In May of 1945, Hinrich Himmler, architect of the Holocaust and head of the SS, attempted to disappear among the remnants of the Third Reich, disguised as a police sergeant with an eye patch and false documents. But he had been preparing his final exit for years, a cyanide capsule hidden between his mers. When the British began to search him, he bit it and died within 15 minutes, leaving behind the phrase, “The bastards beat us.
” Behind that miserable escape was the man who turned the SS into an order obsessed with racial purity. He demanded proof of Aryan ancestry back to 1648 for his officers [music] while compulsively logging every call, every gift, and every execution. Under his command, Lebanons was born. A program destined to Germanize and steal up to 50,000 Nordic children across occupied Europe.
While human experiments regarding freezing and altitude, supervised by the SS were conducted at Darkhau. That mixture of bureaucracy, fanaticism, and mysticism culminated in Vivvilsburg, the castle that Himmler wanted to transform into the black Vatican of his racial empire, complete with ritual crypts and the black sun symbol.
From there it led to the Posen speeches where he spoke of the exterminion of Jewish women and children as a glorious page that had to remain secret. This documentary reveals 18 disturbing facts about Hinrich Himmler. The capsule he carried for 6 years and bit in 15 seconds. The end of Himmler. On the night of May 23rd, 1945, at the Lunberg Interrogation Center, Company Sergeant Major Edwin Austin ordered Himmler to strip for an exhaustive body search. Army Dr.
CJ Wells methodically examined him from head to toe. When they reached his mouth, Himmler clamped his teeth down onto the doctor’s fingers with deliberate strength and crushed a cyanide capsule that he had kept carefully wedged in a gap between the mers on the right side of his jaw. Brightman documents that Himmler had told his wife Margaretta at the beginning of the war in 1939 that he carried that capsule with him permanently.
He had carried it for six full years through all the meetings with Hitler, the speeches before the SS, the inspection trips to the concentration camps, the massage sessions with Kirsten, the war planning conferences, and the conversations with Count Bernardot. It was not a lastminute improvisation. It was a decision made at the beginning of the war, kept intact through 6 years of absolute power and crime, waiting for the moment he might need it.
Despite immediate efforts to prevent him from swallowing, and the doctor’s attempts to pump the poison from his stomach using a tube, Himmler died 15 minutes after biting the capsule. One of the British officers present upon confirming the death exclaimed a phrase that was recorded in the Chronicles of that night, “The bastards beat us.
” 3 days later on May 26th, 1945, after British Army surgeons had taken molds of his facial features for future identification and removed parts of his brain and skull for forensic analysis, four soldiers from the Second Defense Division received orders to bury the remains at some point in the Lunberg Heath.
The instructions were that the site should remain unmarked, that no public record of the exact location should be made, and that the operation should be carried out with the utmost discretion. The British authorities did not want to create any place of pilgrimage for Nazi sympathizers. Obsessed with pleasing, incapable of asserting himself, the young Himmler.
Hinrich Himmler was born on October 7th, 1900 in Munich on the second floor of a building on Hildigard Strasa in the center of the city. His father, Ghard Himmler, was a secondary school teacher, a rigorous middle-class man obsessed with social climbing, who had managed to become the tutor of Prince Hinrich of Viddlesbach, the royal house of Bavaria, and who visibly exerted himself to maintain that contact with the aristocracy as the family’s most precious asset.
Historian George Halgarten, a fellow student of the Sun, wrote that Professor Himmler was known in Munich as ridiculously sickantic and survile to the upper classes. He walked to high mass at the Michelites church every Sunday to rub shoulders with the cream of the city. He was so formally correct that when an acquaintance found him naked under a shower in the public baths of Munich, Professor Himmler took a small towel, held it in front of himself with both hands, and introduced himself with a deep bow, citing all his academic titles. “That can only happen
in Germany,” the acquaintance, Americanborn, remarked, laughing afterward. The novelist Alfred Andesh narrated in an autobiographical book titled the father of a murderer his encounter with the headmaster of the Vittlesbucker gymnasium in Munich the very same professor Himmler when Andesh was a student at that school in 1928.
The scene he reconstructs is illuminating in its soft brutality. The headmaster burst into a Greek class and took control of the lesson. He subjected Andesh himself to a meticulous humiliation before his classmates, announcing publicly that the student did not pay tuition because his father, a decorated but ruined officer, could not afford it.
The decision was not justified, the headmaster said, pacing through the classroom. The fee exemption is only granted to outstanding students, but I believed I could do it for the son of an officer with high decorations who has probably fallen into disgrace through no fault of his own.” And thought the pig to announce publicly that my father cannot pay the 90-monthly marks of tuition.
He was expelled from the school that very day along with his brother. That pedagogy of social sadism disguised as educational correctness. That capacity to humiliate under the guise of benevolence has clear echoes in the son who grew up watching that father in operation. The mother Anna Maria Himmler Nhaida was a devout and diligent Catholic.
Heinrich was the second of three sons raised with a nanny with classical reading supervised by the father in family circles with mandatory church visits during every holiday trip and with a diary that his father imposed on him at age 10 as an exercise in intellectual discipline. Ghard Himmler wrote the first entry himself as a model and reviewed his son’s entries for years correcting and annotating in the margin with red ink.
The child who recorded in that diary his fears of three bears in a park on July 15th, 1910, was the same one who 30 years later organized the systematic murder of millions of people. Bradley Smith, one of the great scholars of Himmler’s youth, concludes that the diaries reveal the evolution of a political bureaucrat with an elitist racial ideology, but not that of a pathological murderer in a clinical sense. There is no visible mark of Cain.
There is a serious, industrious, physically uncoordinated child obsessed with pleasing, incapable of asserting himself in sports or around girls who built internal walls of discipline and dogma to compensate for what the outside world denied him. He continued keeping obsessive records his entire life. As Reichfur SS, he had his secretary log every phone call that came in and went out, every letter received or sent, every visit to his office.
[music] He meticulously recorded his personal expenses and reimbured them from his private funds when they were of an official nature. His subordinates recorded the widespread belief that Himmler assigned personnel to the concentration camps down to the level of the last. The diary of the boy from Munich and the log books of the rice furer were the same impulse expressed on a different scale.
