Apart from his Master, Hitler, perhaps no man so personified the inherent evil of the Third Reich as Heinrich Himmler. At the height of his power he controlled the entire police apparatus in Nazi Germany and its conquered territories, the Gestapo, SS, Waffen-SS, the universe of concentration and extermination camps, and a vast slave labor force comprised of Jews, Gypsies, Poles, Russians and just about every other unfortunate people who came under the Nazi's heel. A spectacularly below average personality, Himmler rose through the ranks of Nazi party circles by being officious, detail oriented, and an effective counterweight to Ernst Roehm, head of Hitler's SA. When the Nazi's swept into power and Hitler became first Chancellor and then dictator, Himmler's career and power grew stopping only with his death by suicide after falling briefly into allied hands in 1945. He cheated a just tribunal and, no doubt, a just hangman.
Roger Manvell's Heinrich Himmler, coauthored with Heinrich Fraenkel, is a splendid biograpahy of Himmler. Detailed, but not overly so, Manvell's profile is excellent. Manvell first published this biography in the 1960s. During World War II, Manvell worked in Britain's Ministry of Information.
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