Why did himmler join the nazis

By June , when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Himmler controlled not only the police but the political administration of the occupied territories and, through his control of the SS, the concentration camp system.

In , Hitler appointed Himmler minister for the interior. In this post he oversaw the 'Final Solution' - the attempt to exterminate all the Jewish people in Europe - and administered the system of forced labour. After the failed attempt on Hitler's life in July , Himmler's position was strengthened still further. But as Germany's defeat became imminent, Himmler made attempts to negotiate with the Allies. Hitler was furious and stripped Himmler of all his offices. Following Germany's surrender, Himmler tried to escape under a false identity but was captured by the Allies.

On 23 May he committed suicide in custody. Search term:. Read more. A skilled organizer and a capable manager who understood how to obtain and use power, Himmler was the ideological and organizational driving force behind the rise of the SS. Moreover, he understood his SS men and knew how to secure their loyalty to his own person and to the concept of the Nazi elite to which they belonged. His ability to give his subordinates leeway to exercise initiative to implement Nazi policy was a significant factor in the murderous success of many SS operations.

When he took over the SS, Himmler recognized the importance of internal security and determination of racial purity for the Nazi movement and successfully expanded the functions of the SS to meet these ideological and practical needs.

Himmler understood the importance of police power separated from legal constraint and state supervision; he persuaded Hitler—over the arguments of powerful rivals in the party and the state—that fusion of SS and police would forge the instrument for the Nazi regime to achieve its core, long-term ideological goals. It was Himmler whom Hitler entrusted with the planning and implementation of the "Final Solution. I mean here…the annihilation of the Jewish people…. Most of you will know what it means when corpses lie side by side, or or 1,….

This page of glory in our history has never been written and will never be written…. We had the moral right, we were obligated to our people to kill this people which wanted to kill us. After the failure of the July 20, , attempt to assassinate Hitler, Himmler toyed with the idea of negotiating a separate peace with the western Allies while continuing to fight the Soviet Union.

During the winter of , he considered using concentration camp prisoners as a bargaining chip to initiate such negotiations. In part because the Allies would not negotiate with a man so implicated in Nazi crimes, and, in part because Himmler could not quite separate himself from Hitler or the belief that somehow the Germans would win the war, his half-hearted feelers came to nothing.

Eisenhower, the commander-in-chief of the Allied forces. News of the offer reached Hitler in encircled Berlin on the night of April , In one of his last official acts, Hitler stripped Himmler of all of his offices and ordered his arrest. Despite having continuously assured his SS officers and men that he ultimately would take responsibility for all of their actions, the end of the war found Himmler dressed in Secret Field Police uniform with papers in the name of Heinrich Hitzinger.

Captured by Russian soldiers on May 20, , he was turned over to the British, to whom he eventually confessed his identity. While undergoing a body search on May 23, , Himmler killed himself by biting down on a cyanide capsule hidden in his mouth for that very purpose. We would like to thank Crown Family Philanthropies and the Abe and Ida Cooper Foundation for supporting the ongoing work to create content and resources for the Holocaust Encyclopedia.

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Glossary : Full Glossary. Heinrich Himmler. More information about this image. Its remit was to find where exactly those extraordinary beings from Atlantis had gone after the bolt from the blue and the resultant deluge, and where traces of the great race still remained and could be discovered.

One was Ernst Schafer, a gifted zoologist. Schafer was young, barely twenty-eight years old, and had been to the India-China-Tibet border twice earlier. In the post-war years, he attempted to either downplay or altogether deny his Nazi connections, but the truth was that he had joined the SS soon after the Nazi triumph of , much before Himmler acted as his patron for the Tibet expedition.

Schafer was crazy about hunting and loved to gather all sorts of trophies in his home situated in an elite neighbourhood in Berlin. Sometime in late , Schafer took his wife Hertha out for a duck hunt on a lake near the German-Polish border. He was about to shoot from the boat they were in, when he slipped. She died within an hour. The second key man on the team was Bruno Beger, a young anthropologist who had joined the SS in The ship carrying the five Germans docked at Colombo early in May From there, they took another one to Madras and a third one to Calcutta.

The British authorities in India had been pretty wary of the travelling Germans and saw them as nothing but a bunch of spies.