Heinrich Himmler (7 October 1900 – 23 May 1945) was the commander of the SS of Nazi Germany and a high-ranking member of the Nazi Party under Fuhrer Adolf Hitler. He was one of the men most responsible for the Holocaust and one of the most powerful men in the country. Himmler defected to the United Kingdom in April 1945 when Hitler sent men to arrest him due to his secret peace talks with the Allies, and he committed suicide in British captivity.
Biography[]
A young Himmler, 1919
Heinrich Himmler was born on 7 October 1900 in Munich in the Kingdom of Bavaria, German Empire to a middle-class Roman Catholic family. He was a sickly child, but in 1917 he was drafted into the Bavarian 11th Infantry Regiment during World War I. In August 1923, he joined the Nazi Party of Germany and joined Ernst Rohm's paramilitary unit that attempted to bring fascist leader Adolf Hitler to power in Bavaria in the Beer Hall Putsch. Although the coup failed, he helped Hitler to come to power in 1933 and was made his right-hand man alongside Joseph Goebbels. Himmler became the leader of the SS, a radical Nazi organization whose goals were to act as Hitler's personal military forces. During World War II, the SS were responsible for the deportation of Jews, homosexuals, Gypsies, intellectuals, Poles, mentally-ill people, disabled people, union workers, Catholics, and non-Nazis to concentration camps. They were responsible for their horrible treatment there and, in many cases, their murders. He was also responsible for the murders of anti-Nazi activists in Nazi-occupied territories and on-the-spot murders of "undesirables". 14,000,000 people died at his command, most of them people from Poland and the Soviet Union.
Downfall[]
Himmler in 1945
Later in World War II, Hitler posted Himmler in military command as the commander of Army Group Vistula. He performed poorly in command of the military and the Soviet Union gained much ground at the time of his command in 1944-1945. Gotthard Heinrici replaced him as commander of the army group, and Himmler began to realize that the war was lost. In April, he began secret peace talks with the Allied Powers, and Hitler ordered his men to arrest him. Himmler defected to the British to avoid Hitler's fury, and he committed suicide with a cyanide capsule after the war's end on 23 May.
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