Hitler's Inner Circle: Part One

the woman known to history as Ava Braun the longtime mistress and briefly the wife of Adolf Hitler was born in the Bavarian city of Munich Germany on the 6th of February 1912. the second of three daughters her parents christened her Ava Anna Paula Braun Ava's father Friedrich Braun was a high school vocational teacher and her mother Francisca kromberger was a homemaker who prior to her marriage had worked for a textile firm as a seamstress in 1908 Francisca gave birth to her eldest daughter ilsa in 1915 the bronze welcomed their youngest daughter Margarita whom everyone called Gretel the bronze had a difficult family life but Ava maintained fairly close ties with her parents and sisters throughout her adulthood most particularly her younger sister Gretel Ava's family faced challenges similar to many of their fellow Germans during the early 20th century including the upheaval of the first world war and the accompanying economic hardships Friedrich Braun enlisted voluntarily when war broke out in 1914 serving first in Serbia and then in a hospital in Wurzburg until 1919 when he came home Friedrich and francisca's marriage promptly fell apart Ava was just six years old when her father came home from the war and she probably had little or no memory of him prior to his return like so many women during wartime Francisca had coped alone with her three daughters during her husband's absence the exact reasons for the brawn's marital Discord are unclear but perhaps the couple's near complete separation for almost the entirety of the war contributed to the decision to separate permanently perhaps Friedrich like so many men who witnessed the horrors of Modern Warfare for the first time between 9 1814 and 1919 had suffered trauma which his marriage could not withstand one recently published biography of Ava Braun claims that her father struggled with alcoholism adding another dimension of pain to the picture of the bronze Family Life whatever the reasons Friedrich and Francisca finalized their divorce in 1921. interestingly they renewed their marriage only a year later some historians believe that her parents reconciled for purely financial reasons maintaining just one household during the economically turbulent post-war period in Germany was challenging enough after a year of trying to maintain two households Friedrich and Francisca likely decided that they could only afford to support one and they remarried in 1922 the marital difficulties of the bronze apparently made their home life extremely tense and fraught according to Ava's childhood friend helter ostermeyer Ava spent as much time away from home as possible presumably so she would not have to listen to her father and mother arguing she apparently spent so much time at the ostermaier's house as a child that she even called Hatter's parents mother and father like many other struggling German families the bronze Financial circumstances began to improve markedly by 1925 thanks to the infusions of American money flowing into Germany as a result of the doors plan of 1924. Friedrich Francisca and their daughters moved into a much nicer apartment and were even able to afford a car unfortunately Improvement in the family's material circumstances did not serve to improve the brawn's marriage and they evidently remained unhappy together notably all three of their daughters have effectively left home as soon as they reached the age of majority some of Ava's biographers note that she struggled with depression throughout her adolescence and into her early twenties perhaps partly owing to her turbulent family life Ava spent her childhood in Munich attending a local elementary school and later a Catholic lyceum in the city she was a decent student but an exceptionally strong athlete who loved any and all sports which he continued to enjoy throughout her adulthood in 1928 when she was 16 she left home to attend the Marion Herr Institute a Catholic vocational school at simbach I'm in she spent one year at The Institute studying domestic arts and secretarial skills including bookkeeping and typing Ava received an education which was quite good for a girl from a lower middle class German family at the time an education designed to prepare her for marriage but one that also gave her practical job training so that she could just as easily support herself secretarial skills were highly valuable in the young women's job market and Ava was able to secure a position quite soon after graduation in 1929 she responded to a newspaper advertisement for a shop assistant at the photo studio of heinley Hoffman The Unofficial photographer and propaganda photojournalist for the Nazi party Ava worked behind the counter at the shop selling postcards photographs and cameras as well as managing the store accounts and inventory over time Hoffman also trained Ava in the skills and processes of professional photography including how to operate all of the equipment and how to develop photographs the career of a professional photographer was a rare and privileged one for a young woman in 1930s Germany and Ava continued to work for Hoffman as a photographer for the propaganda wing of the Nazi party for the next decade and more and it was in this Niche that she continued to explore and develop her Chief interests including media the fashion and Beauty Industries Cinema and popular culture it was not long after she first began working at Hoffman Studio that Ava Braun first met Adolf Hitler the exact date is unknown but one of Ava's biographers recounted the following anecdote of their first meeting although it should be noted that the sources for this historical account are not very well documented reportedly sometime in October of 1929 when closing time was approaching a tall middle-aged man with a short Thin Mustache walked into Heinrich Hoffman's shop Hoffman introduced the visitor to Ava as hair wolf and asked her to run out and fetch some beer and sausages then all three sat down to eat while Hoffman chatted companionably with the so-called hair valve who throughout the meal seemed unable to stop staring at Ava when he rose to leave he offered her a ride home in his Mercedes which she politely declined haven't you guessed who that gentleman is Ava's boss asked her as soon as their guest had departed no she replied don't you ever look at our photos Hoffman asked incredulous it's Hitler Adolf Hitler being a native of Munich Ava of course knew all about the aggressively populist leader of the nsdap whose political power and reputation had only grown throughout the previous decade Heinrich Hoffman was not only Hitler's personal propaganda photojournalist but a close family friend who remained part of the dictator's intimate Inner Circle to the end because so few personal letters or writings survive from either Adolf Hitler or Ava Braun that might shed light on the details of their relationship her biographers have relied heavily on the post-war testimony and Memoirs of those who survived the war including Hoffman's Memoirs according to Hoffman Hitler did not seem very interested in Ava initially though Hoffman claimed that Ava's regard for Hitler was obvious one biographer speculated that the 17 year old Ava whose home life had long been difficult and unhappy was attracted to the projected authority of a father figure which Hitler may have represented for her perhaps it was his Regional celebrity that impressed her as inconceivable as it seems to most observers today Ava may even have found him handsome as indeed many women in 1930s Germany did but Hitler may have been more interested in Ava than he was willing to admit to Hoffman despite his chief photographers later claims about Hitler's initial lack of interest in Ava he was apparently interested enough to order a discrete investigation into Ava's background as early as 1930 only months after meeting her Hitler had privately asked his secretary Martin Borman to investigate whether Ava's ancestry was fully Aryan which it apparently was believing that a large part of his popularity stemmed from his decision to remain a bachelor Hitler probably kept his feelings hidden if he had any for Hoffman's young employee Hoffman's daughter Henrietta remembered Ava remarking that every time Hitler came into the studio after their first meeting he seemed to have time for a chat with her he sometimes brought us small gift or offered to drive her home yet two more years would pass before the relationship became more serious at the time of Hitler's first meeting with Ava Braun he was living with his 21 year old niece gaeli raubal the daughter of his half-sister Angela the nature of this relationship is still unclear and some historians have characterized its Dynamics as sexually codependent if not overtly intimate but whatever else it was the relationship was certainly highly controlling and restrictive for gaily she had moved in with her Uncle at the age of 17 to attend school in Munich and to continue to live with Hitler for several more years after failing to complete her studies she had a brief love affair with Hitler's chauffeur Emil Maurice in 1927 enraged Hitler had fired Emil and dramatically restricted his nieces activities and freedoms he kept her home away from friends and visitors and assigned a guard to accompany her anywhere she went in the fall of 1931 when Hitler was away in Nuremberg is believed to have committed suicide by shooting herself in the chest with Hitler's own valtter pistol it was rumored that the two had quarreled over a young man from lint in her native Austria that gayley wanted to marry Hitler had apparently forbidden the marriage leaving his Munich apartment in a rage galey's death was a major Scandal for Hitler and his political opponents did not waste the opportunity to suggest that an incestuous and abusive relationship had driven Hitler's niece to her death it was even suggested he might have arranged her murder himself most historians however tend to reject this last suspicion according to most accounts Hitler was devastated by galey's death he reportedly kept her room in his apartment just how she had left it and kept portraits of her in all of his private residences until his own death however the Observer should not ignore the reality that this highly publicized personal tragedy did much to win Hitler greatest sympathy with his political supporters and helped facilitate his rise to National power during the following year within weeks of his niece's passing Hitler began to spend a good deal more time with Ava Braun because Ava worked for Hoffman Hitler's close friend it was made easier for him to carry on an extremely discreet relationship with her he took her out occasionally for a meal or a movie or to the Opera but more frequently Ava's employment with Hoffman made it possible for she and Hitler to meet more privately either at the shop after hours or in Hoffman's own home according to multiple sources including Hitler's housekeeper by 1932 Ava was spending nights at his apartment whenever he was in Munich Hitler was adamant that he should never marry or carry on a romantic relationship in the public eye his public Persona carefully crafted over many years was one of austerity and patriotic sacrifice Hitler believed that German women supported him politically because they admired his supposed commitment to his people above all else additionally a casual relationship with a young girl half his age was completely antithetical to the official Nazi ideology which was both highly traditional and family oriented he was therefore resolved to keep his relationship with Ava Braun both informal and secret believing that if he married his female supporters would find him less attractive and the German people would cease to view him as a lonely and lofty figure dedicated only to Germany but Ava was evidently not satisfied with being Hitler's part-time secret girlfriend she saw less and less of him during the summer and fall of 1932 when he was deeply engaged in campaigns for the chancellorship and the Nazi party's election to a majority in the reichstag some historians believe that Ava's disappointment at Hitler's continued absence and her dejection over what she perceived as his lukewarm regard for her led her to attempt suicide sometime during the Autumn of 1932 while sources differ on the exact date and some of the Minor Details of this event several witnesses and biographers believe that Ava's suicide attempt was a desperate cry for attention from Hitler Ava shot herself in the chest with her father's pistol and then quickly contacted a certain Dr platter for emergency medical attention platter was Heinrich Hoffman's doctor and some scholars believe that Ava's decision to contact him first was was strategic according to this reasoning Ava could just as easily have contacted Dr Martin Marx for help for whom her sister ilsa worked as a medical secretary but Ava instead summoned a doctor perhaps via Hoffman himself who would be guaranteed to promptly inform Hitler of what had happened by the next day Hitler had returned to Munich and was at Ava's bedside upon hearing from the doctor that she had purposely aimed for her heart Hitler reportedly remarked a Hoffman that he had not realized how much Ava loved him perhaps thinking of his niece scaly Hitler said that he was now resolved to take care of the poor child indeed despite his Assumption of National Power in 1932 Hitler often spent less time in Berlin at the Reich chancellery in the ensuing years than he did in Munich or at the berghoff his vacation retreat near Berger's Garden on the Ober Salzburg whenever he returned to Bavaria from Berlin whether to Munich or to the berkov Ava joined him she still continued to work at Heinrich Hoffman's photo studio but also became an unofficial party photographer herself selling her photographs so Hitler and other party members to Hoffman who paid her extremely well for them presumably at Hitler's request being known as Hoffman's Junior photographer helped Ava to remain close to Hitler in the most discreet fashion possible Ava was now 21 years old and officially an adult but she still technically lived with her parents as most young unmarried German women tended to do throughout the years of Ava's relationship with Hitler it seems to have been Heinrich Hoffman Who provided a wall of respectability around Ava if she stayed out late spent the night out or left suddenly to spend a few days on the Ober Salzburg it may have been Hoffman's Province to reassure any concerned parties that Ava was merely working accompanying party members as a photographer or secretary in fact she frequently did fulfill such roles during her travels with Hitler especially in the early years of their relationship despite the significant amounts of time they spent together they managed to keep their Affair and almost total secret as far as the general public was concerned they were publicly photographed together only once over more than a decade at the Olympic Winter Games in in February of 1936 in the photo the two are not even sitting together and Ava Braun can be seen seated in the row behind Hitler indeed it seems only their family members and closest friends knew about Hitler's girlfriend when rumors of Ava Braun's relationship with the fuhrer became known to the German public at the end of World War II many did not believe them at first so solid was the wall of Silence which had been erected around her according to multiple contemporary Witnesses even when they were surrounded by friends and family at the belkov estate relaxed and well out of the public eye Hitler and Braun always scrupulously avoided even the slightest displays of affection toward one another Albert Speer Hitler's Chief Architect armament's Minister and member of the dictators intimate in a circle noted in his Memoirs that Ava Braun had her own Suite of rooms in each of Hitler's residences including at the berkov yet he claimed at the end of the evening's activities Hitler and Braun would quietly withdraw to Hitler's rooms the question of a sexual relationship between Adolf Hitler and Ava Braun has long been a matter of speculative curiosity for historians most Scholars agree that there was an undeniable closeness and intimacy between Adolf Hitler and Ava Braun but the exact nature of this intimacy will likely never be known for sure in light of the unparalleled Horrors perpetrated by the Nazi regime it is very difficult for most historical observers to imagine or explore the human facets of his or Ava Braun's lives although we understand that such aspects of Life are important biographical details it can be for many people extremely unsettling to confront the humanity in individuals who because of their deeds and convictions we can only see as monstrous and repugnant biographers and historians have speculated widely some imagine that the twisted and hate-filled Hitler must have had some Unthinkable sexual proclivities While others believe instead that he and Ava had a fairly conventional albeit extremely discreet sexual relationship one of Eber Braun's most recent biographers however claims to have uncovered previously unknown testimony and documentary evidence that the sexual relationship between herself and Hitler was mostly non-existent according to this chain of evidence Ava Braun was born with a reproductive condition called Maya orokitansky syndrome or mrkh a rare condition which only occurs in approximately one out of every 5 000 women if this is correct it is quite possible that Adolf Hitler and Ava Braun had no sexual relationship because many women who live with mrkh find sex extremely painful depending on the particularities of their individual condition Ava Braun is not alone as the subject of such deeply personal historical speculation numerous Scholars have also claimed that Adolf Hitler was also born with one or more congenital reproductive conditions some historians believe that he had both an undescended testicle and a condition known as hypospadias in which the urethra appears on the underside of the genitals rather than the tip it is generally known that Hitler was utterly paranoid about being seen naked and even refused to allow his private doctors to examine him unclothed he disliked being touched unless he instigated it and both he and Ava Braun shared an intense cleanliness fetish Hitler pursued so few romantic relationships in his life none of which can be fully confirmed so it does seem possible that extreme self-consciousness about his body might have played a part in his determination to remain single if it was indeed the case that Hitler and bro one had a virtually sexless relationship it makes the seemingly long-standing bond between them even more interesting some might look upon the relationship as a mutual Refuge from the sexual expectations that other potential Partners might have had other Scholars suggest that Hitler used Ava her devotion and her obvious love for him to project the appearance of an active and socially conventional sex life to members of his inner circle we can speculate but the full truth of the matter may never be known as well as the potential physical health issues she may have suffered Ava Braun also experienced mental health problems including depression and suicidal ideation indeed Ava attempted suicide a second time in 1935 by taking an overdose of sleeping pills historians and biographers have pointed to Hitler's non-committal treatment of Ava during the early years of their relationship to help explain why she might have made the second attempt a fragmentary document purporting to be Ava Braun's diary which she supposedly kept during the Spring and Summer of 1935 reveals that she saw very little of Hitler during these months and that his lack of commitment to her seemed manifest it is unclear whether this diary is indeed genuine for Scholars disagree about its authenticity Ava's older sister Ilse examined the document many years later and apparently believed the handwriting to be that of her sisters but a few historian are still unconvinced Hitler's distant manner with his girlfriend was remarked upon by others as well in his Memoirs Albert Speer noted Hitler's treatment of Ava Braun during the early years of their relationship with distaste instead of extending to her the same refined Viennese manners he seemed to show toward Other Women of his acquaintance he seemed dismissive and even disrespectful towards Eva shpia observed that on one occasion Hitler did not even kiss her goodbye or take her hand when she was departing the berghoff he simply handed her an envelope which presumably was filled with money after her second suicide attempt which many historians tend to view as another bid for Hitler's attention Ava seemed to advance even further in Hitler's favor according to her alleged diary Ava was relieved that she would soon no longer have to play the part of a shop girl for Hitler for Hitler was going to buy her a house in Munich in 1935 at the age of 23 Ava officially moved out of her parents house and her sister Gretel moved in with her whatever the true nature of their relationship it is clear that Ava Braun did come to play a central role in Hitler's life despite the fact that she was kept out of sight during most formal or diplomatic functions she was soon established as the Undisputed Mistress of the house even if only to people in the know much of the information about their relationship comes from letters post-war testimony and Memoirs from Ava Braun's family and friends as well as from Hitler's Inner Circle of military adjutants secretaries private doctors and high-ranking Nazi officials these individuals were those received most often by Hitler at the Irish chancellery in Berlin and were also frequently invited to the more relaxed atmosphere of his berghoff estate this so-called Royal Court around Hitler included Joseph and Magda Goebbels Albert and Margarita spier Martin and Gerda Borman Heinrich and Erna Hoffman and their daughter Henrietta with her husband Baldur the combined documents and testimony from the members of Hitler's Royal Court reveal a highly narcissistic and insecure man at the very center of it all a man who dominated every conversation with self-important rambling monologues and one who could not bear to be challenged or contradicted on anything yet several of these Witnesses report that by 1935 Ava Braun's position in Hitler's good graces appeared nearly unassailable she was the only member of his inner circle who dared to remonstrate with him regularly about anything she had begun by all accounts as a quiet modest and unassuming presence among Hitler's milier in Munich and at the berkov but over time she apparently gained confidence as her influence with Hitler grew this should not suggest that she inserted herself into Political or military discussions or attempted to advise or intervene in such matters virtually no account describes her doing such a thing and multiple Witnesses claim that she in fact had little interest in politics she did seem however to be the only person in Hitler's life who could get away with interrupting him she rolled her eyes at him when his long Rants and die tribes bought her ore seized the initiative to direct the amusement of everyone assembled whenever she found the current activities tiresome no other members of the Royal Court could have or would have dared to behave in such a way in Hitler's presence in the early stages of World War II when certain goods were being rationed or banned across Germany Hitler instructed that a ban be placed on makeup and other beauty products Ava Braun was apparently outraged and remonstrated with Hitler indignantly after which the dictator amended his original ban to a simple halt on domestic manufacturing Hitler refused to allow even his own sister Angela gaily's mother to criticize his girlfriend Angela who had made no secret about her marked dislike for Ava Braun distanced herself from her brother soon after Ava became a permanent fixture and de facto Mistress of the house at the berghoff she remained the only regular resident guest able to invite whomever she pleased to the estate and the guests present usually included a number of her friends or family members such as her sister Gretel Braun or her childhood friend hail to ostermeyer and hit her's husband and children it is very likely that Ava's privileged position made some of the other members of Hitler's Royal Court dislike her as well various observers who survived the second world war and the collapse of Nazi Germany described her in ways which varied widely a few described her as Lively and Charming a glamorous and gracious Hostess and utterly devoted to Hitler quite a few others described her more negatively using adjectives like feather-brained spoiled and selfish Albert Speer once observed that she seemed to be devoted only to pleasure and remarked disdainfully that all members of Hitler's Entourage were even required to kindly put up with her two awful little Scottish Terrier dogs negus and starzy another interesting adjective frequently used by members of Hitler's Royal Court to describe Ava is apolitical and the use of this particular description according to one biographer is very telling after all what is the one burning question that students of History are likely most curious about when it comes to Ava Braun the question is did she know some historians have been quick to point out that neither Ava Braun nor any members of her family ever actually joined the Nazi party however other scholars believe that it was Hitler's idea to make sure Ava Braun never joined the party members of his family including his sister Angela never joined the party either it is possible that Ava never became a member because Hitler wanted to ensure her protection and anonymity as much as possible Ava's father was the only member of her family to officially join the Nazi party and not until as late as 1938 however one should hesitate to interpret these facts as a sign of reluctance to support Nazism for there is some evidence to suggest that most members of The Braun family were content to see the Nazi party's rise to power as well as content to see Eva enjoy a close relationship with Hitler historians generally believe that Heinrich Hoffman was chiefly involved in providing cover for the relationship between Braun and Hitler but it is possible that such cover was not needed in the case of the Braun family considering the many nights and the more extended periods of time that Ava spent away from home between 1931 and 1935 its somewhat strains credulity to imagine that they did not know or suspect what was going on Ava Braun did not move into her own residence until 1935. a residence that was purchased by Hoffman but paid for by Hitler Ava had worked for Heinrich Hoffman a self-advertised supporter of the Nazis since she was 17 and less than three years after she commenced her employment her younger sister Gretel Braun came to work in Hoffman's photo house as well Gretel Braun spent so much time with Ava in Hitler's Inner Circle in fact that she eventually married Hellman feigeline SS General and himless liaison to the fuhrer in 1944 when they were interviewed by one of Ava's biographers neren Gunn during the 1960s The Braun family seemed not only to have downplayed their difficult family life but her parents also claimed not to have known anything about the relationship between their daughter and the Nazi leader until many years later they claimed only to have met him once by chance when they saw Hitler and a together in a Munich Cafe in light of the facts however these claims are rather unconvincing two of their daughters spent several years working for a prominent Nazi photographer they spent years as part of Adolf Hitler's intimate Social Circle and much of this took place in Munich right under their noses the claims of distance between Ava's family and the Nazi regime are weakened further by the knowledge that as the city of Munich faced bombings and destruction toward the end of the war Ava's parents and siblings were quick to flee to Hitler's berghoff estate for safety one member of The Braun family however gives the distinct impression of an Earnest attempt to distance herself from both the Nazi party and Ava's relationship with Hitler Ava's elder sister ilsabrone ilsa was the first to leave home at age 21. the same year that Ava went to work for Heinrich Hoffman Elsa went to work as a medical secretary for Dr Martin Marx Not only was she employed by Dr Marx but she lived with him for eight years from 1929 to 1937. it is unclear whether Elsa was simply given room and board in her employer's house or if the two actually lived together in the Romantic sense but whatever the case ilsa Braun flatly refused to quit her job despite her sister Ava's attempts to persuade her presumably Ava's issue with Dr Marx was that he was Jewish while Ava and Gretel were becoming entrenched in Nazi Social Circles their elder sister was quietly living and working with a Jewish doctor such a thing in fact became illegal following the establishment of the Nuremberg laws in 1935. no person of Aryan ancestry would be permitted to enter into any personal or professional relationship with a person of Jewish ancestry yet ilsa continued to work for Dr Marx for a further two years only leaving her job when it became clear that Dr Marx was going to lose his license to practice medicine in Germany as all German Jewish doctors eventually did Dr Marx emigrated to the United States in 1938 it was most likely Eva Braun's influence with Hitler that helped Elsa secure her next job secretary to Albert Speer Elsa however stayed in this position only six months she went on to become a journalist unlike her younger sisters her professional and personal life showed little inclination toward Nazism which was something that her work colleagues noted about her as well all this being said it is highly likely that everyone involved with the Nazi regime including Ava's family knew more than they cared to admit later on when the war was over so the question Still Remains did Ava Braun know about the Holocaust eight decades later that question Still Remains definitively unanswered to westerners Adolf Hitler is undeniably the most ubiquitously well-known condemned and reviled figure of the 20th century the dehumanization and genocide of millions of European Jews and other groups targeted by the Nazis are arguably among the most heinous crimes and greatest tragedies in world history as one of the individuals closest to Adolf Hitler naturally we wonder just how far her knowledge of the depravity of Hitler's regime extended but importantly how can we ignore the fact that the testimonies about Ava Braun come from some of the most prom dominant members of the Nazi regime one must concede that after the war was over and the Allies had emerged Victorious these individuals had every reason to give testimony and write Memoirs that downplayed their adherence to a hateful and racist ideology as well as downplayed the extent of their participation in a sadistic and brutal regime the painful Legacy of which is still deeply felt today most members of Hitler's Inner Circle who survived the war insisted that Ava Braun was apolitical indeed they insisted that Hitler is adjutants and fellow party officials never even discussed policy or military matters in front of the women this claim Notes One biographer appears patently self-serving if one can create the image of her don't ask don't tell atmosphere within Hitler's Inner Circle then the claim that they did not know the full extent of the regime's crimes until after the war becomes more believable although Hitler's hit final solution was admittedly known to relatively few people during the war some historians now reject the notion that those closest to Hitler including Ava Braun could have been kept fully in the dark about what was happening in the forced labor and death camps Ava Braun and the rest of Hitler's Inner Circle were certainly well informed about Hitler's determination to eradicate all European Jews anti-Semitism was a concept which was fundamental to the party line of the nsdap Hitler outlined his poisonous rhetoric very clearly in Mein Kampf and reiterated precisely the same ideas in his last will and testament just hours before his suicide all of these individuals were present for the 1935 convention in Nuremberg they saw even more restrictive laws passed against German Jews who had already been removed from civil service and public service jobs had been subjected to a state-sponsored economic boycott and to open persecution and violence in the streets none of them raised their voices in protest when the Civil Rights of German Jews were revoked when they were reduced to segregated communities or subjected to inhumane treatment and conditions and far from the image of a don't ask don't tell atmosphere some historians now suggest that the Blurred Lines between Hitler's public and private lives made such compartmentalization highly unlikely the fact is they insist Hitler did not compartmentalize his public and private lives at all many of those he worked most closely with as Fiora were also his close friends and their female counterparts far from being sheltered from the realities of Hitler's regime were in fact Jester's deeply committed to national socialism and its rabidly anti-semitic elements as Hitler and his high officials were Magda Goebbels ilsa Hess Emmy going these women were official card-carrying members of the Nazi party since the early 1920s Magda Goebbels in fact was such an influential public voice among female members of the Nazi party that for many years she was