Heinrich Himmler

Epic card · No. 3046

Heinrich Luitpold Himmler (German: [ˈhaɪnʁɪç ˈluːɪtpɔlt ˈhɪmlɐ] ; 7 October 1900 – 23 May 1945) was a German Nazi politician, police administrator, and military leader. He was the fourth and longest-serving Reichsführer of the Schutzstaffel (Protection Squadron; SS), serving from 1929 to 1945. He was a leading member of the Nazi Party and one of the most powerful figures in Nazi Germany. He was also one of the main architects of the Holocaust, the genocide of European Jews during World War II. After serving in a reserve battalion during World War I without seeing combat, Himmler joined the Nazi Party in 1923. In 1925, he joined the SS, which was initially a small paramilitary arm of the Nazi Party that served as a bodyguard unit for Adolf Hitler. Himmler rose steadily through the SS's ranks to become Reichsführer-SS by 1929. Under Himmler's leadership, the SS grew from a 290-man battalion into one of the most powerful institutions in Nazi Germany. Over the course of his career, Himmler...

Read on Wikipedia · Image Friedrich Franz Bauer, CC BY-SA 3.0 de