Perhaps one of the most horrific things
about Hitler and regime was that he was not working alone. One man could not
possibly have been orchestrating all of it at the same time. As much as we may
want to pin the events of the Second World War all onto one evil man, the sobering
reality is that Hitler was one of many. And one of the most monstrous of all was the
Chief of the SS and Architect of the Holocaust, Heinrich Himmler, who was directly responsible for
the deaths of nearly 7 million innocent people. And he left a diary. Heinrich Luitpold Himmler was born in Munich
on 7 October 1900. From the age of ten, Himmler started to keep diaries documenting
his life. His family was stable and relatively unremarkable. Devout Catholics, middle class,
and some ties to Germany’s royal family, but nothing to make him stand out from
those around him at his grammar school. He was somewhat of an outcast. His classmates
later described him as being socially awkward but very studious. He did do well in his
schoolwork, but he always struggled with sports. Young Himmler was on the smaller
side for his age, with lifelong stomach problems and a number of illnesses that
hampered his development. Try as he might, training with weights and exercising, he
just couldn’t compete with the other boys. This was made all the more embarrassing as Himmler
got older. In 1915, he signed up to join the Landshut Cadet Corps. If anything was going to
prove to the boys around him that he was tough, it would be this. Himmler was accepted as
an officer candidate in the 11th Bavarian Regiment, but it was likely only thanks to his
father’s royal connections. The year was 1917, and the First World War was raging across
the continent. Himmler’s older brother Gebhard was right in the thick of it, and the
younger boy was desperate to go out and fight, too. This was his chance to prove himself. He was part of the reserve forces, preparing
himself to go out and join the frontline, when suddenly the war ended. Gebhard
returned a hero. He was awarded the Iron Cross after being promoted to
the rank of lieutenant. Meanwhile, Himmler had to go and finish his studies
at grammar school, after which he went to university to learn about agriculture
where he experienced even more illness. All of these factors kept building on one another,
creating a growing sense of resentment inside the young man. All he wanted was to be tough,
and yet life kept throwing frustration after frustration at him. He needed a scapegoat.
Someone to blame all of his troubles on. Anti-Semitism had been on the rise in
Germany for several decades by this point, and was a hot-button topic in universities.
At the start of the First World War, Germany’s Emperor Wilhelm II and the Reichstag
decided unanimously to fund the war entirely by borrowing with the plan of paying off those
debts with money they would demand from the Allied countries. Except they lost, and then had no
real strategy for coughing up that kind of money. On top of that, the Allied Powers had drawn
up the Treaty of Versailles, which heavily punished the German people for their country’s
actions during the war. Among other things, Germany was required to pay reparations to their
opponents during the war. In today’s money, that debt from the Treaty of Versailles
alone wound up being roughly US$442 billion. To put into perspective how much money that is, Germany only made the final payments on that
debt in 2010, 92 years after the end of the war. So what’s that got to do with the Jewish
people? Well, nothing. But the German people spent years suffering from an absolutely crippled
economy, and were looking for someone to blame. At the time of the making of this video, many
countries around the world are suffering the effects of inflation. We are seeing the
costs of food in the supermarket going up while our paychecks stay the same.
The average rate of inflation globally in 2023 is 13%. In Germany in 1923,
the inflation rate was 80,000,000%. That is a real number. 80,000,000%%. To illustrate what that means in real terms, at
the start of 1923, you could buy a loaf of bread for 250 marks. By November, that number
was 200 billion marks or 0.2 trillion. From 250 marks to 200 billion. Let’s say you buy an Xbox in January for $250, then decide to sell it in November. You would
now be worth $41 billion dollars more than Jeff Bezos. That’s how mind-boggling
that amount of inflation is. Germany commissioned 130 printing houses to
churn out new bills as fast as they could, but soon, the cost of producing each
bill was higher than the value of the bill itself. Their economy was in freefall.
Workers were filling up wheelbarrows and suitcases with bank notes every month, which
couldn’t even buy them basic necessities. And somewhere right in the middle of
that was Heinrich Himmler. His parents, having been from wealthy middle-class
backgrounds with ties to the Royal Family, could no longer afford to pay for
his education. He had no choice but to take on a low-paying office job
and abandon his lofty military dreams. But a fire has been kindled inside
of him. Whilst at university, he had made friends with a man named
Ernst Röhm, the founder of a group called the Sturmabteilung or Storm Battalion.
