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Heinrich Himmler: A Life ReviewThis book is a microscopic yet panoramic history of one of the most notorious men who has ever lived on this planet. As the author puts it:" The aim of this biography is to penetrate as far as possible the mystery of this man's personality and the motives underlying his deeds". To do so, Professor Longerich has reconstructed the development of his personality, its essential character traits and the typical behaviour patterns in its formative years,which extend into the start of Himmler's political career. From a small bodyguard he took over in 1929 he created in a very short time a paramilitary organization with elite pretensions sworn to preserve the top party leadership. He then got appointed by Hitler to the post of Chief of the German Police, which he intended to amalgamate with the SS to form a state proteection corps to provide comprehensive internal security. He became the chief of the SS organization which destroyed the lives of many millions of innocent people throughout Europe.In contrast to many other historians who saw the Holocaust as being the central aim of Kimmler's policy (a thesis supported by Richard Breitman and other respectable historians), Longerich claims that this was far from being so. Before discussing this aspect, it is worth writing about the structure and content of this magnificent volume.
It comes in six main parts divided into many sub-chapters and the first third of it is an exploration into the psyche and deeds of Himmler, who was born in 1900 and became part of a generation which suffered from a complex caused by having been too young to take an active role in WW1. Physically weak and emotionally inhibited, Himmler suffered from an attachment disorder in his social life which made it difficult for him to build up strong and lasting friendships. It was this factor which determined his behaviour towords the others in his adult life. Later, during the Weimar years, he was forced to take up a post as an assistant in a factory which produced fertilizers, after getting his diploma in agricultural studies. At this point he joined the German Nationalistic Party and around 1922-23 he gradually developed a coherent volkisch vision, which included a rejection of the Catholic faith, anti-Semitism, extreme nationalism, racism, a rejection of modernism combined with occult beliefs and Germanophile enthusiasms. He assumed the leadership of the SS when Nazism was on the point of rapidly becoming a mass movememnt and in only four years the SS grew to 50000 men.
This is where Longerich's book is at its best: it describes and analyzes in great detail to what extent Himmler had an impact on the daily life of his men. Himmler was regarded as the educator and a father figure to his SS men. He could act out his voyeuristic and manipulative tendencies by snooping into the private affairs of his SS med and their private spheres. Members of the SS were not to bond as mates but to submit to an iron discipline and employ the same reserved and social forms behind which Himmler concealed his own lack of social ease.
In June 1943, Himmler wrote to Ernst Kaltenbrunner asking him to inform SS man Wilhelm B., an official of the Alsace Gestapo, that Himmler was refusing his request to marry Frau Z., since she was older than him. Another case concerned Himmler's approval of a 17-year-old Unterscharfuhrer's marriage to a woman fourteen years older because she was expecting his child. Himmler prescribed four as being the smallest number of children to be expected in a good and healthy family. Everything was targeted in order to build the Third Reich and this by also developing a cult of the ancient Teutons, a reverence for the past and the drawing on the Ahnenerbe. All these elements were to be used in order to build a new order, a racial one, which would eliminate a collection of enemies which included communists, Freemasons, Jews, gypsies, asocials and homosexuals.
Here Professor Longerich makes his point very clear and succint: the Final Solution was only one major step in a series of actions whose purpose was to establish a new Reich by using a policy of unprecedented terror everywhere, or as he puts it, an "ideological and racist war of annihilation, decimating the Eastern countries (Poland, Russia), eliminating the ruling class by the destruction of millions of people with the help of his terror policy which would exploit more millions of survivors as slave labor for the construction of the new German Lebensraum, or living space".
From this point onwards, there is a gruesome description of the annihilation policies carried out by Himmler and his henchmen and his forces, his war against the partisans and the repression policies in the occupied territories, using the Waffen-SS for this purpose. The paradox was that the more the Third Reich headed toward its downfall, the more powerfull Himmler became. It was he who ordered the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto in January 1943. In the occupied Soviet territories at least 10000 gypsies and many more thousands of victims were murdered or sent to the crematoria in Poland.
However, when he realized that the war was lost somewhere around the middle of 1944, Himmler had been making various attempts to offer the Allied Jews who were in his power in exchange for foreign currencies or materials important for the war, presumably with the purpose of putting out feelers to probe the possibility of separate peace negotiations qith the Western powers. Having heard about this, Adolf Hitler flew into a rage and condemned Himmler as a traitor and expelled him from the party.
Himmler was now on the run but eventually surrendered himself to the British and then committed suicide. Thus ended the life of one of the most murderous evil men responsible for the Final Solution and for the murdering of many other millions of others. As chief of the SS, he commanded more than one million people, and in his capacity as the Interior Minister of the Reich he pursued a policy whose purpose was to create a new racial order in Europe. He was the man who desired to draft blue-eyed and tall Aryan men who could show family trees free of any inferior racial origins.
By drawing on tens of thousands of pages of documents and archives from seven countries, by checking many diaries and other pertinent documents and testimonies, Peter Longerich has written a magnificent and most impressive biography and historical work, a masterpiece which will definitely be unsurpassed for many years to come. This he has done in a very long but extremely readable 1000-page-long book using primary and secondary sources. This is one of the best books which have ever been published in the last decade and should be in everybody's library.Heinrich Himmler: A Life Overview
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