viewed as the de facto first lady of national socialism since Hitler remained unmarried why would the husbands of these women or Hitler himself bother to work so hard to keep them ignorant of developments which they seemed always to have supported Hitler's habit of governing events from afar of issuing policy and Military orders in the same environment in which he entertained his friends most of whom were also his colleagues brings the claims of his collaborators lack of knowledge into serious question we are left with the terrible and chilling notion that those closest to Hitler including Ava Braun May well have known the full extent of the crimes of the Nazi regime and found it possible to turn the faces coldly away from the inhumanity which they had helped to nourish for indeed their support for Hitler's Authority may have been the overriding reason for their privileged positions in his intimate Inner Circle Hitler was notoriously insecure and sensitive to criticism and those closest to him tended to remain in his good graces if they never challenged or contradicted him finally Hoffman's daughter Henrietta Von schirag recounted an anecdote of just such an occasion in her memoirs reportedly she and her husband Baldur who had been named rice stuttalter and gaolita of Vienna had remonstrated openly with Hitler while in company at the belkhov during the summer of 1943 Baldur had insisted that Hitler must end the war which was going very badly for Germany thanks to the heavy bombing of German cities by Allied planes Henrietta also claimed to have further challenged Hitler by condemning the deportation of Jewish Women in Holland which she witnessed enraged Hitler had apparently screamed back you are being sentimental what do you care about Jewish women in Holland despite the fact that she was the daughter of one of Hitler's closest and oldest friends Henrietta franciach and her husband were apparently never invited to the berkov again following this confrontation again many of these anecdotes must be treated with skepticism and with an eye to the motivations of their writers some historians have observed that henrietta's Memoirs as well as the writings of Hoffman Goebbels and Speer often show attempts at personal exoneration for participation in the crimes of the Nazi regime but in addition and more importantly they reveal that Hitler valued sycophants above all others what historians have referred to as the cult of the fuhrer strongly influenced Hitler's image for all of his supporters power and favors were given to those who demonstrated the kind of Blind Faith and absolute loyalty that he seemed to Value above all other qualities and if there is one thing about which all of these Witnesses could later agree it was that Ava Braun's commitment to Hitler to live only for him seemed complete and undeniable perhaps this was the reason why she seemed to hold the most privileged place in his life life throughout the years of World War II even as Hitler spent more extended time than ever away from Bavaria and everywhere the privations and brutality of War became steadily more apparent Ava Braun continued to live an absurdly privileged and luxurious lifestyle in Munich and at the berkov she continued to go on Pleasure trips with her family and friends skiing in the mountains or sunning herself in an Italian Villa in a period of rationing and bans on Goods she had access to a seemingly bottomless supply of champagne and Fine Food to expensive designer clothing and jewelry and tailor-made cigarettes when Lively discussions at the berghoff turned uneasy with references to ruined German cities and the Soviets advancing inexorably from the East Ava would be the first to brightly suggest an outdoor picnic and a swim at nearby lake koenigsay or a fun if mildly undignified parlor game ironically Ava Braun The Unofficial first lady of Nazi socialism was the very antithesis of the party's official conception of the ideal woman far from being the plain traditional Thrifty matron of virtuous Domesticity Ava Braun was fashionable and Cosmopolitan she was not at all domestic she wore makeup and bleached her hair but one biographer has suggested that it was precisely this kind of behavior that may have motivated Hitler to continue projecting confidence in a future Victory Goebbels who was perhaps just as blindly loyal to Hitler wrote admiringly of Ava Braun's determination to live as if nothing would change and praised what he viewed as her efforts to keep Hitler's Spirits high as little as Ava Braun conformed to the National Socialist ideas of Womanhood a further ironic and interesting point is that neither did Hitler adhere to the image of virtue he had cultivated for himself as the fuhrer or live lived by the virtues he extolled to the German people he saw himself as Bohemian and intellectual appreciating art architecture music theater opera and philosophy yet his regime persecuted artists and muzzled intellectuals who refused to conform to party lines he sometimes seemed as committed to pleasure as Ava was and officials like Himmler bemoan the difficulty involved in getting him to respond to Communications or make prompt decisions Hitler's habit of governing from afar whenever he felt like it seems striking coming from a person who demanded hard work conscientiousness and Sacrifice from the German people additionally Hitler's ideology strongly stressed the virtues of marriage and many children both of which he assiduously avoided while keeping his socially unconventional girlfriend a secret what we are left with is a vision of hypocrisy of power decadence and privilege purchased at the cost of Unthinkable crimes but there is reason to believe that Ava Braun herself wanted both marriage and children very few of her writings survive but examination of the many surviving photos and home movies she recorded give the Observer an impression of deep and wistful yearning Ava often filmed and photographed Hitler with children usually the children of visiting guests it is true that she sold many of these pictures to Heinrich Hoffman as they were useful in projecting and nurturing and fatherly image of the fuhrer in Nazi propaganda but it is also known that Ava preserved many of these images for herself in a personal album these photographs and home movies hint at Ava born's sadness that she and Hitler for whatever reason could not marry or have a family 1943 saw Hitler's longest absence from Bavaria yet during the campaign on the Eastern Front Hitler spent most of his time at his Command Center in Poland monitoring the invasion of Russia yet Ava Braun was still enjoying the good life in Bavaria she even went on her annual vacation trip to Italy that year while he was away in Poland Hitler reportedly telephoned Ava every night around 10 o'clock by the summer of 1944 the chances of victory for Germany had begun to seem increasingly remote Henrietta franciach recalled advising Ava that when Germany's defeat finally came she should go into hiding Ava had apparently responded do you think I would let him die alone I will stay with him until the last moment no one can stop me Adolf Hitler and Ava Braun had both made their wills and planned a double suicide as early as 1944 should Germany's defeat prove inevitable these plans were made following the attempted assassination of Hitler on the 20th of July he had provided financial support for Ava in his previous will but his last will and testament referred directly to Ava's enduring loyalty and friendship it was for these reasons he claimed that he had finally decided to marry her before they ended their lives together indeed when Hitler retreated Into the fura Bunker Beneath The Garden of the rice chancellery Ava Braun resolutely joined him there traveling from Bavaria to Berlin even though the Russians would overrun the city within days Ava Braun spent the last few days of her life underground with Hitler and a select few members of his inner circle mentally Hitler himself continued to unravel as the end approached he alternated between bouts of rage and all of the traitors who are now turning their backs on him and desperate delusions that he might possibly find the means to launch one last grand counter-attack that might forestall defeat Ava however behaved much as she had always done she dressed and groomed herself to please Hitler and tried to raise his spirits however she could when the mood of the company in the bunker grew morose she handed out champagne put some music on the record player and suggested that those assembled should dance and enjoy themselves in the early morning hours of the 29th of April 1945 Adolf Hitler and Ava Braun were married in the bunker with Joseph Goebbels and Martin Borman as Witnesses the short wedding was followed by a brief champagne breakfast with those still remaining in the bunker the following day on the afternoon of the 30th of April Hitler and porn said goodbye to their Companions and retired to the privacy of Hitler's study some witnesses reported hearing a gunshot from within when they entered the study they found Ava Braun slumped over a sofa she had bitten into a cyanide capsule Hitler had tested the poison for efficacy just two days before on his own pet dog Blondie Hitler had bitten into a cyanide capsule as well and then shot himself in the head with his own pistol according to Hitler's wishes their bodies were taken out of the bunker into the garden behind the Reich chancellery doused in gasoline and burned the Soviets were able to identify their bodies using dental records and the remains of both Hitler and Dawn were buried near magdeburg some decades later their remains are believed to have been re-exumed by the Russians cremated once more and the ashes scattered in the Elba River biographies of Ava porn are scarce compared to the numerous volumes that have been written about Adolf Hitler who remains one of the most infamous figures in world history in fact Ava born continues to be a rather shadowy historical figure which is surprising considering the degree of her closeness to Hitler himself perhaps it was because he took such pains to cloak the relationship in silence additionally all of Hitler's and porn's documents were destroyed according to their wishes after their deaths with a few exceptions before saying goodbye to her sister Gretel Ava had given her collection of photographs home movies and apparently a collection of letters that she and Hitler had written to one another over the years heavily pregnant and trying to get to safety after her husband SS General hellmann fegerline was executed for desertion kratel entrusted the cache of documents to a man who appeared to be a fellow German refugee but who was in fact an American agent Ava porn's photographs and home movies now reside in the American national archives in Washington DC however when the collection was received no letters were found among the documents this chain of events is both disappointing and very interesting to historians the fact that Ava porn was willing to allow these documents to remain intact seemingly in defiance of Hitler's wishes might indicate that she wished their contents to become known because the rumored letters were never found we cannot imagine what it was she may have wanted others to know but perhaps it was that she ultimately demonstrated with her life and the manner of her death that she loved Hitler and that her loyalty to him was complete perhaps she wanted to make sure the world knew that he had cared for her too that she had been important to him after so many years living in anonymity some Scholars can find it in their hearts to pity her a young impressionable girl who wasted herself her life and her love as the anonymous companion of a monster others are not so willing to empathize and can only revile her as the worst sort of collaborator a blindly faithful sycophant who probably understood fully the unthinkable price of the luxury and privilege in which he lived despite the completion of multiple biographies about her few of them have added significantly about what was already known about Ava Braun she remains stubbornly and fundamentally unknowable since few other sources besides her photographs and homemade films remain these offer us a silent and haunting window into her world a world of glamor and privilege that stands in sickening contrast to the brutality perpetrated by those closest to her and at the very least tolerated by her The Smiling Faces of those in the foreground of her pictures seems to be set against an invisible backdrop in which the Silhouettes Of countless murdered Millions stand mute waiting expectantly for justice what do you think of Ava Braun was she an innocent young girl with little interest in politics or someone who knowingly benefited from the atrocities committed by the Nazi regime please let us know in the comments section and as always thank you very much for watching [Music] The Man known to history as Rudolf Hess was born on the 26th of April 1894 in ibrahimia a suburb of the city of Alexandria in the Nile Delta of Northern Egypt his father was Johan Fritz Hess the owner of hessen company a large import export business which ship goods from Egypt to Germany and had been founded in the 1860s to benefit from the new trade routes established by the completion of the Suez Canal in 1869 linking the Red Sea to the Mediterranean and negating the need for ships to travel around Africa to get from Europe to Asia Rudolph's mother was Clara Hess the daughter of a wealthy textile industrialist in Germany who had met Johann as a result of their respective family's business interests Rudolph was their first child two others followed a boy Alfred in 1897 and a girl Margarita after a long interval of 11 years in 1908. Rudolph was born in Egypt at an unusual time in the country's history it had been a province of the Ottoman Empire for over 300 years but during the course of the mid-19th century Britain had gradually begun to unofficially take over Egypt in advance of the construction of the Suez Canal a major project which was necessary for Britain to improve Communications between London and the Jewel of its Empire the British Raj of India thus Hess effectively grew up in a British protectorate following the completion of the canal in 1869 many expat communities of merchants and Traders from European countries popped up here and the German community was significant enough in Alexandria that Hess was able to attend a German language Protestant school there during his youth his youth was formative and left him convinced of the racial superiority of people from countries like Germany and Britain without whom Hess believed Egypt would be mired in pre-modern stagnation he had already adopted that view by his teenage years at which time he was sent to Switzerland by his father to begin studying economics and finance with a view to taking over the family business in due course he studied there for a year between 1911 and 1912. before heading to Germany to take up an apprenticeship in the city of Hamburg while Rudolph was growing up in Egypt Europe was becoming a place of growing tension the German state had only recently come into existence prior to 1871 when the new German Empire was formed Germany was a region made up of a few dozen small Estates of which the largest was Prussia when they were United in 1871 it upset the economic and political balance of Europe and Britain but others were also perturbed by Germany's Growing Power as a result the European powers began dividing into two armed military alliances from the 1880s onwards one centered on Germany and the austro-hungarian Empire and the other comprising Britain France and Russia years of escalating tension caused by military economic and Colonial rivalry as well as competition for land in regions such as the Balkans saw the European diplomatic situation deteriorate precipitously then in the summer of 1914 the heir to the throne of the empire of Austria-Hungary Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated by a Serb nationalist in the streets of Sarajevo and the political crisis which ensued slowly escalated over a five-week period until all of the major European powers declared war on each other by early August 1914. it was the beginning of the first world war and a series of events which would have an enormous impact on hess's life at the time of the outbreak of the first world war Tess was 20 years old and living in Germany learning the family business within weeks he had enlisted in the seventh Bavarian field artillery regiment his wartime service was extensive for instance he was soon involved in the first battle of Eep in the late Autumn and early winter of 1914. one of the first major battles on the Western Front in Northwestern France and Belgium a region that would become The Crucible of the entire War he was soon earning promotions and awards for distinguished service receiving the Iron Cross and being promoted to Colonel in 1915. he then served at the bloody Battle of Verdun in France which dragged on for most of 1916 before being posted to the Romanian front in the Balkans theater in 1917. throughout these periods of service he was injured on several occasions being hit by shrapnel multiple times though these injuries were not extensive and he was soon back in service after a few weeks convalescence by 1918 he had determined to become a fighter pilot in the new field of Aviation combat but by then the war had swung dramatically against Germany following the entry of the United States on Britain and France's side and in early November 1918 as supply shortages and political unrest ravaged Germany internally the country was forced to surrender to the British French and U.S the war was over but the political scars which it created would continue to have drastic consequences for Europe in the aftermath of the first world war Germany entered a period of pronounced turmoil in the closing stages of the war Germany's Imperial ruler Kaiser Wilhelm II had abdicated a German Republic named after the town its Representatives first met in Weimar was declared but the country was completely unstable for the two years that followed for instance German socialists and Communists who were inspired by the Communist Revolution that had occurred in Russia in 1917 began launching insurrections themselves in cities such as Berlin and Munich across Germany on the other side of the political Spectrum right-wing nationalists were determined to prevent the left-wing socialists seizing power and were also bitter about the result of the war the problem was compounded as the Treaty of Versailles which concluded the war in 1919 restricted Germany to having an army of one hundred thousand men as a consequence of this hundreds of thousands of German men who otherwise would have remained in the military after the war ended were demobilized they began joining right-wing paramilitary organizations such as the fry Corps or free Corps which were engaging in running Street battles against Communists and other groups across Germany in 1919. in time these gave way to new political groups which were based on the idea of refuting Germany's post-war position and also finding scapegoats within German Society to blame for the country losing the war many of these focused on the Jewish people as being responsible at a time when anti-Semitism was Rife across nearly all of Europe Hess soon became one of these young German men entering into extremist politics he was discharged from the German Army within weeks of the War ending while he was further disillusioned by the collapse of the family business which had been largely taken over by the British Administration in Egypt during the war in bittered he gravitated towards both the freikor and the Tula Society in early 1919 the latter of which was a new political group that was rabidly anti-semitic and committed to the idea of resurrecting a sort of medieval German state which would dominate much of Central and Eastern Europe by the beginning of the spring of 1919 he was active in both organizations in the Bavaria region of Southern Germany particularly in the regional capital of Munich where there was a quasi-political war in process between right-wing groups such as the freikor and left-wing socialists who wanted to establish a communist state along the lines of that which was being in Russia following a political revolution there in 1917. thus Hess was involved in clashes between paramilitaries here in the spring and early summer of 1919. it was a formative period which would fashion hess's political ideology as both a right-wing Nationalist and as a committed anti-semite Germany's politics began to settle down eventually as the new Republic gained control of the situation in cities like Berlin which had experienced its own attempted socialist coup in the spartacist uprising of January 1919. as it did the country began to prosper and enter a period of cultural Vitality in the 1920s however the politics of Bavaria and Munich in particular continued to have an extreme Edge to it out of the movements such as those of the Tula society and the fry Corps a new right-wing party emerged there in February 1920. the National Socialist German Workers Party known more widely as the Nazi party was anti-semitic zealously Nationalist and committed to reversing the humiliation which its members believed had been inflicted on Germany according to the terms of the Treaty of Versailles Hess had enrolled in the University of Munich in 1919 and had been influenced while there by the teachings of Karl household a professor of geopolitics who advocated for the idea that Germany should rejuvenate itself in the aftermath of the war by initiating new conflicts to acquire extensive labens realm or living space in Eastern Europe he soon joined the Nazis and would bring this idea to the party in due course hess's private life also changed during these years in the spring of 1920 while he was still studying at the University of Munich he had met a fellow student by the name of ilsa pro they soon began seeing each other but it would be seven and a half years before they were married an unusually long courtship by the standards of the 1920s moreover even when they did marry they did not start a family for another decade and it was not until 1937 that Rudolph and ilsa would have their one and only child a boy named wolf Hess if hess's family life was limited it was perhaps because he had become so devoted to the Nazi cause during the early 1920s in ways which would hinder his relationship with ilsa although she shared his politics around the time he met his future wife Hess had also heard a rising member of the Nazi party an Austrian veteran of the German me Adolf Hitler speak at a political meeting for the first time Hess was impressed by his fiery rhetoric so too were many others and shortly afterwards Hitler Rose to become the leader of the party replacing its first chairman Anton Draxler in 1921. Hess soon struck up a close relationship with Hitler one that would become very close in the years that followed and it was through this that Hitler made the concept of acquiring laban's realm in Eastern Europe Central to Nazi ideology Hess and Hitler's relationship would become closer still in the mid-1920s this was owing to the events of the early winter of 1923 between his first rise to power within the party in 1921 and the Autumn of 1923 Hitler had become increasingly convinced that the party needed to seize power in Munich through a military coup along the lines of those that had been attempted in many parts of the country in 1919 thus in the course of 1923 he and the other senior members of the party began planning an uprising in Munich one which would be facilitated by the growing paramilitary wing of the Nazis the Sturm up tylon or sa the Revolt was initiated on the 8th of November 1923 when over 2 000 Nazis and Essay members tried to seize key locations in Munich beginning with the burger broikala beer hall in the city however the beer hall puts as it became known was a shambles and within hours the city authorities were able to establish a major police presence in Munich which brought the city under control Hitler fled the city but was arrested two days later Hess who had been involved during the putch in detaining City officials outside of Munich fled in its aftermath along with many others who had been involved to Austria but he was soon convinced to return and face sentencing in the trials that followed throughout November and December 1923. Hitler was sentenced to five years in prison a rather lenient punishment for the leader of an attempted coup Hess was given 18 months both men were sent to Landsberg prison in the southwest of Bavaria the Nazi party was banned by the state government but this would prove ineffective in fact the period of incarceration proved a formative one in the ascent to power of Hitler and the Nazis while imprisoned at Landsberg Hitler began dictating his political Manifesto to both Hess and another Nazi member who was sentenced there with them Emil Maurice this sprawling paranoid anti-semitic treaties was subsequently entitled Mein Kampf meaning my struggle and was published in two volumes in 1925 and 1926 by the time the first volume appeared in print its author was already a free man the Bavarian state government elements of which were sympathetic to the views of the Nazis decided to release Hitler from Landsberg in mid-December 1924 having only served a year of his sentence Hess was released 10 days later and within just two months Hitler had also successfully petitioned the Bavarian government to lift the ban on the Nazis which had been imposed in the aftermath of the beer hall putch thus somewhat incredibly these individuals and their party which had attempted a military coup just over a year earlier were able to once again go about their business from the spring of 1925 onwards has it become an unofficial secretary to Hitler while incarcerated at Landsberg this position was formalized in the aftermath of their release as he was appointed private secretary to the fuhrer of the party in April 1925 with a fixed salary it was the beginning of a period in which Hess would become known as Hitler's closest Confidant an individual who the leader always made time for no matter what else was occurring indeed the Nazis were wallowing in a political Wilderness during the second half of the 1920s the party had decided that they would attempt henceforth to seize power in Germany through the electoral system but despite retaining a significant base of support in Bavaria and Munich in particular they remained a party with only very limited support throughout Germany despite the efforts of individuals such as Joseph Goebbels to establish new branches of the party in Berlin and elsewhere looking back today it is difficult at times to remember what a collection of Misfits failures and political hacks the Nazi leadership of which Hess was apart were in the late 1920s they would have remained as such a party with a very small base of support in Bavaria and little else had it not been for the events of the Autumn of 1929 that year a momentous economic crisis struck the developed World following the collapse of the stock markets on Wall Street in New York City a catastrophic economic depression followed one which led to mass unemployment across Europe and the Americas during the early 1930s in time it would eventually lead to Rapid inflation in some countries and the loss of people's life savings Germany was particularly badly affected and as millions of Germans suffered and became despondent they began to adhere to more extreme political groupings in their country and as this occurred the Nazis who garnered a tiny percentage of the votes in elections up to that point gradually became more and more popular thus when the reichtag elections were held in September 1930 the party increased its vote percentage from about 2.5 percent nationally to over 18 percent as a result Hitler and his adherents claimed 107 seats in the 577-seat reichstag it was the beginning of a dreadful political revolution in Germany has continued to acquire greater influence within the Nazi party as it was beginning to grow massively in popularity of the early 1930s as the private secretary and spokesperson for Hitler Hess found himself traveling the country with the Nazi leader as Hitler addressed huge audiences at political rallies across Germany while the party gained ever more supporters this placed Hess in a powerful position where he could effectively control who had access to Hitler a man fast becoming the most powerful politician in Germany and one whom many people believed was effectively a Chancellor in Waiting as he could ensure individuals access to Hitler or at least that their message or request for an audience would be passed on to the fuhrer Hess developed significant powers of patronage and all of this began to lead to Greater official titles eventually in 1932 he was placed in charge of the party liaison enough a role which meant that he effectively controlled personal access to Hitler during campaigning as well as being appointed chairman of the party central political commission this meant Hess was largely the senior administrator within the Nazi party by 1932 although others suggest the head of the SS haino Himmler and the chief propagandist Goebbels did admittedly have more control over policy matters Hess was about to ascend to a position of considerable significance within Germany this would be based on the Nazi's final seizure of Power by 1932 the economic situation in the country had become terminal as the Great Depression showed no signs of abating German banks were on the brink of collapse and the political situation was in free fall then that summer new reichstag elections were held in these the first since September 1930 the Nazis once again increased their support dramatically doubling their vote to 37 percent and claiming 230 seats in the 608 seat reichstag yet this was not an outright majority and the Centrist political parties were unwilling to do business with the Nazis if it meant Hitler becoming chancellor of Germany as a consequence a technocratic government was cobbled together one which attempted to govern the country for a few months however this 2 proved ineffective and new elections in November 1932 allowed Hitler to stoke fears amongst political centrists about the rise of the Communist Party of Germany thus early in 1933 an agreement was reached between the Nazis political centrists and the leaders of the German business community that Hitler would become chancellor of Germany in an effort to provide a more stable government and concretely address the economic situation unbeknownst to many of those who facilitated this it was effectively a death sentence for the German Republic within weeks Hitler used his new position to manufacture a political crisis and used that to pass an enabling act which allowed himself and his fellow Nazis to effectively rule by decree the Weimar Republic was over and the Nazi Third Reich had commenced Rudolf Hess had become a significant figure within the Nazi party during the late 1920s and early 1930s based to a considerable extent on his personal relationship with Hitler and then on his promotion to a number of significant official positions within the party apparatus however this all paled into insignificance with his Ascent following the Nazis seizure of power in Germany in the spring of 1933 the extent of which must have surprised many within the Nazi senior hierarchy itself just weeks after the passage of the enabling act Hitler appointed Hess as one of the 16 rice sliders who were created at this time these reichliders or Empire leaders were effectively the senior members of the Nazi party who made up the new governing body of Germany most of them were also individuals who were appointed to ministerial positions within the new German government and this indeed was a distinction which was awarded to s shortly afterwards when on the 1st of December 1933 he was made a minister without portfolio this was a striking rise to official political office for an individual who had only first won a seat in the reichstag in fresh elections which were held in fraudulent circumstances in March 1933 after Hitler had been appointed as Chancellor however all of these promotions in 1933 were dwarfed by the decision in the months following his Ascent as Chancellor by Hitler to appoint Hess as Deputy fuhrer or Deputy leader of the Nazi party in mid-april 1933 the significance of this might have been lost on individuals such as Himmler Goebbels or another Contender to become second in command of the government hellmann Goering at this stage but if they were in any doubt as to hess's seniority this was displaced in September 1933 when Hitler decreed that Hess should cease to be termed a reichlider and instead be addressed henceforth as the deputy fuhrer in acknowledgment of his seniority amongst the other Nazi leaders what this meant was that Hess was effectively Hitler's designated successor at this time should anything happen to the Nazi leader and it was in this capacity that he began acquiring an evergreen greater list of powers in the mid-1930s monopolizing controller for many aspects of Nazi policy relating to finances health and education he was also responsible for the signing of legislation into law and for organizing political events throughout Germany notably the massive Nazi rallies which were organized at the city of Nuremberg annually after this Caesar of power in 1933 Hess also had extensive powers to monitor individuals who were deemed enemies