Himmler’s political career, and thereby to gain insights that will illuminate
his later life. This method makes it altogether possible to explain what
motivated this ‘young man from a good family’ to join the radical right-
wing splinter party, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party
(NSDAP), in the mid-1920s, and what impelled someone who was fairly
weak physically and nondescript in appearance to develop the protection
squad (Schutzstaffel) he commanded into the martial SS and steer it on a
course of selecting only the racially perfect. His personality also allows us to
draw conclusions about what moved Himmler in the following years to
stick stubbornly to his post in spite of defeats and frustrations, and to work
consistently to build up a power structure that exercised decisive control
over the territory under German domination. As far as the unprecedented
crimes he organized are concerned, his own justification of them is indis-
solubly bound up with his biography, with his notion of ‘decency’, which
on closer inspection turns out to be no more than a label for petit-bourgeois
double standards.
A Himmler biography can, however, achieve much more. For if we
build up a biographically coherent picture, with both chronological and
synoptic analysis, of the diverse activities for which Himmler, as Reichs-
fu
¨
hrer-SS, Chief of the German Police, Reich Commissar for the Consoli-
dation of the Ethnic German Nation, Reich Minister of the Interior, and
Commander of the Reserve Army, was responsible, we are in a position to
recognize that the individual fields of political activity for which Himmler
was responsible were much more strongly interlinked than is commonly
supposed. In addition, surprising coincidences of timing come to light that
have not been recognized in research to date.
Research up to now on the history of the SS and Nazi Party structures has
concentrated above all on the reconstruction of the mass crimes carried out
by the SS (with the Holocaust clearly the main focus of attention), as well as
on its various spheres of action. Thus, repression, racial extermination, the
Waffen-SS, settlement and ethnic policies, espionage, and so on were
considered primarily as a series of separate pillars of the SS empire. Yet if
an explanation is sought for what held this exceptionally heterogeneous
apparatus together and for how it came, in the course of time, to seek more
and more tasks, to extend its areas of activity, and, on several occasions, to
redefine itself, then the focus must be turned onto the life story of the man at
its head. For Himmler was to redefine the role of the SS repeatedly, in
clearly distinguishable phases of its existence.
4 prologue