Himmler against the mirror, the paradox of the architect of Aryan purity. Himmler built the most powerful apparatus of racial supremacy in modern history. The SS required its members to prove retroactive Aryan blood purity back to 1750 for soldiers and to 1648 for officers, meaning more than 2 and 1/2 centuries of ancestors without racial contamination.
Candidates had to present genealogical certificates, photographs, cranial measurements, and medical reports. The brides of members had to undergo physical inspections and racial certifications before the wedding could take place. Himmler himself personally signed many of these marriage authorizations, supervising the process with the same attention he dedicated to affairs of state.
In a speech before the Hitler youth in May of 1936, Himmler explained that the process of racial selection could already be observed in German dance halls. In the past, he claimed the girl of low racial value always found a partner because races of less valuable blood mature sexually earlier and are more accommodating. Now comes the change.
I believe we have an era ahead of us in which the Nordic girl will marry and the other will remain seated. The certainty with which he uttered these kinds of statements built on categories that lacked the slightest scientific basis was one of his most constant characteristics. Himmler himself had the square skull and dark complexion typical of the Bavarian peasants of southern Germany without the slightest resemblance to the Nordic ideal of an elongated head, blonde hair, and blue eyes that he himself described as the evolutionary pinnacle of
humanity. He was chubby, nearsighted with the constitution of someone who had suffered lung infections as a child, who had always failed gymnastics, and who could never make his body respond to the standards of strength that his mind adored. The chronic stomach pains that accompanied his entire adult life, and which could only be alleviated by the massage sessions of his personal physical therapist, Felix Kirsten, were so frequent and incapacitating that Kirsten himself wrote in his memoirs that he came to have considerable
influence over Himmler precisely because he was the only person who could relieve that constant physical suffering. Padfield notes with precise irony that it is difficult to understand how someone who grew up surrounded by Bavarians with skulls as square as his own could dedicate his entire life to the theory of the Nordic Superman.
Brightman documents that Gowiter Albert Fer himself when he learned that Himmler was threatening to send his racial experts to examine the new German citizens of Danig responded publicly, “If I looked like him, I wouldn’t speak of race.” The phrase reached Himmler. He ordered witness statements to be taken for the archive.
Accumulating evidence for later use was his personal signature. But the consequences for Foster were deferred until a moment that never materialized. It was not willful blindness. It was a structural dissociation between the reality his eyes perceived and the system of beliefs built to replace it. Psychologist Peter Lovenberg in his analysis of Himmler’s youth diaries describes an ego so fragile that it allowed the subject to identify completely with any figure presented to him as superior or dominant, absorbing their identity instead of building one of his own.
Himmler did not see what his eyes saw. He saw what his ideology commanded him to see. And the consequences of that substitution of reality reached millions of people who had no connection to the frustrated dreams of a Bavarian aronomy student. anti-semitism as the answer to all of Himmler’s personal failures.
The First World War began when Himmler was 14 years old. He followed it with growing fervor in his diary. He played war games with his friend Fal Zipper. He pressured his parents to use their contacts and secure him a place as a cadet before finishing the gymnasium. His parents were not enthusiastic, especially because Hinrich wanted more than just to serve in the war.
He wanted to make a career as a professional army officer. The training as an officer candidate was not easy for him either physically or emotionally, but he endured it. The war ended on November 11th, 1918 before he had reached the front. The German defeat destroyed not only his dreams of a military career, but also ordered his ideological world in a way that was never undone.
The Treaty of Versailles of 1919 limited the German army to 100,000 men, permanently closing his opportunity to become an officer. Inflation devastated the family’s savings. His father, on a fixed salary and depreciated currency, wrote letters asking Heinrich not to buy more than half a kilo of flour because they had no money for more.
Himmler never acknowledged that the defeat was the logical consequence of the war. For him, as for millions of right-wing Germans, it was a betrayal. The Jews, the communists, the revolutionaries of the so-called Red November, had stabbed in the back an army that was still fighting. That narrative, completely false from a historical point of view, was the ideological foundation of his entire life.
He enrolled in aronomy at the Technic Hokula in Munich. He completed the initiation rights of a student fraternity, practiced fencing for ritual jewels, and lived the agitated social life that the city of Munich offered in the postwar upheaval. He finally fought a jewel and received five cuts that required five stitches. I really did not flinch even once, he noted in his diary with satisfaction.
It was a small physical victory over his own rebellious body. The student who had failed gymnastics his whole life had bled without trembling. His diaries from that period record a young man constantly dissatisfied with himself, who reproached himself for talking too much, for being inconsistent, and for lacking the firmness of will that he admired in the heroes he read about.
He noted in December of 1921, “I am a pitiful chatterbox. I can never control my tongue, inconsiderate and immature. When will I seriously put myself under control?” He took note of the times he arrived late for the train, of conversations that seemed reckless to him, of words that should have been kept silent.
He tried a correspondence course to improve his memory and intellectual capacities. He lifted weights to strengthen his body. The results on both fronts were, by his own admission, more or less the same, insufficient. In the summer of 1922, after reading an anti-semitic pamphlet called Judith Schulbach and another by Houston Stewart Chamberlain titled Race and Nation, he noted in his diary how stupid we pure Aryans are, and thank God that we are.
The ideological conversion to fanatical anti-semitism had completed its process. It was not a sudden illumination, but the conclusion of a process of several years in which his personal frustrations, his militaristic background, and the political context of postwar Munich converged toward a narrative that explained everything, the defeat, the inflation, his own failure to reach the front, the ruin of his family, the humiliation of Versailles.
A senior SS official recalled decades later that Himmler’s agricultural background was the stimulus for his subsequent interest in racial breeding and his desire to destroy what he considered human pests. Himmler believed he could apply the principles and methods of agriculture to human society. Weeds were eliminated.
Weak species were suppressed. Superior races were encouraged with the same techniques with which a farmer improves the yield of his livestock. He never actually practiced as an aronomist. But that vision never left him. His diaries from his university years show a young man in permanent war with himself. In December of 1921, he noted, “I am a pitiful chatterbox.
I can never control my tongue, inconsiderate and immature. When will I seriously put myself under control?” He enrolled in a correspondence course to improve his memory, and took up weights to strengthen his body. The results on both fronts were, by his own admission, more or less the same, insufficient. The distance between that young man incapable of shutting up in time at a dinner and the man who 12 years later would build the most detailed surveillance system in modern history would be one of the most uncomfortable chasms of his entire trajectory. The
night Himmler killed his own comrades by phone. In the early morning hours of June 30th, 1934, Hinrich Himmler sat in Herman Guring’s office at the Leipigastrasa Palace in Berlin with Reinhard Hydrich by his side and a telephone in his hand and directed the systematic murder of dozens of people whom in many cases he had known for more than a decade.
