SS - Members of the Schutzstaffel Part Two

foreign 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 gabehyde Ludwig born in 1898 and Ernst Tallman born in 1905. himmler's Father Yusuf gerbart Himmler known as Gebhart 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 ardha 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 lansoot 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 highly 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 control 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 heinous 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 evidence 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 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 hoschula 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 reveal 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 quarreled 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 himless 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 seems 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 exvia 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 krieg'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 organizations 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 Erik 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 boy Keller 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 Ann Strom 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 domed 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 push 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 eln steroom 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 Otto Strasser 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 shtos 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 bergtold resigned as SS leader in 1927. he was replaced by Earhart Haydn 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 gragos traza 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 the 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 a 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 guard-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 was surpassed just 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 mirror at the rise of the Nazis politically who in the reichtag elections of 1930 secured 17 percent 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 highly Rose fast and soon became the head of a new organization named the zika heidstein store SD meaning security service in the hands of heydrich this body would come to act as the covert Espionage and surveillance arm of the SS in the process Heidi 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 eichstag 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 coral 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 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 today's video is sponsored by Wonder the app that turns words into digital art you just pick a subject then enter an adjective and a situation and finally choose an art style then watch as Wonder brings your idea to life and produces a mesmerizing piece of art you might choose pink seahorse in the sky then pick a style such as hyper realistic then hit create or be original and choose ghostly dog meet some cats in the magic style there's no limit to what images you can imagine and create if you can't find the exact image you want now with wonder you can make it yourself and with the premium version of the app you get more than 20 Styles Unlimited art no ads and it's faster plus choose the realistic style and the artwork will look like a human creation rather than AI produced if you need to bring an idea to life then click the link in the description to download wonder and get a free trial of the premium version to put your creativity to the test and remember with premium there's more than 20 Styles Unlimited art no ads and it's faster 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 or enemies of the burgeoning Nazi State culminating in the setting up of concentration camps such as dacha 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 fewer Adolf Hitler and absolute power in Germany one of which was President Paul from 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 home Hitler was inclined to do so as by now room 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 Rome 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 1933 4. an operation codenamed Operation hummingbird headed by Hermann Gering 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 room 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 gahaimashtaz 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 hinary 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 consider 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 Belarusian 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 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 that 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 seek 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 labenswearm 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 previously seen under the command of Hermann Goering was also created and the German Navy or Creeks 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 himla with Hydrox Aid establishing a new element of the SS these were called the einsatz kulipin 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 einsetskropen 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 Babi ya 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 einsatz gluten a based in the modern day Baltic states France Walter schtalacker to Reinhard heideli 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 einzatz gluten 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 these 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 Krakow 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 bierge 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 van Zay 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 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 kaldenbrunner 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 war that the Holocaust took place at all despite the previously mentioned einsert scrutin reports sent to Reinhardt heideley as well as photographic evidence of Einstein's group and 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 Carl 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 doubt the voice of Heinrich Himmler if you know iron guns realist capitals will you hear foreign [Music] foreign in the end himmler's 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 Heidi diverted hundreds of thousands of troops and billions of Reich marks away from the war effort to genocidal projects that did nothing but weakened the Nazi State as a whole for instance 50 000 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 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 Forest 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 of 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 counter-mind 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 vistulo 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 to 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 kaltenbrunner 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 overseen 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 six 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 einzatz corpen 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 primavoda 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 were 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 caldenbrenner 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 guring 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 heideck 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 asked 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 einsatz scorpen 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 remember if you need to bring an idea to life then click the link in the description to download wonder and get a free trial of the premium version to put your creativity to that test [Music] The Man known to history as Reinhardt heidelich was born on the 7th of March 1904 in Hala under zala in the Saxony anhalt region of Eastern Germany his full name was Reinhardt Tristan Oregon his father was Richard Bruno heiderich a noted composer and opera singer of the time who had named his eldest son Reinhardt after the hero of his first opera entitled amen while reinhardt's middle names Tristan and oygen were derived respectively from Richard Wagner's Opera Tristan and his older and organ Krantz the name of his maternal grandfather the director of The Dresden Royal Conservatory reinhardt's mother was Elizabeth Anna Kranz the daughter of the aforementioned oygen Kranz her background was affluent she and Richard had met when he was a student at the Dresden Conservatory which her father was director of at the time Reinhardt was the first of three children with a younger boy Heinz arriving a year and a half later followed by a daughter whom they called Maria reinhardt's youth was one of relative privilege growing up as the son of a noted composer who had also become the director of the Haller Conservatory of Music regard heideli who went by his middle name Bruno was a nationalist who instilled a love of Germany in his sons Reinhardt showed promise in many fields of endeavor from a young age he was athletic and became a good swimmer as well as an accomplished student from his parents he developed an appreciation for classical music and he played both the piano and the violin the latter with some considerable ability yet there was also tribulation for Reinhardt during these years he was bullied at school primarily on account of his supposed Jewish ancestry anti-Semitism was commonplace in much of Europe in the early 20th century and the heideg family was said to have been descended from Jews this supposition seems to have been arrived at by the marriage of reinhardt's paternal grandmother to a locksmith earth called Gustav Robert Seuss in the 1870s This Man became Rickard heideck's stepfather so Reinhardt was not actually his grandson in any event and Seuss was also a Protestant whose name simply sounded Jewish yet Reinhardt was mocked by his peers in school as Moses handle those taunts about his alleged Jewish ancestry would cast a long Shadow over his psyche reinhardt's Youth and early teenage years were spent against the backdrop of War at the time he was born Europe had become a powder gag of political tensions between the great Powers fueled by nationalism Colonial competition in Africa and the development of two armed military alliances on one side was Germany allied with the Empire of Austria-Hungary and on the other were Britain France and Russia Myriad Regional conflicts across Europe and Africa perennially threatened to spill over into outright War but these were often averted that is until the summer of 1914 when a political crisis arose in the Balkans when the heir to the Empire of Austria-Hungary Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated by a Serb nationalist in the weeks that followed what had started as a Regional Crisis ballooned into a continent-wide Act of saber rattling and in early August 1914 this spilled over into a continent-wide war the first world war had commenced but it would not go well for Germany after years of stalemate on the Western Front in northeastern France in 1917 the United States entered the conflict on the side of Britain and France this along with political unrest at home in Germany spelled the end of the German Empire and in November 1918 the German Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated the war was brought to an end and a new German Republic named after the town of Weimar was established one which accepted cripplingly punitive peace terms through the Treaty of Versailles a year later in the aftermath of the war there was considerable unrest across Germany huge numbers of German Workers buoyed by the success of the Socialist Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in late 1917 sought to pressure the new Weimar Republic into taking a more left-leaning pathway forward while many on the right were violently opposed to them a major incidence of this unrest occurred in Berlin in January 1919 when a large number of some 50 000 Communists led by Rosa Luxembourg and Carl lip connect and calling themselves the spartacists rebelled in Berlin threatening to take over the state the spartacist Revolt was only crushed when the government armed tens of thousands of ex-soldiers which became known as the fry Corps or free Corps who successfully suppressed the revolt on the 12th of January the fry Corps became a staple of German life in the years that followed being employed by the Weimar Republic to break up strike and labor movements wherever they occurred though he had just turned 15 years of age Heidi was soon involved in a flight Court attachment known as merka's volunteer rifles in Hala after the town was taken over by striking Communists this unit was substantially responsible for crushing the labor agitation in Hala in the spring of 1919. heydrich would later claim that this period in 1919 was one in which his political sensibilities were significantly shaped from the very beginning those sensibilities were profoundly anti-semitic prejudice against Jewish people was an all too common phenomenon in Europe in the early 20th century and indeed Jewish communities across the continent had faced periodic persecution pogroms and expulsions in regions such as England France Spain Portugal and Germany going all the way back to the Middle Ages hydra's anti-Semitism was therefore unfortunately not uncommon in Weimar Germany but the virulence of it was in 1919 shortly after its establishment in Bamberg that spring heidrich joined the Deutsche fulkishbund the German nationalist protection and Defiance Federation a group whose motto was Deutschland Dean deutschen Germany for the Germans from its Inception the Federation was one of the most rabidly anti-Semitic movements within post-war Germany a time when many people were at pains to suggest that the Jewish people were responsible for Germany's defeat in the war and humiliation ever since it is hard to determine where heidrich's own extreme anti-Semitism emerged from certainly his parents were not especially anti-semitic and his father had even rented out a small room in the Haller Conservatory to a local Jewish salesman in the 1910s rather heidrich's beliefs were shaped by the general growing anti-semitic fervor within Germany of the post-war period when he was just 18 years of age Reinhardt determined that he wished to join the German Navy this was in itself not an easy position to obtain under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles the newly created rice Marina was to be limited to just 15 000 Marines while he could not have any submarines and was restricted to having no more than six dreadnought-class battleships but heidelis family's upper middle class background and connections ensured him an entry as a Cadet at the Keel naval base in Northern Germany near the Danish border by the spring of 1924 he had been promoted to the rank of senior midshipmen and from there he was dispatched to the officer training base at the mirvich naval base in Kiel in 1926 he completed his training with a six-month stint on the SMS schleswig-holstein the flagship of the North Sea Fleet before being sent on a training cruise to the Western Mediterranean where he visited Spain and Portugal heidrich earned some plaudids during this time for having matured into a decent officer and by the summer of 1928 he would rise to the rank of sublive tenant and he was also ambitious a childhood friend who met him during a brief return to Hala around this time noted that heideli had articulated his desire to become an admiral one day as heidrich was finding his sea legs some signs of the future that might lay ahead for Germany were beginning to manifest in the south of the country in Bavaria the aftermath of the war had seen a great many German men feeling extremely discontented with the peace settlement the terms of the Treaty of Versailles had required Germany to militarily disarm retaining only an army of one hundred thousand men while crippling War reparations were imposed on the country when these were periodically not paid the French occupied parts of Western Germany during the early 1920s many individuals were extremely bitter about this and had begun to join Fringe political groups such as the Phi Corps as heidrich himself had done in 1919. these movements continued into the 1920s with small political parties wishing for an overhaul of the post-war settlement and a reinvigoration of German national pride the National Socialist German Workers Party or one Nazi party led by an austrian-born War Veteran by the name of Adolf Hitler was one such movement based in Bavaria in November 1923 they would go so far in pursuit of their goals as to attempt a military Uprising in the city of Munich but this was over before it had ever really begun thereafter Hitler and several others were arrested but the