of the party as such hess's position in Germany expanded greatly in line with his appointment as Deputy fuhrer we might ask at this point exactly how ideologically committed to the Nazi cause Hess was was he a virulent anti-semite and German nationalist or was he primarily a zealous follower of Hitler Above All Else the answer is both there is no doubt that Hess was personally committed in an almost fanatical fashion to Hitler but there is also no disputing the fact that he was committed to the same ideological values as his master too Hess for instance needed no convincing that Germany's recent history needed to be viewed through the prism of a Jewish conspiracy to destroy the country for instance he viewed the League of Nations which had been set up to ensure International Peace in the aftermath of the first world war as an instrument of an international Jewish plot and also perceived many of Germany's enemies such as the Soviet Union has been controlled by Jewish politicians it is interesting to speculate given his pronounced paranoid delusions in these respects exactly to what extent Hess had influenced some of Hitler's views that he stated in Mein Kampf years earlier moreover Hess was also passionately convinced of the need to rejuvenate Germany and of the racial superiority of the German people over others such as the Slavs of Poland and Eastern Europe while he may have been as zealous adherent of Hitler's Hess did not need any convincing about the merits of the Nazis racial ideology Hess was far from alone in his ideological stance and the first years of the Nazi regime's reign in Germany saw a series of virulently anti-jewish laws introduced into the country on the 15th of September 1935 the reichstag which had become little more than a showpiece designed to rubber stamp what Hitler and the other senior Nazi leaders had already decided upon passed a series of legislation aimed at the persecution of Germany's half a million Jewish citizens the Nuremberg Laws as they became known effectively robbed Germany's Jews of their rights in Germany indeed depending on the bloodline of the country's Jews they were officially deprived of their citizenship other elements of the legislation forbade Jews from marrying non-jewish Germans while Jews were also heavily regulated in terms of their ability to employ non-jewish Germans numerous measures were also put in place to restrict the Jewish community's ability to conduct business the Nuremberg laws were the first major step in a series of escalating persecutory measures which the Nazi state would Implement in the coming years culminating in the pre-war period in the infamous kushdown act or night of the broken glass of November 1938 when thousands of Jewish businesses and synagogues were attacked and tens of thousands of Jews were either killed attacked or detained because of his Newfound position of seniority within Germany and his closeness with Hitler Hess would also have been Central to deliberations in the mid-1930s around German rearmament one of the most significant terms of the Treaty of Versailles that had brought the first world war to an end was that Germany was restricted to an army henceforth of no more than one hundred thousand troops why it was completely prohibited from having an Air Force and anything other than the token Navy the Weimar government had exceeded these figures by keeping tens of thousands of troops enlisted in an unofficial capacity but the German Army remained small throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s the Nazis quickly set about reversing this situation arguing on the international stage the Germany had been humiliated for long enough and that it was only right that it should be allowed to move on from the war which had ended 15 years earlier Berlin made an announcement in early 1935 that it would begin recruiting hundreds of thousands of men into a new German Army while a German air force to be called the luftwaffe was also to be established thus within a short period of time the Nazis began re-arming their country and in the spring of 1936 they moved troops into the Rhineland of Western Germany a region which they were prohibited from placing troops in under the terms of Versailles it was the beginning of the march to a war of Revenge which Hitler had desired since 1918. hess's role in German Affairs continued to expand as this rearmament process was underway in 1933 he had been placed in charge of establishing the folks Deutsche meaning the Council of ethnic Germans a body which was responsible for reaching out to ethnic German communities living outside the borders of Germany notably in places like Austria the Sudan land of Czechoslovakia and Western Poland some of these regions had formed part of Germany prior to the first world war and the council was established with a view to improving Nazi relations with the German communities here in advance of reacquiring Direct Control of these territories whether through diplomatic means or through War Hess oversaw the management of the council and efforts within it to disrupt the politics of Germany's neighbors and agitate for a return of land's last in 1918. he was also directly involved during these years in the dry crafting of the Nuremberg Laws and other legislation aimed against groups such as Romani people and Jehovah's Witnesses who the Nazis were also hateful of he also acted increasingly as Hitler's representative in negotiations and conferences with the heads of the German business Community notably the presidents of companies such as ige farben klips and others which were deeply in League with the Nazis Hess was Hitler's right-hand man as the march to war escalated in the late 1930s as we have seen the regime had begun rearming in 1935. this escalated in early 1938 as Berlin began to try to reclaim lands which it had lost in 1918 and other lands which the Nazis wanted to form into a greater Germany through aggressive diplomacy this had been underway in many ways since 1933 in Austria where the Austrian Nazi party had attempted to undermine successive governments in Vienna a different form of Austrian fascism emerged to fend off Germany's efforts to subsume the country but by early 1938 German interference had become so intense that a referendum was declared on the matter of uniting the country with Germany preempting the result of this Hitler ordered the German Army into Austria in mid-march 1938 no major violence occurred but the measure ensured that the union of the two countries known as the Angelus was voted through easily Days Later thereafter Hitler began pressing claims to much of Czechoslovakia a country which was effectively annexed in two intervals in late 1938 and the spring of 1939 as Britain and France tried to avoid a new war by appeasing Hitler however when Czechoslovakia was fully dismembered in March 1939 it was clear that any further Act of aggression would mean War thus when the Nazis invaded Poland on the 1st of September 1939 Britain and France responded by declaring war in turn on Germany the second world war had commenced hess's roles change substantially with the outbreak of the conflict he became increasingly involved for instance in the measures being taken to organize the occupation of Poland in the autumn and winter of 1939 following a swift successful military campaign in September and early October much of this revolved around identifying the country's three and a half million Jewish people and preparing for their persecution under German rule for instance Hess was responsible for overseeing the establishment of a registry of all polish Jews and also the adoption of policies which would effectively commence the creation of laban's realm in Poland by stripping the current inhabitants of the region of their rights thus hess's sphere of activity increased to include administrative responsibilities in Poland much of this was against his own inclinations and Hess wanted to be more active in combat the deputy fuhrer had a lifelong interest in aviation having signed signed up to join the nascent German air force in 1918 towards the end of the first world war he had subsequently learned to fly in the late 1920s and participate in aviation races throughout the 1930s consequently when Hitler initiated the war in September 1939 Hess had sought to join the luftwaffe and to fly active missions in the war yet Hitler had forbidden this stating that Hess was too important to figure within the regime to risk his life flying standard Aviation missions this prohibition was later reduced to a one-year ban but when Hess finally took to the skies during the war it would be for an altogether stranger Mission than he had envisaged in 1939 the second world war was a slow Conflict at first Poland was conquered by the Nazis in a matter of weeks and thereafter there were months of inaction on all sides as Britain and France tried to rearm as quickly as possible this belated effort on their part proved costly and when Hitler finally ordered the German wehrmacht westwards in the spring of 1940 Denmark Norway the low countries and France were all conquered in a matter of a few months thus by the late summer that year the Nazi State stood in control of virtually all of Central Europe and much of Western Europe while those States in these regions which remained outside of Nazi controls such as Italy Switzerland and Spain were either allies or neutral in the war only Britain stood against Germany and that late Summer and Autumn a massive campaign began by land and sea to bomb the country and choke off its resources to force London to submit this latter Campaign which has come to be known by various terms such as the blitz meaning the bombing of British cities by the German air force the battle of the North Atlantic to refer to the German Navy's efforts to strangle Britain's supply lines by attacking its Merchant Navy at Sea and the Battle of Britain more broadly would provide the backdrop to one of the defining episodes of Rudolf hess's life during the course of 1940 and early 1941 Hess and Hitler's relationship began to deteriorate this was not because of a major incident or falling out between the pair rather it was simply that Hess was deprived of the personal contact and interaction with the fuhrer which so much of his career and position had been based on since the mid-1920s the reason for this was Hitler was now largely basing himself out of military compounds in Germany and Poland as he prepared for a vast invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941 as he spent more time absent from Berlin and Munich where Hess continued his administrative work the pair interacted less and less it was at this particular juncture that Hess began making plans to engage in one of the most peculiar acts of the entire second world war from The Early Autumn of 1940 Hess began initiating contact with the Duke of Hamilton button with a view to having him act as an intermediary with King George VI for Britain Hess believed they could collectively initiate peace proceedings between Nazi Germany and Britain hess's motives in doing so which were kept secret from Hitler and all the other Nazi leaders and which were effectively treasonous as a result seemed to have been born out of his concern regarding the feasibility of invading the Soviet Union without first ending the war with Britain has his efforts on this issue continued through the autumn and winter of 1940. by this time he had come to believe that King George was effectively opposed to the British government led by the Prime Minister Winston Churchill concerning the commitment to continue the war with Germany as such he believed it would be possible to use Hamilton as an intermediary with the King and established peace with Britain to that end in November 1940 Hess began making preparations to fly to Britain himself piloting a Messerschmitt bf-110 fighter bomber plane as part of this he began customizing one of these planes to increase its fuel load and fitted with equipment he might need for his mission and then on the 10th of May 1941 Rudolf has the deputy leader of Nazi Germany set off on a solo flight from Germany over the North Sea towards Britain just over five hours later having been protected by the RAF and running short of fuel he parachuted out of his plane in the Skies over Southern Scotland at 2306 PM local time Hess later described his pride in having successfully made it to Britain on his mission he didn't last long unhindered though less than an hour after landing he was apprehended and detained south of Glasgow following his initial detention Hess claimed to be a German officer called Alfred horn posing as this individual he then requested to be allowed to meet with the Duke of Hamilton it was only when this request was granted and he met with Hamilton the following day that Hess revealed his true identity and disclosed the purpose of his mission the deputy fuhrer must have been surprised when Hamilton did not have as positive a reaction as Hess had been led to believe he would have to his mission instead Hamilton headed south to disclose what had occurred and to confer was Churchill in London here it was determined that Hamilton would meet with Hess again at Buchanan Castle in Stirling show in Scotland where he had been detained thus a second meeting was organized at which Hess detailed his proposals for peace Hess believed a mutually beneficial dispensation could be arrived at if Britain made peace with Germany through this Germany was to be given free reign to rule the European continent while Britain would be allowed to retain its independence and also control over its vast overseas Empire as Hess saw it it was a logical mutual agreement for the British and Germans two of the racially Advanced European nations to come to his captors however disagreed and it became clear to Hess in the days that followed that his mission had been completely in vain meanwhile back in Germany news of hess's unsanctioned mission had reached Hitler by midday on the 11th of May just 12 hours after Hess had parachuted to the ground in Scotland it was delivered via a letter Hess had prepared prior to his departure despite Hess outlining his reasons for his mission and trying to justify them on the basis that they were in Germany's best interests and favorable to the war effort Hitler reacted furiously he quickly stripped Hess of all his positions abolishing the position of Deputy fuhrer and assigning his duties to Martin Borman another senior administrator within the regime in an effort to manage the political Fallout a bizarre program of arresting and persecuting astrologers and Faith healers whom Hess had been known to consult was also initiated in order to suggest that the deputy fuhrer had acted as he had after being influenced by occultists of some kind thus Hess was completely disowned by the Nazi regime as a result of his mission in Britain his situation was equally dispiriting after learning that his mission had been futile he was briefly imprisoned in the Tower of London before being sent to Richard place in Surrey a fortified Mansion designated as Camp said where he would spend nearly a whole year under house arrest hess's First Years in detention in Britain would see the course of the war begin to shift dramatically when he first flew into Scotland in the early summer of 1941 the Nazis had reached a position of enormous strength having conquered a vast part of Europe from the Bay of Biscay in Western France East to Poland and the western parts of what is now Ukraine and from the northern stretches of Norway South to the Balkans campaigns were also underweight to conquer Greece and North Africa in conjunction with Hitler's Ally the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini however just six weeks after Hess landed in Britain Hitler initiated a vast invasion of the Soviet Union at first this went very well for Germany and it seemed that the Nazis would soon be able to force the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to cede most of Eastern Europe to them as well but that winter the German wehrmacht began to meet with more determined resistance in Russia outside the cities of Moscow and ingrad then in December 1941 the United States entered the war against the Nazis after it was attacked by Hitler's other major Ally the Empire of Japan thus in 1942 ominous reversals of Fortune began for Hitler and his accomplices as the campaigns in both North Africa and on the Eastern front in Russia began to shift in the favor of the allies things were faring no better for Hess in Britain but mitted place in Surrey he was under house arrest his circumstances here were comparatively favorable to those of an average German prisoner of war in Britain and certainly better than those of the average prisoner of war in German custody on the continent for instance Hess was allowed to move freely about the rather Pleasant surroundings of much of the mansion house and was able to ride home to his family in Germany the major deprivations were that he could not listen to the radio or read the newspapers and the mansion and grounds were guarded by over 150 armed soldiers this information blackout ensured that Hess did not receive any news about the course of the war which he might be able to use to manipulate his situation yet despite the rather Pleasant circumstances in which he was imprisoned hess's psychological state was deteriorating throughout the spring and early summer of 1942 as he claimed that secret forces with special psychic powers were attempting to control figures like Churchill perhaps unsurprisingly the Nazi in Hess Associated these secret forces with a Jewish plot there is debate to this day though as to whether or not Hess was feigning his psychological deterioration one of the terms of the Geneva Convention on the treatment of War prisoners stipulated that those who were mentally incapacitated had to be repatriated to their home nation and Hess was possibly trying to get back to Germany through this loophole in mid-june 1942 hess's situation changed considerably early on the morning of the 16th he attempted to commit suicide or at least make it seem as though he were attempting to take his own life by jumping over a railing of a staircase at mitchard place and falling onto a stone floor below the fall didn't kill him but he did fracture his left leg thus he was forced to use crutches for weeks thereafter and a decision was taken based on his deteriorating mental health and increasing assertions that he was being poisoned at the mansion house to send him to main diff Court Hospital in Southeastern Wales on the 26th of June 1942 Hess would spend the remaining three years of the war confined here his circumstances didn't really improve while there the surroundings were certainly Less Pleasant though as the war continued to go favorably for the Allies Hess was increasingly allowed access to the newspapers and given the radio he complained regularly of suffering from a wide range of ailments related to his internal organs complaints which his Physicians who at first were unaware that Hess was a lifelong hypochondriac might have taken seriously at first but soon learned to ignore thus did the former deputy fuhrer of Nazi Germany spend the last three years of the second World War by this time the war was heading towards an inexorable conclusion in late 1942 one of the most significant clashes of the entire conflict had been fought between the Germans and the Russians for control of the Southern Russian city of Stalingrad it had ended in the first disastrous German defeat of the entire War then in the spring of 1943 with a large injection of U.S personnel and supplies the Western allies were able to gain victory in the North Africa campaign forcing the Italians and Germans out of both Libya and Tunisia that summer they followed up on this by opening a southern front in Sicily in southern Italy however this proved to be a more limited new front compared to the one which was opened in Western Europe in the summer of 1944 following the D-Day Landings in Normandy within weeks the Allies were able to liberate Paris just as the Russians Advanced into Poland by the end of 1944 despite Allah desperate counter-offensive by Hitler in the Arden region of Belgium and Luxembourg that December the Western allies were preparing to invade the Rhineland early in 1945 as the Russians began their military buildup in Poland in advance of invading Eastern Germany the war was effectively over it was simply a race to see who would capture Berlin first back in Britain at Main diff Court Hospital Hess was not responding well to news of developments on the continent on the 4th of February 1945 he attempted to commit suicide for a second time by stabbing himself with a blunt bread knife by that time he was aware that the Russians were advancing on Berlin from the east of the country and the British Americans and other Western allies were attempting to make their descent on the German Capital as well before the war ended Perhaps it is a sign of his mental decline that Hess believed the bread knife could ever inflict a sufficient enough wound to kill himself and the surface gash required little more than two stitches afterwards thereafter he engaged in a hunger strike however this too was abandoned when he was informed that he would be force-fed if he continued on that path by now the British government was determined to keep Hess alive for the purposes of having him appear at the major war crimes trial which was being planned for the Nazi leadership once the conflict was over they were sorely in need of senior members of the regime to stand trial as the war Drew to a conclusion as with Berlin surrounded by the Russians in late April 1945 Hitler killed himself on the 30th and his designated success at Goebbels followed suit a day later on the 1st of May thus although he had been in custody in Britain for four years by the time the war in Europe officially came to an end on the 8th of May 1945 Hess would be one of the senior defendants at the planned war crimes Tribunal Hess was repatriated to Germany in the Autumn of 1945 for the purposes of standing trial before the international Military Tribunal which had been established to oversee the war crimes trials at the city of Nuremberg after the war he was to be tried along with the remaining senior members of the Nazi regime in the headline first trial individuals such as the head of the luftwaffe and Hitler's designated successor for much of the war hellmann Goering the head of the wehrmacht Wilhelm keitler the war economy Minister and Hitler's architect Albert Speer and the head of the general government of occupied Poland were the Holocaust of millions of Europe's Jews had primarily been carried out after hess's flight to Scotland in May 1941 Hans Frank there were 23 men involved in all in the trial generally these individuals were to be tried with having incited the war crimes against humanity war crimes and Broad violations of the law was governing Warfare the trial watched intently by the world's media would be held at Nuremberg from November 1945 onwards and lasted in early 11 months Hess was in poor physical condition when he arrived to Nuremberg in the Autumn of 1945. he weighed little more than 10 Stone and was paranoid that his captives in Britain had been poisoning his food as a result he had brought samples of what he had been fed with him to Germany with the goal of presenting them as evidence of his mistreatment in Britain but these were immediately confiscated when the time for the trial came he started to claim that the Amnesia he was suffering from already in Britain had worsened moreover he refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the Court claiming that the entire tribunal was effectively a show trial at the end of which he expected himself and all of his fellow defendants to be found guilty and executed he was wrong in this while gurring and several others who had a clear and direct hand in the Holocaust of the continent's Jewish people and other groups such as the Romani were indeed sentenced to death others were spared Hess was amongst them while he was deemed to be guilty of having helped to incite the war his defense lawyer argued that Hess could not be held responsible for the Holocaust and other war crimes which had largely occurred after Hess made his flight to Scotland and was imprisoned accordingly he was sentenced to life in prison but spared the death penalty Hess began serving his sentence at Spandau prison in Western Berlin in July 1947. he was confined there with six others who had been placed on trial with him at Nuremberg including spear the foreign minister Constantine Von neut and the two senior heads of the German Navy under the Nazis Karl Von donets and eyreider the prisoners were held under difficult circumstances early on with strict rules forbidding them from conversing with one another and severe limitations on their access to writing materials as time went by these restrictions were loosened Hess however remained a broken figure he continued to believe his food was being poisoned refused to have any visitors and was known to cry out in his sleep despite this situation he continued to be confined at shpanda as an assessment in 1957 deemed him well enough not to Warrant being sent to a psychiatric unit moreover the prison was gradually emptying four of hess's fellow Nazi prisoners were released in the mid-1950s having either served their sentences or on the grounds of severe ill health the final two others albashbier and balder from shirach who had been the Nazi governor of occupied Vienna were released together on the 30th of September 1966 having both served their 20-year sentences thus henceforth shpando prison which had 600 cells housed Rudolf Hess as its sole prisoner from 1966 onwards three years after shpia and franciach left Spandau things began to change slightly although for many years he had been in contact with his wife ilsa and son wolf as well as his daughter-in-law Andrea whom he had never met in person he had repeatedly declined their requests to visit him but following a period of illness in 1969 when he was moved briefly to a medical hospital to treat a perforated ulcer he relented and allowed them to visit it was the first time he had seen his wife and son since 1941. thereafter many individuals began to petition for his release particularly as he began to suffer from many different ailments including prostate cancer however these would all be declined on the grounds that Hess had never shown any remorse for his actions and was still a committed anti-semite his unwillingness to feign some remorse to advance the case for his release was just one aspect of hesse's unrelenting only peculiar approach to those who visited him for instance when historians showed up to interview him in an effort to better understand why he had flown into Britain in 1941 without telling anyone in the Nazi leadership what he was doing Hess would tell them he had been inspired to do so by Supernatural forces which visited him in a dream Rudolf Hess was found dead on the 17th of August 1987 in a room in the garden at shpanda prison which had been converted to allow him a summer reading room he heard apparently hanged himself using an extension cord which he had strung over the latch of one of the windows of the room although a suicide note was found on his person and the Allied bodies which had been charged with overseeing Spandau prison for four decades quickly ruled his death a suicide some doubts were raised at the time Hess after all was in his early 90s by that time and many people believed he could not possibly have managed to hang himself however there seems little reason to think otherwise why would any other power with access to Spandau have suddenly decided to kill him after 40 years of being imprisoned there additionally it was noted at the time that hesse's mental state had never been good and he had previously attempted suicide at Spandau in 1977 following his death spando prison of which he had been the sole prisoner for 21 years was demolished to prevent it becoming a Neo-Nazi Shrine Rudolf Hess was in many ways the last of the senior Nazis to die Rudolf Hess is one of the strangest of all the senior members of the Nazi regime to assess while many Studies have often commented on his personal relationship with Hitler there is also no doubting he was an ideological Nazi one who was both the committed right-wing Nationalist and an anti-semite while also espousing the racial hierarchy which allowed the Nazis to have no compunctions about Mass murdering millions of Jews polls Romani Russians and other peoples across Europe during the second world war moreover he was absolutely Central to the operations of the party once the Nazis seized power in 1933 overseeing the passage of legislation and even drafting parts of notorious ones such as the Nuremberg laws while subsequent events would complicate his reputation there is no doubting that Hess was every bit as committed to the Nazi ideology as Hitler Himmler or Goebbels indeed we will never know how much he might have influenced some of Hitler's own ideas as he was drafting Mein Kampf at Landsberg prison in 1924. despite all of this Hess is more difficult to assess than figures like Himmler and Goebbels this is all because of the events of May 1941 when Hess decided to fly on a solo mission to Britain with the goal of initiating peace talks between Britain and Nazi Germany his mission was a complete failure but because of it many people have judged Hess less harshly than some of his associates within the Nazi leadership but there seems to be little reason to do so hess's actions might have been driven by his declining mental health but they were nevertheless quite in line with Nazi ideology the deputy fura was not trying to bring about peace in Europe through his mission he was simply trying to ensure that Britain was no longer an adversary before Germany went to war with Russia given the apocalyptic plans which the Nazis had for Eastern Europe had they defeated the Soviet Union there is little sense in finding some redeeming quality in hess's efforts to Simply Shore up Germany's Western borders in order to more effectively wage war in the East moreover Hess never showed any remorse for his actions and remained committed to much of the Nazis ideology down to his death more than four decades after the war ended he lived and died a full-blooded Nazi throughout his life and neither his complicated psychology nor his actions in 1941 changed that what do you think of Rudolf Hess should he be judged in the same way that the other senior members of the Nazi regime have been or do his curious actions in heading to Scotland in 1941 to initiate peace talks exonerate him to some extent of his crimes please let us know in the comments section and in the meantime thank you very much for watching [Music] thank you The Man known to history as Heinrich Himmler was born on the 7th of October 1900 in the city of Munich in Bavaria in southern Germany his mother Anna Maria Himmler nahider came from a traditional catholic family and as well as Heinrich she also parented two more boys Gabe Hyde Ludwig born in 1898 and Ernst Hellman born in 1905. himmler's Father Joseph gerbard Himmler known as gerbart was a 35 year old school Master at the time of heinrich's birth and had previously gained a degree in phonology and languages at Munich's university after this he was appointed to be the tutor of Prince Heinrich of Bavaria of the House of wittelsbach the senior most aristocratic family of Southern Germany before returning to Munich as a professor and teacher a proud organized and pedantic man gebhard took great pride in his career success and would decorate the Himmler household with Quality Furniture paintings and collectibles including old German coins and memorabilia as a result of his success both Heinrich and his two brothers enjoyed a comfortable but strict middle-class upbringing this was in stark contrast to previous generations of the Himmler family as while gerpart had made a success of himself his father heinrich's grandfather had been a poor Soldier throughout his life in contrast the himlas had largely survived thanks to the support of Anna's family in Regensburg in the southeast of Germany as her father was a successful Tradesman there this had enabled the himlas to move into a spacious second floor apartment on the Hildegard Strasse in Munich where Anna gave birth to her second son in 1900 this child they named after gerbhard's former student Prince Heinrich the prince also consented to becoming heinous Godfather and so the middle son of the Himmler children would grow up with some semblance of aristocratic pretensions as was typical of children of their age in class within German Society the Himmler Brothers received a strict regimented upbringing one which was only intensified by their mother's religious order and their father's occupation any hopes they may have had of escaping their parents attention was soon crushed when all three were sent to a grammar school in lanshoot northeast of Munich here their father was The Joint School Master it was during this time in lansuit that the young Himmler began to take an interest in Germanic Heritage and history in general a Fascination which had perhaps been inspired by the Bavarian towns castles and countless old buildings that still dotted Southern Germany at that time after beginning to also show a keen interest in his father's historical memorabilia gebhard went to every possible length to encourage his son's Newfound Fascination young Himmler