The operation would later be called the Knight of the Long Knives. What it actually was was the exact moment when Himmler transitioned from being a party bureaucrat with ambitions to the most dangerous man in the Reich after Hitler. The central target was Ernst Durm, head of the SA, the brownshirt militias that in 1934 exceeded 3 million members and constituted in the eyes of Hitler and the army a state within the state with its own revolutionary calling.
Rome was an old comrade of Hitler from the Munich period, one of the men who had turned him into a national figure. He was also homosexual in a regime that had begun to persecute homosexuality with criminal legislation, a trait that Himmler knew of and archived, just as he archived everything.
Rur had been Himmler’s mentor during the movement’s formative years. It was he who had inducted him into the SA in 1923 who had recommended him and who had opened doors for him. That changed nothing. from Guring’s office. While aids circulated among groups of SS and police officers with envelopes that Padfield describes as having the appearance of communications that could cost lives, Himmler and Hydrich coordinated the action groups deployed in Munich, Berlin, and Brelau.
Officer Hansburn Gavius, who entered the palace that Saturday morning, wrote that the environment had a malignant atmosphere of hatred, nervousness, tension, and above all, blood. Through the half-open door of the office, one could see Gurring pacing in a white uniform with kneeh high boots alongside Himmler and Hydrickch.
Exclamations, horse laughter, and shouts drifted out. Shoot. Take a whole company. Shoot. Shoot. Just shoot. Guring was heard bellowing at one point. Himmler’s agitant, Carl Wolf, later recalled that in 72 hours he handled more than 7,000 phone calls. With almost every name on the list, he stated it was a matter of life or death.
General Curt Vonika, former Chancellor of Germany, was shot dead in the study of his home while his wife came running from the adjoining room. They killed her too. General Ferdinand vonred was executed in the street. Eric Clauser, president of Catholic Action, was murdered in his office while working, and the killers attempted to stage a suicide.
Gregor Strasa, the Nazi leader who had been Hitler’s main internal rival and who had been inactive in politics for months, was taken to the Gestapo under an administrative pretext and locked in cell number 16. According to the account that his brother Otto later reconstructed, he was lying on the cot when two senior SS officers, one of whom was believed to be Hydrickch himself, and two corporals approached the peepphole of the door.
They shot through it. Straasa wounded tried to move out of the line of fire. They entered and finished him off. Strasa’s ashes reached his widow Elsa on July 7th in an urn with the inscription Gregor Strasa born May 30th 92 in Gizenfeld died June 30th 34 at the Gestapo Berlin. They included it in a cardboard shipping box.
They warned her not to make any public demonstration. Officially he had committed suicide. Rome was the last to die. Hitler could not order the assassination of his old comrade without his hand trembling. Guring and Himmler convinced him. The following day on July 1st, the commander of the Darkau camp, Teodor Aika, entered the startleheim cell where R was being held and left him a loaded Browning pistol with a single bullet.
He told him he had 10 minutes to shoot himself. R asked to speak with Hitler. Aika replied that time was running out. After the 10 minutes passed, he returned. Rome was waiting for them standing up with his bare chest. One of Aika’s companions shot him in the throat. They finished him off on the floor with mine fura on his lips. The total number of people murdered between June 30th and 4 in the morning of July 2nd when Hitler stopped the executions was never precisely established. Hitler admitted to 76.
Padfield estimates that the real figure is closer to 200 or 250. Corpses appeared in fields and forests for weeks. Less than half of those executed were SA officers. Himmler’s reward arrived on July 20th. Hitler elevated the SS to an independent body of the party, detached for the first time in its history from SA command.
And between July 1st and 6th, 142 SS officers received promotions for their services during the operations. In October, Himmler spoke to his Gestapo agents about what had happened. For us as the Secret State Police and as members of the SS, June 30th was not a day of victory or triumph. It was the hardest day that can fall upon a soldier in his life.
Having to shoot at one’s own comrades, with whom one has stood side by side for 8 or 10 years in the struggle for an ideal, and who then failed, is the most bitter thing that can happen to a man. There was not a single person in the room who did not know that this very man had coordinated the slaughter of those comrades from a telephone while Guring served sandwiches to messengers in the lobby.
General vonfr, who had not participated in the operations, was invited by Guring to the champagne celebration that followed the murders. Wol, who was present, recalled that despite all his social skills, he could not manage to approach the general. The room filled with black uniforms was affecting his nerves. His face twitched nervously and the glass of sect trembled in his hand during the first sip.
Runes, skulls, and eternal flames. The secret liturgy of the SS. In the heart of West Failia, near the city of Padborn on the edge of the Tuturberg forest, where in the year 9 of our era, the Germanic warrior Arminius the Kuskan had destroyed three Roman legions under General Publius Quintilius Varys.
There stands a triangular 17th century castle called Woolsburg. Himmler discovered it in November of 1933 during one of his inspection trips through the region. He leased it that same year from the district of Buran for a symbolic rent of 100 German marks annually. The historical associations with Germanic resistance to Rome were exactly the type of resonance he needed for what he had in mind.
He presented the project publicly as a school for the SS. It was almost certainly a screen to protect the secret and avoid ridicule. Because what Veilsberg became in his imagination was something radically different. The equivalent of King Arthur’s Camelot or the Monsulvat of the Knights of the Grail.
The secret sanctum sanctorum of the elite order of the SS closed to the uninitiated. A year after leasing it, in a speech before senior SS officers, Himmler pronounced what was for him the essence of the entire enterprise. Never forget that we are a nightly order from which one cannot retire, to which one is recruited by blood, and in which one remains in body and soul as long as one lives on this earth.
The project absorbed years of forced labor from prisoners of the nearby Needhagen concentration camp, who built the extensions under conditions that caused a documented number of deaths. Himmler commissioned a circular room in the north tower known informally as the King Arthur’s room with 12 solid oak chairs arranged around a round table for the 12 senior SS officers who formed his inner circle.