government failed to destroy the party entirely and they would re-emerged many years later as a political force one which Hydra would be drawn to hydraulic's path towards the Nazi party was in many ways brought about by his own failings within the Navy and in particular the unrest which is extracurricular activity often created as early as 1926 when he had been on tour in the Western Mediterranean and Atlantic heideg had caused some unrest at a naval base when he became agitated after a British officer's wife refused to dance with him by the late 1920s he had garnered a reputation as a serial philanderer involved in a string of affairs often with married women and often with multiple women simultaneously moreover he had become by some accounts insufferably arrogant towards his subordinates while his major attentions seemed to be focused on Sports such as rowing rather than his Naval duties all of this came to a head early in 1931 when it was revealed that he had made a promise to one woman that he would marry her and then proceeded to abandon that relationship in favor of Lena Von Austin the daughter of a minor German Aristocrat whom Heidi had met at a rowing ball in December 1930 a breach of Promise of this kind was still a legal offense in some common law jurisdictions in the early 1930s and it was considered serious enough that Heidi was discharged from the reichs marina for conduct Unbecoming an officer in April 1931. heinrich's expulsion from the rice Marina in the spring of 1931 was a significant turning point in his life he had though ultimately brought it on himself throughout the investigation into what had occurred between himself and the young woman whose identity is strangely Elusive and who had claimed Reinhardt had proposed to her he deliberately tried to deceive the investigative panel which consisted of Admiral gottlie Hansen the commander of the Baltic Fleet the training officer Gustav kleichamp and the senior most member of heidelis crew Hubertus Von wangenheim rather than accept responsibility for what had occurred heidelich claimed it was the woman who had initiated their relationship and pressured him when this was found to be categorically false heidelich refused to come clean about his conduct and it was this proven insincerity as the investigative panel referred to it which led them to take the DraStic step of discharging him from the Navy and heidrich did not respond well his future wife Lena Von Austin later stated that it was the heaviest blow of his life and that he spent days in his bedroom afterwards crying in Rage and self-pity he even petitioned the German president Paul Van Hindenburg to look into the matter but to no avail perhaps given the psychological blow that all this constituted it is unsurprising to find that within weeks he would embark on a completely different career trajectory one which would dominate the remainder of his life and would have fearful consequences for huge sections of the population of Central and Eastern Europe in the years that followed while hydrix rapid Ascent within the Navy and equally rapid downfall in the late 1920s and early 1930s was occurring the country's politics was beginning to take a sharp turn during the mid-1920s Germany's political landscape had stabilized on the back of good economic growth which reflected the global economy during the so-called Roaring Twenties but much of this International growth was based on speculative investment and in the Autumn of 1929 the stock markets on Wall Street in New York began to cool with huge losses being incurred this was the beginning of a Great Depression across the economies of the Americas and Europe Germany was hit particularly badly and by the early 1930s millions of people had lost their jobs and their life savings as often happens in such times extremist parties were able to exploit the unrest towards their own ends one such party in Germany were then Nazis who had previously attempted a military push under their leader Adolf Hitler in Munich back in 1923. previously they had been a pathetic outfit who would Garner little more than two percent of the national vote but in the reichstag elections of September 1930 they won 18 of the vote and became the second largest party in Germany they would continue to grow in popularity in the years that followed by exploiting the resentment and despair of the German people at the economic situation heidrich was soon involved with the Nazis politically they were akin to the Deutsche volkischer schutz and trotspund of which he had been a member back in the early 1920s with a striking anti-semitic stance and a belief in Germany being for what they deemed as ethnically German people a nationalist orientation which they conceived of along racial lines when he met her in December 1930 Lena Von Austin had already been a member of the Nazi party for some time having joined over a year earlier in 1929 heidelik almost certainly did not need much convincing but she was probably a significant figure in influencing him to join the party himself on the 1st of June 1931 the day after his expulsion from the reichs marina was formalized six weeks later he also joined the should staffer or SS meaning protective Echelon one of two major paramilitary wings of the Nazi party the other being the SA or Stormtroopers under its leader Heinrich Himmler the SS would grow to become a major power within Germany hydreig was listed as member number 10120 and Nazi party member number 544 916. the following 26th of December 1931 he and Lena were married they would go on to have four children Klaus Haider silke and Mata born variously between 1933 and 1942 into what was a committed Nazi family heydrich's life trajectory had taken a major shift in the course of 1931 but he was now without formal employment although the terms of his discharge from the rice Marina had included severance pay for two years while he was still living off this pay a job found him and it came from within the Nazi party around the time that heide had joined both the party and the SS in the summer of 1931 the head of the SS Heinrich Himmler had been looking to establish a counter-intelligence branch for the paramilitary organization one which could act against Centrist and leftist groups seeking to block the rise to power of the Nazis shortly after heydrich joined the SS he was recommended to Himmler as somebody who could carry out a senior role within this new counter-intelligence unit by Carl Von eberstein a native of Hala himself whose mother was heide's godmother he was also friends with heydrich's soon-to-be wife Lena and so was happy to facilitate the meeting between Himmler and heidech this duly occurred in Munich at which Himmler was sufficiently impressed that he hired Heidi as the chief of the new ssic service or intelligence service although it is better known by its later name the sikha heidsteinst or SD meaning security service the new position required heydrich to relocate to Munich with Lena within days of his accepting the offer by the 1st of August 1931 he was operating out of the brown house a mansion on koenigsplatz in Munich which the Nazis had purchased in 1930 as their new headquarters the position was challenging at first with heidelik having to share a typewriter with another member of the SS and receiving low pay but over time conditions improved much of heidelik's work was spent monitoring Nazi Party members the rapid expansion of the party in the late 1920s and early 1930s had created fears that many new members and even some reichstag deputies had either joined as career opportunists with little ideological belief in the Nazis or that the party was possibly being infiltrated by State security figures or members of the Communist party and in tandem the SD was charged with making preparations to begin infiltrating State security apparatuses Itself by late 1931 heydrich was overseeing a network of spies for both these Endeavors and had begun Gathering Intelligence dossiers on Centrist politicians to attempt to Blackmail or exploit them in the years ahead Himmler was more than satisfied with this early work and when Heidi married Lena in December the head of the SS marked the occasion by promoting Heidi to the rank of ss sturmban furre the equivalent of a major Heinrich was Rising within the party which was about to ascend to power within Germany with the national economic situation looking ever more ominous eichstag elections were called for the summer of 1932. in these the Nazis nearly doubled their vote on the 1930 election gaining 37 percent and winning 230 seats out of the 608-seat parliament making them the largest political party in Germany however the more Centrist parties were determined to prevent Hitler from becoming chancellor of Germany and Hitler was unwilling to join a coalition government in a junior role as a result a government was cobbled together led by Chancellor Franz von papen but it too could do little to address the economic and political crisis and fresh elections in November 1932 failed to break the stalemate it was in this ampass that a broad Coalition of centrists and business elements within Germany agreed to a deal with the Nazi is in January 1933 whereby Hitler would become chancellor of Germany and the Nazis would be given a number of ministerial briefs the idea was to stabilize the country's politics and keep Hitler under control but this proved entirely elusive within weeks of political emergency had been concocted by the Nazis following a fire at the reichstag and this was used to pass an enabling act in late March 1933 which effectively allowed Hitler to rule by decree the Weimar Republic was dead hydreig could have expected to occupy a relatively senior position within the security apparatuses of the new state but his entire existence within the Nazi party had become threatened in 1932 as the party was making its final push for power that year claims about heideck's partial Jewish ancestry the ones which had seen him taunted for being Moses handle back in school in Hala resurfaced this was a serious claim to be leveled against any Nazi party member but it was especially inflammatory for a high-ranking member of the SS a group which prided itself on its allegedly unimpeachable credentials as an organization of pure blooded German Aryans one whose goal was to ensure the racial purity of Germany going forward the claims against Heidi were politically motivated and originated amongst party members whom he had antagonized through his counter-intelligence work in the years since he had joined the SD D but they proved ineffective by the Autumn of 1932 Heidi had been cleared of the charge of racial impurity after an investigation by Achim gerka the Nazi party's Chief investigator of such matters and was even promoted by Himmler again as chief of the SD with the rise to power of Hitler and the Nazi party early in 1933 and with the charges of racial impurity having been overcome the path was clear for Heidi to rise swiftly within the security apparatuses of the new Nazi state within weeks of Hitler's appointment as Chancellor Himmler and Heidi oversaw the establishment of the Bavarian political police whereby the police services in Munich and other towns of Southern Germany were effectively placed under the control of the SS and the SD in the weeks and months that followed heidri with a growing number of officials working under him began developing a card index of the regime's political opponents throughout Bavaria be they Trade union activists and labor organizers Jewish leaders journalists who were vocally opposed to the Nazis Communists or any other kind of avert enemy of the Nazi regime in tandem he and Himmler were to move to the Forefront in establishing a new concentration camp near Dachau outside Munich with such political opponents were subsequently detained these concentration camps became an all too familiar site across Germany in the mid-1930s effectively being a temporary prison constructed like an army barracks and with thousands of individuals being detained there often without any legitimate legal basis for their detention these developments in Bavaria were not isolated in Germany in Prussia the largest region in Germany dominating much of the north and east of the country the Nazi Minister and Senior official Hermann Goering had set up the gahaimashdad's polizzai meaning secret State Police to act as a version of the SD in Prussia it is more infamously known by its abbreviated name the Gestapo much of this had to do with senior Nazi officials such as guring and Himmler trying to carve out their own blocks of power within the new Nazi state in 1933 and 1934. thus when the Reich interior Minister Wilhelm Frank tried to begin amalgamating these disparate police forces into a National Police Service early in 1934 Gering was initially reluctant feeling that Himmler was trying to outflank him and take over the Gestapo however by the late spring his interests were being drawn else swear notably his desire to oversee the creation of a new German air force and he reluctantly agreed on the 20th of April 1934 to allow Himmler to take control of the Gestapo two days later imler appointed Heidi head of the organization with this heydrich was now effectively the head of both the SD and the Gestapo making him the most senior counter-intelligence and secret police official in the entire country in this newly found position of power heydrich was immediately charged with a senior role in efforts to crush one of the paramilitary wings of the Nazi party the Sturm up tylon or sa meaning storm Detachment had grown to an immense size in the course of the early 1930s under its leader and trim by 1934 it consisted of over 2 million members known as Stormtroopers though that number could be accounted to be as high as two to three and a half million members if the SS and other groups which were technically subordinate to it were included Rim's perception of his own power within the Nazi regime had grown in Tandem and he had become increasingly insubordinate towards Hitler and others in the late spring of 1934 just as Himmler and heidek were wrestling control of the Gestapo from guring Hitler determined to act Heidi was pivotal in drawing up a list of leading sa figures who would need to be purged in order to neuter the organization then on the 30th of June 1934 a series of attacks which have become known as the Knight of the Long Knives were launched REM was arrested and executed without trial along with nearly 200 others in the months that followed the sa was substantially neutralized largely being turned into a sporting organization while himmler's SS was hencefor ascendant as the primary military wing of the Nazi party heydrich's power was immense in the aftermath of the night of the Long Knives Himmler was now the head of the SS and the German police services and heidelich was effectively his second in command with direct control over the SD and the Gestapo thus while Himmler was the ostensible head heidelich actually ran the operations in the course of the mid-1930s he developed a highly sophisticated State security apparatus one based on a more elaborate version of the card index system he had developed in Munich several years earlier through this method hundreds of thousands of alleged political dissidents were monitored and many thousands were arrested and detained without charge in the growing system of concentration camps which had emerged across Germany to house enemies of the Nazi regime heydrich was also developing a network of individuals in charge of regional bases who were loyal to him notable amongst these were Heinrich himula a former police detective from Bavaria brought on as a senior official in Munich and Adolf Eichmann a fastidious bureaucrat who joined the SD in 1934 charged with monitoring the activities of the Freemasons and other suspected groups within Germany these two would play a significant role in future events that Hyder was front and center to while heydrich was Rising within the German Security Services in the 1930s the Nazi state was preparing for war Hitler and his associates had come to power in 1933 with the express goal of launching a new European War to reassert German power on the continent they were aware that it would be many years before this could be undertaken such was the weakened state of the country militarily and had originally envisaged such a war being undertaken from 1941 or 1942 onwards to this end the Nazis began secretly expanding German military immediately in 1933 and then in early 1935 announced publicly that they were breaching the Caps which had been placed on the German military through the Treaty of Versailles by recruiting over a quarter of a million men into the German Army and establishing a new German air force called the luftwaffe in tandem Germany's industrial capacity to produce weapons tanks and ammunition was slowly increased and the Allied powers of Britain and France largely allowed this to happen believing enough time had elapsed since the first world war the Germany