returned his father's attention by becoming an obedient methodical and voted son over the coming months and years Heinrich soon proved himself to be his father's son as he became a hard-working if quiet and unimaginative child which is evidenced by the fragments of a surviving diary he commenced writing in 1910. in this instead of writing his daily accounts in sentences Heinrich merely listed his trivial daily activities such as meal times or when he took a bath and referred to any adults by their full name or title giving the impression that from an early age Himmler was proper organized and fastidious while Heinrich was growing up his native Germany was drifting towards War for decades the continent had been becoming more and more volatile in its politics much of this was due to the unification of the approximately 30 small German states into a German Empire in 1871. with this Germany began its Ascent as the major political economic and military power of Continental Europe only Britain was more powerful this event destabilized the balance of power in Europe and in the decades that followed the continent's politics became more and more fractious eventually shortly after heinrich's own birth in 1900 two major alliances came into existence one consisting of Britain France and Russia and the other of Germany and the austro-hungarian Empire nationalist tensions in regions such as the Balkans and Colonial rivalry in the Scramble for troll of Africa from the 1880s onwards fueled this descent towards War the spark which lit it finally came in the summer of 1914 when a Regional Crisis in the Balkans escalated into a full-blown European War such was the global presence of the countries involved which had colonies all over the world that this was deemed a global conflict the first World War as Heinrich Grew Older his diary entries became more descriptive the most notable aspect of them was often his recounting of additions to his stamp collection or the holding of church services which he had attended however after the outbreak of the first world war in 1914 Himmler began to write about events and battles which he had read about in the local press as well as letters his father received from heinrich's Godfather Prince Heinrich who had joined the German Army in 1901 as a lieutenant and who shortly after the outbreak of war was badly wounded in action on the Western Front in northeastern France it is evident that the prince was something of a hero to Himmler as after reading the news of his Godfather being wounded Heinrich wrote in his diary that he and his friends would like nothing better than to go and fight the British and the French other accounts within his diary recall occasions when French prisoners of War arrived at Lansford railway station in Bavaria of these Frenchmen Himmler spoke with some sympathy however Himmler had no such compassion towards the Russian prisoners of War who were brought to Germany these he described as Vermin in a surprisingly early sign of his racial animosity towards the people of Eastern Europe it was also during this period that Himmler began to prepare himself to join the German Army when he was deemed old enough by exercising regularly and lifting weights in an effort to gain muscle mass however as much as young Himmler may have wanted to appear as a strong youthful German during this period he also complained of regular colds stomach pains and other illnesses these ailments were a cause of constant frustration and concern for him at school Heinrich proved himself to be a hard-working pupil who neither excelled nor failed at the various subjects he was expected to master which included science mathematics history geography Latin and Greek as well as piano lessons he showed little natural talent for this musical training and after many years of failure eventually plucked up enough courage to request from his parents but he'd be allowed to quit all in all heinrich's greatest interests during his childhood years seemed to have been German history and folklore it is therefore perhaps not surprising that within his diary there are various entries in which he continuously stated how much he wished to join the German Army and fight in the war despite still only being a teenager due to his age he would ultimately never get the chance to experience Frontline combat before the end of the first World War it was in late 1915 that himmler's diary entries began to subside in number which was a gap that may have been perpetuated by the death in 1916 of Prince Heinrich of Bavaria in the mountains of Romania although this undoubtedly was a severe blow for both heineike and his father their reaction to the prince's death is not recorded but it is probable that they were greatly affected by it indeed we get a glimpse of the possible impact of the prince's death on Himmler in 1917 when his father wrote to the Bavarian Royal household asking for his son to be considered as a future officer Cadet but not before he reached maturity in the meantime Himmler was called up for training in 1917 at his mother's hometown of Regensburg with the 11th Bavarian Infantry Regiment however the next year Himmler continued his army training first as a machine gunner and then as an officer yet despite his later claims that he saw action on the Western Front in the first world war records from the time clearly show that Heinrich never finished his army training before the end of hostilities as he was discharged in December 1918 without completing his officer training course the war had come to an end just over a month earlier Germany had found itself without sufficient resources for its economy to keep functioning and Britain and France had been aided by the entry of the United States into the war on their side in 1917. thus with the government collapsing in Germany the country surrendered in early November 1918. in the aftermath of the first world war the German Army was massively reduced in size largely due to the terms of the Treaty of Versailles the peace agreement signed between Germany on the one hand and the Victorious powers of Britain France and the United States on the other the country's economy had also been decimated as a consequence of the war meaning that although Himmler still wished to join the military in emulation of his Idol Prince Heinrich he was forced in the aftermath of the war to seek out a civilian occupation in the short run this led to Himmler obtaining employment on a poultry farm as an apprentice near the city of Ingolstadt where his father had also taken up a teaching position however whilst working there he began to feel ill and was soon diagnosed as having contracted paratyphoid fever caused by Salmonella poisoning this in turn had been caused by ingesting unsanitary meat or water on his doctor's advice himlo has told to steer clear of farm work for at least a year however he evidently wished to seek a career in farming at this time as he then enrolled on an Agronomy course at the Munich technician in October of 1919 where he studied crop and soil usage until 1922. during this time he joined a fencing fraternity and even received the badge of honor that was a fencing scar on his face during this period of his life Himmler enjoyed the Fairly stereotypical life of a student of the time he learned to dance although he did not enjoy it while he also engaged in intellectual debates with his fellow students at least when he wasn't practicing his fencing skills because the university did not provide meals for its students Himmler dined at the home of a lady called Frau Lloyds whose daughter Maya he soon became close to although his Diaries revealed no romance taking place between them this platonic but also paternal pattern of relationships with women would come to repeat itself over the coming years on one occasion after meeting a young lady on a train Himmler revealed his views on male female relationships and also some of his sexual proclivities in his diary here he remarked on her innocence and also stated his belief that women should be loved in three ways as a child that must be punished when she is foolish but also protected due to her weakness secondly as a loyal and devoted companion and thirdly as a wife whose feet he longed to kiss it is also clear from himmler's Diary entries during the early 1920s that he felt uncertain and even aimless writing that he was only engaging in his studies as it gave him peace of mind and quelled his doubts about his life he also stated that he had considered leaving Germany altogether to travel across Europe although he reveals that in his conversations with Maya he had confided in her that he believed that Germany was entering a period of great change he also yearned to join the Army again and with his small circle of friends often practice shooting all told himmler's diary as well as the accounts handed down to us by his fellow students at the time paint a picture of a methodical even pedantic traditional young man who seemed to have taken his studies and church going extremely seriously and who took great pride in Germanic culture and traditions whilst avoiding intimate relationships with young women as he thought they should be protected and prevented from going astray due to Temptation he even told his brother Gebhart that he intended to remain a virgin until he was married these beliefs were no doubt at least in part formed due to his father's dutiful disciplinarian manner combined with his mother's devout Faith as Himmler at this time still regularly attended Mass it was during this period in the early 1920s that himmler's Diaries also reveal another possible influence over his world view this concerned events which were unfolding in Russia where a civil war had been underway since 1917. by the early 1920s it was clear that the Bolshevik Communists were victorious in this himmler's diary entries revealed that he was deeply perturbed by this emergence of a major communist power in Eastern Europe his views in this regard had been shaped by the events of 1919 when Munich and Bavaria as a whole became a hotbed of communist agitation leading eventually to the Bavarian revolution in April 1919. after which a Soviet Republic was briefly set up it was soon crushed by the Nationalist fry Corps a paramilitary group which had emerged within Germany after the war consisting largely of army veterans and nationalists who opposed the Communists across the country towards the end of his studies Himmler joined the freight Corps with whose nationalistic ethos he clearly felt a kinship it was the beginning of his descent into extremist politics it was also during this period that Himmler began to spend a large part of his time at a student Society named the league of Apollo this largely consisted of ex-soldiers and top graduates its president was a Jewish man named Abraham Hoffner although Himmler was at first polite the society's Jewish members it is clear that he was also forming strong anti-semitic views by this time as he was involved in violent arguments as his time attending the league of Apollo went on during the course of which he protested against the membership of the league including Jews this stance soon earned him a reputation as a nationalist militarist himself then on the 25th of January 1922 at a meeting of his Rifle Club Himmler by chance met a man who changed the course of his life and started a chain of events that would ultimately make him one of the most notorious individuals in human history the chance meeting was with a German Army Captain called elmstrom Rome was one of the few officers who had been able to retain his position in the German army or rexvier after the first world war Himmler and he soon found common ground in their discussions as both were virulently opposed to the rise of Communism in Eastern Europe this meeting is considered to be the first hard evidence of Himmler becoming involved in organized nationalist politics after concluding his agricultural studies in August 1922 Himmler joined Rome's newly formed paramilitary Bund rice Creek's Flagger or Imperial War flag Society like the Fry Corps this was a nationalist paramilitary Group by this time Himmler had also become aware of the growing influence of the munich-based National Socialist German Workers Party or as they were more widely known the Nazi party since 1921 these had been led by Adolf Hitler whose bombastic speeches within Munich's beer Halls were attracting the admiration of the local nationalists including aeonstrom as well as the hatred of the Communists resulting in regular Street battles in the city around this time as Himmler was becoming involved in Rome's organization support for nationalist parties was growing amongst certain sections of the population in regions such as Bavaria this was driven by Germany's economic woes crippling economic indemnities had been imposed on the country through the Treaty of Versailles and the French and the belgians had reserved the right to occupy the industrial Heartland of Germany in the Rua and the Rhineland in the west of the country if Germany faltered in its payments to compound the matter inflation had become a problem as had unemployment many young men and middle-aged army veterans were drawn to nationalist parties such as the Nazis with their message of revitalizing Germany and also their extreme antipathy towards the country's Jewish population this was not necessarily unusual in Europe where anti-Semitism was unfortunately widespread in the 1920s but the Nazis views on the country's Jews was especially harsh believing they were responsible for Germany's defeat in the war like many others Himmler decided to join the Nazis in 1923. he also remained a member of rooms rice krieg's Flagger paramilitary group this was around the same time that heightened nationalist activity in Munich was beginning to draw the attention of bavaria's regional government this resulted in the Bavarian prime minister oyegan Fong caniling Banning political rallies in the region and declaring martial law on the 26th of September 1923 he then appointed Gustav fonkar as the stats commissar or state commissioner giving him free Reign Over the maintenance of Law and Order across Bavaria in tandem Colonel Hans Ritter fonseiser was appointed as chief of the Bavarian police and Otto von lossov as commander of the Bavarian branch of the reichsvier the German Army their appointment was notable as Hitler had formed the idea by this time of attempting to emulate in Bavaria Benito Mussolini's fascist seizure of Power with his march on Rome in October of 1922 the Nazi Leader's goal was to seize control of the government of Bavaria and afterwards attempt a similar march on Berlin as plans for doing so escalated in the Autumn of 1928 he even Enlisted the first World War General and war hero Erie ludendorff in an attempt to gain the upper hand over fonkar's government in Bavaria by winning over additional supporters the attempted coup would be launched in early November 1923. Hitler received word during the planning process that Carr along with sisa and lossov were due to address a public meeting in Munich's burger beer hall on the 8th of November 1923. the Nazi leader perceived this as the opportunity to seize bavaria's government he had been waiting for he and the leadership of the Nazi party quickly forged a plan to storm the burger boy killer on the 8th of November following which they planned to take the government leaders in Bavaria hostage and force them to surrender power to them they would be aided in this by anstroom who had recently established a new paramilitary organization known as the Sturm up tylon or sa meaning storm Detachment as the military wing of the Nazi party on the evening of the 8th of November Hitler along with a 600 strong contingent of the sa star formed into the public meeting being held by the head of the Bavarian government Gustav fonkar at the beer hall Hitler proclaimed that a revolution had begun ludendorff arrived shortly afterwards following which the triumvirate of police and army officials effectively surrendered the government of Bavaria to Hitler and ludendorff having seized the beer hall Hitler then made the mistake of leaving to attend to a crisis elsewhere and Carr and the other members of the Bavarian government escaped they quickly took charge of the situation and began pouring military and police forces into the city to crush the Revolt the next morning after realizing that his coup was on the verge of failure Hitler accompanied by ludendorff agreed to March through the streets of Munich with their followers there they would join up with Rome's troops these included Himmler who played a minor role in The Beer Hall Butch as it later became known thus he was present to see the coup quickly suppressed as armed State troops arrived and opened fire on the gathered Nazis in Bavaria on the 9th of November a panic quickly ensued and Hitler and his supporters fled the scene the last pockets of resistance throughout Bavaria surrendered in the hours that followed bringing the short-lived attempted coup to an end Hitler was subsequently arrested and tried for high treason in February of 1924 and was given five years in prison at Landsberg prison along with several other ringleaders of the putch but ludendorff was released without charge Himmler was arrested but was released due to lack of evidence although his involvement in the putch did lose him his job moreover as the Nazi party and the sa were officially banned by the government following the coup Himmler was forced to return home to his parents although Hitler's beer hall push had ended in a humiliating failure Himmler still maintained contact with Elms darum who had been incarcerated himself at stadelheim prison and even took the time to visit him in February 1924 on his motorcycle shortly before room was released on probation this should have been the end of national socialism and the Nazis in Germany however Hitler used his time in prison to begin plotting a new way to seize power firstly he wrote his Infamous book Mein Kampf a paranoid sprawling political Testament in which he blamed Germany's recent woes on a vast Jewish and communist conspiracy to destroy the country he also determined at this time that henceforth the Nazis would seek to claim power in Germany via peaceful means they would do so by attempting to grow as a political party and to take over the country Through The Ballot Box moreover he would be able to set out on this Mission sooner than expected just a year after being sent to Landsberg prison he was released and shortly afterwards the Bavarian Regional government removed the ban on the Nazi party in what was retrospectively one of the poorest political decisions in modern European history thus from 19 to 25 onwards the Nazis were seeking to seize power through elections to the reichstag meanwhile Himmler had no intention of giving up his political activities during the mid-1920s he refused to look for normal work much to his parents displeasure and instead worked as a low-level campaigner for the National Socialist Freedom Movement during the 1925 elections an organization which had been formed as a front for the Nazis following their brief prescription in this role Himmler toured bavarious towns and Villages making speeches on the evils of capitalism as well as the Jews as such he became a prominent member of the party and when the Nazis were allowed to reform in 1925 Himmler was amongst those who rejoined by this time he was 24 years of age and joined the staff of griego and ottostrasa two of the most senior members of the party as a general assistant Himmler soon became indispensable to griego Strasser who as well as being a member of the German Parliament was the Nazi party leader in lower Bavaria later his brother Otto would recall how Himmler at this time was placed in charge of checking the various arms dumps the Nazi party had built up around Bavaria and ensuring they were not discovered by the regional government himmler's virulent personal anti-Semitism was also becoming more and more evident during these years for instance it was around this time that he began drawing up and publicizing lists of local German Jews with the goal of shaming them in a region in which anti-Semitism was proliferating during the 1920s shortly afterwards he was promoted to become strasser's Deputy in lower Bavaria although Strasser remained dubious himself about himmler's personal abilities it was also in 1925 that Himmler joined a seemingly obscure bodyguard unit within the National Socialist Party this was named the schutz staffel or SS meaning protection Squad it was initially a personal bodyguard unit for Hitler's protection from the earliest days of the Nazi movement there had been plans to form a bodyguard for Hitler largely because in the aftermath of the first world war there were as many as 380 political assassinations within Germany the first of these prototype bodyguard units was the so-called ordinal or Steward's troop but as the formation of paramilitary groups had been outlawed by this time the group was disguised as a sports division of the party in early 1923 this was renamed the Strasse troop Hitler consisting originally of only eight men including its Commander Julius Schreck who would eventually become Hitler's personal show sofa this organization adopted the Toten cop skull and crossbones symbol as its emblem one which had previously been used by the elite Prussian hussars of the Imperial German Army it was subsequently adopted by the SS along with the Nordic Victory rooms when it was formed in April 1925. Himmler was one of the new paramilitary units first members number 168 he would soon rise to become its leader and transform it into one of the most brutal institutions in human history the SS was initially established as a subgroup of the much larger sa however even from its earliest days it distinguished itself as an elite unit for instance its members wore caps with the Toten cop skull and crossbones as well as a field gray uniform differing considerably from the brown shirted sa members but despite already having different clothing from the main body of the sa the SS would soon adopt the black German army style uniforms with doffed caps and Polished boots which became notorious in future years this uniform and Insignia would become the unit's signature look in years to come and truly mark them out as the elite policing and security Force within Nazi Germany Himmler was promoted within the SS in 1926 he was made an SS Gau filler or District leader within lower Bavaria however the head of the paramilitary organization Joseph resigned as SS leader in 1927. he was replaced by Earhart Hayden a poorly equipped bureaucrat who proved unsuitable for the task Haydn would eventually be replaced and when he was it would open up an opportunity for Himmler to become one of the leading figures of the Nazi movement by 1926 himmler's salary was about 120 marks a month and his SS duties largely consisted of canvassing members of the Bavarian public to subscribe to the party newspaper he was also charged with securing advertisements and it was this background in journalism that would see griego strasa promote Himmler in 1926 to become Deputy propaganda Chief within Bavaria in which role he often worked alongside another Rising member of the party Joseph Goebbels who in his own diary professed to liking Himmler calling him intelligent and a good fellow it is unknown as to when Himmler first met Hitler in person however it is likely that he came to the fuhrer's attention from even before he was sent to Landsberg prison following the beer hall perch what is clear is that Himmler met with Hitler in September 1927 and told the leader of the party about his idea to turn the relatively insignificant SS into an elite paramilitary unit of the Nazi party the idea evidently impressed Hitler and he promoted Himmler to become the deputy SS leader under Erhardt Haydn at the rank of ss oberfular he was now the second in command of the SS by this time the membership of the larger essay was ballooning in size whilst the SS membership had actually declined from around a thousand to less than 300 members much of this was owing to Erhard Haydn's poor leadership as soon as he became Haydn's Deputy Himmler began demonstrating his organizational abilities by setting up separate SS jurisdictions across Germany this activity soon made it clear to those who chose to look that Himmler was far more able than his SS Superior whom he soon began to eclipse and upstage it was also around this time that the Nazi party as a whole was beginning to expand its reach Beyond its homelands of Bavaria meaning that the attention or focus of its campaigning increasingly centered around Berlin resulting in Himmler in 1927 embarking on a lecture tour of the German capital on one of these visits to the German Capital Himmler met his future your wife a 34 year old nurse named Margaret Borden who owned a nursing home in Berlin and was according to several accounts of Polish Heritage Himmler who was just 27 years old at this time clearly formed a close bond with Margarita as like him she was fastidious hard-working and shared his anti-Semitism therefore only a few months after their first meeting Margarita sold her nursing home bought a house in the country near Munich and married Himmler in July of 1928 as Himmler was still on a modest salary by this stage the couple supplemented their income by keeping around 50 chickens and selling produce although Himmler had little to do with this modest Enterprise nevertheless it has given rise to the notion that Himmler was a chicken farmer when really it was his wife that attended to their small number of livestock as he was away on party business more often than not the following year 1929 would prove to be one of the most important of himmler's life as in August both he and Margarita greeted their only daughter Goodwin into the world more significantly earlier that year Erhard Haydn was dismissed by Hitler on the grounds of his General incompetence and was replaced as head of the SS by Himmler although the SS was Tiny compared to the sa in 1929 its primary role of guarding top party officials gave Himmler direct access to the very top of the National Socialist Party and it was clear that himmler's Vision to transform the SS into an Elite praetorian god-like Force had met with Hitler's approval from the beginning this meant that he could now proceed to effectively mold and expand this unit into what he saw as the ideal Germanic Warriors whose loyalty racial Purity physical fitness and courage were surpassed by none and feared by all this also occurred as the circumstances which would allow the Nazis to secure power in Germany were developing in the Autumn of 1929 a severe economic crisis hit the Americas and Europe after the stock markets on Wall Street in New York City tumbled Nazi popularity soared in the aftermath of the Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression which followed as ordinary Germans found themselves unemployed and impoverished in the process Hitler soon became one of the most high-profile political leaders in Germany along with Hermann Goering and the new propaganda head within the party Joseph Goebbels for the time being Himmler remained in the background continuing his early strategy of quietly accumulating power and expanding the influence and membership of his SS which Grew From 300 to 3000 in the space of just 12 months at the start of the 1930s this mirrored the rise of the Nazis politically who in the reichtag elections of 1930 secured 17 of the vote nationally and then in the next elections in the summer of 1932 became the largest party in the country with just short of two out of every five German voters giving them their support at the beginning of 1931 Himmler began setting up a counter-intelligence division of the SS one of the candidates for admission to this was an unemployed former Navy officer named Reinhard heidech who had recently been fired from the Navy on account of several affairs with married women Himmler interviewed him and was impressed enough that he hired him Heidi Rose fast and soon became the head of a new organization named the zika heidstein store SD meaning security service in the hands of heidrich this body would come to act as the covert Espionage and surveillance arm of the SS in the process heide would become second only to Himmler himself within the SS and one of the most powerful men in the Third Reich as a result following the summer ishtag elections of 1932 the Nazis had become the largest political party in Germany however the Centrist and center-right political establishment of the German Republic were broadly unwilling to allow Hitler to become chancellor of Germany the party's political Manifesto was seen as being too extreme and there were many who were rightly wary of the fact that they had attempted a military coup in Bavaria back in 1923. accordingly a technocratic government was pieced together in mid-1932 to prevent Hitler becoming the leader of the government however by the winter it was clear that this lacked the necessary political support to tackle the country's seemingly never-ending economic woes accordingly in January 1933 Hitler was appointed as chancellor of Germany and several government Ministries were allocated to Nazi officials after this Hitler immediately sought to claim total control of the country and dissolve parliament so that fresh elections could be held in March before these could be held a fire at the reichstag in February 1933 was used as the justification for suspending all basic civil rights and allowing the detention without trial the fire was blamed on the German Communist party which was all but shut down over the coming months shortly afterwards the reichstag deputies met at the coal opera house and voted on an enabling act which gifted Hitler de facto control over Germany for a period of four years and enabled him to pass laws without the consent of the country's parliament in voting for this act the reichstag effectively signed its own death warrant as the Bill's passing made Hitler the dictator of Germany in all but name meaning the German democracy was now dead over the coming months all political opposition was with the aid of himmler's ss crushed throughout the country as political parties were forced to shut down and any persons who were considered any kind of threat were arrested and interned either in prisons or temporary detention centers soon they were being sent to new concentration camps that were being built by the Nazis throughout Germany by 1933 the SS membership had ballooned in size to over 50 000 members all of whom were now subject to strict entry rules such as checks on their ancestry physical fitness and height to ensure only the most Nordic looking Germans gained admission to himmler's Elite Force conversely those within the Third Reich who were deemed to be undesirable or were political or racial enemies of Nazism such as the country's half a million Jews Romani gypsies homosexuals or the disabled soon began to feel the full implications of himmler's planned Purge of the German population of course the irony of all this was that Himmler who was becoming one of the foremost Advocates of the idea of a blonde blue-eyed German race with his black hair and frail physique was the furthest thing possible from the racial ideal his SS was trying to promote one of the first stages of this program of racial cleansing under the Nazis was the setting up of the SS race and settlement main office this was tasked with maintaining the high entry standards for SS members for instance members who sought to marry were required to produce a full family tree dating back several Generations in order to prove that they were of sufficiently pure German blood once they passed this test and actually married it was also expected of them that they would sire many children in order to propagate the German race in conjunction with instigating measures designed to ensure the purity of the SS membership Himmler after Hitler's rise to power in 1933 also began to adopt other measures to contain and even persecute those he considered to be of impure blood all enemies of the burgeoning Nazi State culminating in the setting up of concentration camps such as Dakar near Munich these were initially designed to hold political prisoners but years later and under himless Direction they would become the centers of one of the most brutal genocides ever seen back in Berlin only two obstacles now stood between the fuhrer Adolf Hitler and absolute power in Germany one of which was President Paul Von Hindenburg who was still technically Hitler's Superior the second was the army or rather the Army High command who were now increasingly voicing their concerns regarding Ernst gloom's massive essay which had swelled by 1933 to well over 2 million members this all culminated in Hindenburg telling Hitler he had to reign in the sa and its leader um Hitler was inclined to do so as by now Rome was not just a direct threat to the Army but to the government and to Hitler himself for some time Hitler and the other Nazi leaders became concerned that room was planning to seize power himself as by 1933 he was becoming increasingly arrogant and insulting in his behavior towards Hitler himself as a result in the spring of 1930 4 an operation codenamed Operation hummingbird headed by Hermann Goering one of the chief Nazi ministers along with Himmler and his accomplice Heidi was launched the plan was to decapitate the leadership of the sa and bring it back in line with Hitler's goals the operation was initiated