Beneath that meeting room was a crypt designed to house the burial urns of those very men complete with a ventilation system to maintain an eternal flame. On the floor of that crypt, embedded in the stone was the 12 spoke wheel known as the Schwartza sauna, the black sun. A symbol drawn from the ornamentation of medieval Germanic weapons that Himmler turned into one of the darkest emblems of SS mysticism and which decades later would be adopted by farright groups all over the world.
Himmler was a voracious reader of books on medieval chivalry, the Crusades, the Holy Grail, Nordic mysticism, and Viking sagas. Breitman writes that he had an undeniable mystical streak, although he might also have believed that a certain mysticism was operationally necessary to maintain the ideological cohesion of his organization.
The very tone of the internal SS documents with their appeals to blood, honor, sacrifice, and eternal camaraderie reflected that impulse. Parallel to that world of medieval rights, Himmler supervised the construction of an industry of murder with industrial and bureaucratic precision.
Both dimensions coexisted without apparent contradiction in his mind. The ritual dimension of the SS extended far beyond the castle. Himmler had commissioned Brigard Furer Carl Maria Vistor, an officer who claimed to possess supernatural contact with the ancient Germans and who was either a fraud or clinically affected to design SS birth, baptism, and marriage ceremonies to replace their Christian equivalents.
In 1936, Vistor officiated the baptism of the son of Carl Wolf, Himmler’s agitant. The newborn received not a Christian name, but a string of four Nordic names headed by Thorisman, the Nordic god of lightning. The right included the unfolding of a blue ribbon of loyalty, a silver jug, and a birth spoon.
The word God was written in the SS baptism documents with a single T, the supposed ancient Germanic spelling to differentiate it from the conventional Christian God. Himmler had designed everything, the liturgy, the symbolism, the spelling. He had built not an organization but a church without Christ in which he was the pope. His recording habits extended even to that domain.
In his office, he kept a card file of gift records, color-coded by category, green for people to whom Himmler sent gifts, red for those who sent them to him. Each card recorded the name and rank of the recipient, the name of the spouse, the number of children, the address, the date of birth, the type of salutation Himmler used in his correspondence, and a list of all exchanged gifts with their date and reason.
The level of detail was so meticulous that he noted whether the recipient had failed to send him a thank you note. a man who organized the industrial murder of millions of people, kept a biblometric track of Christmas cards received and sent. Both things, the machinery of extermination and the gift cards were expressions of the same central impulse to control, to record, to archive, to leave nothing outside the system.
Vivevilsburg was also the setting for one of the most revealing aspects of Himmler’s narcissism, the creation of an SS ring of honor, the Aaron ring, which he personally sent to the most prominent members of the order. It was a silver ring engraved with a stylized skull and Nordic runes. The first documented delivery dates back to December of 1933.
Hild Debrandt, one of the first recipients, responded by thanking him for something he described as much more than a gift, a proud and binding oath of eternal and joyful struggle for a pure Germanic Germany. Himmler wanted an order with its own rituals, its own symbols, its own liturgy. What he could not obtain from the church he had abandoned, he built from scratch, using materials drawn from Viking sagas, medieval Germanic history, and his own bureaucratic fantasy of absolute loyalty.
The final fate of Wulesburg Castle carries a severe historical justice. In the final days of the war, as American troops approached Powderborn, a minor SS commander ordered the castle to be dynamited so it would not fall into enemy hands. The explosion partially destroyed the building. The eternal flames that Himmler had designed for his Knights Crypt never burned.
The castle was rebuilt after the war and today is a museum dedicated to documenting the history and crimes of the SS. 50,000 stolen children, the reproductive arm of SS racial engineering. In December of 1935, Himmler founded the Lebans organization whose name means fountain of life. He presented it publicly as a network of maternity homes to support single mothers of valuable blood and as a demographic policy measure intended to increase the birth rate among racially suitable families.
It was considerably more than that and its ramifications extended throughout occupied Europe with consequences that still generate legal disputes in several countries. [music] Lebans was the reproductive arm of the SS’s racial engineering. Its homes received single pregnant women whose children had been conceived with men who passed the program’s racial requirements.
They were guaranteed medical care, food, absolute discretion, and a certificate that normalized the child’s situation before the state. The program was financed through mandatory salary deductions from SS members calculated according to rank and number of children. A 27-year-old single captain surrendered 1% of his salary.
A 34year-old general with three children surrendered 3 and a4%. The logic was to incentivize the birth rate within the proper rank. The fewer children, the higher the deduction. Members under 26 years of age contributed nothing, reflecting the doctrine that an SS member should not marry before that age. Those who already had four children did not contribute either.
They had fulfilled their reproductive quotota with the nation. Himmler was the president of the Lebansborn board of directors and personally supervised every aspect of its operation from the diets in the delivery rooms to the runic logos for the letterheads of official correspondence. In 1938 he removed it from the control of the SS race and settlement main office to place it directly under his own personal staff.
The first home opened in Steinhuring near Munich in 1936. In practice, the facilities also served for extrammarital affairs of some senior SS officers shielded by the systems discretion. SS Oberenfurer Jurgen Stroop, the very man who liquidated the Warsaw ghetto in 1943, declared to Polish journalist Kazmir Moaskki that his visits to Lebansborn had the charm of a hotel fling or a secret relationship.
When Mochi asked if his wife knew, he replied, “She never knew.” But the most disturbing dimension of Lebans was not in Germany, but in the occupied territories. Following the invasion of Poland, Norway, France, and other countries, SS units identified children with features considered sufficiently Nordic and inducted them into the program to be Germanized and assigned to German families.
The process was in some cases voluntary for the families of origin. In others, it involved extreme pressure and in the most severe documented cases, it was direct kidnapping. Estimates of the number of children taken from their families through these mechanisms in the occupied territories range between 50,000 and 200,000 depending on the sources and the methodology used.
The majority never returned to their countries of origin. In Poland, where the process was most intensive, postwar search commissions could only identify and return a small percentage of them. Himmler’s view of women documented in his youth diaries and his speeches had nothing to do with the real women he knew.
He described the proper man in his relationship with a woman on three simultaneous levels. As a beloved child who must be guided and if necessary punished because she is weak and irrational. As a loyal wife and companion in battles who fights in life without chaining or limiting the spirit of the man.
