“Himmler”, by Peter Padfield

656 pages, MJF Books, ISBN-13: 978-1567311181

Of all the creeps, psychos, weirdos, neurotics and nutjobs who surrounded Adolf Hitler during his rise to power – and who helped him wreck Europe – perhaps none was weirder than Heinrich Himmler, the unsmiling Reichsführer-SS, the organizer and commander of the German police, concentration camps and mastermind behind the Holocaust. Himmler by Peter Padfield is the first full-length biography of the most powerful and coldblooded of Hitler’s lieutenants; impeccably documented yet compulsively readable, this book has it all. The son of a schoolteacher (who rather looked like a schoolteacher himself), Heinrich Luitpold Himmler was, second only to Hitler, the most powerful man in the Third Reich and probably the most thoroughly evil. Before his suicide in 1945, Himmler had ruled the SS and Gestapo, headed German intelligence services, ran the slave-labor system in the Reich and directed the death camps in Poland…oh, and he also was responsible for the pseudo-medical experiments in those self-same death camps. But it gets worse, for not only did he create the hell of Auschwitz, he even went there several times to inspect its operations: one day in 1943 – according to the testimony of an Auschwitz prisoner named Rudolf Vrba – one of the gas chambers was packed with prisoners by 8:45 so that Himmler could watch a mass killing at 9…but Himmler dawdled over breakfast, so the increasingly frantic prisoners had to wait inside the chamber until the Reichsführer-SS arrived at 11:00, took his position at the peephole and observed the gassing. “What he had seen seemed to have satisfied him and put him in good humor”, Vrba recalled, “he accepted a cigarette from an officer, and…laughed and joked”.

Delving into the family background and upbringing of this terrible – yet strangely ordinary – man, Padfield analyzes the master-race theories that inspired Himmler and comes impressively close to explaining how a priggish, idealistic Bavarian boy turned into history’s most ruthless slaughterer. Passionately devoted to Hitler, to the Nazi theories of Nordic racial supremacy and to the 18-hour workday, Himmler tirelessly expanded his power until he controlled not only the private empire of the SS, with all its prisoner-operated factories and mines, but also the battlefields where his Waffen-SS divisions fought ferociously against the Allies. Buttressed with excerpts from diaries, letters and speeches, the author examines each phase of Himmler’s life in detail. Padfield describes, for instance, how Himmler expanded Hitler’s personal bodyguard (the original SS) into the all-embracing state-within-the-Nazi-state used to terrorize the party hierarchy as well as occupied Europe. The book even sheds light on Himmler’s 11th hour attempt to make a separate peace with the Allies, and on the details of his final hours. Scary stuff, but the truth must out.