should be allowed to rearm to some extent even when the Nazis reoccupied the demilitarized Rhineland in the spring of 1936 little complaint was heard but Graver problems lay not far ahead as this March towards war was occurring in the 1930s the Nazi regime was also beginning to aggressively actualize its anti-semitic rhetoric in the mid-1930s the Nazi State's main goal was to politically disenfranchise the roughly half a million Jews who called Germany home with the goal of either making these Jewish people second-class citizens or coercing them into leaving Germany altogether perhaps to immigrate to the holy land where efforts had been underway since the late 19th century to establish communities of Jewish people from across the world this campaign of intimidation and political oppression culminated in 1935 with the so-called Nuremberg Laws which amongst other measures prohibited marriage between Jews and non-jews in Germany and restricted both the employment and economic opportunities of Jewish people across the country from early on in these events the SD Anda gestapo were Central to identifying Germany's Jewish people and developing databases on anyone who was deemed to be particularly subversive from amongst the country's Jewish Community thus by the mid-1930s Heidi was playing a central role in the anti-semitic policies of the Nazi State one which would intensify in the years that followed by 1936 heydrich had risen to become a very significant figure within the new Nazi State Not only was he one of the most senior individuals within the security services but this was reflected in a growing social economic and political status the Hydraulics were increasingly invited to social Gatherings at the Irish chancellery where he began to develop a direct relationship with Hitler the fury was impressed by heidel's seeming uncompromising loyalty to the regime and willingness to execute even the most brutal of policies eventually the German Chancellor would come to refer to heideley as the man with the iron heart the Macabre term of endearment this aside throughout his career heideck's position was always based on his personal relationship with Himmler because of his dual positions as head of the SD and the Gestapo heidrich was technically a member of the German privy Council from the spring of 1934 onwards while in March 1936 he was elected as a member of the German reichstag albeit after the spring of 1933 it was a largely ceremonial parliament in tandem with this career advancement he also began to earn a significant salary and The Wider heideg family was able to benefit from reinhardt's political connections during the summer Olympics which were held in Berlin in 1936 the family were provided with their own private box thus despite their marriage being in trouble privately owing to possible infidelities by both Reinhardt and Lena the heidelix had become one of the most prominent families in Berlin during the mid to late 1930s based on reinhardt's seemingly unwavering dedication to the Nazi state and its brutal ideologies heydrich's area of activity was also beginning to expand beyond the borders of Germany itself after the country had rearmed in the mid-1930s there was a growing thirst to bring parts of what was perceived to be a greater Germany under Nazi rule this included Austria and also parts of Czechoslovakia notably the Sudan land which was home to three million ethnically German people efforts to bring Austria under German control had been underway since 1933 when the Austrian branch of the Nazis had applied extensive pressure on the government in Vienna to try to claim power eventually culminating in the assassination of the Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dolphus in 1934. his successor Kurt shushnik had established the Nationalist government which sought to keep Austria independent from Germany and effectively prohibited Nazism in Austria to that end as a result throughout the mid-1930 cheese Germany along with a large body of Austrian Nazis operating from Southern Germany were attempting to subvert the Austrian state heidiary became Central to these efforts by collecting data on public sentiment in Austria organizing Nazi demonstrations there and distributing clandestine Nazi propaganda throughout Austria which emphasized the common German ancestry of austrians and Germans eventually all of this work bore Fruit by early 1938 shushnig faced mounting public pressure within Austria to legalize the Nazi party and consider the Angelus the union of Austria with Germany thus he declared that a referendum on the matter would be held on the 13th of March 1938 and Hydra would play a part in this for instance when shushnig met with Hitler for negotiations in Bavaria early in 1938 military and police figures such as hydrate were asked to attend in order to intimidate the Austrian Chancellor shushnig's subsequent agreement to hold the referendum on Unity with Germany simply provoked further aggression and German troops were sent into Austria on the 12th of March allegedly to ensure that the referendum was conducted in a fair manner it was passed with an overwhelming majority and Austria was joined with Germany that spring Himmler and Heidi were on a plane to Vienna immediately Landing there on the 13th and holding Court in the hotel Regina in central Vienna over the next two days where they organized the policing services in Austria now that it was part of the German Reich with Austrian Nazis such as Kurtz de luga and Ernst kaltenbrenner before they had left the city heidelik had ordered the arrests of thousands of political opponents of the new Nazi regime across Austria a similar process would play out in Czechoslovakia once the country came under German Overlord ship this process was more complicated than that which occurred in Austria because Czechoslovakia had been formed as a new country in the aftermath of the first world war and because the Nazis had displayed enough aggression in re-militarizing and annexing Austria Britain and France were determined to prevent a German takeover of Czechoslovakia thus when Hitler began pressing German claims to the Sudan land in the Autumn of 1939 A Conference was held at Munich where at the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain conceded that Germany could Annex the Sudan land only if it promised to respect Czech Independence beyond the ethnically German region no sooner had this concession been made then Hitler was working on plans for the annexation of the remainder of Czechoslovakia early in 1939 again heydrich was Central to these developments with plans for an invasion of Czechoslovakia detailing how the SD would follow the German Army into the country to arrest perceived enemies of the state there such as Communists social Democrats and other opponents of the Nazis this plan was never initiated as Czechoslovakia was annexed in March 1939 without any real conflict but the plan itself is indicative of how Central to the aggressive German expansion the SD and other Security Services headed by heidrich had become much of the operations being conducted by the SD and gestapo in Austria and Czechoslovakia in 1938 and 1939 focused on immediately identifying the Jewish people that lived in both jurisdictions and persecuting them for instance in May 1938 Heidi directed the Gestapo to arrest an early 2000 Jews in Vienna on the basis that they had prior criminal convictions many of them years old and entirely trivial by November that year upwards of 5000 Austrian Jews had been forcibly deported from the country largely through the administrations of the SD and gestapo and this was just one part of how heideck's role in the Nazi State's anti-semitic policies was expanding in the late 1930s another clear sign of this was seen in Germany on the night of the 9th of November 1938 when a huge wave of attacks was initiated against Jewish people and Jewish businesses across the country by the end of krishnanacht the night of the broken glass hundreds of Jewish people had been killed and millions of rice marks of damage had been inflicted on jewish-owned businesses and synagogues again heydrich was Central to events at a gathering of Nazi leaders in Munich shortly before the pogrom started Heidi had assured other leading members of the party that the state Security Services would not intervene if attacks on Jewish businesses broke out in an apparently spontaneous fashion heydrich's role in Crystal Nacht cannot be understated the Nazi regime was determined to make the wave of violence which swept across Germany on the 9th of November 1938 seemed like a popular movement one which was driven by ordinary Germans rather than being directed by the Nazi State itself Central to this was ensuring that the state Security Services did not intervene and in fact made preparations for interventions against the Jewish victims rather than the tens of thousands of perpetrators thus just hours after the violence began heydrich had telegrammed Muller in Berlin who was his Deputy in charge of the Gestapo by this time and stated that attacks on Jewish businesses and synagogues were not to be hindered and state police were instead to prepare for the arrest of between 20 000 and 30 000 Jews thus heydrich was Central to the pogrom that followed to get his sense of it in Vienna a city that historically had a large Jewish Community 42 synagogues alone in the city were burned down that night and 2 000 Jewish families were evicted from their homes the state Security Services which heidek oversaw across Germany and Austria intervened only to arrest Jewish people approximately 30 000 Jewish men in total were arrested that night and in the days that followed and shipped off to the concentration camps where more than a thousand died owing to the conditions of their imprisonment in the year that followed all of this was indicative of a growing extremity to the Nazi State's approach towards the Jewish people living under its Rule and also of heydrich's increasingly Central role in the Rabid anti-semitic policies of Hitler and his followers this would continue in the months that followed to the extent that Haider would become one of the central architects of the Holocaust of Europe's Jews which followed in the early 1940s by early 1939 the broad parameters of heydrich's role within the Nazi state had solidified he was in effect the senior figure within the police services running day-to-day operations in the SD holding a large amount of control over the Gestapo which Mueller had been appointed to run directly and answerable effectively only to Himmler within the security apparatuses of the state moreover his roles in the Nazi regime's evolving and increasingly brutal attitudes towards the Jewish population and in administering recently conquered and Incorporated regions had been revealed to be pivotal by the Angelus of Austria and the events of Crystal Nacht all of this was important for the Nazis were now on a collision course with Britain and France following the intervention in Czechoslovakia in the spring of 1939 Hitler began pressing claims to much of Poland on the basis that land had been taken from the German Reich when the new state of Poland was formed in 1918. however this time London and Paris were determined to resist further German aggression and made it clear that any violation of Polish sovereignty would result in war and that is what eventually happened when Germany invaded Poland on the 1st of September 1939 one week after agreeing a deal with the Soviet Union for the division of Eastern Europe between the two powers and just days after conducting a false flag operation to make Poland look like the aggressor Britain and France responded by declaring war on Nazi Germany on the 3rd of September the second world War had commenced the outbreak of the war had an immediate consequence for the arrangement of Germany's Security Services and heydrich's position within them to better manage the increasing amount of people and land which was being administered by the Nazis a new body the Reich sikha Heights halped armed meaning the Reich Security main office was established with the stated goal of fighting all enemies of the Reich within and Beyond the borders of Germany the reichs hopped armed or rsha was formally created on the 27th of September 1939 Jester's Germany's armies were finalizing their conquest of Poland the new body would have oversight of the SD the Gestapo the creepo or criminal police and a number of other Security Services Hydra was appointed as its first Chief Additionally the rsha was broken down into seven offices which would oversee matters such as ideological investigation in Department government II and suppression of crime in Department 5. the Gestapo was incorporated into Department four where a sub-department B4 was created to oversee Jewish Affairs and evacuation Adolf Eichmann who had begun working under Heidel years earlier was placed in charge of this branch of the rsha which would become significant in the months to come the early stages of the second world war went exceptionally well for Hitler and the Nazis Poland's Army was no match for the Germans and the Soviets who moved in from the East just a few weeks after Germany as a part of a non-aggression pact which had been signed between the two powers to divide up Eastern Europe thus by October 1939 much of Poland was under German control and the general government was set up here to administer the country for the Nazis the conquest of Poland and indeed the earlier extension of German authority over regions such as Czechoslovakia and Hungary vastly expanded the number of Jewish people who were now In Harm's Way from the Nazi regime in the Middle Ages much of Europe's Jewish population had migrated to Poland after facing persecution in Western and Central Europe consequently by the 20th century Poland was home to some three and a half million Ashkenazi Jews by comparison there had been just over 500 000 Jewish people in Germany when the Nazis came to power in 1933 all of this changed the face of the Nazi's Jewish policies the question now was whether the same policy of intimidation would be employed in order to force the emigration of these Jewish people out of nazi-held territory or whether something much more Sinister would be devised by the Nazi regime in Eastern Europe heydrich would be Central to the so-called Jewish question from the very beginning of the occupation of Poland in the Autumn of 1939. this was increasingly in conjunction with Adolf Eichmann who had been assigned to Jewish Affairs in Department 4 of the Reich Security main office Eichmann had a particular skill for identifying and cataloging huge numbers of people a skill that was useful for a government obsessed with identifying all of the Jewish people living within its borders in an age before computer databases were available this was an especially difficult task in late 1939 as the Jewish population of Poland was so large at this early stage of the war the same policy of Oppression of the Jewish people in order to coerce them into leaving the Reich altogether was generally also favored here to that end hundreds of thousands of Jews were being recorded at this time and many were forced into ghettos and other restricted areas in cities such as Warsaw while the Nazi State deliberated on a more concrete policy Eichmann with heideck's tacit approval was promoting a plan to possibly Deport millions of Europe's Jews to the east African island of Madagascar as a solution to the supposed Jewish question but eventually something much more heinous would be decided upon and Hydra would be absolutely Central in its implementation when it occurred it was not only the Jewish people who were suffering in Poland from heidrich's actions there however in the early stages of the war He was largely responsible for overseeing operation tannenberg an initiative that was directed against polls who were deemed to be enemies of the Nazi regime lists of such individuals had been drawn up by the SD even before the invasion of Poland commenced and when the Germans occupied the country in September 1939 thousands of individuals were arrested notably politicians who had been vocal in their opposition to the Nazis in Germany artists and members of the Intelligentsia Scholars prominent members of the Roman Catholic Church which was seen as a probable lightning rod for opposition to the regime former polish police officers military personnel and many others some of this resulted in Mass executions which became known as the intelligence Axion or Intelligentsia mass shootings in total it is estimated that a minimum of one hundred thousand poles were killed or interred as a result of operation tannenberg some of this even involved Mass murdering the patients of Polish hospitals Hydra would have been guilty of abominable war crimes just for overseeing operation talenberg in the Autumn and early winter of 1939 but much worse was to follow in time the range of hydrix actions as head of the Reich Security main office expanded as the war