The "what" of Himmler is laid out in horrifying detail; the "why" remains a mystery.

Heinrich Himmler: A Life by Peter Longerich 

5 Stars - My review is here.

Peter Longerich's Heinrich Himmler is an excellent book on the life of Heinrich Himmler. In 750 pages of text and 200 pages of endnotes, we learn what seems like everything there is to be known about the political career of the Reichsfuhrer-SS, with "political" meaning Himmler's indefatigable efforts to murder every Jew that he could extend his jurisdiction to. We also get an exhaustive look at Himmler's "origin story," including his parents' history and his youth, his frustrated WW I military ambitions, his friendships and his university years, and his decision to stay within the sphere of German post-war right-wing Volkisch radicalism.

I have not been - and am not now - a World War II "nut." I have had friends who can rattle off the details of the major campaigns of the Eastern Front and seem to be on a first name basis with Erwin Rommel. I've never really been interested in that level of information about the "tactical" details of National Socialism, but, recently, because of the late Christopher Hitchens' scurrilous and false claim that Nazism was "right wing Catholicism," I've been examining the Nazi years, which has raised the issue of how people subjected to the Nazi regime understood themselves in terms of that regime. I thought that looking at the life of Heinrich Himmler, born a Catholic but converted to one of the arch-anti-Catholics of the Nazi regime might shed some light on that question.

I found that the book was compelling history. To be fascinating to the non-"nut" - the person who is not obsessed with a particular historical topic - it helps if the historical subject has an inherent "gosh-wow!" factor. The life of Himmler, unfortunately, has that "gosh-wow!" factor. From an overall perspective, the arc of Himmler's life takes him from being someone who desperately wanted to be a soldier but never was, who went from being a low-level organizer of a not-terribly important part of Germany to organizing political speeches, which required that he also provide security for those speeches through a small group known as the Schutzstaffel (Protection Squad) aka the "SS," a side-line which took him to being the second most important politician at the end of World War II with a virtual empire of terror throughout Europe, and a responsibility for mass murder rivaling Genghis Khan.

In short, it is as if your Rotary Club's "program director" pushed the envelope of his job assignment and became "Dr. Evil."

Longerich does a good job of following Himmler's upward career path. Himmler's chief gift seems to have been his ability to be obsequious to superiors. Himmler did his job competently and without question, and, apparently, his personality was such that he was trusted, notwithstanding his ability to engage in the ultimate act of betrayal to his former mentors. Thus, for example, Himmler was brought into the right-wing Volkisch movement by Ernst Rohm, the head of the SA, and his career was fostered by being the protégé of "left-wing" Nazi Gregor Strasser. However, on the Night of Long Knives, Himmler had no difficulties in demonstrating his loyalty to Hitler by having his SS murder Rohm and Strasser, an act that Himmler subsequently touted as an indication of the toughness required of an "SS man."

Himmler's ascent seems almost effortless. Himmler seems to have simply accreted power and titles over time. His job as SS head seemed to logically imply that he should take over the police of various states, ultimately resulting in his being handed the Prussian secret state police, the Gestapo. The control over the police led to his control over concentration camps, which led to his control over Jewish policy, which led to his major role in the conquered territories, which led to the Waffen-SS, until eventually Himmler was the Interior Minister and, by the way, was also responsible for the department involved in farming a rubber substitute.

Longerich also demonstrates Himmler's single-minded determination to kill every last Jew in Europe, even when he was faced with opposition by Fascists. That last point struck me as surprising. It clearly doesn't fit the "narrative" that has been pressed for the last forty years that all of Christian Europe was just waiting for an opportunity to commit mass murder of the Jews, but it seems that Italy was a positive thorn in the side for Himmler, refusing to release any Jews to Himmler in Italy or in its zones of control in southern France and the Balkans. Himmler was able to seize Italian Jews only after Mussolini was removed from power, and Germany was able to take military control of Italy in 1943. The idea of Mussolini as protector of the Jews seems anomalous, but while he was no friend to the Jews, he was also no Himmler. Himmler had an easier time surmounting the opposition of Tiso in Slovakia and he was able to overcome Hungarian opposition to Jewish deportations with a coup.

For the wealth of information Longerich provides, we never do draw a real bead on Himmler's motivations. Longerich provides a lot of detail on Himmler's life before his Nazi years. We learn about his social awkwardness and his need to control the personal lives of others - something recreated by Himmler in the SS as prime mechanism of controlling his subordinates (along with the tried and true practice of giving disgraced failures from other walks of life a second chance in the SS.) But we don't see in those years the things that would make Himmler so very dedicated to the murder of Jews. Himmler's childhood exposure to anti-semitism was minimal, and there is nothing in his family upbringing that seems to have inculcated a hatred to Jews. During his university years, if anything, Himmler was exposed in Catholic circles to an anti-anti-semitic tendency; in a controversy over whether the dueling societies would permit dueling with Jews, the Catholic student organizations for matters of principle opposed the marginalization of Jews, although they remained traditionally anti-semitic on religious grounds (p. 34.)

It seems that during his early twenties - from age 23 to 25 - Himmler underwent a rejection of the values he had been raised in. It was during this period that the previously arch-Catholic Himmler rejected Catholicism and religious faith in favor of the weird interest in occultism and paganism that he would pursue throughout his life. Concomitant with this was his turn to racial anti-semitism. We don't really get a look at what caused this turn, except that Himmler seems to have "reasoned" his way into occultism, anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism by reading occultic, anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic books. (By the way, on that last, it's fascinating how often we find Himmler lumping "Jesuits" in with Jews as his particular bête noire. Himmler's attacks on the Jesuits and the Catholic Church are of a piece with the traditional liberal anti-Catholicism of the Kulturkampf. See The War against Catholicism: Liberalism and the Anti-Catholic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Social History, Popular Culture, and Politics in Germany).)

A weakness of the book is that we don't really get an investigation of what this turn meant to Himmler. After his university years, the private life of Himmler closes off. We do find out about Himmler's relationship with his wife, and his apparently close relationship with his daughter. We hear about his affair with his secretary and the creation of his second family. But we don't really get any sense of what those relationships meant for him; like the mass murder of the Jews, they are just data of his life, without emotional "qualia." Surprisingly, we get very little insight into Himmler's relationship with Hitler, albeit we learn from an observer of his short, ill-fated tenure as a military general at the very end of the war that he was terrified of disappointing Hitler.

Longerich's book caused me to realize that our view of the Nazis was that portion of the National Socialist project that belonged to Himmler. If we think about what we view as the distinctive features of National Socialism, we might think of the occultism, or the cult of race, or the idea of disciplined, emotionless, loyal elite willing to subordinate their humanity for their leader, or their Nazi "super-science," or the mass-murder of the Jews. All of those features were part of Himmler's vision of what National Socialism meant. Those features don't necessarily apply to other Nazi leaders, e.g., Hitler had disdain for Himmler's occultism and Rohm's view of National Socialism was not elitist. As Longerich points out "[i]f Himmler had been replaced in the 1930s by someone else, this specific and highly dangerous network of different powers would not have come into being. If on the other hand, these responsibilities had been distributed among several Nazi politicians as separate domains, Nazi policy could not have led to its dreadful consequences in quite the same way."(p. 747 - 748.)

Nothing in Himmler's childhood and youth point to the man he became. Take out - or change - that man and perhaps, perhaps, millions don't die. That is maybe the saddest of "gosh-wow!" observations - individuals matter to history.