Heinrich himmler biography summary organizer

Heinrich Himmler was born on October 7, 1900 to a middle-class family in Munich, Germany. In his early life, he had a strong desire to join the army. But World War I ended soon after he came of age to join the military, and restrictions placed on the German army in the Treaty of Versailles dismissed any chance of a military career. Instead, Himmler turned his focus to agriculture, and began studying for his degree at the Technical University of Munich. While attending the university, Himmler joined a German-nationalist student group where he began to read racist and nationalistic literature. Due to the political climate of the interwar years, such material was popular among right-wing radical Germans. By the time Himmler obtained his degree in 1922, he was a fanatic nationalist.

In August 1923, Himmler joined the Nazi Party. Idolizing the party’s leader, Adolph Hitler, Himmler quit his job and devoted his career to the party. On November 9, 1923, Himmler marched alongsi

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Heinrich Himmler

Heinrich Himmler was Reichsfuhrer-SS, head of the Gestapo and the Waffen-SS, Nazi Minister of the Interior from 1943 to 1945 and organizer of the mass murder of Jews in the Third Reich.

Himmler was born on October 7, 1900 in Munich, Germany. The son of a pious, authoritarian Roman Catholic schoolmaster who had once been tutor to the Bavarian Crown Prince, Himmler was educated at a secondary school in Landshut. He served as an officer cadet in the Eleventh Bavarian Regiment at the end of World War I, later obtaining a diploma in agriculture from Munich Technical High School where he studied from 1918 to 1922.

After working briefly as a salesman for a firm of fertilizer manufacturers, the young Himmler joined a para-military, nationalist organization and participated in the Munich Beer-Hall putsch of November 1923 as standard-bearer at the side of Ernst Rohm, Secretary to Gregor Strasser and his deputy district leader in Bavaria, Swabia and the Palatinate, he was

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Heinrich Himmler: A Life

Heinrich Himmler was an unremarkable looking man. Yet he was Hitler's top enforcer, in charge of the Gestapo, the SS, and the so-called Final Solution. We can only wonder, as biographer Peter Longerich asks, how could such a banal personality attain such a historically unique position of power? How could the son of a prosperous Bavarian Catholic public servant become the organizer of a system of mass murder spanning the whole of Europe?

In the first comprehensive biography of this murderous enigma, Longerich answers those questions with a superb account of Himmler's inner self and outward acts. Masterfully interweaving the story of Himmler's personal life and political career with the wider history of the Nazi dictatorship, Longerich shows how skillfully he exploited and manipulated his disparate roles in the pursuit of his far-reaching and grandiose objectives. Himmler's actual strength, he writes, consisted in redrawing every two or three years th