spread across Europe following the conquest of Poland in the Autumn of 1939 Hitler turned his attention to Northern and Western Europe in 1940. conquering Denmark and Norway in stealth operations in the spring and then launching a blistering military assault on northern France and the low countries in the early summer after six weeks of Blitzkrieg the feared lightning War Nazi flags were flying in Brussels Amsterdam and Paris and Britain stood alone in Europe against the Nazi tide months of attacks on Britain from the air and attempts to cut the country off through a submarine campaign against the country's Merchant Navy followed but Britain refused to capitulate and its longevity proved decisive eventually Hitler tired of the British effort and decided from late 1940 onwards that Germany would invade the Soviet Union with whom it had earlier assigned a non-aggression pact by which the Russian leader Joseph Stalin and Hitler effectively carved Eastern Europe up between them now in the summer of 1941 Germany invaded the Soviet Union in what was the largest military campaign ever undertaken and initially it was very successful bringing huge swathes of additional territory in eastern Poland the Baltic and Ukraine under German control by the Autumn of 1941. this New Rapid expansion of the German Reich across Western and Northern Europe in 1940 and throughout Eastern Europe in 1941 massively extended the remit of heidrich's Reich Security main office and in turn the level of atrocities which it was responsible for one of the most heinous was its oversight of the einzatzgolden these deployment groups or task groups were basically SS death squads which had first been deployed in Poland as part of operation talenberg they took their orders from himla but heide oversaw much of their activity as head of the Reich Security main office and himmler's unofficial Deputy leader of the SS in 1941 their conduct became incredibly brutal the einsatz gotten followed closely behind the front lines of the German Army as it Advanced into Ukraine and Russia engaging in Mass executions of Jews Russian and Ukrainian prisoners of War Romani people and supposed political dissidents at babiya near the city of Kiev some 33 000 Jews were massacred by The einsatz Groton in less than 48 hours on the 29th and 30th of September 1941. many similar incidents occurred on the Eastern Front throughout Hydrox tenure as head of the Reich Security main office and by the end of the war the einsatz gluten had killed upwards of 2 million people another instrument of State Terror that heydrich was heavily involved in was the Knight and fog decree this was a measure whereby individuals in occupied territories could be arrested and detained effectively without any legal basis if they were judged to be a danger to the Nazi State the name of the decree which was formally implemented in December 1941 was derived from a statement within it that such people should be arrested under the secrecy of night and fog often people detained in this way simply vanished from parts of Europe such as occupied France or the low countries and their families had no idea what had happened to them in many instances the unfortunate victims of whom there were thousands in the years that followed were taken secretly to Germany where they were processed through heydrich's SD office and then interrogated often such individuals were tortured to make them reveal details of whatever conspiracy against the state they were believed to be involved in and in many instances killed or sent to the concentration camps the latter of which was often the same as a death sentence in this way thousands of citizens of occupied Western Europe a region that was generally spared the worst horrors of the Nazi regime that were being carried out in Eastern Europe fell prey to heydrich's machinations as head of the security services of the Reich however the thing which heydrich is most remembered for today is the very prominent role he played in the development of the Nazi State's response to what they termed the Jewish question as we have seen Germany's attitudes towards its Jewish communities had shifted over time in the mid-1930s efforts had been made to disenfranchise Jewish people across Germany by stripping them of their citizenship and restricting their economic and social freedoms all with the goal of pressurizing the half a million Jews who lived in Germany into emigrating this campaign of intimidation became more Sinister with the krishna-nacht pogroms of November 1938 while the exponential increase in the number of Jewish people living under Nazi rule following the conquest of Poland in September 1939 had seen individuals such as Eichmann working on bizarre schemes to deport all of Europe's Jews to Madagascar where they would live in a kind of giant open-air prison but as lurid as the Madagascar plan was it seemed relatively benign by comparison with the so-called final solution to the Jewish question which was being worked out by Hitler Himmler heidley and others in the course of 1941 as the invasion of Russia was commencing the final solution was devised in response to an increasing awareness that it would prove impossible to remove millions of Jews from the German Third Reich particularly so once the campaign against Britain in North Africa stalled and the possibility of seizing the Suez Canal and with it a naval route to Madagascar was impeded accordingly in the summer of 1941 it was determined that the entire Jewish population of countries like Germany Austria Poland and the Baltic states would be identified by eichmann's office in Department 4 of the Reich Security main office and then using all of the resources controlled by Heidi they would be forcibly brought to the network of dozens of concentration camps which had been created across Central and Eastern Europe there some would be selected to work as slave labor for several months until they were effectively worked to death while the majority would be executed on arrival typically by exposure to lethal chemical Gases such as Cyclone B this final solution would be carried out most extensively at a number of camps whose names such as Auschwitz birkenau Treblinka and sobibor have become infamous those Jews who lived in the Soviet Union would largely be murdered by the einsatz gluten as the German armies Advanced Eastward heidrich was a party to these plans from the beginning there is a lack of paperwork with which to establish the exact timeline of who knew what and when in relation to the evolution of the final solution but a memo from Hermann Gering to Hydra dated the 31st of July 1941 gave authorization to Hydra to issue orders to the heads of various government departments in Germany and the occupied territories if those orders were in line with carrying out the final solution despite the particulars of what was going to occur having all been decided upon by The Early Autumn of 1941 it was not until the winter of that year that details of it were provided to a wider range of officials when this task was assigned it was given to heidelick who along with Mueller and Eichmann organized a conference which was held at an SS owned Villa in the suburb of vanze outside Berlin on the 20th of January 1942 this was attended by some of the senior bureaucrats in charge of the government departments which would be involved in carrying out the Holocaust of Europe's Jews by identifying those who would be murdered and organizing for their transport to the death camps it is a striking statement about heydrich's centrality to the Holocaust that he was placed in charge of organizing and running the van Ze conference historians have long debated what the significance of the Evans a conference actually was we know for instance that the final solution had been arrived at months earlier by Hitler Himmler and others and indeed that experiments which aimed at selecting the gases that would be used to carry out the mass executions had been conducted at concentration camps such as Auschwitz birkenau as early as the Autumn of 1941 so nothing was actually decided upon at the house in the southwestern suburbs of Berlin on the 20th of January 1942 rather the significance of vanzai lies in the fact that the decisions which had been made months earlier were now being put into operation in bringing together some of the most senior bureaucrats of the Third Reich hydreig aimed to ensure that the cogs of the genocidal policy turn smoothly once measures were initiated in the weeks that followed what is particularly striking about this is the manner in which genocide and mass murder could present themselves as a piece of bureaucracy where individuals who largely sat behind desks in Berlin organizing trains moving Personnel between different camps and filling out paperwork were the ones who in the end oversaw the murder of millions of Europe's Jews at the top of that bureaucratic pyramid at the outset of the Holocaust was Reinhardt Heidi it was not all abominable desk work for Heidi much to himmler's regular disproval back in 1935 when Gering had first started rebuilding the German air force into what would become the luftwaffe heideli had begun training as a pilot and had intermittently continued doing so throughout the second half of the 1930s eventually completing his training at the flight school at vernoiken Northeast of Berlin in 1939 as the war was just beginning Himmler was adamant that such a senior figure within the SS should not be flying combat missions and initially forbade heidek from doing so once the war broke out but as the fighting continued into the early 1940s heidelich became insistent and was assigned to the Norwegian front in the spring of 1940 where he served for a month as part of the jagushvider 77 this was a relatively safe theater of war but his decision in the summer of 1941 to join the German air force in its operations on the Eastern Front following the invasion of the Soviet Union was altogether more hazardous and so it proved heidri was shot down by Flack anti-airguns when flying over the denista river in central Ukraine on the 22nd of July 1941. despite Crash Landing in enemy territory he made it back to the German lines and from there to Berlin when he did he received an Express command from Hitler that he was not to fly again while Heidi had been permanently grounded following his brief period of active duty on the Eastern front he was soon being employed in a new fashion which took him away from his main duties as head of the Reich Security main office and the SD in September 1941 he was appointed Deputy right protector of the protectorate of bohemia and Moravia the protectorate had been established in March 1939 following the virtual annexation of Czechoslovakia by Germany at that time the country was dismembered into different parts the Sudan land for instance having been entirely annexed by Germany in late 1938 the protectorate of bohemia and Moravia was one of the new entities it basically consisted of the region around what is now the Czech Republic or czechia and included the city of Prague with a population of some 7.5 million people a considerable economic output and a significant geographical location in the center of the Reich the protectorate was an important colony of the Reich during the War years it was ruled by a protector or Viceroy Who was appointed by Hitler and governed the region in Germany's interest however the protector from 1939 Constantine Von neuerat was perceived as being too moderate and anti-german sentiment and resistance to Nazi rule had been growing there in the early 1940s for this reason a decision was taken in the Autumn of 1941 to a point highly as Von neurad's deputy and the all but governor of the protectorate of bohemia and Moravia if Hitler wanted a more stringent Viceroy to represent him he picked the right individual when he arrived to Prague heidelich was determined to crack down severely on any form of political dissidence for neurat was an old-school conservative Diplomat with little affinity for the Nazis he had been selected as protector of bohemia and Moravia in the spring of 1939 as the war had not yet erupted and Hitler wanted somebody who was a moderate and was acceptable to some of Europe's heads of state he had been commensurately lenient in his methods a particular issue was the widespread proliferation of communist literature by the Czech resistance heidrich was determined to show his new subjects that he was the direct opposite from day one thus martial law was immediately imposed by heideli following his arrival at Prague on the 27th of September and the following morning he had the flags of the SS raised above the turrets of Prague castle in the days it followed he used his exceptional powers to issue lists of individuals who were considered enemies of the state and who were to be executed many of these were already under detention and were awaiting trials which they were now afforded on the 30th of September alone 58 people were executed and 256 more were sent to gestapo prisons this was just the initial bloodletting by the end of November 1941 over 400 people had been executed and over 6 000 had been arrested this was a huge Security operation and 1800 gestapa officers were employed across the protectorate by the end of 1941. many of those arrested were sent to motels and guzen concentration camp in Upper Austria where only four percent of those so incarcerated survived the war but while hydraulic's methods quickly earned him the sobrike The Butcher of Prague they were also effective by early 1942 the Czech resistance had been depleted considerably and with the confiscation of dozens of Wireless transmitters political dissidents across the country were robbed of the ability to communicate between isolated resistant cells moreover Hydra was a shrewd propagandist and tried to buy off much of the Czech populace with labor reforms and the distribution of the large s from confiscated properties amongst the country's workers this was when it came down to it the main reason why hydri was sent there for the protectorate was critical to the German war economy with a major Munitions Factory at berno and the skoda car manufacturing company at Pilsen providing valuable automobiles for the war effort heydrich's time as governor of bohemia and Moravia was a brutal conclusion to what was a brutal career hundreds were murdered in the weeks following his arrival and thousands more were sent off in what was a virtual death sentence to the concentration camps in addition heidrich began forcing tens of thousands of Czech people into what was effectively slave labor in the first four months of 1942 approximately 40 000 Czech laborers were added to a huge list of individuals who were to be forcibly moved from the protectorate to Germany to make up for Manpower shortages in the Reich as German men were sent in ever increasing numbers eastwards to Russia he did all of this with an ideological fervor that was virtually unmatched by any of his colleagues within the Nazi hierarchy in an address to the protectorate government on the 19th of January 1942 he stressed that with a firm hand he had done more to bring the region under control in four months than had been achieved in the previous two and a half years and more was to come he claimed the next task was to introduce quote a correct and unambivalent education of the Czech youth in an attempt to further germanize the country brutal though his methods were they were all approved of in Berlin where the propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels noted in his diary the policy that heidri has pursued in the protectorate can be described as nothing short of exemplary given the immediate brutality of hydraulic's governance of bohemia and Moravia in late 1941 and early 1942 it is unsurprising that it immediately aroused clandestine opposition within the upper ranks of the Czech resistance indeed heydrich's reputation had preceded him and already on the 3rd of October 1941. just a week after the man with the iron heart had taken up his position in Prague the head of the Czech resistance in Exile in Britain Jan sramek and his advisors had determined that they would attempt to assassinate heydrake to this end it was decided to send two czechoslovak resistance Fighters Joseph blabcik and young kubish to Bohemia to oversee the mission glabchik and kubish who were Slovak and checked respectively were in London at the time but were quickly prepared for the mission which was codenamed Operation anthropoid then on the 28th of December 1941 they were flown over the Czech Countryside on a British RAF plane before parachuting down to the east of Prague in the hours that followed they made contact with the check resistance on the ground and began planning how to execute the governor of bohemia and Moravia it would be five months before they moved against Heidi part of the problem for gab chicken kubish was that heitelich was often absent from the region at the time that they parachuted into Bohemia in the dying days of 1941. Italy