And as a goddess at whose feet to bow in hours of inner peace. That abstract and deeply paternalistic trinity was the framework within which he organized his entire reproductive policy. Women were vessels for racial continuity, not beings with their own will. Libbons was the logical consequence of that vision. Dr. Russia and the experiments that Himmler personally supervised.
Himmler took an active and personal interest in the medical experiments performed on concentration camp prisoners. He was not a passive observer or a distant administrator who delegated those decisions to subordinates. Padfield and Brightman document his direct involvement, his personal initiatives, and his specific enthusiasm for concrete projects, noting that the most useless ones in terms of practical medical results were carried out precisely at his suggestion.
The altitude experiment subjected prisoners to low pressure chambers that simulated the conditions of free fall from great heights or explosive depressurization in flight. The stated goal was to study the physiological survival limits of Luftvafa pilots. The doctor responsible was Dr.
Ziggmund Rasher who had come to Himmler’s attention through his mistress, the singer Nini Deal, with whom Himmler had had a relationship in the past whose exact nature was never documented. Rasher received funds from the SS Anurerba organization, an honorary rank of Untorm Fura, and access to the prisoners at Dhau. The pressure chamber installed there was a wooden and metal cabinet approximately 1 m wide by 2 m high with an observation window.
Prisoners were placed inside connected to instruments recording their vital functions and subjected to depressurization up to altitudes of 21 km. Some experiments ended with the death of the subject. The records of Rasher’s own wife in a letter to Himmler dated April 13th, 1942, described how her husband had performed alone during Easter, the experiments for which his colleague Dr.
Roberg would have had scruples and would have shown compassion. The letter opened with a fusive thanks for the chocolates Himmler had sent to the couple. Himmler annotated the letter with his own observations and archived it. The file survived. Of approximately 150 subjects subjected to the altitude experiments, about half died during the sessions or as a consequence of them.
Rasher and Roberg subjected themselves to an ascent. Rasher reached 12 km with an oxygen mask before stopping the test, describing the pain as the sensation that half of his body was being crushed between presses and his head shattered. He did not extend that forbearance to his subjects, some of whom were taken without masks, to altitudes that Rasher himself had not reached.
The freezing experiments subjected naked prisoners to immersion in ice water or to exposure to the winter cold outdoors in Poland for periods of several hours. The reanimation that most interested Himmler was that which used the body heat of living women placed naked next to the frozen prisoners. A method that SS doctors debated internally over whether or not it constituted a morally acceptable practice within the experimental protocol.
That debate held in the context of experiments in which subjects were methodically murdered is one of the most disturbing documents in the archive of Nazi medicine. The food substitute experiment was proposed from within Himmler’s industrial circle of friends. Wilhelm Kepler, Hitler’s economic adviser and liaison with business circles, had commissioned chemist Arthur Imhausen to develop synthetic fats from German coal to reduce dependency on food imports.
To test the effects on human health, Kepler and the company managers utilized concentration camp prisoners. Breitman documents that over a 3-year period, approximately 12,000 prisoners from the Saxonhausen camp received diets containing those artificial fats. In December of 1939, Kepler notified Himmler that the formula was now suitable for cooking.
Himmler immediately ordered his head of SS Economic Enterprises, Oswald Pole, to contact the company to build a synthetic fat factory in Awitz, where slave labor would reduce costs to zero. Guring blocked the project due to competition with his own state-owned economic conglomerate. The Immhausen family did not disappear from the historical map.
Decades later, Arthur Imhausen’s son, Jurgen Imhausen Hippensteel, would be arrested and convicted for supplying Libya with equipment and blueprints for the construction of a poison gas plant. Minsk 1941. Himmler vomited at the edge of the pit and stopped nothing. In the summer of 1941, probably in the final days of July or the first days of August, Himmler flew in his personal Junas 52 to Minsk to visit the headquarters of Enzat’s grouper B, the extermination group operating in Bellarus under SS Grippenfura Arthur
Neabber. By that time, the Inats group had been executing Jews on mass for weeks along the entire Eastern front. The tally from August 7th, 1941 for that specific region recorded 37,810 dead. It was the work of 3 weeks. Neighbor met him at the Minsk airport. He took him to his headquarters, the former building of Stalin’s police, where the officers and non-commissioned officers of the Einats grouper had been assembled to listen to the Reichfura.
What Himmler said there was not recorded in any document. There only exists the version of Carl Wolf, his agitant, who constructed his post-war account to minimize his own responsibility before the courts. According to Wolf, Himmler learned almost accidentally that an execution of 100 Jewish spies and saboturs was scheduled for that day and decided to witness it.
“It is good that I can see it myself for once,” he said. Padfield reconstructs the scene in detail based on several testimonies. Two pits had been dug in an open field, each about 8 m long, 2 m wide, and 2 m deep. A firing squad of 12 men was lined up next to one of them. The victims had been taken beforehand to a forest half a kilometer away so that the groups waiting would not hear the shots.
A truck brought the first group. Ragged figures, mostly young men, some with tears streaming down their cheeks. Two of them upon stepping down from the truck threw themselves to the ground and hugged the knees of their guards, begging for their lives. They were pushed toward the pits and forced to lie face down on the dirt at the bottom.
Himmler positioned himself at the edge of the trench with his arms crossed over his chest, his lips pressed tight, the dark arches of his eyebrows raised, looking down to the bottom. The volley of 12 rifles, the metallic rattle of bolts chambering rounds, another volley, and another.
Wolf saw Himmler convulse violently, run his hand over his face, and stagger. He approached and pulled him away from the edge. Himmler’s face was almost green. He pulled out his handkerchief. He vomited. He did not order the executions to stop. He did not modify the instructions. He spoke with the men carrying out the executions to tell them that he understood the burden weighing upon them, that history would remember them, that they were doing what was necessary for the survival of the German people, and that he would bear that responsibility with them. He then
expressed concern for the psychological hygiene of the executioners and requested that alternative methods be studied. That criterion, the psychological protection of the executioners, was one of the factors that accelerated the development of the industrial gassing system in the extermination camps.
Killing with gas required less direct eye contact between the executioner and the victim, reduced the psychological burden on the SS personnel, and allowed the process to be scaled up without the human limits imposed by individual shootings over a pit. From the Baltic to the Black Sea, the continental manhunt of the Einats Groupen.