Shortened to the SA, they were a paramilitary group that made up the violent wing of
a new political party. The Nazi Party. Röhm was everything Himmler had always
wanted to be. He was a decorated soldier and had established himself in a position
of power and influence over those around him. Anti-Semitism had been surrounding Himmler
for years, but he had never paid too much mind to it. He didn’t associate with Jews
but also didn’t actively shun them as much as some of his peers, but the more
time he spent with Röhm and his circle, the more Himmler became obsessed with
what he dubbed ‘The Jewish Question.’ His diary entries quickly filled up
with vitriol against the Jewish people, blaming them for the problems plaguing German
society and musing on what could be done to deal with them. In August of 1923, right in
the middle of the heights of hyperinflation, Himmler officially joined the Nazi party,
being given the badge number 14303. From there, things moved quickly for him.
Even though he never made it far in the traditional military forces, Himmler excelled
in the paramilitary, seizing opportunities to assume positions of ever-increasing power. He
was part of the SA during the Beer Hall Putsch, an early failed attempt for Hitler to seize power
by force in Munich in November of that year. Hitler was arrested, and Himmler lost his job.
He had to move back in with his parents and sat for many evenings in his bedroom, seething
with rage. His views became more extreme by the day as his frustration and embarrassment
at the failures of his life grew. But there was a chance for him. Hitler’s arrest had left
a power vacuum within the Nazi party. In the ensuing chaotic jockeying for positions, Himmler
cleverly managed to use his bookishness to snag a promotion to party secretary and propaganda
assistant. In his new role, he got to travel all over Bavaria, delivering speeches, handing out
literature, and, most importantly, networking. That meant upon Hitler’s return to
the party after his release in 1925, Himmler was able to jump back across to
the SA but in a new capacity. The Nazis saw that Hitler was now a high-value target,
many of them had even started to worship him, and as such, he needed protection. The
SS was formed, tasked with being Hitler’s personal guard, and Himmler landed
a role as an SS Führer or SS Leader. Over the following two years, Himmler
worked his way up the ranks within the SS and got closer to Hitler. By the
time he was close enough to strike, Himmler already had a well-prepared
pitch to give to the party leader. His vision was for the SS to be the elite
of the elite. Ruthless and perfect men, exemplifying the heights of what the Nazi party
could be. Loyal, powerful, and racially pure. That was all Hitler needed to hear.
He appointed Himmler as the Deputy Reichsführer-SS—the highest rank in the SS. But
this was only the beginning of Himmler’s ascent. In 1932, the Nazi party won the election.
Furious with the state of their country, the floundering economy, and their shame following
the First World War, many German voters looked to more fringe parties. The Nazis were there to
capitalize, spewing a highly nationalistic rhetoric that empowered the German people,
expressed their anger at the state of their world, and sought to do something about it. The
Nazis simplified a lot of Germany’s problems by blaming others, primarily the Jewish and Roma
people, as well as a number of other groups. They believed that if those
groups were ‘dealt with’, then the pure-born German people
would thrive and see their former glory return. It was a solution that many
were desperate and angry enough to vote for. Himmler was suddenly in a real position of power, which was only heightened by a fiery attack
on the Reichstag building, the house of the German government. Hitler capitalized on this
event, using it as a chance to force through legislation that granted him greater powers and
effectively turned Germany into a dictatorship. All of a sudden, Heinrich Himmler
had free reign to do as he wished. His dream of being the commander of a
vast and powerful army was realized. Himmler couldn’t have been more excited
at the prospect, and as soon as he could, he went about recruiting with a
strong emphasis on racial purity. In his own words, he was "like
a nursery gardener trying to reproduce a good old strain which
has been adulterated and debased; we started from the principles of plant
selection and then proceeded quite unashamedly to weed out the men whom we did not think
we could use for the build-up of the SS." The irony, of course, was that Himmler himself, being a weak and sickly specimen of
a man, would never have made it past the entry requirements of the SS. But now
that he was in charge, who could stop him? Year after year, Himmler grew in power
and severity. He created the SS Race and Settlement Main Office, where he enacted a
number of racial policies. Anyone joining the SS had to provide an airtight family tree that
proved that they were of Aryan descent all the way back to the year 1800. He even instituted
a policy where his officers had to enter into an Aryan marriage and produce four children. This
failed pretty dramatically, with less than 40% of his men actually marrying and on average,
they didn’t produce more than one child. Compared to many of the policies
he went on to be responsible for, this one was tame. Himmler was closely involved
in so many events in the following few years that it is impossible to cover them all
in this video. But there are two events in particular that proved to be pivotal
to the horrors of the Second World War. First was Project Himmler. Nazi Germany had