on the 30th of June and would result in three days of violence which has subsequently become known as the night of the Long Knives thousands of the Nazis political enemies and rooms leading supporters in the essay were either arrested or murdered in coordinated attacks across the country these included a Rome himself and also figures like himmler's old boss in the mid-1920s griego strasa who during the Great Depression had begun to publicly distance himself from Hitler another victim was Rita fonkar the former leader of the Bavarian government at the time of the beer hall putch who was dragged into a wood and hacked to death with hatchets a huge proportion of these attacks were carried out by himmler's SS and as a result himmler's paramilitary organization now began to politically supersede the sa which was allowed to continue after Rome was killed but the political significance of which was greatly reduced from the summer of 1934 onwards in addition to now being head of the foremost paramilitary and security force in all of Nazi Germany from the mid-1930s onwards Himmler was also increasingly monopolizing control over the policing Services of Germany back in 1933 Hermann Goering had formed a police force of his own named the gahaima stats polizzai or gestapo however from 1934 onwards the Nazi state began re-arming in anticipation of a future war of revenge against the European powers consequently gering's attentions drifted towards establishing a new Air Force called the luftwaffe and in April of 1934 he handed over control of the Gestapo to Himmler the SS Chief quickly placed it in heydrich's capable hands and on that same day Hitler rewarded himmler's loyalty and efficiency by placing him in charge of all Germany's police forces outside of Prussia itself me meaning that he now had control over the close protection of the Nazi Elite the secret services and the police in many ways this effectively made Himmler the second most powerful man in Germany after Hitler himself thus in little under five years Heine Himmler had gone from relative obscurity as a Nazi Party official in lower Bavaria to control the interior of virtually the entire German state the mid-1930s saw the Nazis begin to implement their extreme anti-semitic policies in Germany this began with the introduction of the so-called Nuremberg Laws these forbade marriage between Jews and non-jews and deprived Jews of German citizenship they also prohibited Jews from hiring non-jewish Germans the introduction of these laws marked the beginning of an increasingly severe series of governmental measures designed to persecute German Jews which would eventually culminate in what many considered to be one of the worst periods of mass murder in world history Himmler would be Central to these developments and their unfolding over the years that followed in the meantime himmler's power over the interior of the German Third Reich or Empire hit even greater Heights in June of 1936 when Hitler decreed the unification of all state police forces within Germany and named Himmler the head of all of Germany's police forces effectively bringing them under the umbrella of the SS as a result now that the SS controlled Germany's police forces and secret Services Himmler perhaps in an effort to fulfill his dreams of a military career began the formation of a new fighting arm of the SS which would eventually become amongst the most feared of the entire second world war this Branch would eventually become the evaphan SS or armed SS whose Origins can be found as early as 1933 when a unit called the Zonda Commander was formed in Berlin under the leadership of Seb Dietrich this initially acted as an elite bodyguard it to Adolf Hitler pledging Allegiance and obedience to him until death however after the 10th anniversary of Hitler's beer hall putch in 1933 this unit was renamed the leipestand Atta Adolf Hitler making it Hitler's elite paramilitary bodyguard a year later Himmler renamed it as the leibestandata SS Adolf Hitler as he wanted it to be clear that the unit was comprised of national socialists and was not part of the German armed forces the leibstant Atta would eventually form the first of 38 SS military divisions each consisting of around 15 000 to 20 000 Elite troops the vaffan SS would grow to include the fifth SS Panza Viking division that was comprised of men from Norway Denmark Sweden and other Scandinavian countries whilst the 13th raffan Mountain division was comprised of bosnians Slavs and croatians in addition there were even divisions consisting of French Villa Russian Flemish Hungarian Dutch as well as latvians meaning that the total Manpower of the Waffen SS numbered in the region of 900 000 men at its height in the early 1940s although Himmler is well known as being the head of Nazi Germany's police and intelligence Services a less well-known aspect of his character it's his fascination with Nordic mythology as there are records of him approving Expeditions and research projects to find ancient relics as well as evidence of the existence of Germanic cultures before the spread of Christianity which despite his mother's fervent Catholicism he had grown to believe to be a threat to the morality and purity of the german-speaking peoples these antiquarian interests included a wide array of obscure and even fanciful projects and Expeditions such as sending German scientists to Japan to ascertain if there were genealogical links between the Asian and Germanic peoples and he also sought evidence from the German ancestry research Society for ancient intellectual history that undertook archaeological and research projects across Europe and Beyond in an attempt to prove the superiority of the area and race historians also surmised that it was himmler's intention to replace Christianity altogether within the Third Reich Jesus after all was a Jew therefore Himmler felt that the Aryan peoples should return to their ancient Nordic Pagan Roots which he and the SS would have jurisdiction over giving Himmler yet another method of control that he and the Nazi Elite could use to bend the German population to their will the replacement of Christianity manifested itself in the SS by its members having to renounce their faith for the new SS suda religion which consisted of Christmas being replaced by winter solstice festivals and Christian weddings being changed to Pagan ceremonies these were devised by Himmler who in 1933 bought a Renaissance style castle at weaversburg in Bavaria which Himmler intended initially to become an SS training center but that soon became a venue for hosting SS dinners and Pagan ceremonies an example of himmler's reverence for Nordic history and mythology is the SS logo itself which was designed by an SS graphic designer named valter heck in 1933 and consisted of two Scandinavian Sikh runes that originally represented the sun however these were interpreted in error in 19th century Germany as meaning Victory as the German word for victory is Sikh therefore the infamous SS logo not only stands for such staffel but is also supposed to mean victory victory indeed the cry seek Heil was soon adopted by the masses during Hitler's rallies in which they would give the Nazi salute whilst crying seek Heil meaning Victory hail while Himmler was establishing the Waffen SS and completing his takeover of all policing and Security Services in Germany Hitler was making preparations for a new war one which as the Nazis saw it would bring about retribution for the humiliation Germany had suffered at the end of the first world war in this they would aim to reclaim the lands they had lost in 1918 as well as acquiring vast new territories in Eastern Europe which would be used as labensrem or living space for colonization by Germans as early as the spring of 1935 a massive program of rearmament had been initiated with the newly formed German wehrmacht or Armed Forces expanding Way Beyond the 100 000 men Germany was supposed to cap its military forces at under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles in 1935 Hitler and his generals began conscripting hundreds of thousands of men a new Air Force as previous seen under the command of Hermann Goering was also created and the German Navy or kriegs Marina was also expanded then in 1936 the demilitarized Rhineland was reoccupied by the Nazis in a further show of aggressive intent however Britain and France had no desire for war and allowed Hitler to continue these bullish methods ultimately though the scene was set for a war in Europe in the coming years originally Hitler and the other senior Nazi leaders such as Himmler had envisaged waiting until the early 1940s perhaps as late as 1942 or 1943 to launch their new war however as the 1930s proceeded and they saw that Britain and France were failing to re-arm and prepare for conflict these plans were moved forward thus from early 1938 a more intense program of diplomatic aggression was initiated in the spring of that year Austria was forcibly annexed into a greater Germany Himmler was deeply involved here ensuring that the SS was quickly expanded into the new regions of the Reich whilst also rapidly expanding his control over the policing services in Vienna and elsewhere no sooner was this done than claims were made by Hitler on parts of Czechoslovakia again Britain and France caved to Hitler's aggression and gave him parts of the west of the country in September 1938 but when the German moved in and annexed the rest of the country in the spring of 1939 both London and Paris made it clear that any further Act of aggression would result in war this was exactly what happened when Hitler ordered the invasion of Poland on the 1st of September 1939. two days later Britain and France declared war on Germany the second world war had commenced the outbreak of the war saw Himmler with heideck's Aid establishing a new element of the SS these were called the einsatz kloppin meaning task forces or deployment groups these were effectively squads of ss members who were established to travel in the rear of the main German Army acting as death squads as they moved into Poland in the first weeks of the war the einsatz gluten began murdering thousands of Polish intellectuals and political leaders who had been identified as potential leaders of a Polish resistance movement and these were just the first of the actions undertaken by himmler's einsetskopen in the years that followed they would be used extensively in action all over Central and Eastern Europe committing enormous atrocities wherever they went for instance following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 the einsatz kropen were responsible for some of the single worst atrocities of the in entire War such as that ad babiya in the Ukraine here some 33 000 Jews were executed by the einsatzkopen in the space of two days in late September 1941. all of these activities were overseen and commanded by Himmler this however lay in the future in the immediate term Germany's goal was to conquer Poland and then switch to Western Europe to knock the French and British out of the war this all proceeded very well initially for the Nazis Poland was conquered in a matter of weeks in September and October 1939 then after a lengthy period of inaction Denmark and Norway were occupied in the spring of 1940 before a massive Invasion of France in the early summer this was a blisteringly quick military campaign and within six weeks Paris was occupied and the British expeditionary force was forced to flee over the channel to Britain but London was not defeated instead the island nation held out in the months that followed against a German Naval blockade and bombing campaign and it was at this juncture that Hitler made the Fatal decision to leave Britain be and instead turn eastwards to invade the ideological enemy of Nazism the Communists of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941 he ordered the invasion of Russia in what was the largest military campaign ever undertaken millions of men streamed into Russia in what was termed Operation Barbarossa the war in the East initially went very well for Germany again hundreds of kilometers of territory were captured in the first months of the war as the German armies closed on Moscow and Leningrad however as the Russians mounted a more solid defense in the early winter the Germans stalled outside these cities it was the first time a German Army had been checked during the war and it was the beginning of a major reversal of Fortunes for the Nazis in the war effort as the German Armed Forces proceeded into Ukraine Eastern Poland the Baltic states and Russia from the summer of 1941 onwards the actions of the einsatz cotton which Himmler commanded became ever more brutal as we have already seen tens of thousands of individuals were massacred in the space of just a few days in some regions these included Jews Romani people the disabled Soviet prisoners of war and almost anybody else who was considered racially inferior or direct political enemy of the Third Reich proof of these massacres can be found in a report sent by the commander of einsatzguben a based in the modern day Baltic states France Walter schtalacker to Reinhard heidelich in January of 1942 this detailed the numbers of Jews that had been killed by his units since the start of the German invasion and even included a map listing the exact number of Jews killed in each of the Baltic states the number of people murdered totaled over 220 000 men women and children in this region Alone by the end of the war it is estimated that the einstead scrotum were responsible for the mass murder of over 2 million people the vast majority of them in Eastern Europe of these approximately 1.3 million were Eastern European Jews including women and children often being shot at point-blank range however the sheer Logistics of murdering so many Jewish people using these methods combined with the psychological effects on SS soldiers who often had to shoot children soon prompted Himmler and Hyde to turn the extermination of the Jews into an industrialized process German expansion into Eastern Europe had brought millions of additional Jewish people under German rule between 1939 and 1941. originally the Nazis had been intent on simply coercing German Jews to leave the country by robbing them of their rights as Citizens and persecuting them through programs such as the night of the broken glass in late 1938 when thousands of Jewish businesses synagogues and homes were attacked across Germany and Austria however there were only half a million Jews in Germany whereas Millions more lived in countries like Poland Ukraine and other parts of nazi-controlled or influenced Europe such as Hungary a new way of dealing with what the Nazis termed the Jewish question or Jewish problem was needed once the War Began initially after the invasion of Poland areas in the country's inner cities were walled off that were then populated with the country's Jews the most famous of which were the Warsaw and track of ghettos the conditions inside which were Grim here the inhabitants were systematically starved from 1940 onwards being given just a few hundred calories of food a day soon the weak and in firm were left dead or dying in the streets whilst families were forced to live with dozens per room often with no heating or running water however soon even this barbaric policy would be eclipsed and Himmler and his SS were at the center of these developments in August of 1941 Himmler traveled eastwards into those parts of the former Soviet Union which had been occupied by the Nazis following the Inception of operation Barbarossa his destination was Minsk where he attended the mass executions of an unknown number of Jews but as he observed the firing squads carrying out their horrendous work followed by the site of corpses dropping into pre-prepared Graves the SS leader was deeply affected this was according to his chief of staff Carl wolf who later testified after many volleys I could see that Himmler was trembling he ran his hand across his face as he swayed his face was almost green he immediately threw up and complained that a piece of brain had splattered on his face after the killings had stopped Himmler told an eight to quote devise a less gruesome means of mass execution rather than just shooting people this change in policy with regard to the mass executions quickly led to experiments being undertaken in which Jews were loaded into Vans and were effectively gassed to death by pumping car exhaust fumes into the vehicle however these experiments were still deemed to be inefficient and thus plans were drawn up in early 1942 for gas Chambers to be added to some of the existing concentration camps which had been erected across Nazi occupied Europe to house political prisoners six camps were eventually identified as those which would act as death camps where the continent's Jews would be sent to be gassed to death these were all in a confined location in Poland and consisted of Auschwitz birkenau Treblinka sobibor bjergs hilno and maidanic concentration camps these plans for what became known as the final solution were formulated by himmler's Deputy Reinhard heideck who on the 20th of January 1942 summoned Nazi party officials from various departments together at the now Infamous vanzai conference which was held in the suburb of vanze outside Berlin here he outlined the SS plan for the so-called final solution to the Jewish question in territories under German control and coordination of all government departments to that effect to over a dozen senior Nazi bureaucrats the orders for the final solution had come down to Himmler and Heidi in the late summer of 1941 shortly after the invasion of the Soviet Union was initiated from Hitler and a number of other senior Nazis such as Hermann Gering however over the four years that followed it was Himmler and initially hidily who were responsible for carrying out the Holocaust of Europe's Jews the the policing Services which Hydra oversaw across Europe such as the Gestapo would be responsible for identifying and apprehending all of the continent's Jews while Adolf Eichmann a logistician with a knack for organizing the movement of hundreds of thousands of people from place to place would oversee the actual deportation of the continent's Jews to the six death camps but it was himless SS which ran things within the camps it was they who selected who would die immediately and who would be used for slave labor when people arrived to the camps and it was the SS overseen by Himmler which carried out the final solution over the three years that followed it is clear that by the spring of 1942 the plans for the final solution had been finalized and were ready to be put into effect but one of the main instigators of the Holocaust Reinhardt heidrich would never see the final solution become reality as he died of a bacterial infection on the 4th of June 1942 after two Allied trained czechoslovak agents attacked him in his chauffeur-driven car in Prague on the 27th of May 1942 leading to thousands of Czech citizens being murdered in reprisals after haido's death Himmler took personal command of the implementation of the final solution though in January 1943 he did eventually appoint a new head of the security services as Heidi's successor an Austrian member of the SS named Ernst kaldenbrenner during the course of 1942 1943 and 1944 over 4 million Jews were Mass murdered in the death camps run by himmler's SS the most notorious of these was of course Auschwitz birkenau which Himmler had ordered the expansion of in early 1942 with the addition of gas Chambers and furnaces were Jews Romani gypsies homosexuals and those who the Nazis termed undesirables were killed using a pesticide called zyclon B their bodies were then quickly incinerated in purpose-built crematoria nearby all in all it is estimated that over 6 million Jews died during the Holocaust whether they were killed in the death camps or by the einsatzgruppen in Eastern Europe hemless SS was front and Central to their murder however because the Third Reich and himless SS in particular were careful to cover their tracks there has been a significant amount of skepticism in some circles since the war that the Holocaust took place at all despite the previously mentioned einsert scrutin reports sent to Reinhardt heinerly as well as photographic evidence of Einstein's Crippen mass killings the signed confession of Adolf Eichmann at his trial in Israel in the early 1960s and quotes from himmler's Chief of Staff Karl wolf who confirmed that he had been present at mass killings with Heinrich Himmler during the war not to mention the countless eyewitness statements of the survivors of the Holocaust themselves be they Jewish or otherwise perhaps the most damning piece of evidence however came from Himmler himself as on the 4th of October 1943 during a secret meeting with SS officers in the city of poznan Himmler expressly referred to the mass murder of the Region's Jews the poznan speeches and others Himmler made in 1944 were recorded and are without a debt the voice of Heinrich Himmler if you know eigen's realist capital is [Music] foreign programs to bring about a racially pure Nation would prove to be nothing but counterproductive as his insistence and obsession with purging the Third Reich of racial impurity simply wasted massive amounts of resources which could otherwise have been used to Greater effect on the fighting fronts against the Russians as well as the Western allies in short the National Socialist hatred of the Jews proved to be one of their several Achilles heels in essence Hitler Himmler and heide diverted hundreds of thousands of troops and billions of Reich marks away from the war effort to genocidal projects that did nothing but weaken the Nazi State as a whole for instance fifty thousand guards served in the concentration camp system and hundreds of thousands more Germans and their allies were involved in this program of mass murder in one fashion or another whether it was trying to identify Jews Romani and other enemies of the regime who were in hiding in cities like Paris Amsterdam or Vienna or in managing the ghettos in Warsaw Riga and other cities or simply running the train systems and the administrative branches of the Concentration Camp system all of this entailed a massive bureaucracy which tied up hundreds of thousands of Germans this Manpower was very much needed elsewhere by 1944 it was evident that Hitler's attempt to secure European domination had comprehensively failed after the German Armed Forces had stalled outside Moscow and Leningrad in the winter of 1941. the Russians had began pumping millions of men into the war effort the war on the Eastern front now became one of attrition while at the same time the United States finally ended the second world war after being attacked in December 1941 by Germany's Ally the Empire of Japan thus from the end of 1941 onwards a new powerful Alliance of Britain the United States and the Soviet Union as well as further allies such as Canada and the free French had coalesced to fight Germany and its allies 1942 did not bring a major breakthrough but the Germans were quite simply losing too many men against a numerically Superior enemy Hitler's hopes now rested on seizing the city of Stalingrad in Southwestern Russia and with it the oil fields of the Caucasus on which the Russians were light for their oil needs this ultimately failed in the winter of 1942 in the first major defeat of a German Army of the war it was all downhill for the Nazis from there in the spring of 1943 the combined forces of Italy and Germany and North Africa which had been attempting to seize the Suez Canal in Egypt and with it control of the Middle East were pushed back into Tunisia and finally expelled from North Africa altogether the Western allies followed up this Victory by opening a new Southern front in Italy through the invasion of Sicily that summer this occasion the Italian fascist government to remove its dictator Hitler's Ally Benito Mussolini from power and surrender unconditionally to the Allies however there would be no quick end to the war there as Hitler established a puppet regime headed by Mussolini in the north of the country and continued to resist the Allied movement North yet this in turn diverted resources from Eastern Europe and by late 1943 the Russians were beginning to push the Germans back towards Poland by 1944 they were making rapid advances westwards a development which was compounded when the Western allies opened a western front in France that summer following the D-Day Landings the third reich's days were numbered the massive reversals suffered by the German Army and the Soviet Union as well as the Allied Landings on D-Day LED Hitler to order the creation of new Army units consisting of every able-bodied man the German State could muster as a result Himmler finally realized his childhood dream of becoming a soldier when he was appointed as commander of army group upper Rhine in the winter of 1944 as well as this Hitler also ordered Himmler to facilitate the creation of so-called folkstorm units which were a little more than armed civilians or militia in the desperate hope of holding back the advancing Allied Forces nonetheless these units although nearly half a million strong largely consisted of teenagers as well as pensioners who were equipped with makeshift weapons and who despite their best efforts were unable to offer much resistance against the Soviets who in many cases just swept them aside as a result by the winter of 1944 the Allies were massing in eastern France and the low countries for an assault on the Rhineland early in 1945 while the massive armies of the Soviet Union had spread out across Poland and were preparing for their own entry into Eastern Germany it was now simply a question of which side would capture Berlin first himmler's time as an army commander in Western Germany overseeing Army group upper Rhine coincided with the final Nazi offensive of the war as Hitler tried to launch a counter-attack against the Western allies in the Arden forests straddling Luxembourg Belgium and Eastern France this was launched in mid-December 1944 though operational command was held by field Marshal guard Von runstadt and there is little evidence to suggest Himmler played a major role in the operation which met with some considerable success in the opening days of it but was soon repulsed shortly thereafter Himmler was transferred to the command of the newly formed Army group Vistula named after the river Vistula in Poland near the front lines where the Russians now stood in this capacity Himmler was charged with contributing to the defense of Northeastern Germany the Pomeranian region from the impending Onslaught by the Red Army himmler's appointment to oversee a major aspect to of the military defense of Germany and the route to Berlin was strongly criticized by the career generals within the German Army but Hitler who held many of his most capable commanders responsible for German defeat in the war by this time refused to countermind his decision Himmler proved incompetent in this role setting up his headquarters on a train with few resources available he was known to work for only a few hours every day and when Army group Vistula was sent into action in February 1945 his forces became bogged down in rain and mud within days he was revoked from his command an ignominious end to his short career as a military commander one might ask at this juncture why Himmler was given command of two sizable military forces at this critical time in the effort to slow the Allied Advance towards Berlin the answer lies in his personal relationship with Hitler from early on Himmler made it clear that he would obey Hitler's commands unquestioningly moreover his position as head of what was originally Hitler's personal bodyguard unit gave him personal access to the fuhrer he also had Ambitions to succeed Hitler one day who was 11 years his senior and in poor health thus he cultivated his relationship with him as much as he could from the late 1920s onwards the result of all of this was that Hitler trusted the head of the SS referring to him as the faithful Heinrich he consequently promoted him in 1943 to the position of minister of the interior in addition to his already sizable list of titles and positions however this is not to suggest the relationship was ever close and while Hitler considered Himmler to be one of his most loyal followers he otherwise had disdain for many of the SS leaders beliefs and did not count him amongst his inner Social Circle in the same way that he did figures like Goebbels thus when he arrived at the conclusion that Himmler had failed him in his command of army group Vistula the SS leader plummeted quite quickly in Hitler's eyes in the weeks that followed his revocation as The Noose was tightened around the neck of the Third Reich Himmler was just one of many senior and mid-ranking Nazi officials who attempted to initiate peace negotiations some of these such as his second in command within the SS since early 1943 Ernst kaltenberg attempted to do so through the Red Cross stationed in neutral Switzerland himmler's efforts also focused on a country which had remained neutral throughout the war Sweden in the final weeks of the war as the Russians were surrounding Berlin and as Hitler held himself up in his bunker in the center of the city and refused to countenance surrender Himmler made contact with Nicolas masur a Swedish representative of the world Jewish Congress in these negotiations he discussed the possible release of tens of thousands of Jews from the concentration camps which were still controlled by the SS to Scandinavia through this action the man who had over seen the Holocaust released twenty thousand Jews in the final days of the war as he plotted some way to save himself as a result of this gesture of some good faith himlo was able to meet with count bernadotte the head of the Swedish Red Cross on the 23rd of April 1945. here he claimed to be acting as the head of the German government despite the fact that Hitler was still alive and submitted a written proposal which he wished to be sent to the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe the U.S general Dwight D Eisenhower in this he offered Germany surrender to the Western allies but his proposals were quickly refused news of himmler's Peace offer was broadcast by the British Broadcasting Corporation on the 28th of April 1945. once he learned that his loyal Heinrich had betrayed him and tried to negotiate Germany's surrender Hitler flew into a rage he then stripped Himmler of all his offices and titles and issued a warrant for his arrest this was not incongruous and Hitler turned on many other senior Nazis in the final weeks of the war either for countenancing peace negotiations or because he could lay some of the blame for the fall of the Third Reich at their feet his decision to remove Himmler from his position was one of his last major actions shortly afterwards on the 30th of April 1945 the Nazi leader whom Himmler had first encountered over 20 years earlier back in Bavaria killed himself in the Reich chancellery bunker in Central Berlin his appointed successor Joseph Goebbels the propaganda Minister followed suit the next day with that the German Army and interim government entered into peace negotiations the second world war in Europe was thus brought to an end on the 8th of May 1945. henceforth known as victory in Europe or VE Day in the final weeks and days of the war a huge number of the Nazi leadership had fled Berlin for Northern Germany here they formed an interim government at the town of flensburg on the Danish border the goal of eloping here was that this region was relatively unaffected by the war and they would be captured by the Western allies rather than the Russians Himmler had headed to the German Danish Border in the Hamburg region but he was under no illusions that he would avoid detention and prosecution he perhaps more than anybody else had been responsible for the Holocaust of 6 million of the continent's Jews and the mass murder of millions of more Romani Soviet prisoners of war and other groups in Central and Eastern Europe it was the SS which he built into an army within the Reich which staffed the einzatzgopan and ran the Concentration Camp system indeed by the time the war came to an end the Allies had determined that most German would not be punished for the war but that all members of the SS and in particular its officer class were Prime targets as such Himmler like many other members of the paramilitary organization he ran went underground in the first days of May Himmler sought to go into hiding by masquerading as an ordinary German Soldier traveling with some companions however his efforts did not last long with Allied troops spreading out across Germany Himmler and his comrades were detained at premavorda in lower Saxony at a checkpoint set up by former Soviet prisoners of War on the 21st of May 1945. his captors however did not know who he was at this juncture over the following two days Himmler was moved between several internment camps before being brought to a British civilian interrogation camp near Lunenburg on the 23rd of May during an interview here Himmler without any major prompting openly admitted who he was his captors probably found this unusual this was the leader of the notorious SS the man who would stand trial before the international Military Tribunal which was being planned to be held at Nuremberg there he would encounter Justice with figures such as guring who was still alive amongst the Nazi