was in the middle of planning the van Zay conference which had been originally scheduled for early December but which had to be rescheduled following the attack by the Empire of Japan on the U.S Pacific Fleet at anchor in Pearl Harbor in Hawaii which resulted in the entry of the U.S into the second world war given his Myriad duties it was often the case that heideck's routine changed making planning an attack on him difficult however an opportunity presented itself in late May when it was learned that heide was scheduled to fly back to Berlin where Hitler was proposing to send him to France to take over the occupation government in Paris the road to the airport contained several tight bends where the driver of heideliskar Johannes Klein would have to slow down consider terribly and Hydra had taken to riding around without a security detail in an open car in the warm late spring weather having examined the road he would travel on gabchik kubish and their Associates within the check resistance decided on a particular location where the pair would Ambush hide his car and assassinate the governor the date would be the 27th of May 1942. on the morning of the 27th heydrich set off at approximately 10 30 am the location gab chick and kubish had selected for the Ambush was near a tight curve on the road Hydra will be traveling on and where the car would have to slow down in order to take the turn as the car neared it that morning gamchik emerged from his hiding place and took aim at the vehicle with a Sten submachine gun however his gun jammed and failed to fire had Hyde simply ordered Klein to press his foot on the accelerator and get them out of there at that point then he would have survived the attempt on his life but instead haiduri who believed gabchik was acting alone commanded Klein to slow down and went and draw his Luger Pistol to gun the resistance fighter down it was at this juncture that kubish emerged from his hiding place and threw a grenade at heide's car it bounced somewhat away from the vehicle when it hit it but the explosion was sufficient as the blast injured heydrich in his chest spleen ribs and lung he was though still alive and a shootout followed before gabchik and kubish fled at this point haidili collapsed by the side of the road as the driver Klein chased after the pair of assailants as they fled the scene gabchik and cubish believed that the assassination attempt had failed but they were wrong Heidi was still alive but in very bad shape Klein could not make it back to drive him to a hospital as he had been shot in the leg by gabchik when he had chased after him instead a Czech woman who had been nearby went to him following the shootout and a van was flagged down which transported him to the nearby bulovka hospital in Prague there a splenectomy was performed to remove much of his damaged spleen along with another operation to debride his lung and diaphragm and treat the chest wound but it was all to no avail although his conditions seemed to improve in the days that followed such that he was lucid enough to communicate when Himmler visited on the 2nd of June on the 3rd heidek fell into a coma and died the following day the exact cause is not 100 clear given the range of injuries he had sustained but but it was most likely from sepsis he was 38 years of age perhaps the most curious thing about the assassination was that heydrich was usually extremely cautious when it came to his personal security back in Berlin the entire Hydra house was linked by alarm bells to local police stations so that any Intruders would be quickly apprehended when traveling around the German Capital the head of the Reich Security main office had cars fitted with machine guns and pistols in case he was ever attacked in the wake up chicken kubish had ambushed him in Prague perhaps most amazingly Heidi had been personally responsible for drawing up guidelines for the safety measures which should be followed by senior members of the regime and the Nazi party during wartime and in the weeks leading up to his assassination the gestapo and other Security Services Under heidrich's overall command had received numerous reports that the check resistance and other elements amongst the Allies were planning to attempt to assassinate him one of these had involved the arrest and interrogation of a Russian who had been apprehended in Warsaw on his way to Prague with a sniper rifle disguised inside a secret compartment of his suitcase another reported specifically noted checked resistance fighters who had parachuted into the country as gabchik and kubish had this makes hydra's complacency in riding around Prague in an open car without a proper security detail somewhat confounding but he appears to have viewed it as a political point of principle a major security presence around him would suggest that he feared the checks and would damage his Prestige as the iron-fisted governor of the region if this was his view it was an ultimately fatal miscalculation on his part brutal reprisals were carried out in Bohemia and Moravia in the weeks that followed in response to heidek's assassination at least 1300 people were arrested while entire Villages were massacred for having the flimsiest of possible links to the resistance one of these at the Village of leditze roughly 20 kilometers outside Prague resulted in the massacre of nearly 200 civilians while hundreds more were arrested and sent to the concentration camps where the majority of them died in the months that followed and the brutal Crackdown also resulted in the locating of gupchik and kubish on the 18th of June 1942 two weeks after heidrich had died in hospital the pair were cornered along with several other members of the Czech resistance in the church of Saint kiril and Saint matildas in Prague a six-hour shootout followed during which dozens of German soldiers were killed or wounded before the church was successfully stormed gabchik and several others committed suicide before they were taken alive hubish was wounded by a grenade blast and was unable to kill himself but he died from his wounds anyway shortly after the Germans entered the building even this did not bring the violence to an end and reprisals against the Czech populace continued for weeks thereafter as the people of bohemia and Moravia were made to pay a high price for the assassination of heydrich heydrich was the most high profile member of the Nazi regime to be assassinated during the second world war his funeral was accordingly organized in a lavish fashion and used extensively for Nazi propaganda purposes his body was first put on display in the courtyard of Prague Castle on the 7th of June 1942 during which time tens of thousands of Czech citizens were encouraged to pay their respects from there his body was transmitted to Berlin where the main funeral ceremony was held on the 9th of June in the Mosaic room of the Reich chancellery there the propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels stage managed the ceremony to have Hitler and others enter as Richard Wagner's Twilight of the Gods was played Himmler delivered the eulogy while Hitler who privately blamed heidrich for allowing himself to be assassinated laid the blood order medal the highest distinction awarded by the Nazi party in hydra's coffin thereafter he was buried in the invalidant paid off a military cemetery in Berlin Hitler had intended that a giant Monument would be erected here after the war but today heydrich's grave is unmarked in the days that followed his funeral the man who more than nearly anybody else within the Nazi regime was responsible for the carrying out of the Holocaust was lionized by the Nazi media as the perfect Aryan heydrich might well have faced the consequences of his heinous actions in the long run anyway even had he not been killed outside Prague that summer Day in 1942 for the Third Reich was doomed when he arrived to Bohemia and Moravia in the late Autumn of 1941 the German war effort seemed infallible German armies continued to move eastwards with great speed into Russia and towards the cities of Moscow and Leningrad with the einsatz gluten which hydreig had been Central to establishing conducting their deadly work behind the front lines but while Hydra was presiding over Mass executions and arrests in Prague things soured in Russia in the early winter of 1941. the German Advance stalled outside the main cities in the face of the first stringent resistance from the Russians that the Germans had encountered then the winter set in and the logistical preparations of the German wehrmacht were revealed to have been very poor as tens of thousands of German soldiers were killed or incapacitated by the Russian winter as they did not have suitable winter clothes to withstand the cold by the time heydrich was assassinated in the summer of 1942 the war on the Eastern Front had settled down into a stalemate but the Swift German victory that had been obtained in France in 1940 looked ever more elusive things got precipitously worse for Germany in the months following heydrich's death Hitler's hopes on the Eastern Front rested on gaining victory over the Russians at the southern city of Stalingrad in the winter of 1942 an engagement which ended in the spectacular Russian Victory in February 1943 and the surrender of the German sixth Army the Russians then went on the attack and the Germans were being pushed back into Ukraine and then Poland throughout 1943 and 1944 simultaneously the Western allies led by the United States and Britain opened a southern front in Italy in the summer of 1943 and then a western front in France a year later finally in 1945 the Allies streamed into Germany from West and East Hitler killed himself in Berlin on the 30th of April 1945 before he could be taken alive as did other senior Nazis such as Joseph Goebbels Germany formally surrendered just over a week later bringing the war in Europe to a conclusion in its aftermath the senior members of the regime and the SS were put on trial at the city of Nuremberg and most were executed for their crimes thereafter notably Idris successor as head of the rice Security main office and the SD Ernst kaltenbrenner had he survived heydrich would have been presented in 1945 with the choice of suicide attempting to flee Europe or standing trial and being executed Reinhardt heidrich was in many ways the vilest of all the Nazis an individual who oversaw the extension of genocidal policies and mass murder across the continent of Europe during the second world war what is perhaps slightly strange about this is that his rise to his position was in many ways so mundane from a very young age he had exhibited anti-semitic Tendencies which were perhaps exacerbated by having been criticized by his peers as a teenager on account of his own alleged Jewish ancestry but as he grew into his adult years he did not act on these in any overt way and his career trajectory throughout the 1920s was relatively conventional for an aspiring naval officer however this rather routine development was thrown out of kilter in 1931 when he was simultaneously expelled from the German Navy and then introduced into the upper echelons of the Nazi party by his soon-to-be wife from there once Heinrich Himmler realized that heydrich had an unusual talent for counter-intelligence and Security Services work a species of bureaucratic demon was effectively in the fashioning one Whose actions were so calculated and emotionless that even Adolf Hitler would come to refer to him as the man with the iron heart the crimes Hydra committed over the next 10 years down to his death are hard to enumerate a successively head of the SD the gestapo and then the rice Security main office he was responsible for arresting and terrorizing tens of thousands of people throughout Germany during the 1930s a practice which was extended to countries like Austria as the rice began expanding from 1938 onwards once the War Began he oversaw operation talenberg whereby tens of thousands of poles were executed and murdered without trial or due process already at this stage he was involved in the operations of the einsatz copen which would go on to murder approximately 2 million people in Eastern Europe during the war then in the course of 1941 hydreig was heavily involved with others from within the Reich Security main office in developing the final solution whereby millions of Europe's Jews would be Mass murdered in the concentration camp system which had been developed across Central and and Eastern Europe it was heydrich who organized and oversaw the conference at runs a in January 1942 where details of what would become the Holocaust were transmitted to several senior bureaucrats of the right and the terrible process was initiated visali heydrich's ruthless and brutal Crackdown on political dissent during his brief term as Governor of bohemia and Moravia almost seems like a footnote to his career when judged against everything else that it involved given all of this it is entirely safe to say that Reinhardt heideli represented the epitome of the evil that was the Third Reich what do you think of Reinhardt heidrich was he the perfect Nazi and were the Allies justified in plotting his assassination 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 and Brenner was born on the 4th of October 1903 in the town of Reit in in Christ in Upper Austria not far from the city of Salzburg near the German border his father was Hugo Carlton Brenner a lawyer in read him in Christ and his mother was Teresa udvari together she and Hugo had several more Sons Friedrich who was born almost exactly two years before Ernst and then Verna and Roland born in 1905 and 1910 respectively ernst's childhood and teenage years were relatively unremarkable he was sent to the nearby town of Raab in Upper Austria for his primary schooling but thereafter was dispatched to Linds one of the biggest cities in Austria to attend the real gimnasium this school had been established under the auspices of the Austrian Imperial government back in 1851 several years before caldenbrenner arrived at the school A Child Called Adolf Hitler had been a student there he and Carlton Bruner's paths would cross again another child who also at attended the real gymnasium in Lintz but at the same time as Ernst was Adolf Eichmann the two became firm friends and their associations with each other would continue through their lifetimes cuddinburner's childhood was otherwise non-descript though it is notable that his family home was a nationalist one firmly believing in the mission of the austro-hungarian Empire to rule over a wide range of disparate people across the southern stretches of Central Europe and Southeast into the Balkans where the austrians had replaced the ottoman Turks as the major power during the course of the 19th century Carlton Bruner came of age in a period of conflict long before he was born the continent's politics had been destabilized by the union of the 30 or so smaller German states into a German Empire in 1871. Germany's emergence upset the balance of power in Europe where it now became the foremost power on the continent itself and a challenge to the British Empire the global superpower of the late 19th century by the time of Carlton Brunner's birth the major Powers were dividing into two armed alliances one centered on Germany and the austro-hungarian Empire of which the Carlton Brunos were subjects and the other eventually comprising Britain France and Russia in the summer of 1914 when Ernst was just 10 years old war arrived when a regional conflict involving the austro-hungarian Empire and Serbia in the Balkans ballooned into a continent-wide war it soon expanded into the first world war as other nations such as Japan became involved and then the United States in 1917. the entry of the latter power on the side of Britain and France tipped the conflict in their favor and in November 1918 the war ended in the total defeat of the austro-hungarian Empire and Germany though he was just barely a teenager when the guns fell silent carltonville in his life would be shaped by The Fallout from this first global conflict the political landscape of Austria shifted dramatically in the months following the end of the first world war for over 600 years the country had been ruled by the house of Habsburg a noble line which had created an enormous Empire in Central Europe and the Balkans covering modern day Hungary czechia Slovakia Croatia Bosnia and Herzegovina and parts of Serbia defeat in the war brought the house of Habsburg to an end and saw the Empire disintegrate as new nations such as Hungary and Czechoslovakia declared their independence in response to this situation a new Republic of German Austria was established in late October 1918. shortly before the war ended the new government which was formed in Vienna quickly determined that Austria might best be served in this rapidly changing World by uniting with Germany into a greater Germany they subsequently initiated talks with the new Republican government in Germany even as the end of