The Reichsfuehrer SS raised chickens and studied Russian.
Perhaps there is no such crime of the Nazi regime, to which the Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler would not have had a hand. And if the crimes are striking in their monstrosity, then the personality of the Reichsfuehrer strikes another - with mediocrity.
Agronomist by conviction
At the end of the war, the Swedish Count Folke Bernadotte negotiated with Himmler. "I did not find anything demonic in him," the Swede recalled.
Many, like Bernadotte, expected to see the fiend of hell. And they saw a rather awkward person, like a school teacher.
Heinrich Himmler was born into a family of respectable burghers. He was always respectful to his parents. “Daddy doesn't have to work that hard. Let him go out for a walk more often,”he writes in a letter to his mother. And when the mother died, the loving son stood all night at the tomb.
In his youth, Himmler made buns for a pensioner and read a book to a blind neighbor. It can probably be called sentimental. When the turkey died on the farm, Himmler cried all day. The Reichsfuehrer SS, who killed millions of people, was present at the execution only once. And fainted. And he decided that mass shootings were bad, they were too much on the nerves. This is how gas chambers appeared.
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Himmler dreamed of military service. And at the end of 1917 he entered the army. But he did not have a chance to fight: while he studied at the courses of ensigns and machine gunners, the war ended. Himmler wanted to continue serving, but his father decided that an officer was not a suitable profession for peacetime. And he sent Henry to study as an agronomist.
Oddly enough, this harmless profession had a major impact on the worldview of Himmler. He was convinced that the peasantry was the stronghold of the German nation. But the stronghold is not doing well. And the Jewish capital is to blame for this. In addition, the peasants lack land. But there is a lot of it in the east, where the Slavs live. Which must be enslaved, and the lands to populate with German peasants.
So in the inflamed mind of Himmler, the main enemies appear - the Jews and Slavs.
Agronomists, as you know, are engaged in selection, develop new varieties of plants. Himmler wants to breed a new human race - the Nordic race. And weed out the "unsuccessful" human material like weeds.
After getting married, Himmler started a farm. There he was engaged in the selection of chickens and turkeys. In the SS, he will also be engaged in selection. A candidate for an officer's rank must prove Aryan ancestry and provide information on ancestors from 1750. But this is not enough. The SS man must be proportionally built. The structure of the body was assessed by nine points - the ratio of the length of the legs and the body, the lower leg and the thigh, etc. Himmler even invented the ideal Aryan height - 170 centimeters. And the ideal age for raising offspring is 25 to 30 years old. At the same time, an SS officer could marry only with the personal permission of the Reichsfuehrer, attaching the bride's genealogy and her photograph in a bathing suit to the application.
The crazy agronomist-breeder dreamed that in 120 years all Germans would become the German-Nordic race, and exclusively blue-eyed blondes would lead the Reich. Himmler himself, by the way, was not at all blond.
At the head of the order
With such ideas - "blood and soil" - Himmler simply could not help but join the National Socialists. Indeed, in 1922 he meets with the leader of the stormtroopers Ernst Rem, and the next year he takes part in the "beer coup". Then he serves as a secretary to the prominent Nazi Georg Strasser. In 1934, on the "night of the long knives", the Himmler SS men will kill both Rem and Strasser.
Himmler's career in the NSDAP was not dizzying. For a long time, he considered himself a failure. “I am a talker and a talker. I don't have enough energy. I can't do anything,”Himmler writes in his diary. He seriously thinks about emigration - 14 diary entries for the years 1919-1924 are devoted to this. Nazi agronomist wants to leave for Turkey or Peru. Or engage in peasant labor in Russia. Himmler even learns Russian, although Soviet Russia is clearly not the best place to embody his crazy ideas.
Himmler needs an idol. You need a man to lean against. And such a person becomes Adolf Hitler. Himmler was in awe of the Fuhrer, called him the greatest brain of all times and peoples. And he did not appreciate him too highly. He considered him an uncreative, simple performer. When Hitler came to power in 1933, his closest associates occupied prominent government posts. And SS Reichsfuehrer Himmler got the modest post of policeman-president of Munich. But Himmler saddled the right horse - the police. In a police state, this is the foundation. And the SS - security detachments - are gradually turning into a kind of empire that controls the police, special services, concentration camps, and industrial enterprises.
True, Himmler was convinced that the SS was something like a knightly order. The Germans are the elite of the world, the SS are the elite among the Germans. Himmler is not only an agronomist, he is also a mystic, a lover of astrology and mythology. When dining, the SS Reichsfuehrer always invited 12 guests. They symbolized the 12 Knights of the Round Table of King Arthur.
Himmler communicates with the spirit of the Saxon king Heinrich the Birdcatcher, who died in the 10th century. Acquires the Wewelsburg castle for the SS, allegedly built by the Huns. According to the head of foreign intelligence Walter Schellenberg, the castle became "a kind of SS monastery, in which once a year the general of the order held meetings of the secret consistory." After the final victory of the Third Reich, Wewelsburg was to become the "center of the world."
Fortunately, there was no victory. At the end of the war, it turned out that Himmler, of course, was an ideological Nazi, but for the sake of saving his own skin he was ready to give up his principles. He negotiated with the allies for a separate peace, betraying his idol Hitler. Himmler once again plunged into a world of illusions, saw himself at the head of a revived Germany. Instead, a chewed-up poison capsule and death.
"Half a school teacher, half an eccentric fool," was how the Minister of Armaments Albert Speer described Himmler. Alas, there are times when eccentric fools decide the fate of peoples and continents. And the eccentric agronomists are turning into executioners, on whose account millions of victims.
I wanted to agree
At the end of the war, Himmler even met with a representative of the World Jewish Congress and promised to release Jews from the death camps.
Author: Gleb Stashkov