When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union on June 22nd, 1941 in Operation Barbarosa, four mobile killing units called Insatin advanced in the immediate rear of the army. These were units composed of personnel from the Gestapo, the Creo, the SD, and the Ordnung Polyai, reinforced by Vaffan SS troops, and crucially by local auxiliaries recruited from Baltic, Ukrainian, and Bellarusian populations who brought their own hatreds accumulated during years of Soviet occupation.
In Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Ukraine, there were communities that had witnessed the Soviet deportations of 1940 and 1941, and who in some cases viewed the Germans as liberators. That energy was channeled by the SS units with cold efficiency. The methods were uniform across thousands of kilometers of front. Jewish communities were summoned under administrative pretexts, forced to hand over their belongings, documents, and valuables led to the outskirts of the towns, forced to strip and stand next to previously dug pits or to dig the very
ones that would receive them and shot dead. The men of the squad fired while standing on the edges of the pits. The wounded were finished off. The pits were covered with earth, and the column moved on to the next town. Adolf Iikman, head of the Jewish department of the Gustapo, traveled to the front by order of Müller himself to witness the executions and report back.
In Minsk, he saw shooters with toteen cop skull insignia firing at people in a pit already filled with corpses. In Lvof, he arrived after the pit had already been covered, but blood was bubbling up from the ground like what he described in his trial in Jerusalem as a geyser. Those images, Iman declared, never left him. In Barbya, a deep ravine located on the outskirts of Kev on the days of September 29th and 30th 1941’s group of sea with the support of order police units executed 33,771 people.
It was the record of a single action in a single location in 2 days. The report was sent to Berlin by Tellex as part of the usual bureaucratic routine and filed in the RSHA statistics under special treatments. By the end of 1942, the Einats Grupen and cooperating units had killed more than a million and a half people.
Padfield describes that continental manhunt with words that should not be necessary but are. From the Baltic to the Black Sea, across thousands of villages and cities on a scale that no image or word can fully encompass. The most conservative historical estimates placed the total victims of the Inzat group, the order police and auxiliary units at more than 2 million people before the extermination camp system assumed the main weight of the process.
There is a document from that period that condenses the bureaucratic coldness of the system with an almost unbearable precision. The Jerger report prepared by the commander of Enzat’s commando 3, Carl Jerger, and dated December 1st, 1941. It is a 38-page list in which Jerger enumerates by date, location, and exact number each action carried out by his unit in Lithuania between July and November of 1941.
The numbers are broken down by category: Jewish men, Jewish women, Jewish children. In those pages of tallies, the total accumulated by December 1st, 1941, was 137,346 people. The report concludes with Jerger’s sentence expressing his satisfaction at having achieved the objective of making Lithuania Judenfry free of Jews with the exception of work Jews and their families.
That document reached the RSHA archives in Berlin where it was filed, cataloged, and presumably read by Himmler or his staff. It was just one among hundreds of similar reports. The final solution was not born in Vanzi. It was born in Himmler’s mind before. The Vanzy conference took place on January 20th, 1942 at an elegant villa on the shores of the lake of the same name on the outskirts of Berlin.
It brought together 15 senior officials of the Reich, representatives of the SS, the SD, the Foreign Ministry, the Interior Ministry, the General Government of Poland, the 4-year plan office, and other agencies to coordinate the implementation of what the minutes formerly termed the final solution to the Jewish question in Europe.
From that meeting, only one document survived the war. The minutes drafted by Adolf Iikman and signed by Reinhard Hydrich. The minutes put the number of Jews in Europe to be subjected to the treatment at 11 million. It details the methodology with the coldness of a business memorandum. In the forced labor of major infrastructure projects in the eastern regions, able-bodied Jews would be employed under conditions that would naturally eliminate the greater part.
Those who survived, representing the most resilient and therefore most dangerous part, would have to be treated accordingly. The most complicated cases, the mestzos of first and second degree were the subject of classification tables with exceptions and application criteria. Himmler did not attend. The Vanzi conference was not the moment when the extermination was decided.
That moment had arrived months earlier, and by January of 1942, the extermination camps were already built or under construction. What Vanzi coordinated was the logistics of implementation on a continental scale. which agencies would be responsible for which populations, how rail transport would be organized, what to do with the Jews of allied countries.
Brightman argues based on the analysis of Himmler’s appointment books and his notes from meetings with Hitler that the decision to proceed with systematic extermination was made by Himmler in agreement with Hitler well before Vanzi, most likely in the context of preparations for the Eastern campaign in the first half of 1941. What decades of historiographical debate have established is that Himmler was not a passive executive of orders, but an active planner who in some aspects of Jewish policy was more radical than Hitler himself. And that the absence of
written and signed orders from the Furer is explained by the way both communicated their most sensitive decisions verbally without leaving a documentary trail following Himmler’s practice of never writing down what could be said. Breitman concludes in what constitutes perhaps the central thesis of his work that the idea of executing Jews was an essential element of the plans from the beginning.
Although a complete program like the final solution came later, the evolution of the planning had more to do with the geography, scale, and methods of extermination than with any shift from a moderate objective toward a radical one. In other words, the historioggraphical debate between planners and improvisers may have been poorly framed from the beginning because it was not a question of whether to kill but of how to organize the machinery to do so on a continental scale with the minimum waste of resources and the maximum
concealment. That operational question is the one Himmler answered during the years from 1939 to 1942. The recording that survived. Himmler explains the Holocaust to his generals. On October 4th, 1943, at the city hall of Posen in occupied Poland, Himmler delivered one of the most chilling speeches that 20th century history has preserved to senior SS officers.
It was recorded on magnetic tape. The recording survived the war. The following day, he delivered another similar speech to a broader group of Nazi leaders. By that time the extermination camps of Belzek, Soior, Trebbinka, Maidan, Chelno, and Awitz Berkanau had been operating for more than a year.
In Trebinka, where operations had begun in July of 1942, between 700,000 and 900,000 people had already been murdered. At Avitz Burkanau, the process continued on an increasing scale. Yet, no prior official Nazi document had spoken with such clarity about what was being done. Himmler spoke without euphemisms. He described the extermination of European Jews by calling the action by its name.
