Himmler was born in Munich to Gebhard Himmler, a respectable headmaster and tutor of the Wittelsbach royal family of Bavaria, and his wife Anna Maria. Himmler’s godfather was a Wittelsbach Bavarian prince, the king of Bavaria’s uncle. Slightly built and preferring chess and stamp-collecting to the sports field, he was the antithesis of the Aryan ideal. He did eventually marry following a chance meeting with divorcée Margarete Siegroth in a hotel lobby. The couple had one daughter, Gudrun.
Himmler met future Nazis in the right-wing paramilitary Freikorps after the First World War. Supporting Hitler from the start and joining the Nazi Party in 1925, his unflinching loyalty, coupled with his administrative abilities and utter ruthlessness, led to his appointment in 1928 as Reichsführer-SS, head of the
The outbreak of war in 1939 saw Himmler appointed commissioner for the consolidation of the German race, charged with eliminating “inferior” people from the Reich, and he set about expanding his concentration camps to detain opponents, Slavs and Jews. In September, Reinhard Heydrich—his talented protégé, head of both the SD intelligence service and Gestapo—ordered the forcible eviction of Jews from across the Reich into ghettos in Poland, where thousands were executed, starved or died from disease.
Tall, slim, athletic, blue-eyed and blond, though with broad feminine hips, Heydrich became Himmler’s chief organizer of the secret but colossal slaughter of Europe’s Jews. He specialized in clandestine intrigues, running a brothel to bug well-known patrons and using concentration-camp prisoners, murdered with injections, to provide the pretext for Hitler’s invasion of Poland.
Heydrich was born of musical parents in the city of Halle, near Leipzig, in 1904. His father was a Wagnerian opera singer and the respected headmaster of the Halle Musical Conservatory while his mother, who was extremely strict and regularly beat her son, was a talented pianist. Young Heydrich was never popular among his peers, who nicknamed him Moses because of (untrue) rumors that he had Jewish ancestry.
Deeply sensitive about these rumors, in his teens Heydrich came to believe in the supposed inherent superiority of the Germanic people, but he was totally uninvolved in politics until a social-professional scandal ended his naval career. After the First World War, Heydrich joined the navy where the ambitious but sensitive officer who played violin beautifully was teased for his supposed Jewish origins. He had just become engaged to Lina Von Osten when he was cashiered from the navy for a simultaneous sexual relationship with another woman. In 1931, at age twenty-seven, he joined the SS, impressing Heinrich Himmler during his interview with his knowledge of secret police techniques derived from his obsessional reading of American detective novels and police procedures. In 1933 he was promoted to brigadier general and given the responsibility of setting up the SD, the SS security service, where he identified the administrative talents of Adolf Eichmann, who became the Jewish expert of the SS.
In 1939 Heydrich was put in charge of the Reich Main Security Office, and after the invasion of Poland formed five SS
Himmler now proposed plans—put together with Heydrich—to Hitler to rid Europe of all Jews through “forced evacuation to the east”—their euphemism for physical extermination—the “final solution to the Jewish problem.” Hitler approved. In June 1941, following the invasion of the Soviet Union, Himmler—delegated to carry out “special tasks”—dispatched his SS
On January 20, 1942 Heydrich convened a meeting of the fifteen leading Nazi bureaucrats, many of them lawyers and eight of them possessing doctorates, in a large house in an affluent suburb of Berlin, near a picturesque lake called the Wannsee.