I sort of wished I had taken a picture of my wife’s face when I lifted (using my legs, not my back, because this thing’s heavy) Peter Longerich’s Heinrich Himmler from the Amazon box in which it was delivered. It is roughly the size of a toaster and the cover is adorned with a crisp black & white picture of a weak-chinned Nazi with rimless specs and a death’s head emblazoned on his cap. I suspect my wife would’ve been happier to see me haul out back issues of Jugs rather than a monstrous tome devoted to a monstrous twit. My wife’s furrowed brow asked the silent question that you may ask yourself, when confronted with this book at your local bookseller: do I really need to read a huge (750 pages of text, 200 pages of endnotes) biography about a hateful little henchman who presided over the deaths of millions of innocent people? The answer is no. Obviously. You don’t have to do anything. If you’re interested in World War II, however, you are going to be tempted to pick this up eventually. It is the full-dress treatment of the diminutive toad lurking in Hitler’s shadow in every history of the Third Reich. Heinrich Himmler was the head of the Schutzstaffel, a paramilitary organization best known as the SS. The SS began as a guard unit. Under Himmler, its duties expanded to include military formations, death squads, and concentration camp guards. His name, today, is synonymous with evil. In many ways, he out-Hitlered Hitler. When you read his life story, however, you also realize how amazingly unremarkable he was. For a man who revered the Teutonic Übermensch, Himmler had a below-average physique and extremely below-average looks. In terms of intellect, he was middling. Longerich’s biography is studded with long passages from his diary, and the themes he develops are strikingly average. It’s quite possible that Himmler never had a truly profound thought in his whole life. What Himmler lacked in appearance, intelligence, wit, skill, or strength, he made up for with ambition. The man had drive. He also had wild, ridiculous, unrealizable ideas. At any other time in history…well, he would’ve been lost to history. Just one more crackpot scribbling harebrained nonsense into a journal that nobody would ever read. Unfortunately for humanity, Himmler came of age during the tumultuous years of the Weimar Republic, following World War I. These confused times proved fertile ground for men of inflated self-esteem and grandiose delusions. In 1923, he joined his fate to that of the nascent Nazi Party. He was part of Ernst Rohm’s SA before joining the much smaller SS. Over time, as the SA came into disfavor, Himmler maneuvered the SS to take its place. Eventually, it became one of the most powerful organizations in the Third Reich. Longerich’s immensely-detailed biography begins with Himmler’s upbringing in a conservative Catholic family. Perhaps the most fascinating parts of the book are Himmler’s early diary entries, as he struggles with religion, girls, and sex. It’s fairly clear that Himmler was an awkward youth, unable to bridge the chasm between female friendships and actual physical intimacy. In response, Himmler resorted to a prudishness and hypermorality that he would later attempt to install in the SS. These early sections are the most intimate and human-focused of the book. They are also apt to be controversial, since they are minutely focused on Himmler’s inner-workings. In other words, his psychology. Historians hate psychology. They hate it more than jackets without elbow patches. Historians want to focus on what happened. And when they attempt to explain why something happened, they prefer to do so mechanically, by showing how one concrete event led to another. They prefer to avoid the human heart and the human mind as world-historical forces, because it’s a lot harder to quantify. To Longerich’s credit, he avoids getting anywhere near an argument that Himmler’s early childhood, adolescent formation, or upbringing caused him to become the murderous, sadistic Reichsführer-SS. Instead, Longerich shows us Himmler as the creepy weirdo he was. Certainly, his psychological hang-ups – well delineated by his own writings – informed his direction of the SS (e.g., the stringent racial criteria to get in; Himmler’s molding of the SS into a “family,” complete with SS swag sent to members every Christmas; the intrusive requirement that every SS man had to get Himmler’s permission to marry, etc., etc.).At a certain point in the book, Longerich eschews a chronological approach in favor of a thematic structure. Under this approach, each chapter focuses on a specific topic, ignoring other events that might be occurring simultaneously. For instance, a chapter on Himmler’s leadership style ranges from 1925 (the year he joined the SS) to 1945 (the year he bit down on a cyanide capsule). Other thematic chapters include surveys on Himmler’s insane (and I do mean insane) beliefs in the occult; his grand vision of the SS as avatars of racially pure excellence; and his deadly plans for resettling the East. (Himmler’s plans – most of which never even started – are so deviously detailed that it chills the blood). Longerich’s method means that readers without a relatively-detailed knowledge of World War II are apt to get