hierarchy after this confession he was transferred to British second Army headquarters in Lunenburg where a doctor began a medical examination of him but when the physician attempted to look in himmler's mouth he resisted and a few seconds later collapsed onto the floor despite efforts to revive him Himmler died 15 minutes later it was later determined that he had bitten into a potassium cyanide capsule which the SS leader had probably been carrying for weeks with the intention of killing himself if he was apprehended shortly afterwards the former Reich sphera's body was interred in an unmarked grave in Lunenburg the location of which remains a mystery to this day as a result of his suicide and the assassination of Reinhardt Heinrich near Prague in 1942 Ernst kaldenbrenner would be included in the primary trial at Nuremberg as the most senior surviving figure within the SS Heinrich Himmler was undoubtedly one of the most significant figures within the Nazi regime while Hitler will forever be the Paramount figure associated with the crimes of national socialism there were a handful of individuals who are always considered as being nearly as consequential in the regime three in particular stand out they being Helm and going Joseph Goebbels and Heinrich Himmler what is unusual about this is that Himmler Rose from Fairly humble Origins within the party while Gering for instance was a senior figure as early as the time of the beer hall push in 1923 Himmler only became a member of the Nazi party a few months before the attempted coup in Munich he played a negligible role in the Insurrection and even in the years that followed he can hardly be said to have been a major figure within Nazism however all of that began to change from the late 1920s onwards as he gradually gained control over the SS after becoming its leader in 1929 and as the Nazis Rose to power in the early 1930s he used his significant administrative abilities to build the organization into the leading paramilitary wing of the Nazi party he not only managed to replace Holmes essay in this respect but also used the SS to monopolize control over policing and security services within Germany during the mid-1930s aided considerably by his brutal sidekick Reinhardt heidech by the late 1930s the SS which had originally been a small bodyguard unit when Himmler joined it became effectively a small ideological Army within the Third Reich one fashioned around Aryan racial ideology and German folk history however himmler's creation was monstrous already by the late 1930s it was beginning to develop into a brutal instrument of Nazi Terror one which was used to police Germany and then ask Austria rooting out those who were considered racial and ideological enemies of Nazism many of these were already being rounded up and sent to concentration camps by this time but things became even worse once the second world war commenced in September 1939 as soon as the German Army crossed into Poland it was accompanied by the einsatzkopin detachments of fanatical members of the SS who acted as death squads as bad as their actions were in Poland they were eclipsed by what happened following the invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941 in the years that followed though primarily in the first six months of the invasion these SS death squads acting on himless orders murdered in excess of one and a half million people as the German Army moved eastwards and this was just the Prelude to the implementation of the final solution through the Concentration Camp system which was run by the SS when all was said and done the SS murdered upwards of 10 million people during the second world war through the camp system and their actions on the Eastern Front Himmler did not create the SS but he did turn it into the killing machine that it became as such there is an argument to be made that he was more responsible for the crimes of the Third Reich than any other individual within it what do you think of Heinrich Himmler was he the worst of all the Nazis whose crimes are second only to Hitler himself please let us know in the comment section and in the meantime thank you very much for watching [Music] The Man known to history as Paul Joseph Goebbels was born in the town of Wright in West Germany on the 29th of October 1897. he was born into a modest family and his background was quite unremarkable his father was Fritz Goebbels he worked in the local Wick Factory and eventually Rose to become a foreman there his mother Katarina Maria odenhausen was half Dutch the daughter of a blacksmith Katarina had a close connection with her son and she and Joseph remained close throughout his life both Joseph's parents were devoted Roman Catholics though later in his life Goebbels had to persistently refute allegations they were partly Jewish the family was solidly lower middle class enough that a family piano was purchased in 1909 a symbol of their upwardly mobile aspirations but Fritz Goebbels was earning Just 4 000 marks annually and had no liquid assets consequently the young Joseph did not come from any significant wealth and his early life was characterized by efforts to attain a greater financial and social position Goebbels suffered from ill health as a child he had a club foot that he acquired in his early years following a bout of osteomyelitis a swelling of the bone marrow this left his leg deformed for the remainder of his life and he also had lung problems and so much of his later Psychology was shaped by insecurities about his health problems and lack of athleticism this was compounded by his rejection for military service when he sought to enlist in the German Army at the height of the first world war his later writings are suffused with statements which make it clear that he was attempting throughout his life to compensate for his physical deformity through his literary and political ambitions the world in which Joseph Goebbels reached his teenage years and then young man hoodin was one of turmoil in the summer of 1914 conflict enveloped Europe when a regional diplomatic crisis in the Balkans expanded to lead to a war involving all of Europe's major powers on one side were arrayed Britain France Italy and Russia with the United States joining these allied powers in 1917. on the other the German Empire the austro-hungarian Empire and the ottoman Turkish Empire formed an alliance known as the Central Powers as a native of Western Germany Goebbels would have spent his early years watching German soldiers passing through on trains towards the Western Front in Northeast France where the bulk of the fighting took place in horrific trench warfare between 1914 and 1918. consequently his spurning by the military in his formative years was a difficult experience for the young Goebbels Germany eventually lost the war in November 1918 and was forced into a highly punitive series of Peace treaties the following year generally referred to Under the Umbrella terms of the Treaty of Versailles the German Reich was stripped of a huge amount of its territory which was granted to other countries and made up much of the new country of Poland formed to the east of Germany after the war ended under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles Germany was also forced to pay punitive monetary remuneration to France and Britain for its alleged fault in causing the war furthermore Germany was forced to reduce its Army to a tiny contingent of men and was prohibited from re-militarizing the Rhineland region of Western Germany the terms were negotiated by the government of the Weimar Republic which was formed in Germany following the dissolution of the second German Reich or Empire named after the town in central Germany where the new Republic was formed early in 1919 in time Weimar would become a derogatory term for those who had negotiated Germany's humiliating surrender to the Allied powers and The Architects of the peace became known as the November criminals goebbel's life in the years that followed was highly formative for him for a while he considered entering the priesthood but his commitment to his parents Catholicism cooled eventually he also spent periods of time at multiple Universities at mon Munich wurzberg and Freiburg before eventually earning a PhD in German philology from Heidelberg University in 1921 at just 24 years of age he would later publish his work just one of 14 books he had written by 1940 following his time at Heidelberg Goebbels attempted to establish himself in the early 1920s variously as a journalist novelist and playwright but he was broadly unsuccessful in his Endeavors somewhat like Hitler who had aspired to become a watercolor artist in his early years Goebbels had sought a career in the Arts and literature through his writing but was frustrated in his efforts as this occurred he became increasing disaffected in the course of 1923 and 1924 like many other young men who were disillusioned with life in post-war Germany Goebbels found himself drawn to a new political party in Bavaria which had earned a reputation for controversy in a short period of time the National Socialist German Workers Party or Nazi party had been established in Munich in 1920 its goals were the overturning of the humiliating terms of the Treaty of Versailles which had ended the war German rearmament and re-expansion of the German State into Eastern Europe from its earliest days the Nazi party was also an extremely anti-semitic party and envisaged the total exclusion of the Jewish Community from German life it was led by a young Austrian called Adolf Hitler under his leadership the Nazis attempted a failed coup d'etat in Munich on the 8th of November 1923. the beer hall push as it became known was quickly snuffed out on the 9th of November by the regional authorities Hitler and some of his closest Associates were tried for treason in March 1924 and imprisoned the abortive Revolt possibly Drew Goebbels to the Nazis he had been moving increasingly in right-wing political circles throughout 1924 his radicalization at this time may also have been owing to the occupation of the Rua area of Western Germany by French and Belgian troops between January 1923 and August 1925. in response to Germany defaulting on its War reparations payments on the 22nd of October 1924 the Goebbels family home in Wright was searched by Belgian police and the following day Goebbels himself was interrogated by the occupation police it is hardly coincidental that two weeks later in November 1924 he wrote and published an article in a newspaper at the fogish of high height in which he called for Hitler's early release from prison Hitler was indeed released early on the 20th of December 1924 by which time Goebbels had joined the Nazi party beginning the association which would dominate the remainder of his life goebbel's role in the Nazi party grew in the Years had followed we know a great deal about his life from the mid-1920s through goebbel's own writings starting in 1923 he kept a series of extensive Diaries unbroken for 22 years down to his death in 1945. these Diaries were taken to Russia after the war and have only become fully available since 2008. straight matching to 32 volumes in the modern print editions they provide a uniquely detailed insight into the life career and thoughts of one of the leading members of the Nazi leadership they also provide what one of the foremost historians of Nazi Germany Ian Kershaw has deemed a vitally important source of insight into Hitler's thinking and action particularly in his Ascent to power in the 1920s and early 1930s the Diaries Give extensive details of goebbel's career in the initial years of his membership of the Nazi party in his early days he was under the patronage of Gregor Strasser a leading member of the party who led a branch of the Nazis that leaned more towards socialism and anti-capitalism in opposition to Hitler's right-wing faction and owing the strasse's influence in 1924 Goebbels was appointed as a spokesperson for the party in the Rhineland region where he originally hailed from his role as a propagandist for the party also began at this time as he was set to start work as a writer and editor for the party newspaper the falkisha bail bhakta or the people's Observer during these years of the mid-1920s Goebbels found himself increasingly drawn into an internal struggle within the Nazi regime over the ideological future of the party this was driven by a split between Hitler who favored a hard-line anti-semitic nationalist approach with only a limited emphasis on socialism and starsa goebbel's Diaries reveal that he sympathized with both sides he was drawn to the more socially grounded Outlook of strata but he increasingly favored Hitler from late 1925 onwards having read Hitler's anti-semitic biography Mein Kampf or my struggle which Hitler had written while serving his prison sentence for the failed beer hall putch in 1924 and the first volume of which was published in 1925. following multiple meetings with the charismatic Hitler at a party Conference held in Bamberg in Northern Bavaria on the 14th of February 1926 Goebbels became a committed adherent of the Nazi leader it has been speculated that Goebbels was an extreme narcissist and needed a figurehead or leader of some sort from whom he could gain affirmation and approval this would certainly explain the obsession he developed with gaining Hitler's esteem in the mid-1920s an obsession which would characterize the relationship over the 20 years that followed Goebbels support for the leader boarded on zealotry and from this point forward Goebbels began his long Association as one of Hitler's closest allies in recognition of his Rising position within the party Goebbels was appointed as Gaul lighter or Regional commander of Berlin within the Nazi party in August 1926 a position he would hold until his eventual death in 1945. in Berlin in an effort to promote the party in the capital Goebbels developed many of the propaganda strategies which became Hallmarks of the Nazis in the years ahead these involved using large posters of vibrant red and black ink often emblazoned with the swastika the Nazi party's symbol and with Stark political messages these banners often featured at large torch-lit party rallies filled with symbolism which became a staple of the party in the years that followed Goebbels also founded a party newspaper called de angriff or the attack in the capital combining his propaganda strategy with violence and intimidation Goebbels also had the Nazis uniformed paramilitary body the essay engage in attacks and violence in beer halls in Berlin in the months that followed his appointment as a consequence of all this work Goebbels won election to Parliament in the reichstag elections held on the 20th of May 1920 8 his election was especially surprising as the Nazis generally performed poorly in these elections particularly in the cities and their power base was largely confined to the Munich region of Bavaria and some parts of the Countryside by 1928. the attitude of the new reichstag Deputy towards parliamentary democracy was Stark having stated we are entering the reichstag in order that we may arm ourselves with the weapons of democracy from its arsenal we shall become reichstag deputies in order that the Weimar ideology should itself help us to destroy it goebbel's statements that the Nazis could undermine the German Republic from within Parliament itself may have seemed fanciful given the party's election result in 1928 but all of this began to change in 1929 after years of Rapid economic growth in the 1920s the United States stock market began to overheat and collapse in the Autumn of 1929 starting in September share prices began to fall culminating on the 25th of October with the largest one day selling off of shares in U.S history what became known as Black Friday was the peak of the Wall Street Crash It ushered in the Great Depression which would see economies all over the world impacted in the years ahead still suffering from its War debt and other political and economic problems Germany was particularly susceptible to the problems created by the Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression and in the years ahead as the German economy contracted and millions of Germans lost either their jobs or their savings the Nazi party with its message of resentment and xenophobia would grow in popularity the first major electoral boom occurred in 1930 an election was called in the spring for the 14th of September 1930. Goebbels was Central to the Nazis electoral campaign shaping the party's message around opposition to the terms of the Bayside treaty which had ended the first world war and the humiliating terms of which Germany continued to suffer under thousands of meetings were held Countrywide in the resulting election the Nazis went from being a minor party which had actually lost support in the 1928 election to the second largest party in Germany with nearly one in five voters supporting them this translated into 107 seats in the 577-seat reichstag only the Centrist Social Democratic party won more seats taking 143 the Social Democratic party were consequently in a position to lead the government significantly the Communist Party of Germany came in third in the election winning 77 seats as such the extremist parties won a great share of the vote in this election as the effects of the Great Depression hit home in Germany the rise of the Communists also allowed the Nazis to depict themselves in the years ahead as a bull walk against a potential communist takeover of Germany as one of the Nazi's Chief propagandists Goebbels was Central to its efforts to exploit fears over a communist surge in the years ahead between 1930 and the next reichstag elections the Berlin gallighter was developing new methods of disseminating the Nazi message he began experimenting with the new medium of silent films something which would play a central role in spreading the Nazis ideology and wartime propaganda in the 1930s and 1940s the radio was also exploited effectively by Goebbels when Hitler ran unsuccessfully for the office of German president in 1932 Goebbels oversaw the broadcasting of regular radio messages detailing the fuhrer's almost daily plane Journeys around Germany to torch-lit parades where he stirred up increasing support amongst Protestants middle-class business owners and women these were groups in German Society who increasingly favored the Nazis as the German banking system needed collapse in 1931 and efforts by the Centrist administration in Berlin to negotiate German debt relief with Britain and France failed although Hitler lost the 1932 presidential election to Paul Von Hindenburg a German hero of the first world war the Nazi leader buoyed by Goebbels propaganda and election strategizing had nevertheless performed very well coming a close second upon Hindenburg it was inevitable that this newfound support for the party would translate into greater electoral success when a new reichstag election took place new elections were imminent by 1932 in their efforts to ensure that both the Nazis and the Communists were kept out of government a coalition of centuries parties had been operating minority governments for months when the first election since 1930 was held on the 31st of July 1932 the Nazis became the largest party in Germany for the first time this was largely owing to socio-economic circumstances the unemployment rate in Germany had reached nearly 30 percent by 1932 people's savings had been obliterated the banking system was on the verge of total collapse and the Centrist governments had seemed incapable of arresting the situation despite successfully negotiating to have the majority of Germany's War reparations debt canceled by expertly manipulating popular resentment and anger at the prevailing economic conditions the Nazi party won 230 seats in the July 1932 reichstag elections thus the Nazis along with Goebbels a major driving force behind their propaganda and election campaigns had ascended to become the dominant party in Germany by the summer of 1932. nearly two out of every five voters had supported Hitler and his party however they lacked a majority in Parliament and negotiations with some of the more Centrist parties to establish a coalition broke down in the Autumn of 1932. consequently Germans had to return to the polls in November 1932 for the second time that year the reichstag elections held on the 6th of November 1932 were the last free and fair elections held in Germany prior to the establishment of the German Third Reich although the Nazis lost votes they yet again emerged as the largest party winning 196 seats and one in three votes the elections of November 1932 continued the Parliamentary stalemate yes better solution was in the making for several months an uneasy Alliance but an alliance nonetheless had been developing between the Nazi party and some Centrist political forces along with the powerful industrial lobbyists who ran German business the latter were wary of the Nazis but were prepared to countenance supporting Hitler and the party Goebbels had become the leading propagandist for if the Nazis could prevent the rise of the parties of the left in Germany as such the industrialists and centrists agreed to do business with the Nazis in 1932 in an effort to prevent the further rise of the Communist party and their allies on the left of the political Spectrum the Specter of Soviet Russia where the Communists had risen to power following the Russian Revolution of 1917 hung large over Germany in 1932 inadvertently it would facilitate the rise of Hitler and the destruction of the Weimar Republic following extensive negotiations a coalition of the Nazis Center parties and industrialists was finally concluded on the 30th of January 1933. Hitler became chancellor of Germany the head of the government and the Nazis were given three of the 11 cabinet positions Goebbels was frustrated not to receive one of these positions but he would not have long to wait to Mark the event he oversaw a huge torch-lit parade in Berlin on the night of the 30th of January 1933 attended by approximately sixty thousand supporters of the Nazis it featured brigades of ss and sa members the paramilitary branches of the Nazi party and would prefigure the military parades which would become ubiquitous in Germany for the next 12 years of Nazi rule the new government moved quickly to consolidate its power punitive measures to repress the Communist party and other parties of the left were quickly implemented in February 1933 a fire at the reichstag on the 28th of February was then used as a pretext for passing emergency legislation which briefly gave the government additional powers and a snap reichstag election was called for the 5th of March voter intimidation and fraud was employed in the resulting campaign but the Nazis was still only able to win 44 of the vote which translated into 288 seats in the reichstag this however was enough on the 23rd of March 1933 the Nazis excluded the Communists and others from the reichstag and intimidated several other parties in order to ensure that an enabling Act was passed by an overwhelming majority through both houses of the parliament this enabling act decreed that the German Chancellor and his government could effectively suspend the government and rule by decree for a period of four years the passage of it through the reichstag effectively spelled the end of the Weimar Republic and the establishment of a single party Nazi rule in Germany Goebbels did not have to wait until the passage of the enabling act to acquire the ministerial position he had long sought on the 14th of March 1933 Hitler appointed Goebbels as head of the newly created Reich Ministry for public Enlightenment and propaganda over the next 12 years and for the duration of the German Third Reich Goebbels would enforce Nazi ideology throughout Germany and Europe through his ministry goebbel's thoughts on propaganda and its uses were perhaps best expressed in a speech entitled The Art of propaganda which he made before the political education seminar of the Nazi party in Berlin on the 9th of January 1928 here he stated propaganda shows that it is good if over a certain period of it it can win over and fire up people for an idea if it fails to do so it is bad propaganda if propaganda wins the people it wanted to win it was presumably good and if not it was presumably bad no one can say that your propaganda is too crude or low or brutal or that it is not decent enough for those are not the relevant criteria its purpose is not to be decent or gentle or weak or modest it is to be successful thus goebbel's view was clear the end always Justified the means when it came to State propaganda and any methods however crude or deceptive could be used if they furthered Hitler's and The Wider Nazi party's ideological goals a sense of the scale of control which Goebbels hoped to exercise over German life through his ministry can be glimpsed by examining the organizational structure of his Department it was divided into multiple branches which variously dealt with broadcasting the national and Foreign Press films censorship the Arts music and theater Mass rallies race issues indoctrination of German Youth and counter-offensives against anything which was deemed to be foreign or domestic propaganda directed against the Nazi state over the next 12 years from its headquarters across from Hitler's own offices in the Reich chancellery Goebbels would shape the ideology of the Nazi party and the Third Reich no one did more to shape how the German people perceived the Nazis and their governance of Germany Goebbels propaganda methods were immensely varied one of his first major acts was the massive repression of German art and culture writers and artists who were considered anti-german in their actions were silenced and their Works destroyed or suppressed Goebbels was also Central to a series of mass book burnings which swept through Germany shortly after the ascent to power of the Nazis the foremost occurrence being on the 10th of May 1933 that evening German students in Berlin oversaw the burning of over 25 000 books which were deemed ungerman these included works by Karl Marx ayuri Maria remark Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud Goebbels was Central to the events in Berlin on the 10th of May and gave a speech before thousands of people in which he encouraged the crowd to reject the moral corruption which searched books instilled suffusing his oration with the anti-Semitism which was the trademark of the Nazi party he stated at the event in Berlin that the era of Jewish intellectualism is at an end these events showed how far Goebbels had drifted from his earlier life the PHD student and would-be writer of 1921 had become the overseer of mass book burnings and cultural destruction unsurprisingly in the years ahead many prominent authors such as Thomas Mann began to leave Germany Goebbels continued in these years to mold German culture to the goals of Nazi ideology using the Reich chamber of culture which was established in September 1933. the Arts was subordinated to the Nazi cause for instance new new films being produced in Germany henceforward often had a Nazi message sometimes a subtle one but one which aided the Nazi cause much of this sought to portray Hitler as the savior of Europe against the threat of bolshevism and communism taking power in Germany and Elsewhere on the continent goebbel's control of the German film industry became absolute in March 1937 when the German film industry was nationalized and came virtually entirely under his ministry's control around this time he stated his views on how Cinema could be used as an art which expresses an attitude through its National Socialist character and by taking up National Socialist problems but should do so in a way which did not appear deliberate and remains in the background even more consequential was goebbel's exploitation and control over the national press and methods of communication Germany had more papers than almost all other European countries under the Weimar Republic but under goebbel's Ministry the Nazi party effectively took control over the major newspapers journalists were briefed by goebbel's Ministry and often had what they printed dictated to them by the party apparatus journalists who diverged from the Nazi message were often intimidated or arrested his control of and exploitation of the new and emerging types of mass media was even more comprehensive under his leadership the ministry chief of public Enlightenment and propaganda distributed millions of radios to Germans this was the mass medium which Goebbels preferred for indoctrination of the German people in the first year of full Nazi rule alone over 50 of Hitler's speeches were broadcast on radio the emerging medium of film was also exploited in this way loudspeakers were set up in public places throughout Germany so that state messages could be drilled into people in public places Goebbels was also Central to the organization of the huge Nazi party rallies which were held throughout Germany in the years ahead the most infamous example was the 1934 Nazi party Congress rallies at Nuremberg the events of which were immortalized in the propaganda film of the same directed by Laney Riefenstahl the Triumph of the will which won many film Awards around Europe in the 1930s and has been called one of the most effective pieces of political propaganda ever made the effects over time of this constant affirmation of the Nazi message was immense in their rise to power the Nazis had never been able to attain the support of more than about a third of the German people in the last free reichtag elections in November 1933 the party had gleaned only one third of the votes however by the late 1930s in large part owing to Goebbels propaganda work the Nazis had become more popular Countrywide and faith in Hitler's leadership was immense as a result when a referendum was held on the 19th of August 1934 to appoint Hitler officially as fewer or leader of Germany with the combined offices of Chancellor and president it was passed by an overwhelming majority of 88 in favor a result which was only partly fraudulent indicating the growing popularity of the Nazis and in the months and years after their rise to power there is little doubt the Goebbels work as a propagandist was highly successful after the Nazis seized power in the 1930s at the same time goebbel's own political power was growing in the 1930s he was generally disliked by his colleagues in government indeed an article in Life magazine in 1938 noted that Goebbels likes nobody is liked by nobody and runs the most efficient Nazi Department despite his aloofness towards most of his colleagues he was one of Hitler's closest confidants when Hitler decided to combine the offices of German Chancellor and president of Germany following the death of the president Paul Van Hindenburg in August 1934 it was Goebbels who made the announcement By Radio to the German Nation on the 2nd of August as well as this Hitler had become close with goebbel's family on the 19th of December 1931 Goebbels had married Magda ritual they had numerous children in the 1930s and the family became referred to as the first family of the Reich Hitler having remained a bachelor without children other signs of goebbel's prominence in the regime followed for instance he was appointed as president of the organizing committee for the summer and winter Olympics when they were held in Berlin in 1936 a major role which put him center stage in Germany for an International Event Goebbels was also involved in the growing persecution of Germany's Jewish population in the Years following the Nazis Ascent to power his anti-Semitism was long-standing and was one of the reasons why he had been attracted to the Nazi party and Hitler in the 1920s yet there were also contradictions to goebbel's anti-Semitism in his student years he had a close relationship with several Jewish teachers for a time and he dated Elsa Yanka a Jewish school teacher for several years in the early 1920s he even considered marrying her despite these contradictions in his attitudes towards German jury Goebbels quickly became one of the most enthusiastic persecutors of Germany's Jews following the nazia sent to power in 1933. in October of that year he was responsible for passing the Reich press law through which all Jewish editors were removed from working at German newspapers and other print Outlets throughout these years there are repeated references in his Diaries to efforts to de-jurify German culture when a set of laws known as the Nuremberg laws were passed on the 15th of September 1935 effectively prohibiting Jews from holding German citizenship and from marrying Germans Goebbels had propaganda pieces published in Outlets such as the newspaper der sturma justifying the prohibitions and attacks on Germany's Jews his propaganda continued to feed the Nazi State's growing anti-Semitism in the years ahead as the first concentration camps were set up in Germany to house political prisoners including many Jews in early November 1938 Goebbels was Central to the worst anti-semitic program in Germany prior to the outbreak of the war on the 7th of November 1938 a Jewish teenager Herschel grinspan shot a German Diplomat Ernst Von rat at the German Embassy in Paris from died two days later on the 9th of November later that evening Goebbels gay gave a speech at a commemorative event marking the 15-year anniversary of the beer hall putch of 1923 in which he made it clear that spontaneous acts of violence and attacks on Jews