Read Heinrich Himmler : A Life for Free Online

‘extermination through labour’, ensured the expansion of the concentration-camp system.
    From Himmler’s perspective the sequence of brilliant military victories won by the Wehrmacht from 1939 onwards was like a time-lapse, making the span of several generations that he had hitherto estimated as being necessary to establish a Greater Germanic Reich drastically shrink: in 1942 there seemed to him a window allowing him and his SS to turn ideas that had up to then been regarded as utopian into reality. What looked from hisstandpoint like a huge acceleration of historical processes and the entirely justified expectation of turning utopian dreams into reality in a very short time seems to me an absolutely decisive factor in explaining his actions in implementing the ‘Final Solution’ and organizing gigantomaniacal ‘plans for a new order’. Up to this point he had, in his own estimation, been ultimately successful with almost everything he had tackled. Nothing and nobody seemed capable of stopping him.
    Yet very shortly after this, at the end of 1942, came the turn in the war, and Himmler was forced to put his extensive plans on hold. If one examines more closely the diverse projects to which he had given powerful impetus, most in any case ran aground fairly swiftly: his projects for new settlements were inadequately carried out or ended in a fiasco; his plan to build bridgeheads in the ‘Germanic countries’ by forming alliances with local leaders and agencies willing to collaborate was largely unsuccessful; his own arms business never materialized; the ‘combating of bandits’ turned out to be a hopeless endeavour; the large-scale recruitment of ethnic Germans into the Waffen-SS weakened the position of German minorities in south-eastern Europe, and the recruitment of volunteers from ‘alien nations’ to the Waffen-SS had mainly negative results.
    Now he concentrated fully on what had always represented the core of his power: the exercise of violence and terror, with the help of which he now intended to guarantee the ‘security’ of the territory still dominated by Nazi Germany. By taking on further offices, in particular that of Reich Minister of the Interior and commander of the Reserve Army, towards the end of the war he to all intents and purposes united in his own person all the instruments of violence belonging to the Nazi state.
    Nevertheless, he was unable to stop resistance movements in the occupied territories, nor is there evidence to suggest that he had developed even the beginnings of a coherent idea of how to do so. The situation in Germany itself was, however, different: up to the military capitulation in May 1945 he was largely successful in what he had set himself in 1937 as his chief task in the event of a new war, namely, to cover the regime’s back in the ‘internal theatre of war’ inside Germany. The fact that the Third Reich did not collapse from within but only under the force of the Allied armies—a prolongation of its existence that cost millions of lives—really was to a considerable extent the work of Heinrich Himmler.
    In the final phase of the war Himmler tried for the very last time to redefine his role in the Third Reich: as an honest broker, who, acting fromallegedly humanitarian motives, was opening up the way for peace. He made efforts to establish contacts with the western Allies via neutral states, offering in the process the possibility of exchanging concentration-camp prisoners and even seeking to contact Jewish organizations—an absurd course of action that possibly underlines his tendency to indulge political illusions as much as his striving to adjust to whatever circumstances he found himself in. When these efforts failed and Hitler repudiated him in the final days of the war he took refuge in hectic activity, without finding anything with which to counter his inner or outer collapse.
    What is remarkable in all this is above all Himmler’s ability, in the course