the war Unleashed political social and economic chaos across both countries these talks continued into the spring and summer of 1919 but by then Britain and France had become implacably opposed to Austria and Germany uniting thus when the Treaty of San German the peace agreement between the Victorious powers and Austria was signed in September 1919. it included a clause which forbade Austria premuniting with Germany nevertheless this was not the end of the matter and the issue of German Austrian unification would be resurrected again in the 1930s with serious consequences Carlton Bruner was too young to have fought even in the latter stages of the first world war though he would have been politically cognizant enough to be aware of what was occurring around him in a destabilized Austria in the late 1910s shortly afterwards he headed for the city of guides himself where he first began studying chemistry but in 1923 decided to follow in his Father's Footsteps and switched to studying law eventually he earned his PhD from the University there before heading back to Upper Austria to work in the courts in Salzburg in 1926. he remained there for nearly two years before establishing his own legal practice in Lintz in 1928 as we will see he became politically active in Austrian nationalism both during his student days in Gratz and when he returned to Upper Austria in the mid-1920s another notable feature of these years is the toll they took on Carlton Bruner's physical appearance he was a keen amateur fencer when studying at Gratz and it is widely believed that it was this hobby which resulted in several large scars to his face however the details of how he obtained these injuries are not certain and others claimed he was involved in a serious car accident in his younger years regardless of how they were obtained the result was that Carlton who was well over six foot tall was left with a striking almost Sinister look many people would report feeling intimidated by his presence in future years well Carlton Brenner was earning his law degree the political situation across the border in Germany was one of chaos following the end of the first world war the country had been gripped by a series of bloody revolutions as communist groups and others tried to seize power in cities like Berlin and Munich in late 1918 and into 1919. these had all failed eventually but this political environment had allowed for the emergence of right-wing reactionary paramilitary organizations and political groups one such group founded in Bavaria in 1920 was the National Socialist German Workers Party or Nazi party a group who wished to reverse the terms of the Treaty of Versailles which had imposed harsh peace terms on Germany at the end of the war the party was led by an Austrian one who was rabidly anti-semitic and eventually led the Nazis in the direction of believing that a massive of Jewish and communist plot was attempting to destroy Germany they attempted a coup in Munich in November 1923 one which was suppressed in just over a day and after which many members fled over the border to Austria where branches of the party had also been established in 1920. despite a Crackdown back in Germany following the beer hall Butch of 1923 and Hitler's brief imprisonment in its aftermath the Nazis would continue to be a Malignant Force in German politics into the second half of the 1920s as noted cullenbrenner had been raised in a family which favored nationalist politics and he himself had become involved with several nationalist political parties in Austria in the early 1920s while studying at the University of Gratz these included the independent movement for a free Austria a far-right political group in 1929 he revealed his political sympathies for Nazism but he agreed to represent the Austrian branch of the party in several legal issues it was dealing with it was unsurprising then that he decided to join the Nazis himself in October 1930. this was at a time when the wider Nazi party in Germany and its Southern neighbor was beginning to gain increasing amounts of support after years in the political Wilderness both countries had been badly impacted by the Wall Street crash of 1929 and the Great Depression which followed it as jobs were lost and life-saving things were wiped out by hyperinflation many individuals in both countries began turning to extremist political parties such as the Nazis as a way of expressing their resentments caldenbrenner Rose quickly within the Austria branch of the party and by 1931 was a major District official in his native Upper Austria later that year on the 31st of August he also joined the SS a paramilitary wing of the Nazis headed by Heinrich Himmler one of Hitler's closest Associates Carlton Bruner was beginning his Ascent within the Nazi party as The Wider organization was gaining massive amounts of support in Germany for instance in the reichstag elections of September 1930 it increased its vote share to 18 and became the second largest party in Germany less than two years later it increased this to 37 percent in fresh elections and became the largest political party in the parliament by some margin as a result in January 1933 Hitler was able to pressure the Centrist and center-right political establishment to make him chancellor of Germany within months the Nazis succeeded in completely undermining the Democratic process in Germany and turning the country into a one-party dictatorship the situation was different in Austria in legislative elections held there in November 1930 the Nazis only acquired three percent of the vote which translated into zero seats in Parliament nevertheless in the months that followed the party began to gain favor amongst more and more austrians particularly so from May 1931 onwards when Credit unstalt One of Austria's largest banks declared bankruptcy rocking the financial system of the Americas and Europe even further and creating enormous economic difficulties in Austria itself no further parliamentary elections were held in Austria during the early 1930s and so it is difficult to assess exactly how extensive the Nazi party's support had become there by the time Hitler became chancellor of Germany in January 1933 yet it was certainly quite sizable and had gained much from the collapse of credit anhalt a bank which was founded in the mid-19th century by the Rothschilds a banking family of Austrian Jews this was exploited by the Austrian Nazi party to stoke anti-semitic sentiment in the country and Garner greater support from 1931 onwards ultimately though the growth of Nazism in Austria was curbed in the spring of 1933 just as Hitler and his accomplices were passing an enabling law in Germany to allow them to rule by decree there in part inspired by the example of Germany and partly out of concern and about Hitler's calls for German unification with Austria the Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dolphus effectively suspended parliamentary democracy in Austria in March 1933 and initiated the country's own type of fascism by declaring a new party the Fatherland front to be the only legally recognized political party in Austria from May 1933 onwards this was influenced by Benito Mussolini's brand of fascism in Italy its remit Dolph was envisaged was to bring political and economic stability to Austria and to prevent the Nazis from taking over the country by this time Carlton Bruner was one of the most senior figures within the Austrian Nazi movement and he along with other prominent members of the Austrian SS such as our tour size inquart were in regular contact with Himmler about how to undermine the Austrian political system from within oh into his subversive activity he was arrested by the Austrian government just days after marrying Elizabeth Ada a fellow member of the Austrian Nazi party on the 14th of January 1934 he was detained at a Detention Center which was newly erected at Kaiser Steinberg on the grounds of conspiring against the state and for membership of the Nazi party which had been prohibited by dolphus's government in the summer of 1933. kalden Broner was just one of approximately 50 000 austrians who were arrested in the second half of 1933 and the first six months of 19 34 for their associations with the Nazis over the next months he led to hunger strike here and there was Major unrest in February as riots broke out this caused severe disquiet in the town of Kaiser Steinberg itself and the Detention Center was abandoned in May 1934 at which time Carlton Bruner was released therefore he was a free man again by the time Dolphus was assassinated by Nazi agents in Vienna on the 25th of July 1934 with a Carlton Bruno knew of the plan to kill the Austrian Chancellor is unclear Dolphus was succeeded as Chancellor of Austria by Kurt shushnik an austrophascist of a slightly milder disposition than his predecessor shushnig faced the same problem as Dolphus of trying to suppress Austrian Nazism as its proponents built up their strength over the Border in Bavaria in southern Germany throughout the mid-1930s Austrian Nazis operated from here slipping over the border to undertake sabotage missions and attack Fatherland front officials was often amongst them traveling to Passau in Bavaria by train on several occasions to bring in money and resources to Austria to Aid the Nazi effort to undermine the state there at the same time he had risen to become one of the leading figures within the Austrian SS and some of his trips to Southern Germany were to pass on intelligence to Himmler and his new Protege as head of the Nazis Security Services and intelligence networks Barnhart Haider as a result of all this activity Carlton Bruner was arrested on several occasions in the mid-1930s on suspicion of treason and other offenses though he was never successfully prosecuted he did lose his license to practice law though meanwhile the Insurgency by the Nazis into Austria from Bavaria continued it resulted in hundreds of deaths and attacks on thousands more during the mid-1930s despite his best efforts to prevent the growth in support for the Nazis within Austria by late 1937 shushnig's government was in a difficult position under Hitler's rule Germany had begun aggressively re-arming in 1935 in violation of the Treaty of Versailles by late 1937 this had reached a point where a military intervention in Austria by Germany would see the country easily conquered simultaneously Hitler's rhetoric about Germany and Austria uniting a move increasingly referred to as the Angelus meaning connection or political union was becoming more and more inflammatory as Nazi Terror tactics in Vienna escalated and Berlin's demands increased in the first weeks of 1938. shushnig decided to call a referendum in Austria to decide on the issue of uniting with Germany his goal was to win this and settle the issue going so far as two promises other political opponents in Austria that fresh elections would be held if their supporters rallied against the Nazis however before shushnig's Gambit had a chance to pay off Hitler ordered German troops over the border into Austria on the 12th of March 1938. the ground had been well prepared in advance by Leading figures of the Austrian Nazi movement such as says inkvart and cultandwinner and the Takeover was bloodless four weeks later the Angelus was ratified by a plebiscite which passed by 99 and in which political enemies of the Nazis such as the Austrian Jews and those of Romani descent were prohibited from voting cousin Brenner and many other Austrian Nazis who had risked much during the mid-1930s to further the Nazi cause in Austria were commensurately rewarded for their commitment following the union of Germany and Austria the country was officially designated as the province of ostmark of which Arturo size in quite became the first governor kalden Broner was appointed as the minister of public security within Austria and was promoted to the rank of brigadefire within the SS although the German ice dag had largely become a ceremonial Body by 1938 the acquisition of a seat was a sign of an individual being held in favor by the Nazi senior leadership and so Colton planners are sent as a member of the parliament in April 1938 when Austrian members were added was a further sign of his Growing Power Within Nazi Austria finally he was also made an SS and police leader for the donau administrative region a posting which effectively made him the most senior police figure in all of Austria in this role he was involved from the summer of 1938 onwards in efforts to begin persecuting Austria's Jewish communities and also to establish a branch of the Gestapo the Nazi secret police in Vienna Carlton Bruner was also heavily involved in the months following the Angelus in the establishment of malthouse and concentration camp this was established outside the town of Mount Hausen approximately 20 kilometers from Lintz in early August 1938. concentration camps such as this which were effectively prisons which could be built quickly and cheaply to house political prisoners and the ideological enemies of Nazism had been built throughout Germany since the rise to power of the Nazis there in 1933 mountausen was the first concentration camp established in Austria here socialists Jews Romani homosexuals and anyone else considered an enemy of the state in the new reality Austria found itself in were detained in cramped conditions most were given extremely limited rations and effectively starved to death while they were made to work as slave laborers Mining and building Munitions and aircraft for the impending Nazi war effort eventually several satellite camps were established near the village of Goosen so that the entire cam complex could house 85 000 prisoners at maximum capacity all told by 1945 some 190 000 prisoners would pass through motaus and goose and concentration camp of which it is estimated that nearly half died owing to the severity of the conditions of the camp which Carlton Bruner had a major hand in first establishing in 1938 while Calvin Brenner was involving himself in the development of the concentration camp at Mount Hausen guzen Hitler was bringing Europe ever closer to the precipice of War the Union of Germany and Austria had been prohibited under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles but there was no appetite for war in Britain and France over the issue particularly so when public sentiment in Austria had been so broadly in favor of the Angelus however no sooner had swastika Flags begun flying over government buildings in Vienna then Hitler and his associates in Berlin began pressing German claims to the sudetened land in Western Czechoslovakia this was a region with a predominantly ethnically German and german-speaking population which the Nazis claimed was also rightfully part of the greater Germany they were trying to create on this occasion the British French and even Benito Mussolini's fascist government in Italy objected to German claims however at a summit of European leaders convened in Munich in September 1938 Hitler managed to convince the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain that if Germany was granted the sudeten land it would be the last territory he would seek Chamberlain acquiesced but he maintained to Hitler that any further aggression would result in war Chamberlain's actions at Munich have typically been seen as a wholly misguided strategy of appeasement but this unfairly ignores the fact that the agreement bought Britain and France time to begin rearming should Hitler break his promise they did not have long to wait to see if he would or not in March 1939 just six months after the agreement at Munich the Nazis effectively dismembered the rest of Czechoslovakia annexing parts of it and created occupied protectorates out of the rest the city of maimul in the Baltic Sea region was seized from Lithuania at the same time still Britain and France did not react but when Hitler began pressing claims to Poland within a short period of time the situation changed London and Paris now once again claim that if the independence of another Sovereign Nation were threatened they would have to act the Germans initiated a false flag operation in an effort to make Poland look like the aggressor in late August 1939 but no one was fooled thus when German tanks and infantry divisions rolled over the border into Poland on the 1st of September Britain and France responded by declaring war on Germany the second world war had commenced in the course of it Carlton Bruner would move from being a middling Nazi official in Austria to one of the most senior figures of the entire Nazi hierarchy Carlton Brunner's further Ascent within Austria reached a new height in the early summer of 1940 when he was promoted to the position of police president of Vienna at the same time he was made an understorm leader within the SS one of the senior officer grades of the paramilitary organization Carlton Bruner was now the most senior police figure within Austria over the next year he made considerable strides in expanding the Nazi