Heinrich Himmler: The Nazi Leader’s Master Plan

By Heather Pringle | World War II  | 4 comments  |  Print This Post  |  Email This Post

On the afternoon of July 2, 1936, Nazi SS leader Heinrich Himmler and a coterie of his senior officers paraded on foot through the winding cobblestone streets of Quedlinburg, one of the most perfectly preserved medieval cities in all Europe. Himmler’s staff had been planning the trip to the small city in central Germany for weeks. They ordered the streets to be cleaned and the old houses along the main thoroughfares to be painted. They draped Nazi banners from the rooftops and garlands along the walls. They rehearsed the SS band, drilled the local chapter of Hitler Youth and arranged for an SS photographer to record the proceedings from beginning to end. Nothing of importance was overlooked.

Dressed in a shiny black helmet, immaculate black uniform and tall black boots, Himmler made his way up the city’s Castle Hill. Pale and anemic-looking, with a spindly frame and a head one or two sizes too small for his body, he looked strangely out of place among his entourage of tall, athletic-looking SS men. He stopped to admire Quedlinburg’s splendid stone castle, then proceeded to its large medieval cathedral—the ultimate object of his pilgrimage. Himmler despised Christianity, a religion that preached compassion for the weak and the brotherhood of all men and accepted a Jew as the son of God. But the Quedlinburg cathedral guarded something of immense importance to him—the tomb of an obscure 10th-century German king, Heinrich I.

Himmler was enthralled by ancient history, and he wanted all SS men to share his passion. Indeed, he regarded the feudal past as a blueprint for the future glory of the Third Reich. He viewed Heinrich I as a great leader who could serve as a model for Adolf Hitler and planned to transform the cathedral’s dusty tomb into an SS shrine. Himmler stood at the foot of the crypt and gave a speech exhorting his officers to pay careful heed to Germany’s proud ancient past, “Just as a tree withers if its roots are removed, so a people fall if they do not honor their ancestors,” he later warned.

For years, scholars of the Third Reich have ridiculed Himmler’s intense interest in the German past, dismissing occasions such as his visit to Quedlinburg as the foolishness of a fanatic drunk on power. Even some senior Nazis poked fun at his ardor for history. As Albert Speer, Hitler’s former chief architect, jeered after the war, Himmler “was half schoolmaster, half crackpot.” But Himmler was deadly serious about returning the Third Reich to the lost golden age of his imagination. In 1935 he founded a large SS research institute, employing more than 100 German scholars to study the past and help tutor SS men in the ways of their ancestors. With such research, he intended to transform vast stretches of the Reich into medieval fiefdoms ruled by SS lords, a plan he began acting on before the war. Far from being a dreamer lost in fantasy, Himmler was a careful, methodical planner who worked diligently toward this sinister future in much the same tireless way that he labored on creating the concentration camp system and implementing a “final solution.” Indeed, these were the twin poles of his existence, the yin and yang of his world: the squalid, crowded camps and the sunny SS farm villages.

Himmler set about constructing this future in three ways. He recruited tall, blond-haired men to the SS in order to scientifically rebreed what he believed was a primeval master race. With the help of his researchers, he instructed SS men and their families in ancient German religion, lore and farming practices. And before the war started, he began installing SS families in “feudal” villages of newly fabricated medieval-style houses. He planned to create thousands of these antique colonies in conquered lands across Eastern Europe. In this way, Himmler hoped to give birth to a new golden age, thereby reversing the decline of Western civilization and rescuing humanity from its mire. This was social engineering in its most swaggering, arrogant form—utopianism gone horribly wrong. But Himmler, who rose to become the second most powerful man in the Reich by early 1945 as Hitler’s health failed, fully intended to carry out that plan if Nazi Germany won the war. Only crushing defeat by the Allies stopped him.

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Tags: Historical Conflicts, Historical Figures, World War II

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