and their property would be tolerated by the government in response to formal Arts death a later report stated that goebbel's speech had clearly been intended to indicate that while the Nazi party and the government did not wish to be seen as perpetuating retaliations on the Jewish Community it was essentially stating that they should be organized and carried out on an unofficial basis What followed was an orgy of violence on the night of the 9th of November 1938. Krishnan or the Knight of the broken glass as it has become known saw the Nazi paramilitary forces and gangs of German citizens attack Jewish businesses homes and synagogues throughout Germany approximately 100 Jews were murdered in the hours of violence over 200 synagogues were ransacked or destroyed at as many as 7 000 Jewish businesses had Windows broken or Worse damage inflicted perhaps as many as 30 000 Jews were also detained on fabricated charges and confined to the new concentration camps which were proliferating around Germany the psychological effects were even worse the Jews thereafter in Germany were aware that they were a people under Perpetual attack it is estimated that several hundred Jews committed suicide in the days and weeks following the pogrom and many Jewish families began to consider leaving Germany however Christal Nacht was a potent of worst to come while Goebbels was one of the most Ardent supporters and actors in Germany's growing anti-semitic policies he was less enthusiastic about the Nazi States drift towards war in the late 1930s the Nazis had long been committed to re-establishing German military power in contravention of the heavy restrictions placed on the size of the German Army and Air Force Under the terms of the Versailles treaty from 1933 onwards Hitler and the Nazi leadership began expanding the German air force the luftwaffe and the German Army the Vermont and on the 7th of March 1936 German troops were sent into the Rhineland region of Western Germany which had been established as a demilitarized zone under the terms of Versailles further aggression followed in the years ahead on the 12th of March 1938 Germany annexed Austria uniting the two german-speaking countries under Nazi rule the Angelus as it has become known made clear Germany's aggressive intentions in Europe and the other European powers were increasingly fearful of war from early 1938 onwards however Britain's prime minister Neville Chamberlain tried to pacify Hitler through concessions in the months ahead particularly as the Nazis began pressing a claim to the Sudan land region of Czechoslovakia in the Autumn of 1938 on the 14th of September 1938 Goebbels published an aggressive editorial in the folkisha bail bachta promoting German claims to the region owing to the large number of ethnically German people living there eventually in early October 1938 Germany was ceded the sudeten land in return for a guarantee that Hitler would otherwise respect czechoslovakia's Independence this was breached in early March 1939 as Germany invaded Czechoslovakia in the days ahead the country and neighboring Hungary were variously either annexed by Germany or formed into satellite vassal States thus by the spring of 1939 the Nazis had established themselves as masters of all of Central Europe but Britain and France were now clear that Hitler and Germany could not be pacified as a consequence when the Germans invaded Poland on the 1st of September 1939 Britain and France declared war on Germany two days later on the 3rd of September 1939 the second world war had commenced in its initial stages the war was a resounding success for Germany Poland was quickly overrun and divided up between Germany and Soviet Russia in the Autumn of 1939 with whom a non-aggression pact had been agreed despite the ideological differences between the fascist Nazis and the Communist Russians the following April Denmark and Norway were invaded and quickly conquered then on the night of the 9th of May 1940 after months of military buildup in Western Germany the vermacht received orders to invade France through the low countries of the Netherlands Belgium and Luxembourg over the next five weeks they followed a complete military collapse of France Paris was captured on the 14th of June 1940 effectively ending the military campaign and on the 25th of June an Armistice was signed as a preliminary to establishing a puppet government in France Germany had effectively conquered Western Europe Britain had only barely managed to pull its Army out of Mainland Europe and back to Britain in time undertaking a daring Naval evacuation of over 300 000 troops from the port town of Dunkirk in northern France between the 26th of May and the 4th of June consequently Britain was able to continue in the war and Germany would have to undertake a protracted effort to weaken its resolve through bombing campaigns in 1940 and 1941. the blitz as this campaign became known was ultimately unsuccessful despite these early successes Goebbels was less enthusiastic about the prospects of war in 1939 than many of the other senior members of the Nazi party at times he was entirely realistic for instance an entry in his Diaries in April 1940 noted we must achieve victory in the course of this year otherwise the material superiority of the opposite side would become too strong a war of many years would also be difficult to maintain for psychological reasons nevertheless he was Central to the war effort the Reich Ministry for public Enlightenment and propaganda was effectively responsible for shaping the state's message about the war effort and what German citizens were told about what was happening in 1939 and 1940. from the start of the invasion of the low countries and France in May 1940. Goebbels wrote and published editorials which were broadcast nationally on German radio video and often published in newspapers for instance between May 1940 and the spring of 1945 Goebbels published 218 editorials in the newspaper he had founded that's right or the Empire this was published weekly so goebbel's writings glorifying the war effort and denouncing Germany's enemies were rarely absent from any edition of the paper as the war progressed Goebbels also increasingly exploited the medium of film to glorify the German war effort at home and abroad films of the German armies progressing through Poland and France became Staples of German life though these depictions of German Valor would have to be increasingly doctored from late 1941 onwards as the German Army began to suffer increasing setbacks and as it did goebbel's job increasingly became about managing the expectations of the German people what was needed from the spring of 1942 onwards was resolve in a war that would not be over soon and which was almost certainly doomed to end in German defeat Goebbels was also Central to the increasingly barbaric methods being used to persecute the Jews of Germany and occupied Europe on the 30th of January 1939 Hitler had delivered a speech in the reichstag which Goebbels had been in involved in writing in which it was declared that if Europe was cast into war the Jewish people would be held responsible by the Nazi State and the annihilation of the Jews of Europe would be undertaken in the years ahead this threat was put into action following the conquest of Poland a huge ghetto largely populated by Poland's considerable Jewish population was established in Warsaw in October 1939 the following month polish Jews were legally required to wear armbands or yellow stars to indicate they were Jews this stipulation would eventually be imposed in Germany by Goebbels Express order in September 1941 and on the 20th of May 1940 a concentration camp was established at Auschwitz in southern Poland a place which would become the epicenter of the Holocaust which followed in the years ahead however the most terrible moment in the Nazi State's persecution of the Jewish people did not come until 1942. on the 20th of January 1942 at a conference at Van Ze a Berlin suburb it was effectively decided by the Nazi party to begin Exterminating the Jews of nazi-occupied Europe the final solution as it has become known was resulted in the Holocaust of approximately 6 million Jews between 1942 and the end of the war in 1945. there is no doubting the significance of goebbel's role in the persecution of Europe's Jews the development of the final solution and the Holocaust in general in a radio address he made on the 16th of November 1941 as a more extreme approach towards the Jews was being developed within the Nazi hierarchy Goebbels made his views clear in an outlandish address he claimed that the Jews were responsible for the war which now enveloped all of Europe and much of the wider world the Jews Goebbels asserted were receiving a penalty that is certainly hard but more than deserved going on he stated that the Jews must be removed from the German community for they endanger our national Unity this is an elementary principle of racial National and social hygiene who cares about their difficulties there is no doubting that goebbel's anti-Semitism was extreme by the early 1940s this manifested itself further in the production of anti-Semitic propaganda films during the war year days such as the Eternal Jew a film made in 1940 in which Jews were depicted as parasites who were undermining social and political order these efforts by Goebbels to sway public opinion against the Jews of Germany and Europe was largely responsible for creating an environment in which hundreds of thousands of people were at least partially complicit in the murders of millions of Europe's Jews in the years that followed moreover there is no doubt that he was entirely aware of what was occurring at Auschwitz and the other extermination and labor camps of Eastern and Central Europe having received the details of the Evans a conference in early March 1942 Goebbels noted in his diary that he assumed about 40 percent of the Jews in these camps would be put to work producing amarans and other War material but in a chilling turn of phrase he stated that the other 60 percent would almost certainly be liquidated there is no doubt that Goebbels was one of the central architects of the sustained policy of anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany and in the Holocaust itself indeed as the Jews of Berlin were being deported to concentration camps from the capital in the early summer of 1942 Goebbels urged Hitler to speed up this process bemused at this time but it might even be better to liquidate them in Berlin itself as this would be more efficient than shipping them to the camps as the final solution was being developed German Fortunes in the war were declining in the summer of 1941 Hitler turned his attentions away from Britain and Western Europe towards the east it was now time he believed to confront Bolshevik Russia and acquire labens or living space for the German people in Eastern Europe on the 22nd of June 1941 Operation Barbarossa was initiated and an army of three million Germans invaded Russia in the weeks it followed the Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe crumbled as the poorly trained and equipped Russian armies were devastated by the oncoming German forces by the Autumn the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was contemplating negotiating peace terms whereby the Soviet state would cede much of Eastern Europe to the German Third Reich but at this point Hitler's Ambitions got the better of him and envisaging a total victory over bolshevism he directed further drives towards the major Russian cities of Leningrad Moscow and Stalingrad this was to be the Fatal moment for the Third Reich as the Russian winter of 1941 set in the German Army's progress eastwards slowed confronted by a Russian army that suffered enormous casualties but which had a seemingly never-ending stream of Manpower and improperly supplied with winter clothing and arms which could not withstand the Russian winter the German wehrmacht began to experience significant setbacks on the Eastern Front Goebbels became Central to these events in many ways for instance on the 17th of December 1941 he was placed in charge of the drive in Germany to collect winter clothing to be sent to the Eastern front as a matter of urgency by the spring of 1942 a stalemate had set in on the fronts near Leningrad Moscow and Stalingrad with the latter City experiencing one of the bloodiest and most catastrophic sieges in Modern Warfare more and more resources were pumped into Stalingrad as the winter of 1942 neared and the region became The Crucible of war in which the confrontation between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia would be decided when The Siege eventually ended in Victory for the Soviets in early 1943 the result of the war was sealed the Russians henceforth were now on the offensive and began the long inexorable campaign westwards towards Berlin reconquering on their way all of the lands of Eastern and Central Europe that the Nazis had occupied between 1939 and 1941. this reversal in fortunes for the Third Reich was further compounded in the years ahead as a southern front was first opened in Italy when a combined British and American Force invaded Sicily on the 10th of July 1943 and then a western front was established when the Western allies invaded France on D-Day on the 6th of June 1944. Goebbels took on an Ever more important role in the war effort from 1942 onwards as these escalating military reverses began Recent research has highlighted how several members of the Nazi leadership became increasingly incapacitated from 1942 by various illnesses and even drug addiction particularly so in the case of both Hitler and the head of the luftwaffe the German air force hellmann-gerling the latter of whom was heavily addicted to opiates as Hitler sank into a miasma of delusion about German war prospects and needed ever greater amounts of painkillers to alleviate various ailments more and more of the day-to-day direction of government in Berlin fell on goebbel's shoulders particularly as Hitler was increasingly ensconced in a military bunker in Poland Goebbels was one of the most clear-sighted of the German leadership Hitler was broadly delusional about the prospects of victory until late in the war but as early as 1942 Goebbels was aware of the unlikelihood of Victory now that the Russian campaign had stalled in 1941 and the German Army was unlikely to win the war on the Eastern Front this was made clearer in the winter of 1942 When the tide was turned in Russia with German defeat at the Battle of Stalingrad as a consequence from the spring of 1943 Goebbels began arguing for what he termed Total War by which he meant that all of the state's resources would be employed to the maximum degree possible to fight the war at a meeting of the Nazi faithful at the Berlin sport palast a huge Sports stadium in the capital on the 18th of February 1943. Goebbels laid out his belief about what was needed in what has been deemed to be his most famous speech Germans would have to live a spot exhausting way of life henceforward Goebbels asserted in his speech which was broadcast nationally on radio he argued that Germans would have to work 14 or 16 hour days to keep up the war machine but this was necessary to keep Europe from falling almost entirely under the control of Bolshevik Russia having stirred up the thousands of attendees who had been selected for their Nazi credentials he ended by asking the frenzy crowd do you want Total War although Hitler was won over by the idea of Total War he would take until the 23rd of July 1944 before he officially appointed Goebbels as Reich plenipotentiary for the total war effort this was just three days after a failed attempted coup by senior members of the vermacht which had sought to assassinate Hitler and end the war shocked by the coup effort Hitler committed himself to goebbel's extreme plan for Total War just days later with this new position Goebbels was charged with overseeing the deployment of all parts of society to facilitate the Army's efforts the position was a major confirmation of goebbel's seniority in the Nazi leadership with the promotion essentially being an acknowledgment that Goebbels had supplanted Hermann guring as Hitler's second in command of the Nazi party and was now his ostensible successor should he die goebbel's efforts to put his ideas on Total War into effect in the weeks and months ahead met with mixed results he focused first on increasing the numbers of men entering the armed forces the numbers of the rank and file in the German wehrmacht had fallen drastically in 1942 and 1943 owing to huge casualties on the Eastern front and with the opening of additional fronts by the Allies in France and Italy the German Army was stretched extremely thin by 1944 to combat this Goebbels increased the age limit to which German women were required to work in German factories producing raw material of all kinds from 45 to 55. this had the benefit of freeing up many men who had been working in the factories for active service on the front yet in the end these measures were not effective the German state was simply too under-resourced and not possessed of sufficient Manpower by 19 44 and the additional men who were conscripted into the German Army were simply replacing those who were dying or being captured on a daily basis as the Russians Advanced from the East and the Americans and the British from the west and the South ultimately Total War achieved little other than the further impoverishment of the German people and the conscription of old men and boys into the German Army in the last desperate stages of the war in the winter of 1944 and the spring of 1945. yet Goebbels never wavered the last of his 218 wartime editorials in dasry called for resistance to the very end even as the Soviet armies closed in on Central Berlin in January 1945 the Soviet forces crossed into Eastern Germany and the Americans and British simultaneously Advanced into the Rhineland in Western Germany following a bitter struggle in the Arden Forest of Belgium and Luxembourg in December 1944 and January 1945. German defeat was clearly just months away and Hitler and the Nazi leadership were now hoping that a falling out might occur between the English-speaking allies and the Russians which might work in Germany's favor this never came and in the spring of 1945 the only question was whether the Russians advancing from the east or the British and Americans from the West would seize Berlin despite these setbacks goebbel's commitment to Total War never wavered it was expressed most forcefully in the final weeks of the war in an article in Das Reich magazine published on the 22nd of April 1945 entitled resistance at any price here goebbel's fanaticism and willingness to let everything in Germany be destroyed in defense of the remnants of the Reich is laid bare the war has reached a stage at which only the full efforts of the nation and of each individual can save us the defense of our freedom no longer depends on the army fighting at the front each civilian each man and woman and boy and girl fight with unequal fanaticism no Village and no City may give in to the enemy indeed perhaps it was his unwavering fanaticism and commitment to the Nazi cause in the final days of the Third Reich which led Hitler to appoint his propaganda Minister as his successor when the fuhrer took the decision to end his life on the 30th of April 1945 goebbel's few hours as head of the German state were a ghastly conclusion to his own life on the 1st of May a day after Hitler's suicide he sent an offer for a ceasefire to General vasilichwikov the head of the Soviet Army's assault on Berlin when this was rejected he decided to follow his master's example later that day Joseph and Magda Goebbels had their six children sedated with morphine before killing their children by force feeding them cyanide once they had lost Consciousness Joseph and Magda then headed upstairs where they committed suicide themselves in the garden of the Reich chancellery thus died The Mastermind of so much of the Nazi party's ideology few individuals were as critical in shaping the Third Reich as Joseph Goebbels both prior to the party coming to power and as Reich Minister for public Enlightenment and propaganda in the years ahead he shaped how the Nazi message was presented to German citizens and The Wider world the visual image we have of the Nazi party as being visually dominated by huge parades with massive Nazi banners in red and black is almost entirely owing to how Goebbels choreographed and designed these events and the public view of the Nazis from 1939 he was the decisive figure in deciding what information on the war effort was provided to German citizens and how it was presented he also pushed for an increasingly fanatical all-out War as planet potentiary for Total War moreover he was one of the central individuals in the evolution of the final solution and Holocaust of Europe's Jews as zealous adherent of Hitler's Goebbels was perhaps the most clear-sighted of the Nazi leadership about the prospects of German victory in the second world war and yet his fanatical adherence to the fuhrer and the tenets of national socialism led him to favor dragging Europe to the brink of utter destruction given how close his ideology was to Hitler's own it was perhaps unsurprising that the fuhrer appointed him as his successor in April 1945. what do you think of Joseph Goebbels was he merely a cog in Hitler's government or was he a critical figure in the Third Reich who shaped Nazi policy and how State propaganda was implemented in the 20th century please let us know in the comments section and in the meantime thank you very much for watching the man done to history as Hermann Wilhelm Gering was born in the marimbad sanatorium on the 12th of January 1893 Gering was born in the town of rosenheim in the Kingdom of Bavaria to Heinrich Ernst Gering and Francisca tiefenbrun goering's father Heinrich had already been married once and had five children he would marry tiefenbrun at the age of 45 in London having been sent there by Otto von Bismarck On Assignment to study the British method of colonial Administration before studying British colonial Administration methods he served as a Cavalry officer in the Bavarian Army and following his studies he was reassigned to the oversight of German territories in Southwest Africa heinlich's time as Minister resident for Southwest Africa would be relatively short as he would soon be appointed the ambassador of Haiti Hermann gering's mother Francisca tiefenbrun had given birth to three other children Carl Olga and Paola before hellmann and when Gering was born his mother returned to Haiti without him leaving him in Freud Bavaria with a family friend and for the next three years guring would live with the GAO Family holding much resentment for his mother for leaving him behind so much so that when they finally reunited in 1896 and she tried to give him a hug guring ran at his mother trying to punch her for leaving him for so long subsequently the family moved to Berlin and lived in fragosstrasse in the friedenau suburb and from a very early age guring wanted to become an officer in the German military just like his father the family Dynamic shifted dramatically during guring's childhood as his father's friend Dr Hellman apenstein who was Hellman's Godparent spoiled the guring children and when Dr apenstein returned to Germany he bought the castle mountaindorf in Austria not far from the Bavarian border he would also buy a second smaller Castle called feldenstein near the city of Nuremberg Gering would come to see feldenstein become the family's seat of nobility yet this was only possible due to his affluent Godfather Dr apenstein was also friendly with Francisca and she would become apenstein's mistress humiliating her frail husband as when apenstein visited he would be given the finest bedroom with Francisco's bedroom not far away while Heinrich was placed on the ground floor and was forbidden from entering that part of the castle he would take little to no part in raising guring as Dr apenstein took over the care of the children Dr apenstein was a Christian as he had been baptized as a child that his family's Roots were Jewish he would often write to the gerings about directing their children's lives in areas such as education marriage and Investments while guring's father was obsessed with his past Glory his Godfather embodied true power yet Gering resented the relationship between apenstein and his mother he was spoiled as a child and received little discipline stating he was Daddy's darling he was a difficult pupil and left his first school in fruit in 1900 and in 1904 he was sent to boarding school in ansbach which he hated so much so that he spent his last change on a ticket home whilst making sure to cut all the stringed instruments before leaving his parents insisted he go back to school but he stubbornly resisted he was unable to cope with the restrictions placed upon him at ansbach and he believed his Defiance towards authority figures was a sign of natural heroism his father said historical greatness ran through their blood and this saying would Inspire going towards a Grand Vision in 1905 it was agreed upon by his father and apenstein to send him to the cadet School in karsruhea in Baden ironically the two did not anticipate Going's positive response to the idea of attending the academy as he thought it was finally a school Fit For A Hero by 1909 he enrolled into a military training college at lichterfelder near Berlin he enjoyed the daily regime of military life and also his solitary nights spent alone he left lichterfelder with the highest distinction available at the Academy and by March of 1912 he had joined the prince Wilhelm regiment he would be part of the 112th inventory regiment stationed at mulus and by 1913 Gering would become a commissioned officer it would be only a year later that the tenuous friendship with apenstein would end in 1913 forcing the family from feldenstein as a result Heinrich moved the family to Berlin and shortly afterwards passed away though the loss of his father was devastating Gering settled into life at mulus and became friends with Lieutenant Bruno lertzer mulus was aboard a Garrison town in German al-sas with no more than a mile separating Germany and France meanwhile in Sarajevo The austro-hungarian Heir Apparent to the throne Archduke Franz Ferdinand had been assassinated by gavrilo princip a member of young Bosnia in 1914. this assassination resulted in the July crisis which saw the Diplomatic relationship of European countries deteriorate when war was declared lieutenant guring and his men were ordered to retreat behind the Rhine to take up a better defensive position and the French quickly took the town one of guring's first missions would be to provide a scouting report of the French position in mulus although guring eager In the Heat of the Moment pushed the French out of the town he captured four French Dragoon horses and returned to base with his War prizes on the following day guring and his platoon entered the town on bicycles and engaged the French troops in a skirmish sending them into a panic guring's success led him to concoct a plan to capture General Paul now but a nervous Rifleman gave away their position when he misfired his gun with their position compromised the platoon returned back to base empty-handed leaving guring bitter about his lost opportunity to gain instant Fame guring became an experienced and reliable Junior officer but would be unexpectedly struck down with rheumatism he was sent to a hospital in Freiburg to recover and kept in touch with lertza who had entered into an air training school Goering applied for a transfer to the training school but was denied despite the official denial Gering took the matter into his own hands by arranging his own transfer to be trained as an aviator Gering would be court-martialed for his actions but was never punished as he was attached to the 25th field aired attachment of Crown Prince friedish wilhelm's Fifth Army the two friends carried out reconnaissance missions which required photographing and drawing the enemy's entrenchment and gun placements the two became Legends as guring drew the chain of forts surrounding verdal and shot at enemies with a pistol when Lutzer flew low enough the pair would be awarded the first class Iron Cross for their bravery flying reconnaissance took up much of going spring in 1915 and he eventually learned Morse code enabling him to send messages down to the base whilst in the sky the first Morse code message he sent was quote you can stop firing you won't hit the bloody Target anyhow when the French Air Force commenced a raid on the crown Prince's headquarters during the visit of Crown Princess Cecily going and lurza responded by badly damaging a French plane with a pistol before dropping a small bomb on a French Aerodrome as a result of this raid Gering decided to carry an improvised machine gun when flying becoming the first German Airman to bring a machine gun with him into aerial combat once Aviation Technology had improved guring decided he wanted to Pilot his own plane rather than being relegated to being just an observer guring and lurzer both attended senior meetings despite their low rank but their experience in the air proved too valuable for them to be left out at this time he caught the attention of Crown Prince friedish Wilhelm and returned to Freiburg to gain his wings he never crashed a plane during his training and in October 1915 he gained the title of yucktvlieger also known as a Pursuit fighter following the award of his new title Gering and lertzer joined the jagstaffle franff the newest Fighter Group which was formed to fight on the Western Front guring saw aerial combat in November when he engaged the new British aircraft a Handley page which was a large aircraft for the time supporting a crew of two the pilot along with one other person who would observe repair and shoot at enemy aircraft although gering's aviatic was more Nimble than the Hanley page which allowed him to outmaneuver and take its Gunner out of action guring was attacked by a squad of sup with Fighters and his engine and fuel tank were hit he sustained an injury himself and began to lose Consciousness until the sound of machine gun fire brought him out of his State of Shock allowing him to pull his throttle up from the nosedive his plane was in he crash-landed in the cemetery of a church next to a field hospital where he was pulled from the wreckage and operated on for a critical wound to his hip which if not operated on would have caused him to bleed out in total 60 bullet holes were found in the fuselage of his aviatic gering's wounds left him out of action for over a year but it was during this time that the art of Air Combat was rapidly developing this new form of warfare was greatly romanticized as a deadly duel in which the ace with the best wit would win the day in the meantime lertzer was appointed as commandant to field Squadron 26 based in malus where guring would join him in 1916. guring's reputation as a fighter pilot had spread and he received the daring lion with swords the Carl Friedrich order along with the Hoenn Solon medal with swords third class in May of 1917 he was put in charge of the 27th Air Squadron which flew out of the same Airfield as the 26th Squadron near Flanders going and lurza squadrons would combine to create a new unit called the yagt kashwada commanded by mandrel Von richtovin also known as the Red Baron in 1918 Germany launched an offensive against the triple entente on the Western Front but by April richtoven was killed in action leading to gering's Rapid rise up the ranks in May gurring Was preparing to take off when his adjutant stopped him informing him he had been awarded the polar Merit the highest honor that could be given to an individual for continual bravery on the battlefield where he tovan was soon replaced by Captain Reinhardt in May but he was killed shortly after crashing an experimental plane Gering had recently flown himself on the 7th of July Gering was selected to command the yag geshbada and in a ceremony he was given the rich Hoven emblem a walking stick which had been passed down by the previous commanders Gering would keep this walking stick with him till the day he died as the end of the war approached the orders the soldiers received became increasingly confusing and hypocritical for example on the 10th of November he received instructions telling him to surrender their planes to the American forces whilst another order told him to evacuate all of their equipment to darmstadt and then on the 11th of November the official news of the Armistice reached the troops along with the order to Halt the evacuations but Gering refused he instead told his fighters to fly to darmstadt although some would surrender to the French at Strasburg as intended others mistook gering's instructions and flew to Mannheim where soldiers and workers councils had revolted and confiscated the Pilot's firearms wordreach guring and without hesitation he and the rest of his Squadron flew to Mannheim guring threatened he would shoot the aerodrome if the weapons were not released and the revolutionaries obliged the Squadron flew to darmstadt where guring ordered them to crash land their planes so they would not fall into the hands of the enemy Gering would be honorably discharged from the German air force with the rank of Captain in the Bavarian town of ashaffenburg and it was here that he discovered that he was a gifted orator and his