lost. He skips about in time more often than Scott Bakula, without ever stopping to provide much context. Furthermore, the spotlight never wavers from Himmler’s receding chin. There is no effort to introduce or breathe life into the peripheral players in Himmler’s twisted world. This is one of those rare books where Adolf Hitler is confined to a role that barely qualifies as a walk across the stage. Heinrich Himmler has been translated from German into English. The translation is, in a word, toneless. It is as though an extremely proficient (and probably German-engineered) robot took Longerich’s German text and spit back a grammatically perfect but otherwise-lifeless English version. The fault here, I believe, is probably not with the translators. They cannot add music or rhythm to prose that is already dead. It’s more likely that Longerich’s writing is dry in every language. That makes getting through this doorstop a challenge and a test of intellectual will. The size of this biography is both a detriment and its allure. It is too long, too complicated, and too inertly written to lend itself to casual readers. Yet at the same time, a huge volume on a pivotal Nazi will prove irresistible for World War II buffs. Aside from Himmler’s childhood, there is nothing revelatory here, or facts you can’t get elsewhere (the personal side of the adult Himmler is not nearly as well documented as the child). The portrait that’s ultimately revealed is of a wildly-delusional man given a lot of free rein and power to implement his fantasies. One of the more interesting things Longerich showed was Himmler’s detachment from Hitler’s inner circle. Certainly, Himmler used Hitler to exercise power, but you don’t get the feeling that Himmler loved Hitler in the way that Goebbels and others did. Indeed, towards the end of the war, Himmler was chief among those willing to betray the Fuhrer. In the end, you get a good sense of the type of person Himmler was, based a lot on his own extensive scrawling. However, I’m not sure that this indispensable (or something most people care to learn). There are other better written books on the Nazi higher-command and the SS. The lasting takeaway of this book, at least for me, is the striking realization that Heinrich Himmler was once a child.
I give up! I surrender! I got to page 602 of this 1,050 paqe book and I simply could not proceed onward. It's flat out BORING!!! I expected to learn gripping, intimate details on Himmler, the SS, Himmler and Hitler, and more. Instead, I was deluged with numbers and statistics, with resettlement in towns and provinces too numerous to mention. Oh God, it was so boring. Okay, so Himmler started out as a quiet youth, unable to deal with females, which made him a prude until he was married in his mid-20s, and which later made him legislate morality to his SS troops. He had to approve each SS marriage personally. I learned he got a degree in agriculture and spent some time working in the field before somehow rising to be the head of the SS. I never figured out how that happened. At some point, he's working closely with Hitler (we're never given a good, let alone any, picture of Hitler in this book), yet there are absolutely no details at all as to how they met, when they met, where they met, what lead Hitler to promote this loser to such a vital role. There's nothing there. It boggles the mind. We learn about Himmer's hundreds of associates, underlings, and enemies. The name dropping is so intense, it's a wonder one can remember any names from the book at all. Now, the book does detail Himmler's vaguely anti-Semitic views in college, his vision of a pure German nation, his grand visions of resettling Europe and eventually ridding Europe and Russia of all Jews. However, it's hard to connect the dots. How does he go to looking down his nose at Jews to wanting to exterminate all of them, and how does he get tens of thousands of men under his command to murder them? I still don't know. Apparently, the goal was to relocate the Jews, first to Madagascar, and then later to Poland and Russia. How did that turn into mass murders? Also, Himmler was apparently as opposed to the Christian church as he was to the Jews, particularly the Catholics, of which he was raised. But he felt like he couldn't act on that because Hitler didn't want to persecute the Christians. That's never explained either. The book throws tons of numbers at you -- how many Jews from this town, from that ghetto, from this province, from that city are carted away monthly, first for forced labor, later for extermination. The numbers are overwhelming and become so commonplace that the horror of the situation is actually lessened by the deadening weight of giving numbers to the reader. Also, I wanted to read about the attack on Russia, but that was never really addressed. One day there's an attack, another day Himmler is touring the front lines. How did this happen? I could go on and on, but I'm boring myself now and that pretty much sums up my experience with this book. It could have been and should have been so much more -- some life could have been written into it -- but instead it reads like an electrical engineering textbook, which would put most people to sleep. Sadly, not recommended.