He explained to his generals and high-ranking officials that the irrevocable decision had been made not to do the work in an incomplete manner. That meant, he declared, not exterminating the men while leaving the women and children to become the generation of Avengers. That sentence uttered in a calm and methodical voice before high-ranking witnesses has no equivalent in any other document in the history of organized crime, the public and deliberate exposition before an audience of generals and officials of the reasoning that justified the
systematic murder of children. He also said that this burden, the responsibility of having carried out the task and having kept it in absolute secrecy, would be taken to the grave by everyone present without exception. He described having managed to ensure that the men of the SS remained morally upright through the process of extermination, which was in itself, he stated, a glorious chapter of their history that could never be written publicly, but which everyone present had to know and honor. He referred to
himself and his men as people who had performed something harsh but necessary out of love for their people. On the whole, we can say that we have fulfilled this most difficult duty out of love for our people and our inside, our soul, our character has not suffered any damage from it.
The audio of the Posen speech was played at the Nuremberg trials. The defendants sitting in the dock listened to it in their headphones with expressions that the trial photographers captured. It left no room for any interpretation. What the Posen speech reveals about Himmler’s psychology goes beyond the mere evidence of a crime. It reveals the way he related to responsibility.
Instead of hiding or diluting it, he embraced it ostentatiously before his peers. He presented it as a glorious and solitary burden that he and his chosen ones were the only ones capable of sustaining. In that presentation, there is something that historians have noted as deeply representative of how Himmler saw himself, not as an official executing orders, but as the bearer of a historical mission that exceeded ordinary moral categories.
The same dissociation between the crime and its name that functioned in his written documents functioned also in his self-perception. He had performed something terrible, yes, but he had performed it with decency, with loyalty, with the sacrifice of enduring the burden without breaking. In that logic, the decency of the executioner was measured not in terms of the victims, but in terms of the psychological resistance of the executioner before the task.
There is also an aspect of the Posan speech that is rarely examined with sufficient attention. The function it fulfilled for the audience. By speaking so explicitly before his generals and high-ranking officials, Himmler made them explicit accompllices. Everyone in that room by listening to those words and not rising to protest by leaving no record of objection became bound to the secret in a way that left no escape.
It was a mechanism of cohesion through forced complicity. The silence of that room was not just consent. It was a lock. Action 105. Himmler ordered the exumation and burning of his own victims. As the war turned against Germany and the Soviet armies advanced, reclaiming territories where the earliest massacres had taken place, Himmler ordered the launch of Operation 105, also known as action 105, between 1942 and 1943.
Its objective was the systematic and most complete destruction possible of the evidence of the extermination. Special commandos known as sder commandos 105 frequently composed of Jewish prisoners under SS guard received orders to exume the mass graves where the victims of the einsat groupin had been buried.
They extracted the corpses, burned them on ps made of wood and railroad tracks stacked in alternating layers, crushed the bones that survived the cremation using portable mills, and scattered the ashes. The work tools were in some cases manufactured by the very prisoners who later used them. Once the task was finished in each locality, those prisoners were generally executed to eliminate testimonies of both the original crimes and the concealment process.
In Babbya, where more than 100,000 people had been massacres in different phases, the commandos worked for weeks in the autumn of 1943. In Chelno, the first extermination camp operated with gas vans where more than 300,000 people had died. They proceeded in a similar manner. In Trebinka, operation 105 was particularly ambitious.
A fictitious farm was planted on the grounds of the camp, and a Ukrainian settler was moved there with his family to give the appearance of an ordinary agricultural establishment. The operation was partially successful in some locations and completely insufficient in others. The scale of what had occurred made it impossible to erase the traces completely.
When the Allied armies reached the camps, the architecture of the crime was still standing. The piles of ashes and bones found at Trebinka, Soibbor, and Belzac, despite the efforts of action 105 were evidence that no erasure attempt had been able to eliminate entirely. There is a final paradox in Action 105 that deserves attention.
The very prisoners who were used to destroy the evidence of what had been done to the previous victims were in the process also victims waiting to be eliminated upon completion of the task. Several of those s commandos managed to escape during desperate revolts such as the one at Soibbor in October of 1943 or the one at Trebinka in August of the same year.
The testimonies of those survivors were crucial for subsequent knowledge of what had occurred in those camps. In the attempt to erase the evidence, the system left alive some of the most detailed and irreplaceable witnesses of the extermination. The paradox is that action 105 designed for silence contributed indirectly to allowing some of the most vivid voices to speak.
Traitor by the BBC, how Hitler expelled Himmler while Berlin was burning. In the final months of the war, as the Third Reich crumbled under the weight of imminent military defeat from the east and the west simultaneously, Himmler attempted one of the most audacious and at the same time most delusional maneuvers in the entire history of the conflict to secretly negotiate Germany’s surrender to the Western Allies, offering himself as a valid and responsible interlocutor to build the peace.
The instrument of those negotiations was Count Folk Bernardot, a representative of the Swedish Red Cross, with whom Himmler held talks in April of 1945. Himmler’s proposal was clear in its fantasy. Germany would surrender to the Western powers while keeping the Eastern front open. The German armies would continue to fight the Soviets while negotiating with the Westerners.
In that scenario, Himmler imagined that he could retain some relevant role in postwar Germany as a valid interlocutor and as a guarantor of the anti-communism that was in his view the true common interest between Germany and the Anglo-Saxon allies. It was a fantasy without any foundation in the political or military reality of that moment.
Bernardot transmitted the proposal. The allies rejected it outright. The policy of unconditional surrender agreed upon in Casablanca in January of 1943 left no room for side maneuvers of that kind and much less for negotiations with the man who had organized the systematic extermination of 6 million European Jews. The news of Himmler’s secret attempts reached Hitler in the Berlin bunker still alive beneath the burning city through a BBC radio broadcast.
The reaction was a fury that those present described as almost inhuman. Hitler expelled Himmler from all his posts, declared him a traitor to the Reich and to the Furer, and ordered his arrest. The man who had built the most efficient police state in modern history, who had been for 12 years the most faithful instrument of Hitler’s will, was dismissed by radio over the BBC while Soviet tanks closed the final ring around Berlin.
It is one of the most revealing endings of the era. The architect of terror reduced to a traitor by the very system he had built. 16 Allied checkpoints and the man with the patch whom no one recognized. With the Reich disintegrated, Berlin in ruins and an arrest warrant issued by the man who had been his leader for 12 years, Himmler began his escape on May 1st, 1945, the day after Hitler’s suicide.