men would often cheer him on as he raged against the German people for their betrayal of the army who had sacrificed so much to protect them curing lived a nomadic life after his resignation from the Army and would spend some time in Denmark in 1920 guring was asked by count Eric Von Rosen a renowned Explorer to fly him to his estate on Lake bavan however the weather was horrendous and by the time they landed on the frozen lake it was too late for guring to return counter Rosen offered going to stay the night in the castle where he would meet caltransen's wife's sister baroness Karin vonkansoff gurin quickly fell in love with the woman during the night as the group sang songs Karen was five years older than guring and was married with an eight-year-old son but she was estranged from her Swedish husband and was looking for the love and affection Gering was offering by the end of gering's stay they had arranged to meet kyrene's parents at their home in Sweden Karin's father was Baron Carl frock an officer in the Swedish army while her mother was baroness haldini beamishfak who was an English woman whose family had lived in Ireland Karen's sister Fanny was married to count Ricard Von villamovitz milendorf who was an officer in the German Army but had been killed in the Great War the loss of her brother-in-law made her sympathetic towards Germany and also towards going yet the prospect of divorce as well as guring's unemployed status made the match unlikely and so Gering returned to Berlin in 1921 to enroll in a university to study political science at the age of 28. meanwhile Karin convinced her husband to divorce her and he even gave her a sum of money which would allow her to marry Gering the couple married in Munich on the 3rd of February 1922 and moved to hokkoith in the Bavarian Alps roughly 50 miles from Munich the couple were Avid National lists and it did not take long for them to become involved in politics guring met Hitler in 1922 and soon became active in the party the National Socialist German Workers Party nsdap or Nazi party was based in Munich as the Bavarian government was ineffective at handling radical political parties the core of the party lay in the Sturm up tylon which was composed of working class and ex-military Men Who guarded party meetings whilst also instigating fights with other political parties in fact the nsdap were a welcomed political party as they frequently attacked the Communist Party who were not welcomed at all since being ousted from power as a result of gering's interest in the party and his prior military experience Hitler offered guring a position in the nsdap as the leader of the Sturm up tylon Gering set out two goals as leader he said quote at first it was important to weld the essay into a stable organization to discipline it and to make of it a completely reliable unit which had to carry out the orders which I or Adolf Hitler should give it I strive from the beginning to bring into the essay those members of the party who were young and idealistic enough to devote their free time and their entire energies to it in the second place I tried to find recruits among laborers goring's exploits from the Great War made him an ideal candidate to run the sa as he was held in high regard by counter-revolutionaries as well as nationalists wishing to smash the Communist party later in life Hitler would praise Goring whilst also dismissing the later work of elmstrom when he said quote he is the only one of its heads that ran the sa properly I gave him a disheveled rabble in a short time he organized a division of 11 000 men the two formed an unlikely Duo as guring was a highly decorated officer receiving orders from Hitler who was low born and never achieved a rank higher than amelda Gengar or officer's Runner it was at this time that the gerings moved to a new home in the suburb of obermensing in the city of Munich it was modestly furnished and their home became the meeting place for the nsdap during one of these meetings guring would meet Rudolf Hess a great War pilot Alfred Rosenberg a self-proclaimed philosopher and Captain ernstroom an active military member with connections to weapons Depots these men were needed to formulate the rise of the nsdap and were exactly who guring was comfortable being around both Gering and om's relationship with Hitler was similar as Hitler found a way to leverage the best traits out of his leaders whilst also keeping the unruly aspects in line furthermore Rim's active status in the Bavarian military allowed for easy recruitment into the sa and whilst room viewed guring Moore's a rival than as an ally his own Memoirs never outright declared his disdain for the man after all Gering was useful as he was more even tempered and unwilling to make rash decisions unlike whom who was given the title of Chief of Staff of the sa however it was Gering who was truly in charge REM would not be given command of the essay until 1930 yet throughout 1923 guring strenuously organized and drilled the essay in the woods outside of Munich and maintained a hesitant relationship with the state government violence erupted between the Communists and the Nazis on the 1st of May 1923 a rallying day for communist members and as a result of the first of May incident guring and the others were forced to rethink their strategy to grow the nsdap it would not be long before Hitler and guring were both begging general fund losoff to join them as Gustav schweizerman had become Chancellor and had enacted martial law noticing the increased political unrest in part this declaration was made because of the black ice sphere under the direction of major buchrika who now threatened the government the black reichsphere was a secret organization within the reichsphere which was associated with the secret society known as femi an organization marked by extreme violence even worse than the street violence perpetrated by the Nazis and the Communists objection towards passive resistance to the French occupation of the word deeply infuriated many Germans especially the Nazi party guring attempted one last time to convince General vanlosov to break his agreement to stay in line with Berlin in order to join them in the coup to unseat streisaman and his government this would not come to fruition leaving Hitler and guring without an ally however a prime opportunity would come along which prompted the need to act Gustav fonkar the new state commissioner for Bavaria Colonel Hans written vonseiser the premier of Bavaria and General von lossov had announced a meeting on the 8th of November 1923 at the burger boycella beer hall where they were going to give a speech to 3 000 people it was believed by Hitler that Carr's intention behind announcing the meeting was to declare Bavarian Independence if this was true an egotistical Hitler could not let him steal the Glory of Revolution guring was stressed during the ordeal as his mother had just passed Karen had pneumonia and all the while he was trying to gather the Stormtroopers for the revolution Hitler stormed the beer hall and jumped on the table and fired a shot in the air shouting the national revolution has begun Hitler motioned with his gun to the ministers to leave the room and gurring was able to read the reaction of the crowd he took the podium and shouted there is nothing to fear we are your friends you've no reason to Grumble you've got your beer meanwhile Hitler and the ministers unwillingly formed the new government believing General ludendorff was going to be involved despite even him not knowing of his involvement ludendorff soon arrived and was irate at not being consulted over the plan yet there was a problem as Hitler had to leave in order to settle a street fight between the sa and Bavarian soldiers leaving ludendorf in charge of the ministers the ministers left and abandoned the plot Carr quietly moved the state's government to Regensburg printed pamphlets denouncing their allegiance to the Nazi party and ensured the military was not aligned to the Nazis meanwhile guring finally found time to telephone Karen to tell her not to worry that he may not come home that night even during the coup his main thought was with kind the situation continued to deteriorate as Hitler and guring did not act as quickly as rum had who had taken over the military headquarters in Munich as the morning came ludendorff proposed the group marched to the center of Munich believing the Army and police would not fire on them because of his reputation by 11 in the morning ludendorff led the column of Nazis towards the center of Munich the column of three thousand had to cross the Ludwig bridge in order to reach the inner city of Munich but armed policemen were blocking their path gearing approached alone informing the officers that they held hostages and if they were to use Force against the Nazis the hostages and those who resisted would be shot the police stood down and allowed the column to advance but they had their weapons confiscated as a precaution the group continued through svi britenstrasse heading towards the war Ministry where room was being besieged but in order to get there they had to pass through the small Street of residence Strasse which was blocked by armed police the Nazis shouted at the police to surrender but shots were fired and the Nazis scattered Gehring was shot in the groin and was bleeding heavily from his injury he was taken by Stormtroopers into the house of a furniture dealer named baleen and his wife ilsa who ironically were Jewish and ilser dressed the wound as best she could once night had fallen Goering was sent to Professor Von akh to treat his injuries and Karin arrived to learn that General von lossov had issued a warrant for goering's arrest and guring begged her to help him escape from Bavaria goring's condition was serious and so he could not easily be moved but Karin did receive help from friends in the town of garmish to smuggle him there guring's recovery was slow as his wounds became reinfected leaving him bitter a about the situation and before long guring's presence in garmesh became well known and he was arrested and placed under guard at a hospital the crowd sympathized with Gering and mass demonstrations occurred outside in support and with Karen's persistence and support from the police gurring was smuggled out of Germany and into Austria where he would be operated on in a hospital in Innsbruck following the surgery Goering would suffer from high fevers and excruciating pain which he would be given morphing for twice a day as a result of this guring would fight morphing addiction for the rest of his life Gering spent a considerable amount of time in Exile prohibited from returning to Germany by Hitler who refused to let him stand trial for the failed push his first assignment would be in February of 1924 when he was to speak at a nationalist convention in Innsbruck Gering soon took a leadership role for the Nazi party in Vienna and worked closely with Austrian Nazi valta real he stayed at the tirolahof with Karen and was barely able to pay for their stay with most of their possessions impounded by the Bavarian authorities at the end of the trial in April ludendorff was acquitted while Hitler was found guilty along with the other Nazi leadership including guring who was found guilty in absentia guring filed for amnesty but never received it the results of the trial should have ended the Nazi party but instead it resulted in a Resurgence seeing the Nazis earn a seat in the reichstag the gurings left Austria and traveled through Italy before stopping in Rome they would be given an audience with Benito Mussolini where they talked at length about the failed beer hall putch following their short stay in Italy the couple moved into a flat in odengarden Sweden to take care of Karen's mother bakarin's own health soon started to decline as she started having epileptic seizures and as she suffered more from epileptic episodes guring's Health also deteriorated with his morphine addiction in 1927 Paul Von Hindenburg was elected president and issued a general political amnesty which included gurring who equally returned to his homeland guring worked hard to regain his wealth and connect with Hitler for employment and political purposes guring's former position as the leader of the sa was currently occupied by Frank Von fever a wealthy Aristocrat who Hitler could not afford to dismiss due to his economic advantages the Nazi party was fiscally weak and needed strong economic backers to succeed and guring's vulnerable financial status did not help them despite this guring was accepted back into the Nazi party and sent to Berlin to work on accumulating wealth it was at this time that guring's connection to the airline industry paid off as his friend Erhard MILF senior executive of Lufthansa got him a job working as a business representative with the Bavarian Moto Works company by the winter guring had successfully petitioned Hitler that he should be one of the representatives for the Nazi party in the upcoming reichstag election he proved to Hitler he could stand a chance as he stood against Otto and craigorstrasse the brothers who had earlier broken away from the Nazi movement due to their leftist ideology being driven out eventually by Hitler's cult personality in fact guring's position as a representative suited the Nazi party as guring was able to banter with the elite of society while Hitler was terrible at small talk and felt uncomfortable in the company of intellectuals in the election the Nazis performed poorly but Goebbels and guring both took seats in the reichstag Hitler and Goebbels were less than pleased but guring was ecstatic as it renewed his family's depleted wealth and allowed him to move into a modern flat with five rooms at seven Barden shastrasa at the reichstag deputy he sat on the communications committee which also oversaw the aviation section he lobbied to increase funding for the airline industry which was exclusively held by his friends at Lufthansa because it was a quote Great Patriotic task which needed fulfillment in part this was also a ploy to build up Germany's military air defense the push by going to finance these industrial Giants also worked as a way to bribe the industrialist to side with the Nazi party following the victory in the reichtag the Gering family lost karine's mother on the 25th of September 1931. Karin was barely well enough to attend the funeral in Stockholm and going returned to Berlin to oversee political matters but on the 17th of October Karin who had been ill with tuberculosis died of heart failure Goering was devastated at the loss and he returned to Berlin after the funeral as he believed it was the only way he could get over her death after months of political upheaval and multiple chancellors resigning from Office Hitler ascended to the chancellorship on the 30th of January 1933. Gering held three positions in Hitler's cabinet minister without portfolio minister of the interior for Prussia and her Ikea commissioner for Aviation as a minister without portfolio he acted as an ambassador speaking on behalf of Nazi Germany while the minister of the interior for Prussia was technically under former Chancellor from papin's supervision it did give him authority over the police in the largest and most important German State meanwhile as the Iraqi commissioner for Aviation he had the honor to develop the air force of the Reich he also maintained his role as president of the reichstag until the Nazis dissolved it on the 5th of March 1933 it would also be in early March that the concentration camps were founded although guring's opinion of them differed to the other Nazi leaders as he felt their role should be one of re-education for those who suffered from political delinquency much of the early history of the camps centers around the intense rivalry between guring Himmler and Rome as a result of this rivalry Gering created a secret police force which would Patrol Prussia they would eventually become known as the geima stats polizzai or gestapo Himmler soon became the police chief of Bavaria and in an effort to keep power away from Himmler Gering moved the Gestapo on the 26th of April from the Prussian Administration to their own headquarters Hitler wished to unify the police forces and gave the Gestapo to Himmler on the 20th of April 1934. the Rivalry with room was also growing at this time as he was attempting to replace the Reich sphere with the sa a move which threatened both Hitler and guring as an act of defiance room helped establish nearly 50 concentration camps by the end of 1933. despite Going's so-called approved concentration camps the SS out of their own Defiance founded Dachau concentration camp in the spring of 1933 and fired upon guring's men when they tried to investigate the unauthorized concentration camp Hitler forced Himmler to close the camp yet guring was outclassed as he lost control of the police to Himmler Rim was becoming more bold with his demands and as a result guring allied with Himmler to try to eliminate him they needed time before they could move on room but guring's Health was starting to fail Goering had grown fat as a result of inconsistent eating schedules and over-indulgence when entertaining guests his preferred Foods included sandwiches and beer along with his favorite which was cake guring's sleeping habits weren't much better as he would stay up late watching films privately going to bed at 2 or 3 AM and requesting to be woken up at 6 30. although guring hardly needed to be wakened since he suffered from insomnia in May of 1933 Hitler appointed guring reichmaster of the hunt and master of the German forest Gering loved the countryside and quickly invoked laws to protect Wildlife such as elk bison boers swans and birds of prey he restricted the number of hunters allowed and outlawed poaching hunting on Horseback or the use of traps it was also due to this love of the forest that he purchased Prime real estate in the schofhider a vast area near the Baltic Sea and Polish border he would build Karen Hall in schofheider near the lake called vacaze and it would be here that he would create a sanctuary for both wildlife and himself it would be a great achievement for Gering as he designed every aspect of the house quote down to the door handles just before Himmler took control of the Gestapo away from guring Rob deals came to him with a new tool he had acquired abroad which could be used to listen in on telephone calls going turned it over to his agents and instructed his research staff officers to start monitoring nearly all high-ranking Nazi officials on guring's list Gering received a wave of information including jokes about him but he seemed to enjoy them and laugh about it his most important wiretapping came in a conversation between General Werner Von blomberg minister of defense and head of the rice sphere kruppenfire Carl Ernst as well as elmstrom there were frequent conversations held by Von blomberg over concerns surrounding REM usurping control of the army and his fears were backed by REM and ernst's own exchanges it also confirmed guring's suspicions of Graham's hatred for him as REM Was Heard calling him the pig guring and hair I Axion or Mr reaction Gering and himmler's opportunity would come when Rome proposed a joint conference between the sa SS and reichsphere this led to Growing resentment of room and if Hitler would not stop him then the Army would not support him the sa was called to bad Vice say for a leadership conference and it was here that the Trap would be sprung Hitler and other top Nazi officials raided the Hansel bar Hotel on the 30th of June 1934 and arrested room and other sa leaders Gering was in Berlin raiding the sa headquarters where he meticulously went room to room pointing at individuals ordering their arrest the night of the Long Knives as it would be known was an act of political suppression against inner party members carried out to settle political disagreements the following year on the 10th of April 1935 guring would ask Emmy Solomon an actress he had been dating since 1932 to marry him it was to be a grand event with great Pomp and Circumstance the streets decorated for the event soldiers lined the streets leading to the cathedral and all traffic was stopped for the procession Hitler would serve as the best man for guring at the wedding however there was a possibility that the wedding occurred at Hitler's behest as he believed there were too many eligible men among the high-ranking Nazi members following the wedding Emmy would be crowned as first lady of the Third Reich by Hitler and the couple retreated to Karen Hall with a small Entourage guring slipped away and spent an hour at Karen's tomb in the mausoleum the next morning guring and Emmy left for Wiesbaden and then went on to Yugoslavia for their honeymoon Gering was promoted to ice Marshal on the 4th of February 1938 following Hitler's dismissal of six generals for anti-nazi views and his promotion of himself as commander-in-chief of German armed forces in March Austria was invaded and incorporated into the Nazi like under the eyes of guring following their annexation the Austrian Nazi party wanted Goering to increase propaganda against the Jewish population Goering was reluctant as he enjoyed Jewish composers and Painters yet believed they were guilty of profiteering and scheming leading to the defeat of Germany in World War One in private conversations with Emmy he would say quote the Jews were just like any other people but a bit smarter which he would often say with a grin he would also say that they had good and bad people he felt squeamish when Goebbels and Himmler talked about the extermination of the Jews and would often excuse himself the gurings had their first and only child Eda on the 2nd of June 1938 and Hitler would act as the newborn's Godfather in the following year on the 1st of September 1939 German troops invaded Poland and going would Ascend to the Pinnacle of his power Hitler had selected Gering to be his Heir should anything ever happen to him as the war progressed going started to argue with Hitler over strategic decisions Gering wanted to start the air assault on Britain while Hitler wanted to hold them for the attack on France Hitler instead set his eyes on the Nordic countries although guring had personally guaranteed Sweden's neutrality despite Hitler's own wishes to invade Sweden for their iron ore guring was able to broker a treaty in which Sweden would remain independent and in return give the Nazis the iron ore they needed following the defeat of the British at Dunkirk Gering requested an immediate attack on the British he believed the disorientated state of the British military would allow for even the most ill-conceived plan to succeed Hitler refused believing Britain would surrender in the next few weeks unlike Gering who knew they would only surrender once the final blow had been dealt the good weather turned terrible which prohibited them from flying because guring wanted the most accurate bombing raids to destroy ports factories and airfields when the lotvaphar was finally Unleashed they met heavy resistance from the RAF the luftwaffe Lost nearly 1 500 planes as they underestimated the advancement in British radar and code decryption this would be the beginning of a year-long campaign of bombing England which became known as The Blitz on the 9th of August 1940 gearing and Hitler had an argument over their next military moves Hitler wished to attack the Soviet Union as a preventative measure Goering pulled Hitler up on his hypocrisy as Hitler had stated in his biography Mein Kampf he would never involve the German people in a two-front war similar to The Great War Hitler was outraged over guring's dismissal of his plan and even more so that Gering ignored him to continue arguing his point Hitler had become obsessed with attacking the Soviet Union and Gering pleaded with Hitler to look at Napoleon's failure to conquer Russia as comparable to the British he argued that the Russians would not broke a piece in 1941 guring became involved with his most infamous interest his love of art Gering had long planned the hellmann-going museum an art gallery which he planned to open in 1953 he loved Renaissance and Dutch paintings as he was well versed in the two he had four stately homes that needed to be filled and he enjoyed staring at paintings for hours going had multiple staff members who helped him acquire the art he even told them not to worry about the race of the individual selling the art and instead Focus only on the art when further anti-jewish laws were enacted guring used his power to assist Jewish art dealers into Switzerland to avoid prosecution Goering also worked closely with directors of National Institutes such as the Louvre to build Special bunkers to protect the art from bombing raids whilst Gering did protect collections he plundered others having Trains full of art shipped back to Germany to be displayed in Public Museum games or private collections it was an impressive collection with superb record keeping by Andreas hosfer and his assistant gizella limberger the two created a detailed Ledger which included photographs of every piece of art when it was bought and sold along with the specific detail of what had been restored all money made from the sale of art would be directed towards the construction of the hermann-gering museum on the 31st of July 1941 Goering ordered himmler's right-hand man Reinhard heideck to make quote necessary preparations for a total solution of the Jewish question it was this command that would the following year in January 1942 culminate in Heidi calling the infamous vanzai conference in which he laid out the details by which millions of Jews across Europe would be exterminated in purpose-built death camps although Gering had little involvement in the day-to-day operations of the final solution he did give the order for the SS to begin operations to liquidate the Jews and it was this order more than anything else that would result in both guring's death sentence at the Nuremberg trials and cementa's reputation as being amongst the primary instigators of the Holocaust by the end of 1941 and into 1942 it was becoming clear that the Russian campaign would not be over quickly the troops supplies Logistics and Technology needed to defeat Russia was outpacing the Nazis ability to produce them Goering was still in charge of Labor currency and rationing but this changed on the 21st of March 1942 when he announced Fritz salkel would take over the duties of assigning the use of labor while Gering was still to be consulted on the matters he effectively removed his hands from the cruelty and extermination of the Jewish people which was to begin in Eastern Europe sankul filled the factories with slave labor and ordered they be worked to death Hitler and guring's relationship became more strained as the war went on the Allies increasingly became unopposed as the number of planes protecting German cities diminished Hitler ordered an all-out assault on England by the luftwaffe a feat which was both impossible and suicidal and Gering was distraught over it Hitler would neither accept guring's advice or take his resignation Gering was stuck as the Third Reich was disintegrating going withdrew himself from the decision-making process and he wasn't present during the D-Day invasion his last ounce of Gravitas was used to release his nephew who had been arrested following the failed operation Valkyrie he was suspected of being part of the coup but there was no evidence to prove it as the Red Army advanced in 1945 they were closing in on Karen Hall guring had the art removed and a demolition team rigged the house to explode as Germany collapsed guring and Emmy escaped into Bavaria where U.S first lieutenant Jerome n Shapiro found him stuck in a traffic jam and brought him into American custody he remarked how the gurings were happy to be found by the Americans as if they were escaping a bad dream gurring was taken to the seventh Army interrogation Center in Augsburg and it was here where he talked freely to the Americans in the reports they noted quote guring is by no means the comical figure he has been depicted so many times in the newspaper reports he is neither stupid nor a fool but generally cool and calculating he is certainly not a man to be underrated although he tried to soft pedal many of the most outrageous crimes committed by Germany he said enough to show that he is as much responsible for the policies we within Germany Goering is at all times an actor who does not disappoint his audience guring painted a vivid startling and proven authentic account of life in Nazi Germany which had eluded the Allies for so long he told the Allies he was unable to save all of the art and some had fallen into the Russians hands Gehring helped the Allies recover all the art they could except for the ones that had fallen into the hands of the Russians in Berlin Goering was moved to a small Suite in the Palace Hotel at mondorf in Luxembourg this would serve as the jail for many high-ranking Nazis such as Joachim Von riventrop Admiral Karl dernitz Albert Speer and Helmer shakt and it could be said that there was some irony here as Dr Robert M Kempner was to prosecute the Nuremberg trials and he was once the youngest Prosecuting Council in the Prussian Police Department when guring fired him in 1933 leading up to the trial Gering was detoxed from the morphine and lost significant weight there were unannounced room inspections to ensure sure there was no Contraband and before the trial Dr Kempner indicted gurring with all four counts crimes against peace war crimes crimes against humanity and conspiracy to plan and commit all three in response to the upcoming trial he said quote it's just a cut and dried political Affair and I'm prepared for the consequences I have no doubt that the Press will play a bigger part in the decision than the judges and I'm sure that the Russian and French judges at least already have their instructions I can answer for anything I have done and I can't answer for anything I haven't done but the victors are the judges the trial at Nuremberg would see the remaining Nazi leadership turn on one another mainly Albert Speer and guring guring tried to keep the other Nazis in line but spear won out in the end Colonel Andrus successfully found a way to lessen guring's influence by separating the lunch groups into specific categories to minimize gehring's Authority and it worked the judges found gurin guilty on all four counts and sentenced him to death guring was to be hung but he requested to be executed by firing squad as it was a soldier's death his request was denied and the security of the prison was tightened to prevent the war criminals from cheating The Hangman's noose in the final days of the war all Nazi leaders carried poison with them in case they were captured yet medicines were heavily monitored by the guides preventing the possibility of poison pills being slipped to the defendants the executions were set for 2 am on the 16th of October 1946 and the next series of events is where the Mystery Begins the prison chaplain Captain Henry gareka saw Gering in his cell in the evening before his execution and noted his depressed state when Captain gareka left lieutenant John West came for his nightly inspection and found no Contraband West stated Gering was very happy and talked at length to him during the search at 9 30 PM Dr floker and Lieutenant Arthur mclinden visited to give guring his nightly pill and left three minutes later when private first class Gordon Bingham came for guard duty at 10 30 private first class Harold Johnson took over Johnson noticed gering's body was stiff and not moving around 10 44 pm and by the time the senior guard officers reached gering's cell he was dead from cyanide poisoning Gering wrote two farewell letters the first rebuts the claims of the trial while the second was an affectionate letter to Emmy he claimed to have always had a vial of Cyanide and he even wrote a letter to Colonel Andros bragging about having one in his place riventrop would be the first to be executed with the executions only lasting an hour and 15 minutes their bodies would be placed into caskets and taken to a crematorium the building had been heavily guarded in case of civil disturbance and once the bodies were verified and cremated they were driven to the countryside and dumped into a gutter ham and Gering remains one of the more complex and fascinating members of Hitler's Inner Circle his record as a fighter Ace in the first world war along with his drug addiction love of the Arts and the Finer Things in life undoubtedly made him a compelling figure at first glance however he was also greedy selfish and ruthless as time and again he schemed against his enemies in the Nazi regime used his power to make himself rich and at all times placed his own interests above those of the Nazi party and even his country furthermore his place as being one of the instigators of the final solution has ensured that no matter how charismatic or Brave he may have been early on in his life he was in the end corrupted by power becoming just another mass murderer addicted to excess what do you think of Hermann Goering do you think he could have mustered the strength to stand up to Hitler or was he doomed to cowdis please let us know in the comments section below and in the meantime thank you very much for watching [Music]

Channel: The People Profiles

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Id: Z-_ThAQ_jEo

Length: 303min 3sec (18183 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 11 2023