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Unfortunately we're still waiting for the definitive biography of Himmler, one of the most mysterious figures of the Third Reich. While Longerich fairly ably covers the events of Himmler's life and career, there are vast empty spaces. For example, he never deals with Himmler's relationship to and with Hitler, which simply boggles. Himmler's development into an important figure in the Nazi party more or less simply occurs - at one moment, Himmler is quietly raising chickens and dabbling in right wing politics, at the next he's the head of the SS.Huge gaps of this sort make this book far less important than it might have been; the way is still open for someone in the future to reveal this bizarre and horrible figure in all his complexity.The conversion to Kindle is very good; the translation to English is a bit toneless.
—Susan Paxton
I have been interested in the Third Reich for many years, and whilst we all know who Heinrich Himmler was, I have long thought that he deserved much more serious study than he still seems to receive. In this book, Peter Longerich confidently rises to the challenge. We see Himmler as the young man, the outsider; Himmler as the man haunted by the fact that he missed out on being able to fight in the Great War, and eager to make an impact of his own, in whatever way, on the future. We see Himmler as what could, and often is, described as the "effecient bureaucrat", restructuring government offices. We see Himmler as Reichsführer-SS, in charge of the Reich's police, and later as Reich Minister of the Interior, with which, by the end of the war, he literally had a finger in every pie.Perhaps most importantly, we see Himmler as a prime example of how an individual can act once he or she is put in a position of Power. Himmler experienced early adulthood in that curious time-frame located between the end of WWI and the Great Depression of the 1930s when strong opinions about political, economic, and social reordoring abounded, and not just in Germany. A member of the Nazi Party from the very beginning, Himmler progressively found himself in a position to make his own thoughts of how Europe should look a reality, and he was willing to use any means at his disposal to complete his mission. Hence, in his position as Reichsführer-SS, and later also as Reich Minister of the Interior, Himmler was able to implement many of his actions. Always conscious that he needed to obtain permission from "his Führer", he seems to have been able, in some ways, to manipulate Hitler, the very man who was capable of demoting him, by outlining his plans and obtaining approval, only to then act in a different or more direct way. He had the power to do so, and so he was going to use that power. It did not matter to him how many people would fall victim to his crucial reordering of society. He had been put in charge of it and, in his view, it simply had to be done.This is an in-depth, comprehensive biography of a man with a very complex character. Far from stupid and certainly not unintelligent, he seems to have been a very opinionated individual with a multi-layered personality. An extremely organised person, he was able to adapt and even change his actions according to what he felt was needed or demanded by Hitler, without ever losing view of his New Europe ideal and final objective. This is, in many ways, a double biography: that of Heinrich Himmler on the one hand, and that of the SS on the other. For the more Himmler reorganised his elite police force and the state which it patrolled, the more he needed to be in constant touch with it as an entity. Himmler himself was the SS: the very embodiment of Terror itself. The SS, in its turn, was Himmler: the physical representation of his darkest, most ambitious, thoughts.Within the ever changing boudaries of Himmler's ever changing thoughts, we are also introduced to the diverse aspects and origins of the "Final Solution": where it came from, how it took form, and how it evolved. An excellent read for anyone interested in the inner-workings of Hitler's Germany and the individuals who made the wheels go round, and of course, anyone who is interested in Holocaust topics or the SS as the terror machine that it was. There are plenty of opportunities for further reading from this book, and it includes an extensive bibliography and notes section. The biography and History presented in this book is, however, as complex as Himmler himself, and therefore I would not advise this to newcomers of Third Reich history.
—Stacey
Very interesting read on the high priest of Nazism and madness. The author did a good job of showing how Himmler's demented racial ideals became national policy - as crazy as that sounds. I echo the criticism of a fellow reviewer in that the author didn't delve into the relationship between Hitler and Himmler much, if at all. The book gets bogged down in somewhat irrelevant details, like crop yields from Himmler's wacky SS agricultural enterpises in occupied Europe, rather than filling him out with personal anectdotes from people that knew him, or his aforementioned relationship with Hitler. I was also looking for a more thorough analysis of Himmler in the last days of the Third Reich, his ridiculous attempt to take over the Nazi government while it was on its funeral pyre, and his even more ridiculous attempt to "negotiate" surrender with the Allies (from the Allies' perspective).
—Cary Lackey
