Heinrich Himmler: The Nazi Leader’s Master Plan
By Heather Pringle

World War II  | one comment  |  Print This Post  |  Email This Post

Himmler inherited his passion for ancient history and for scientific classification from his schoolmaster father, Gebhard. The elder Himmler had majored in philology at university, a discipline defined by the >Athenaeum in 1892 as “a master science, whose duty is to present to us the whole of ancient life, and to give archaeology its just place by the side of literature.” Gebhard Himmler took a strong hand in the education of his sons. Often in the evenings, he and his wife read aloud to them from books on German history or from the sagas of the medieval European bards. Young Heinrich grew to love the old tales of savage violence and vengeance. Steeped in dark medieval lore, he had studiously memorized details of Germany’s most famous battles by the age of 10. In high school, his knowledge of ancient weaponry and warfare rivaled that of his teachers.

He did not make friends easily. He spent part of his childhood in a small town outside Munich, where Gebhard Himmler was a deputy headmaster at the local school. The students there discovered that Heinrich regularly reported their schoolyard pranks to his father, resulting in stern disciplinary action. So the other boys shunned him, going silent at his approach and resuming their conversations only when he was safely out of earshot. Rather than make amends, Heinrich determined to get the upper hand by supervising the after-class punishments that his father liberally doled out.

On vacations, Gebhard took his sons on visits to archaeological and historical sites. Together, they searched for rune stones to read and collected coins and small artifacts to study at home. Archaeology at the time was largely a science of classification. Its disciples sought to identify and sort artifacts into precisely defined categories, an important step toward making sense of objects recovered from the ground. Gebhard followed suit, classifying the family’s collection of artifacts and organizing them in a filing system he set up in a special room in their Munich apartment. Young Himmler relished this process of turning the chaos of ancient life into a rigid, unbending order, and the pleasure he took from it seems to have stayed with him all his life. Under his direction, concentration camp officials later issued prisoners color-coded badges so that individuals could be classified at a glance into one of 18 precise categories, from political prisoners to Gypsies.

At his father’s behest, Heinrich also developed an almost fanatical devotion to organization. He often noted in his diary the exact time of day, sometimes down to the minute, when he received letters and birthday greetings from friends and family members. He recorded the precise time his train departed from a station, as if in training to become an inspector, and kept a lengthy list of all the books he read, often penning the dates he started and finished each, followed by a few brief sentences neatly encapsulating his response to them. Everything, it seems, was to be observed, documented, organized and neatly pigeonholed.

By his late teens, however, he chafed under his father’s iron grip. World War I had ended in Germany’s defeat, leaving the German economy in ruins. Eager to escape to a simpler, more bucolic world, Himmler decided to study agriculture, enrolling at what is now called the Technical University of Munich. There he developed an intense personal interest in breeding livestock—both animal and human. To Himmler, a born micromanager, it was one way of perfecting an increasingly imperfect and troubled modern world. Around this time he fully embraced right-wing political extremism. He joined the Nazi party in the summer of 1923, and when the first volume of Hitler’s manifesto, Mein Kampf, came out two years later, he fell upon it like a starving man.

Himmler was much struck by Hitler’s ideas on the origins of the German people. The Nazi party leader believed that many of his countrymen could trace at least part of their pedigree to a primordial master race—the Aryans, who had brought civilization to a primitive world. This was pure fiction, but Hitler employed it skillfully to stroke German vanity. “All human culture,” he wrote, “all the results of art, science, and technology that we see before us today, are almost exclusively the creative product of the Aryan.” The world had lost its spark of genius, he argued, when the Aryans married into lesser races, thereby diluting their superior blood.

Tags: Historical Conflicts, Historical Figures, World War II

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