He dressed in the uniform of a field police sergeant, the type of gray green uniform worn by tens of thousands of low-ranking German policemen in the chaos of defeat. He removed the glasses that had accompanied him throughout his entire adult life. He placed a black leather patch over his left eye. He took identity documents under the name of Hinrich Hitzinger, a German sentenced to death by a Reich people’s court whose papers he had kept, as he later told his wife, anticipating they might be useful in an extreme situation.
He traveled with two aids, the three of them trying to pass as ordinary deserters in the flow of millions of displaced Germans. They crossed the Ela River in a fishing boat. They walked south through northern Germany, which was filled with soldiers from all armies, refugees, and the chaos of the immediate post-war period.
On May 20th, 1945, 15 days after the official end of the war in Europe, Himmler and his two companions separated from the main group. That very day they were detained by a Soviet patrol that did not recognize them and handed them over to a group of British soldiers. Himmler preferred to be in British hands. He considered the Anglo-Saxons part of the Nordic family of races, racial brothers with whom he hoped the common Soviet enemy would create some kind of understanding.
The three were taken to the prisoner of war camp at Seos Babramdda where they were provisionally registered as possible deserters. They were then transferred to interrogation center 031 in Barnstead near Lunberg on May 23rd, 1945. Himmler was brought into a room with Captain Tom Sylvester. The guards left. The man with the black patch and the sergeant’s uniform removed the patch.
He put on his glasses. In a soft voice, and without any dramatic gesture, he uttered two words: Hinrich Himmler. Sylvester later described his behavior during the following hours as perfectly correct, almost jovial at certain moments. He ate, washed himself, and repeatedly asked about his aids, showing what Sylvester interpreted as genuine concern for them.
It was impossible for me to believe that this man was the arrogant character that the press had portrayed before and during the war, Sylvester wrote in his report. the obsessive archavist who lit the fire over his own documents. In the final days of the war in Europe, while his flight continued, Himmler took active and carefully planned measures to destroy his own historical record.
It was the culmination of a lifelong adult habit. The very same person who had meticulously recorded every phone call, every letter, and every visit for over a decade in power dedicated himself with the same meticulousness to erasing those records before they could fall into enemy hands.
His longtime secretary, Erica Lawren, received specific instructions. She traveled from Saltsburg to the SS Castle of Fishhorn near Hitler’s mountain headquarters in Oberazaltzburg in the final days of April of 1945. Two SS officers accompanied her to a room where a steel filing cabinet stood. Laurens pulled all the contents out of the cabinet, spread them across the floor to visually inspect them, put them into a laundry basket, and carried them alongside one of the officers to the building’s furnace.
Before beginning the burning, she noticed that among the contents were personal letters from Himmler’s family, though the greater part consisted of official files. Her job was to help her boss destroy his own record of what he had done. Brightman notes that the destruction was partially effective and partially unsuccessful. The files that reached the National Archives of the United States and the Federal Archives of Germany and Cooblins represented only a fraction of the documentation that Himmler had generated during his years in power. Some files
had been destroyed in the chaotic final months of the war. Others had been deliberately eliminated beforehand. But the scale of the bureaucracy that Himmler had built was so colossal that even systematic destruction left a volume of material that researchers still study today. The deepest irony of all that destruction is that Himmler was simultaneously the Nazi figure best documented due to his methodical obsession with records.
And one of those who worked most actively to make that documentation disappear before the courts. The tension between those two opposing impulses to record and to erase, to document and to deny, runs through his entire trajectory as the darkest common thread of his character. A single impulse that in its positive form created the archives and in its negative form lit the furnace.
Brightman points out in his work that precisely this incomplete destruction left enough material to reconstruct Himmler’s role in the final solution with a level of detail that history would otherwise hardly have possessed. The files burned at Fishhorn failed to erase those that remained in Washington, in Cooblins, in the Berlin document center, in the National Archives of Keev, and in Yadvashm.
Himmler’s bureaucratic obsession had been so deep and had generated such a quantity of copies, cross records, and parallel correspondence for more than a decade that the destruction of one part only highlighted the abundance of what could not be burned. The man who tried to erase his history ended up being paradoxically one of the best documented Nazi perpetrators in the entire Reich.
The architect of the thousand-year Reich buried without a name in a misty moore. On May 26th, 1945, the British general staff ordered that Himmler’s corpse be buried in absolute secrecy at some point in the Lunberg Heath. Four specifically selected soldiers carried out the burial without any markers.
No public record of the exact location was drawn up. The military documents that might indicate the site were classified. The stated objective was to prevent the site from becoming a sanctuary for those nostalgic for Nazism and also to avoid any parallel with Hitler’s grave. The Soviets had incinerated his remains in Berlin precisely so that no concrete place to visit would remain.
For 69 years, Himmler’s grave was one of the best kept secrets in the immediate history of the Second World War. In 2014, a team of archaeologists working in the Lunberg Heath located skeletal remains in a location consistent with available historical testimonies and with the approximate coordinates recovered from partially declassified British military archives.
Subsequent forensic analyses, which included DNA comparisons with identified descendants of the Himmler family, confirmed in 2016 with high probability that the remains corresponded to Hinrich Himmler. The news was received with little enthusiasm. There was no possible surprise, only the confirmation that the heath had kept it secret for more than seven decades. There is no monument.
[music] There is no signage. There is no public place to visit. The man who built a medieval castle for the elite of his black order with a crypt of eternal flames. for the sarcophagi of his 12 most faithful knights, who planned to the last detail the setting of his own death as the feudal lord of a millennium he was building, who had aspired to be the architect of a civilization that would last a thousand years, and whose spiritual center would shine in the heart of Westfailia for eternity, ended up in an unmarked pit in a misty moore
in northern Germany, buried in less than an hour by four anonymous soldiers under instructions to leave no trace of any kind. And there remains even today a question that historians have not been able to close completely. The question that the destruction of the Fishhorn archives made permanently insoluble in its finest details.
To what extent did the actual scope of the final solution as it was executed correspond exactly to what Hitler had authorized and to what extent did Himmler act at certain moments and in certain specific decisions with an autonomy that exceeded what his furer had explicitly foreseen? The destroyed diaries, the conversations never transcribed, the meetings without minutes, the files burned at Fishhorn carry that question into the territory of the permanently open.
It is the last secret that Hinrich Himmler took with him to the Lunberg Heath.