intelligence Services throughout the country in a bid to identify and root out any opposition movement which might emerge there during the war preemptive steps had been taken to prevent this in 1938 and 1939 arresting approximately one hundred thousand individuals who were deemed to be opponents of the Nazis out of Austria's population of nearly 7 million people but new resistance movements sprang up during the war particularly around the Roman Catholic Catholic priest haino ihmaya whose followers were able to obtain schematics of German warplanes and pass them to the Allies Carlton Bruner's secret police had limited success in breaking up Maya's organization but considerably more in dismantling resistance groups such as the Austrian Freedom Movement whose most prominent members were eventually identified tried and sent to concentration camps while Kelton Brenner was expanding his intelligence Network and overseeing the policing of wartime Vienna The Wider European conflict was going very well for Germany the initial campaign into Poland had foreshadowed events elsewhere as the country was effectively overrun in four weeks by early October Warsaw was in German hands and the polls were effectively defeated a lulling hostilities occurred that winter so much so that the people in Britain and France began to talk about a phony War but this was the quiet before the storm in the spring of 1940 German tanks rolled over the northern border into Denmark and paratroopers landed into Norway's main cities and ports as both countries were brought under Nazi occupation in a matter of days then in May the long-expected invasion of France was initiated in a blistering military campaign the Nazis crushed the resistance in northeastern France on San Belgium and then trapped the British expeditionary Force consisting of more than 300 000 men in the port of Dunkirk only a daring rescue operation in late May and early June starred these men from being captured or massacred nevertheless by mid-summer Paris had been captured and France was defeated the Nazis were triumphant throughout Western and Central Europe only Britain stood against them the first years of the war changed the Nazi State's situation in many ways one of the most substantial changes was in terms of the number of Jewish people that were now living within the borders of the Reich or the territory that it occupied ever since their rise to power in Germany in 1933 the Nazis had implemented increasingly oppressive laws which effectively disenfranchised Germany's half a million Jewish people and made them second-class citizens the goal here was to coerce Germany's Jews into leaving the country and moving abroad on the 9th of November 1938 this anti-Semitism took on an even more Sinister Edge when thousands of Jewish homes businesses and synagogues were attacked across Germany in government orchestrated pogroms hundreds of Jewish people were killed and thousands more interred in concentration camps from which the majority never returned some of the worst of these attacks on what became known as the night of the broken glass or kushtal Nacht occurred in Vienna which had one of the largest concentrations of Jewish people anywhere in the Third Reich at that time Carlton plinner was Central to overseeing the attacks in Vienna during krishnaqt an operation which was unofficially led by the SS the war changed the situation again there were approximately three and a half million Jewish people living in Poland when it was conquered in the Autumn of 1939 thus the policy of coercing Jews to leave Nazi held territory was much less practical here dystopian plans would developed to resolve the so-called Jewish question in the course of 1940 by caldenbrenner's old school friend Adolf Eichmann who was now working within the newly established rice Security main office which was overseen by Reinhard heide himmler's second in command of the SS eichmann's scheme involved the mass Detention of Europe's Jews and their forcible deportation to the east African island of Madagascar it was though eventually concluded that this scheme was Impractical particularly so from early 1941 when Hitler had fully determined that Germany would invade the Soviet Union that coming summer when and the invasion was initiated in June 1941 and much of Ukraine Eastern Poland and Western Russia were quickly overrun this brought over 2 million more Jews under Nazi rule with all of Europe seemingly haven't fallen before them in the Summer and Autumn of 1941 a new approach to the Jewish question was decided upon by Hitler Himmler and other senior Nazis such as Hyde they called it the final solution the final solution was effectively a plan for the mass murder of all of Europe's Jews elements of this were already being rolled out as the German Army Advanced eastwards into the Soviet Union in the late Summer and Autumn of 1941. brigades of ss death squads known as the einsatz corpen followed in the rear of the German Army and massacred entire communities of Jewish people throughout Ukraine and other regions elsewhere it would involve the systematic identification and arrest of Europe's Jews they would then be sent to a number of concentration camps primarily located in Poland where the vast majority would be gassed to death within hours of their arrival this genocidal operation would be overseen by the SS of which Carlton printer was a member the logistics of identifying all of Europe's Jews would be overseen by heidrich's Reich Security main office where officials like Eichmann were in charge of making sure the trains to the death camps run efficiently figures like Carlton Bruner would oversee the regional aspects of this by using the police services under their control to identify any Jews attempting to hide in cities like Vienna in the end an estimated 65 000 Austrian Jews constituting the majority of those who had not fled Austria prior to the outbreak of the war in September 1939 were identified and killed as part of the final solution Carlton blinner was Central to these events in Austria in the early summer of 1942 events unfolded in the protectorate of bohemia and Moravia the administrative Zone which had been formed out of much of Czechoslovakia in 1939 which would have a bearing on the rest of Carlton's life the previous Autumn Reinhardt heideli the head of the Reich Security main office an umbrella organization which oversaw all of the policing and intelligence Services across Nazi Europe was appointed as the stand-in governor of bohemia and Moravia the Jack resistance had been growing stronger in 1941 and Hitler had determined that Heidi who he once referred to as the man with the iron heart was the best person to crush the unrest there hideoi certainly made inroads quickly executing hundreds of people within weeks of taking up his position in Prague and arresting thousands but his actions also aroused widespread animosity and plan fans were quickly underway to assassinate heide it would take months for a plan to be put into action but on the 27th of May 1942 heidelich was badly wounded in an assassination attempt outside Prague he died a week later in hospital leaving the most senior office in Europe's intelligence and policing Services empty Himmler temporarily stepped into the role as head of the SS but with his responsibilities in other areas stretching him thin a successor to Haider would eventually be needed Carlton Bruner was appointed as the head of the Reich Security main office in succession to heidek on the 30th of January 1943 after much prevarication on himmler's part his appointment was a major surprise to many who did not consider him to be a candidate for a position which effectively made Carlton plinner the most senior figure within the SS other than Himmler himself many had expected that Heinrich Muller the head of the Nazi secret police the Gestapo would be given the post at the same time carltonpoena also succeeded highly as president of the international criminal police commission or ICPC the Forerunner of Interpol as head of the Reich Security main office Carlton plunner was now in charge of an umbrella organization which oversaws seven different departments each handling various elements of the intelligence and policing services for instance the Gestapo was assumed within Department 4 which also contained the offices run by Carlton Bruner's childhood friend Adolf Eichmann Department 6 oversaw intelligence gathering abroad while other departments handled Administration and matters such as standard policing in the Reich and occupied territories as head of the Reich Security main office calden printer became a pivotal figure in the Holocaust of Europe's Jews and other groups such as the Romani which hydroly had played an absolutely critical role in initiating during 1941 and early 1942. several years later Carlton Bruner would claim that he was barely involved in the Holocaust and other crimes committed by the regime that effectively he stepped into heinrich's shoes when the gears of the genocidal program were already in operation and that he did not contribute to what was happening in any tangible fashion this is not true for instance it was long after heideck's assassination and following Carlton Brunner's appointment as his successor that the Reich Security main office established the policy of schutzhaft or protective custody this directed that anyone who was designated as being in protective custody in Central and Eastern Europe would be quickly transferred to the Concentration Camp system its purpose was to speed up the processing and thus murder of Europe's Jews Romani and other groups moreover directives to the common dance of the main death camps of Auschwitz birkenau Treblinka sobibor hialno maidanic and biaget to continue the mass executions using zyclon B and carbon monoxide were received directly from the Reich Security main office throughout 1943 and 1944. the end result of all of this was that caldenbrenner was the head of the Reich Security main office during the most intense period of the Holocaust and other genocidal policies while the final solution had been agreed upon by the hierarchy in 1941 and experiments using cyclon B had been carried out at Auschwitz that Autumn it was not until January 1942 that heidelich had passed on details of what was to occur to senior Nazi bureaucrats at a conference outside Berlin steps were taken to begin initiating it in the months that followed and from the summer of 1942 it intensified until the Nazi Genocide operation was at its most extreme in 1943 and 1944. for instance it was in the spring of 1943 after Carlton Bruner succeeded highly that most of the 60 000 Jews in occupied Greece were deported to Auschwitz and killed there it was in the summer that the Jewish ghettos across the Baltic states and Below Russia were liquidated and all of their inhabitants transferred to the concentration camps and near certain death similarly it was only after Germany effectively took over Northern and Central Italy in the Autumn of 1943 months after Carlton Brenner became head of the rsha that the identification arrest and deportation of Italy's Jews to the death camps commenced kaldenbrenner whose pronouncements at various points in the 1930s and 1940s indicate his own personal extreme anti-Semitism described the quote eradication of the Jews in Italy as a matter of special interest to him there is no doubting the centrality of Carlton plinner to the Holocaust and the genocide of other groups by the Nazis in accepting the position as the head of the Reich Security main office in succession to Haider Carlton Brunner was placing himself in an exposed position for the war was turning dramatically against the Nazis by the time he was promoted in January 1943. the invasion of Russia had stalled in the winter of 1941 outside Moscow and Leningrad as it did the war became a conflict of attrition on the Eastern front with the Russians mounting a much stouter defense in 1942 their sheer numbers made it clear by that summer that Hitler needed a major victory if he was to Stave off defeat but a massive campaign in the Autumn of 1942 to try to take the southern Russian city of Stalingrad and with it access to the strategically vital oil fields of the Caucasus did not go as planned by the early winter the German sixth Army had been surrounded by the Russians and was slowly being starved into submission just weeks after Carlton Bruner took over the rsha they surrendered at Stalingrad in the first massive defeat of German arms during the war thereafter the Russians began inexorably pushing the Germans back westwards while after defeating the Italians and Germans in North Africa the Western allies opened a southern front in Italy in the summer of 1943. it was now a matter of when not if Germany would be defeated and as the defeat of the Nazis became inevitable people like Carlton Brunner must have surely known they would have to answer for their crimes in years to come in his first year in charge of the Irish Security main office Carlton Bruner became a major Patron and advocate for a man who would develop a fearsome reputation amongst the Allies by the end of the war this was Otto squadzini an austrian-born member of the SS Carlton plinner recommended scotseni for several missions in 1943 and as head of the rsha he may have been pivotal in the selection of scotseni to lead a special operations mission in Italy to rescue Benito Mussolini from his Italian captors after the fascist government in Rome had overthrown him and offered to surrender unconditionally to the Western allies scotsini led the infamous Grand Sasso raid in which Mussolini was rescued by German special operatives led by squadzany from a Mountaintop hotel where he was being held captive in central Italy with the Italian leader rescued scored zany and his men extracted him back to Northern Italy and he was installed as the puppet ruler of the Italian social Republic which continued the war against the Allies from Northern Italy for the remainder of the war Carlton Brunner's faith in scotseni had been rewarded and he became the go-to German special operatives Commander for the remainder of the war in the late Autumn of 1943 Carlton Brunner and scotseni became Central to a highly secretive initiative this was codenamed Operation long jump and resulted from the Germans acquiring intelligence that the three main leaders of the Allied war effort the prime minister of Britain Winston Churchill the president of the United States Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the dictator of the Soviet Union Joseph Stalin were due to meet in a major Allied conference in the city of Tehran in Iran in late November 1943 Carlton blender was placed in charge of a top-secret plan to assassinate the three leaders he quickly chose scordsini as the man to oversee the actual carrying out of the operation in the weeks it followed a special training school was established in Copenhagen and there were plans afoot to send several units to Tehran when the conference started the details remain shadowy to this day but Carlton Brunner and scottsani seem to have also planned on trying to take Roosevelt alive in order to bring him back to Germany as a bargaining tool in negotiating peace terms with the United States the entire plan though was fatally undermined when an undercover Soviet agent Nikolai could netsov obtained details of it from an SS officer Ulrich Von ortel in Ukraine weeks before the conference was due to start thus Carlton Brunner's efforts came to nothing and the operation was abandoned it was also during his time as the head of the rsha that caldenbrenner became notorious for his stance towards homosexuality homosexuality had been illegal in Germany prior to the Nazis claiming power in 1933 however the laws had only been Loosely applied and few individuals were prosecuted that all changed from the mid-1930s onwards as the Nazis made it a priority to persecute homosexuals eventually between 1933 and 1945 over 100 000 people were arrested on charges of homosexuality of which roughly half were convicted many were sentenced to years in prison as head of the Reich policing services from January 1943 Carlton blinner attempted to develop even more extreme policies petitioning the Reich Ministry in the summer of 1943 to have a compulsory sentence of castration imposed on any males found guilty of homosexuality in the end he withdrew his proposal not because he had changed his mind but because it seemed more plausible that the Gestapo could implement this independent of the courts additionally many of those who were so convicted in the months that followed were often coerced into volunteering for chemical castration by telling them that it was a choice between this fate or being sent to the concentration camps it is estimated that upwards of 800 men who were convicted of homosexual Acts were castrated before the war ended Carlton Bruner was also one of the central figures in one of the most brutal episodes of the entire Holocaust this occurred between the spring and late summer of 