been looking for a reason to invade Poland. Convinced of their racial superiority and
obsessed with the idea of total domination, they needed a reason to convince their people
and the population of the world as a whole that their invasion would be justified. Himmler
had long been working with Reinhard Heydrich in the Nazi party. A close companion to
Himmler, Heydrich had been his Deputy during his years in the SS and had overseen
the Gestapo, the Nazi’s secret police force. The pair of them, along with Heinrich
Muller, concocted Project Himmler. They dressed a number of their own soldiers as
in Polish army uniforms and orchestrated fake skirmishes along the border to
make it look like Poland was trying to invade them. The propaganda machine then
spun those events into a cause for war, and Germany officially invaded Poland,
kicking off the start of the Second World War. The other part of the war that Himmler
had his hands all over is consider by many to be one of the darkest
moments in all of human history, and would gain him the nickname
“The Architect of the Holocaust.” The extermination of the Jewish people had been a
core value of the Nazi party from its inception. Now that the Nazis were in power, they were
looking for solutions to make that a reality. Their initial approach had been to force Jews
to “voluntarily” leave the country. Jews were denied entry into restaurants and theaters, they
couldn’t use public transportation or own bikes, and they were only allocated an hour for
shopping. A fierce propaganda campaign painted them as the villains, the root
cause of all of the country’s problems. In every way possible, they were made
to feel like they were not welcome. But for the Nazis, for Hitler, and for Himmler, this simply did not go far enough. They
needed another solution, a final solution. Heydrich, Himmler’s deputy, outlined his plans for
this final solution on the 20th of January 1942 in a meeting with all of the top Nazi officials
known as the Wannsee Conference, named after the Berlin suburb where it took place. Heydrich
estimated that there were roughly 11 million Jews across the whole of Europe for the Nazis to deal
with. Heydrich thought that the Jewish people were a drain on society, but he had a plan to get
some use out of them before disposing of them. It’s worth pausing here to remember that the
people Heydrich was talking about, the people that Himmler, Hitler, and the Nazi regime as a
whole were trying to exterminate, were people. Humanity has a remarkable ability to desensitize
itself to suffering. We’re all capable of it. The Nazi party showed us the extremes
of this desensitization. It can often start out quite subtly, seeing someone of
a different race as being ‘other’ to you, someone who you don’t understand or have much
in common with. Often, it starts with language, changing the way people speak about
one another, one word at a time. The word ‘extermination’ that the Nazis
used was not chosen offhandedly. You exterminate pests - rodents - you don’t
exterminate humans. You murder humans. The group of men sitting around at the
Wannsee Conference were not dealing with rats under their floorboards.
They were logically, systematically, and in full knowledge of their actions,
planning the mass murder of 11 million people. The ‘Jewish Question’ that Himmler had spent
night after night musing about in his diary whilst at university was about to be ‘solved’, and
he would be the architect at the center of it all. Himmler’s plan was as follows. Of the 9.5 million Jews in Europe,
a large percentage would be healthy, strong adults. Those adults would be put
to work building roads and infrastructure. They would be worked relentlessly until they
dropped dead. A larger portion of these people would not be able to do such work. Children,
the elderly, those with disabilities. Those people would be murdered outright in as
quick and efficient a manner as possible. The Nazis would benefit by eradicating
those who they saw as being racially impure and getting an enormous free labor source
that they had no duty of care over. There would be no need for medical treatment, pay,
suitable accommodation, appropriate clothing, or tools. The end goal was for their workers to
die, so none of those things mattered at all. But before any of this plan was put
into action, Reinhard Heydrich was assassinated. Himmler was devastated. Having
worked so closely with Heydrich for years, he had developed a deep friendship with
the man to the point that he delivered the eulogy at Heydrich’s funeral and
took responsibility for his children. The fire that had been burning in Himmler
for years now became an inferno. Furious at his years of suffering and catalyzed
by the death of his close friend, Himmler launched Operation Reinhard, which started with the founding of three extermination
camps in Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka. At first, Jewish people were executed
by firing squads and, in small groups, taken into gas vans, but Himmler quickly grew
frustrated with these methods. They were too slow, not industrial enough. He visited one of the
camps to witness a firing squad execution firsthand and found himself feeling
nauseous and upset by what he had seen. His human body was reacting to the horror of
his actions, but Himmler’s mind forcefully suppressed his basic empathy and decided that
the method was too gory. He didn’t want his soldiers to be distressed by their actions. He
was worried about the mental health of his men, as they mercilessly gunned down
dozens of innocent civilians. He needed a solution, so he turned to the field
he knew best. The subject he had studied at university all those years before: Agriculture.
