with figures such as Gregor Strasser. In 1925 he joined the Schutzstaffel (SS), then a small guard unit within the Nazi movement. Methodical and ambitious, he proved adept at building bureaucratic structures, recruiting loyalists, and cultivating absolute allegiance to Adolf Hitler.

Rise to Power in the SS
In January 1929 Himmler was appointed Reichsfuehrer-SS, the head of the SS. He expanded the organization from a few hundred men into a vast apparatus bound by strict discipline, ideological indoctrination, and personal loyalty to Hitler. He brought in Reinhard Heydrich to create the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the party's intelligence service. After the Nazis took power in 1933, Himmler moved rapidly to consolidate control over policing and the concentration camp system. Theodor Eicke reorganized the camp regime under his authority, while Himmler placed trusted subordinates such as Heinrich Mueller and Kurt Daluege in key positions. He and Heydrich played central roles in the 1934 purge known as the Night of the Long Knives, aligning the SS as the regime's primary instrument of coercion.

Chief of German Police and the SS State
By 1936 Himmler had become Chief of the German Police, integrating the Gestapo (secret state police), the Kripo (criminal police), and the Ordnungspolizei (uniformed police) into a structure ultimately controlled by the SS. This fusion of party and state power enabled pervasive surveillance, arrests without judicial oversight, and the expansion of concentration camps for political opponents, Jews, Roma and Sinti, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, and others targeted by Nazi policy. Himmler also sponsored the Ahnenerbe and other pseudo-scholarly initiatives, and supported programs like Lebensborn, casting SS racial ideology as state doctrine.

War, Occupation, and Genocide
The invasion of Poland in 1939 brought a vast expansion of SS authority in occupied territories. Himmler directed mass expulsions, the creation of ghettos, and the deployment of SS and police leaders to terrorize and remake societies along racial lines. After Germany attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, the SS organized and oversaw the Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing units that murdered Jews, political commissars, and others by the tens of thousands. Himmler visited execution sites, demanded ever more "efficient" methods of killing, and pushed the system toward industrialized murder.

Under his direction and through subordinates like Odilo Globocnik, Adolf Eichmann, and Richard Gluecks, the SS built and managed a network of concentration and extermination camps, including Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, Majdanek, and Chelmno. Policies crystallized in 1941, 1942 into the "Final Solution", coordinated administratively at the Wannsee Conference chaired by Heydrich. Millions of Jews were deported and murdered, alongside countless other victims. Himmler's bureaucratic language masked the brutality of genocide, but his orders and inspections make his personal responsibility clear.

The Waffen-SS and Military Ambitions
Himmler expanded the Waffen-SS from a small guard formation into a sprawling military force, aided by commanders such as Paul Hausser and Felix Steiner. He recruited ethnic Germans and, increasingly, non-German volunteers and conscripts from across Europe, positioning the Waffen-SS as an ideological army parallel to the Wehrmacht. Waffen-SS units, like SS police formations, were implicated in numerous war crimes and atrocities behind the lines and during anti-partisan warfare. Himmler's ambition to rival the traditional army brought friction with military leaders, including Hermann Goering and elements of the General Staff.

Interior Minister, Repression, and Collapse
In 1943 Himmler was appointed Reich Minister of the Interior, consolidating his control over domestic administration and intensifying his role in forced labor, deportations, and the exploitation of occupied populations. After Heydrich's assassination in 1942, Ernst Kaltenbrunner took over the Reich Security Main Office, but ultimate authority remained with Himmler. Following the July 20, 1944 attempt to assassinate Hitler, Himmler took command of the Replacement Army and helped orchestrate a sweeping purge, arrests, and executions of suspected conspirators. He later accepted commands of Army Group Upper Rhine and Army Group Vistula in 1945, but proved militarily inept as the Third Reich unraveled.

As defeat became inevitable, Himmler sought separate peace contacts with the Western Allies. Through intermediaries such as Karl Wolff and Count Folke Bernadotte, he tried to negotiate surrenders and present himself as a pragmatic statesman, a move that infuriated Hitler once discovered. In late April 1945 Hitler stripped him of all offices and expelled him from the party.

Personal Life and Character
Himmler married Margarete Boden in 1928; they had a daughter, Gudrun, in 1929. He maintained a long-term relationship with his secretary, Hedwig Potthast, with whom he had additional children. Personally, he cultivated a fussy, pedantic manner, professed temperance and discipline, and harbored a fascination with mysticism, pseudo-history, and an imagined Germanic past. This banal exterior coexisted with the ruthlessness of his policies. Colleagues such as Joseph Goebbels and Albert Speer noted both his bureaucratic diligence and his ideological rigidity, while subordinates like Eichmann and Mueller executed the machinery he designed.

Death and Legacy
Disguised and using a false identity at the war's end, Himmler was captured by British forces in May 1945. Upon identification, he killed himself by biting a concealed cyanide capsule on May 23, 1945, in Lueneburg. Had he lived, he would have faced trial as a principal architect of mass murder and crimes against humanity. Postwar tribunals declared the SS a criminal organization; many of his associates were tried and convicted, though others escaped justice for years.

Himmler's legacy is that of a central organizer of state terror and genocide, who combined ideological fanaticism with administrative skill to lethal effect. Working alongside figures such as Hitler, Heydrich, Goering, and Kaltenbrunner, he built the institutions that enabled systematic persecution and the murder of millions. His career stands as a stark warning of how bureaucracy, police power, and racist ideology can merge into a machinery of destruction.

Our collection contains 18 quotes who is written by Heinrich, under the main topics: Leadership - Honesty & Integrity - Equality - Human Rights - War.

Other people realated to Heinrich: Joseph Goebbels (Criminal), Martin Bormann (Soldier), Heinz Guderian (Soldier), Alfred Rosenberg (Soldier), Julius Streicher (Soldier), Alfred Jodl (Soldier), Alois Brunner (Criminal), Fritz Sauckel (Soldier), Albert Speer (Criminal), David Irving (Author)

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