1944. early that year Hitler had decided to take a more interventionist line in Hungary a country which had been allied with Nazi Germany throughout the war but one which had played a largely passive role in the final solution and other genocidal policies there were three quarters of a million Jewish people in Hungary so when Germany effectively took greater control of the country in the spring of 1944 a massive campaign to extend the Holocaust into the region was initiated and his old friend Eichmann were the two pivotal figures in what followed indeed when the Hungarian Regent miklash horti was informed at a meeting with Hitler in Austria early in 1944 that Germany was taking greater control over Hungarian Affairs Kelton traveled with haughty back to Hungary on his train between March and July 1944 upwards of 400 000 of hungary's Jews were arrested and sent to the death camps the vast majority ended up at Auschwitz where over 2 000 Hungarian Jews were being killed every day in May and June 1944. Moore would have been killed here at this time if the crematorium had the facility to burn more bodies Kelton blinner was one of the central architects of this industrial scale Slaughter of hungary's Jews by the time the worst of the arrests and deportations were coming to an end in Hungary Carlton plinner was called to Berlin on the 20th of July 1944 there had been an attempt to kill Hitler at his military headquarters in Western Poland that was very nearly successful this had been led by the military commander Klaus Von stauffenberg and involved a network of Fairly senior and middling Military Officers their plans to launch a coup in the aftermath of the assassination failed as a bomb which had been intended to kill Hitler and several other leading members of the regime only wounded the fuhrer the Revolt was suppressed in the hours that followed as chief of the security forces caldenbrenner was called to Berlin to lead the investigations into How deep the plot ran weeks of Investigations led to the arrest and conviction of thousands of individuals many of them simply for knowing somebody who was implicated in The Conspiracy see eventually approximately 5 000 people were executed in reprisals and thousands more were sent into the Concentration Camp system for his role in this Carlton Brunner was awarded the knights cross to the war Merit cross with swords the blood order which was usually only awarded to those who had participated in the beer hall perch all the way back in 1923 and the golden party badge an award given to the oldest and most trusted members of the Nazi party by now Carlton Glenna was at the height of his power within the regime as his personal standing with Hitler had sought thus in December 1944 Himmler determined to promote him to the rank of general of the evaphan SS there were additional reasons for doing so which were tied to the general course of the war in the summer of 1944 the Western allies had opened the long-awaited Western Front in France with the D-Day Landings in Normandy by mid-autumn Paris and Antwerp had been liberated and the Allies began building up their forces in the east of France for a drive into Germany that winter in the East the situation was even worse the Russians had pushed the Germans back into Poland by the Autumn of 1944 and despite efforts to hold the line both there and in Western Ukraine by the end of the year they too were massing their armies in Western Poland for a late winter offensive into to Eastern Germany it was at this juncture that Himmler began awarding SS officers such as Cullen Brenner the title of General The Hope being that once the war was over they would be considered Military Officers rather than police officials and would consequently be subject to International laws regarding the treatment of military prisoners Carlton planner was also one of many senior Nazis who as the war effort became utterly doomed for Germany tried to establish channels to determine what exact terms Germans surrendered to the Western allies rather than the Soviet Union could be negotiated on the belief by this time was that the Western allies would treat Germany far more leniently than would the Soviet Union a nation which had been left devastated by the German invasion and where approximately 27 million people lost their lives during the war to that end late in 1944 he established contacts with the International Red Cross based out of neutral Switzerland in mid-march 1945 he met with the president of the organization Carl Jakob Burkhart at for alberg in Western Austria these negotiations however ultimately LED nowhere though Carlton Corner was not implicated for any trees business behavior in attempting these negotiations and many senior Nazis had also been seeking to establish what the parameters of surrender might be through various diplomatic lines in late 1944 and early 1945. there was one last desperate act for Carlton Turner during the war on the 18th of April even as the Allies were spreading out all around Germany Himmler appointed Carlton Brunner as commander of the Southern armies by this stage this involved some disparate forces which were still holding much of Austria and parts of Hungary Croatia and adjoining territory not because the forces here were holding out against Allied attacks but simply because they faced little hostile action the Allies seeing little Strategic Benefit in securing these countries when the real Target was Germany and Berlin thus rather than overseeing a major military campaign here caldenbrenner spent the last weeks of April and early May making some Provisions for the remaining Nazi soldiers and SS members under his command to begin a guerrilla campaign against the Allies once the area was occupied he also became involved in a peculiar dispute shoot with the Nazi governor of Upper Austria Auguste igruber over the fate of a huge cache of 6500 artworks which had been assembled over the years in the region for the purposes of erecting a museum to Hitler near his hometown of brauno I'm in ikluber wished to destroy the entire collection which included works by Renaissance Masters such as Michelangelo Jan van Haik and Jan famir and which had been looted from a cross-occupied Europe Carlton Brunner prevented him from doing so in a peculiar conclusion to the war in Upper Austria Carlton Bruner was not alone in his efforts to negotiate the terms of a German surrender in late 1944 and early 1945 and others such as Himmler and Hermann Goering were involved in similar efforts none of these were successful however in large part because Hitler was determined to fight on until the end this was despite the inevitability of defeat by early 1945. the Soviets had crossed into Eastern Germany by this time and were advancing on Berlin while the Western allies had begun occupying the Rhineland in Western Germany at the same time both sides were anxious to be the one to capture the German Capital but it was the Russians who had the geographical advantage thus while the Americans Canadians British French and others were spreading out to take Bavaria and other regions in the spring of 1945. the Russians surrounded Berlin the battle for the city began and in mid-april with the Nazis arming old men and teenagers to defend the city it did not last long and on the 30th of April with Russian gunfire and tanks nearing the city center Hitler killed himself in the Reich chancellery bunker his nominated successor Joseph Goebbels did likewise the following day leaving the negotiation of a formal surrender to the Allies to be worked out by the new president of Germany Admiral Carl donitz a formal announcement of the end of the war in Europe was made on the 8th of May 1945. by the time the surrender was formalized on the 8th of May calden Clinic was on the Run he had briefly flown to Berlin in mid-april for a meeting with Hitler to have his post as commander of the German armies in southern Europe confirmed and to discuss his strategy for proceeding in the coming weeks after which he returned to Austria he was there when news of Hitler's suicide and then the end of the war reached him as it was clear that high-ranking Nazi officials and senior members of the SS would be arrested by the Allies kalden prerna eloped with his Deputy commander in Austria Artur scheidler and several other SS members into the Austrian Alps where they hope to avoid detection hiding in a mountain cabin with false identity papers on the way Calvin Brenner threw his official seal as head of the rsha into an Alpine Lake from which it was recovered by a tourist in 2001. the a small party of ss soldiers did not operate under the radar for very long on the 12th of May 1945 they were apprehended and arrested by members of the U.S 80th Infantry Division after reports had circulated in the nearby town of alt Aussie that some men were hiding in the cabin on the Mountainside when they were apprehended their false identities were soon unraveled but Carlton Brunner would not have avoided positive identification for very long anyway his profile as head of the Reich Security main office was too high and his facial scars too identifiable for him to have avoided arrest Carlton planner and those he was arrested with would soon face trial in the closing months of the war the Allies had keenly debated exactly how they should proceed in terms of dealing with Germany and its people once the war concluded soberheads prevailed ones which argued that to impose blanket penalties and punishments on the German population such as had been done in the form of indemnities after the first world war would possibly create new resentments in Germany and would also be fundamentally unjust many Germans had nothing to do with the crimes of the Nazis a political party which had only ever received just over 35 percent of the vote in any national election in Germany moreover ordinary Germans could hardly be held responsible for the atrocities which had been committed at concentration camps which were clandestinely established in occupied Poland as such the Allies came to the conclusion that they would only seek to prosecute the leaders of the Nazi party other officials and Germans who had actively facilitated them in fermenting the war and committing widespread crimes against humanity and the entirety of the SS the organization that had run the concentration camps and been responsible for an appalling Litany of crimes across Central and Eastern Europe between 1939 and 1945. fell into two different categories of those who were to be prosecuted he was a high-ranking member of the Nazi party particularly in Austria where he had aided in the establishment of the Concentration Camp system and served as police chief of Vienna and latterly as a senior military commander additionally he was a member of the SS and had actually risen to become its second most senior figure Junior only to Heinrich Himmler furthermore events that occurred in the weeks following Carlton Brunner's arrest made him an even more significant figure when it came to the prosecution of German war criminals on the 21st of May 1945 Himmler was arrested in Northern Germany near the Danish border where many Nazi leaders had fled as Berlin was being captured by the Russians he was quickly identified and interrogated but just two days later on the 23rd of may he committed suicide by swallowing a cyanide capsule at a detention center near Lunenburg thus suddenly Carlton Brunner became the most senior surviving member of the SS with both Himmler and Heidi dead he was the figure who would be included as the main SS defendant in the trial of the leading members of the Nazi regime which was to be held before an international Military Tribunal at the city of Nuremberg in southern Germany the Nuremberg Trial commenced in mid-november 1945. it lasted through to the Early Autumn of 1946 the length of the trial is explained by the fact that the prosecution wanted to make clear to the whole world the extent of the Nazis crimes while there were also two dozen defendants involved though several were missing individuals who were to be tried In Absentia of them hellmann Gering was the most senior While others included the Nazi foreign minister Joachim Von riventrop the former deputy leader of the Nazi party Rudolf Hess and the armaments minister and Hitler's architect Albert Speer caltenbrunner was initially absent from the trial as he received treatment for a brain hemorrhage when he was able to attend in person he claimed his signature had been falsified on documents which implicated him in the committing of war crimes and that his position as head of the rsha was symbolic unsurprisingly the court did not believe him and he was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity and sentenced to death he was brought for execution with the eight others who had been sentenced to death in the trial on the 16th of October 1946 and Carlton Brunner's last words before he was hanged were used to further the claim yet again that he had no knowledge of the crimes committed by the regime afterwards the bodies of those who were executed were cremated and Scattered in the river Issa near the Austrian border Ernst Carlton Brunner is something of an enigmatic character unlike many of the others whom he stood trial with at Nuremberg in 1945 and 1946 he was a somewhat peripheral figure within the Nazi regime at the outbreak of the second world war by way of contrast how menguring was one of the most senior figures in the Nazi party and Hitler's declared successor for much of the war Wilhelm Keitel was the overall commander of the German armed forces and Joachim Von riventrop was the German foreign minister who orchestrated the infamous Molotov ribbon trough agreement with the Soviet Union kaldenbrenner was a regional SS police officer in Austria in the Autumn of 1939 a relatively senior one within the Vienna hierarchy but not someone who would have been expected to ascend to a major position in the years that followed his promotion as head of the Iraq Security main office was owing to A peculiar set of circumstances firstly Reinhardt heideley the occupant of the position was assassinated the only senior Nazi official to be successfully killed during the war and then Hyundai Himmler made a peculiar decision to appoint calden printer as his successor despite the availability of some other more likely candidates such as the head of the Gestapo Heinrich Muller many were surprised that Carlton plinner was appointed to the Post perhaps owing to his rather strange rise from obscurity to become the second most senior official within the SS kaldenbrenner has remained one of the most shadowy and little disgust characters within the Nazi regime but there is no doubting his ideological fanaticism he was a zealous follower of Hitler and he proved as ruthless ahead of the Reich Security main office as haidai had been as a result the final solution which hydroly had overseen the initiation of across the SS run concentration camps shortly before his death was energetically overseen by Carlton Bruner and individuals whom he managed through the rsha such as his childhood friend Adolf Eichmann his anti-Semitism and ideological adherence to Nazism was considerable and it was under Carlton Brunner's oversight with eichmann's Aid that the mass murder of over half of hungary's 7 150 000 Jews was orchestrated in the space of just six months in 1944. moreover Carlton Brunner's Outlook in other areas was barbaric notably his desire to have an official policy of castration implemented across the Reich for those found guilty of homosexuality once the war ended caldenbrenner yet again found himself seemingly promoted to a position few would have expected this was as a defendant at the headline trial before the international Military Tribunal at Nuremberg from the Autumn of 1945 to the Autumn of 1946 with both Himmler and heidelit dead Carlton Brunner was the most senior member of the SS Left Alive to stand trial given his record as head of the Reich Security main office since 1943. he was certainly an adequate replacement to be sentenced to death in six what do you think of ounce was he every bit as brutal ahead of the Reich Security main office as heidley or was he simply a functionary who continued the processes which had been put in place by his predecessor please let us know in the comments section and in the meantime thank you very much for watching foreign

Channel: The People Profiles

Views: 2,395,300

Keywords: Biography, History, Historical, Educational, The People Profiles, Biography channel, the biography channel, biography documentary channel, biography channel, biography highlights, biography full episodes, full episode, biography of famous people, full biography, biography a&e, biography full episode, biography full documentary, bio, history, life story, mini biography, biography series on tv, full documentary biography, education, 60 minutes, documentary, documentaries, docs, facts

Id: H8E20ZBDJ4I

Length: 232min 24sec (13944 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 11 2023