He needed to industrialize murder in the same way that the tractor had industrialized the
fields. The gas chamber was created. An empty room where naked people would be crammed
in like cattle. The doors would close, and Zyklon B gas would be pumped into
the room, killing everyone inside. Any Jews who were deemed ‘Unfit for Work’
were sent into the chambers immediately on their arrival at the camp in Auschwitz
without even being assigned a number. Anyone deemed unworthy of life was to be given a similar
treatment. That went for anyone with a disability. At its height, Auschwitz had multiple gas
chambers, which combined were capable of killing 2,000 people at a time. They
had crematoria constructed to burn the bodies that were capable of burning 1.6 million
corpses per year. And that was just in Auschwitz. Firsthand witnesses from these camps describe how
there would be so many bodies lying on the floors of the chambers that rigamortis would set in
long before they had all been cleared out of the room. As a result, the bodies often ended up being
locked together as the tissues stiffened, and the Jewish workers responsible for clearing the space
would have to break their own people's limbs. They were killing people faster than
they could burn the bodies. And so some camps resorted to digging
enormous trenches outside where they’d burn the bodies in an open grave.
Channels had to be dug running away for the trenches to drain the human fat away
that melted and gathered at the bottom. The horrors of these camps
are simply unimaginable. And what is most chilling of all are
Himmler’s diary entries from this period. Because against the background of
this inhuman evil, he was going about his normal life. He recorded
his daily routines and activities as he visited and oversaw some of the
darkest moments in human history. On January 3rd, 1943, for example, Himmler
talked about how he had gone for a massage, took part in a number of mundane meetings, had
a call with his wife and daughter back home, and then ordered the execution
of 10 Polish police officers and sent all of their families to concentration
camps, before getting an early night in bed. The normality of his lunches and
exercise routine weave their way through him having direct control over the
mass genocide. Unconfirmed reports tell that he offered furniture made of human bones
and lampshades made of skin to his peers. In total, over 6 million European Jews died in the
Holocaust, and over 5 million others including, Roma and Sinti people, people with disabilities,
Poles, Jehovah’s Witnesses, gay people, and Soviet prisoners of war. Estimates believe
that 1.5 million of those people were children. What punishment would be appropriate for such a
heinous crime? What happened to Heinrich Himmler? Near the end of the way, seeing the
inevitable defeat looming over him, Himmler broke rank from the others in
his party. Going behind Hitler’s back, he tried to negotiate a peace deal with the
Allied Forces. Himmler was so blinded by his own power over life and death that he thought
he could still come out on top. It was his goal to be the first to negotiate with the Allies
so that he could find favor with them and be established as the leader of the German
people after Hitler’s inevitable defeat. As part of his peace negotiations, he ordered
what’s come to be known as the ‘death march’. Thousands of prisoners in concentration camps
were marched mercilessly from camps within Germany out to near the frontlines. His hope
was that these people could be used as hostages to increase his leverage in negotiations.
Thousands of people died on the marches. He also released faked reports of the survival
rates in his camps to paint his treatment of prisoners in a far more positive light and
even released roughly 20,000 prisoners, perhaps hoping to get on the good side of
therapidly approaching Allied Forces. Deluded, he believed that his peace deal could
be an exciting new start for him. Of course, no such deal ever
materialized. Worse still for Himmler, Adolf Hitler caught wind of what he
was doing and immediately ordered his arrest. Taking a fake paybook and
adopting a disguise, Himmler fled the country with a small group of companions
but was soon caught by Soviet soldiers. No one knew his true identity, and so he
was passed around from group to group until he found himself in British captivity. The
stamp on his documentation matched up with several other fleeing SS officers, and so
he was brought in for interrogation. With relatively little persuasion, Himmler
confessed his identity to his captors. He was transferred right away to
Lüneburg for further questioning, where a doctor carried out a routine examination
on him upon his arrival. But all of a sudden, Himmler stopped cooperating. No matter how much
the doctor tried to look into the man’s mouth, Himmler refused to let him, clamping
his jaw shut and turning his head away. A discreetly hidden cyanide pill sent
Heinrich Himmler to his grave, there and then. The unhealthy boy who had spent his whole
life trying to play soldier lay dead on the floor of the doctor’s office. He
never saw justice for the atrocities he committed. Never had to look his victims
in the eye and face up to what he had done. Himmler’s journals paint the story of a
monster who considered inhuman atrocities and boring mundanities with equal weight,
cementing his legacy as one of the most despicable men in history, even compared to
his terrible associates in the Third Reich. And in the end, he died as he had lived:
As a rotten coward, through and through. Now watch “What They Didn't Tell You About
Concentration Camps” Or watch this video instead.
