Read Heinrich Himmler : A Life for Free Online Page A

of the Nazi dictatorship, on the one hand to create all-embracing plans for the power complex he controlled, and on the other to allocate to the individual component organizations of his empire tasks connected with the realization of these plans that, from the regime’s perspective, not only made sense ideologically and in terms of power politics, but also gave the impression of forming a coherent whole. Although he was extremely careful in each individual case to obtain Hitler’s confirmation of any new powers, he was nevertheless the one who was able to combine these separate powers tactically into a system. In this way he made successive additions to his areas of responsibility, until finally, at the end of the war, he was probably the most powerful Nazi politician after Hitler.
    And yet Himmler’s career cannot be interpreted one-sidedly in terms of a continuous and persistent process of realizing existing ideological tenets. Although a particular theme—the refrain of the eternal struggle of ‘Germanic’ heroes against ‘Asiatic’ subhumans—runs through his mind and actions, this way of seeing the world was so general and vague that he could adapt it to fit any political situation. This ability to combine ideology flexibly with power politics was his real strength.
    It should finally be emphasized that Nazi policy took its particular explosiveness and dynamic to a considerable extent from the manner in which Heinrich Himmler brought together the police, the camp system, racial selection, settlement policy, combating of partisans, forced-labour programmes, and the mobilization of ‘Teutons’ and ‘ethnic Germans’. From this an SS and police complex arose, the internal coherence and full scope of which can be understood only if the person who united all these powers is taken into account. If Himmler had been replaced in the 1930s by someone else, this specific and highly dangerous network of differentpowers would not have come into being. If, on the other hand, these responsibilities had been distributed among several Nazi politicians as separate domains, Nazi policy could not have led to its dreadful consequences in quite the same way.
    If we consider Himmler’s empire and the plans and utopian fantasies he developed in their entirety, it is also evident that he had amassed a potential for destruction that far exceeded the catastrophes that Nazism itself actually caused: for the systematic murder of the European Jews, with which above all the name Himmler is connected today, was not in his eyes the ultimate goal of his policies but rather the precondition for much more extensive plans for a bloody ‘new ordering’ of the European continent.

Endnotes
     
PROLOGUE
     
1 . Himmler and his companions were apprehended by two freed Soviet POWs who were deployed to reinforce a British patrol; see ‘Die letzten Tage von Heinrich Himmler. Neue Dokumente aus dem Archiv des Föderalen Sicherheitsdienstes’, presented and with an introduction by Boris Chavkin and A. M. Kalganov, in
Forum für osteuropäische Ideen- und Zeitgeschichte
, 4 (2000), 251–84.
     
2 . On Himmler’s time in Camp 31 see the report Selvester wrote in 1963 at the request of the Himmler biographers Roger Manvell und Heinrich Fraenkel, who subsequently used it in their biography (
Himmler: Kleinbürger und Massenmörder
(Herrsching, 1981), 227 ff.). Before passing the report on to Manvell and Fraenkel, Selvester sent it for approval to the Public Relations Department of the War Office. The paragraph on the plan to drug Himmler (PRO, WO 32/19603) was crossed out. Written almost twenty years after the event, the report contains a number of inaccuracies, particularly with regard to the chronological sequence of events, as is clear from a comparison with the report written on 23 May 1945 by Smith, the chief interrogating officer, and the 2nd British Army communication concerning the events dated 24 May 1945. All these documents are in PRO, WO