May 23: Himmler’s End

Heinrich Himmler, head of the Nazi S.S. and Gestapo and a central architect of the Holocaust, committed suicide with a cyanide capsule on this date in 1945, following his capture by British forces. It was Himmler who oversaw the Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing squads) that slaughtered well over a million Jews following Germany’s invasion of Poland and the USSR, and who established the network of concentration camps and extermination camps that killed millions more Jews, as well as Roma, Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, homosexuals, and other victimized groups. It was also Himmler who provided the most explicit, public justifications for genocidal Nazi policies based on racist theories. At 23, he participated in Hitler’s 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, and he joined the SS two years later. By 1929, he headed the SS, and over the next four years built it up from a membership of under 300 to more than 50,000. In the winter of 1944-45, Himmler sought negotiations with the British and Americans as Germany’s “provisional leader.” (At an April 21 meeting with a representative of the World Jewish Congress, he said he wanted to “bury the hatchet” with the Jews and he agreed to release 1,000 women internees at the Ravensbruck concentration camp.) His overtures were ignored by the Allies and he was captured near the Danish border while trying to escape in disguise. Himmler’s suicide preempted his prosecution at the Nuremburg war crimes trial.

“This is something that is easily said: ‘The Jewish People will be exterminated,’ says every Party member, ‘this is very obvious, it is in our program — elimination of the Jews, extermination, a small matter.’ And then they turn up, the upstanding 80 million Germans, and each one has his decent Jew. They say the others are all swine, but this particular one is a splendid Jew. But none has observed it, endured it. Most of you here know what it means when 100 corpses lie next to each other, when there are 500 or when there are 1,000. To have endured this and at the same time to have remained a decent person — with exceptions due to human weaknesses — has made us tough, and is a glorious chapter that has not and will not be spoken of.” —Heinrich Himmler, October 4, 1943