Heinrich Himmler

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 went on to join 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 acquired a reputation for good organisational skills and for selecting highly competent subordinates, such as Reinhard Heydrich. From 1943 onwards, he was both Chief of the Kriminalpolizei (Criminal Police) and Minister of the Interior, which gave him oversight of all police and security forces (including the Gestapo). He also controlled the Waffen-SS, a branch of the SS that served in combat alongside the Wehrmacht (Germany's armed forces) in World War II.

As the principal enforcer of the Nazis' racial policies, Himmler was responsible for operating concentration and extermination camps as well as forming the Einsatzgruppen death squads in German-occupied Europe. In this capacity, he played a central role in the genocide of an estimated 5.5–6 million Jews and the deaths of millions of other victims during the Holocaust. A day before the launch of Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, Himmler commissioned the drafting of Generalplan Ost, which was approved by Hitler in May 1942 and implemented by the Nazi regime, resulting in the deaths of approximately 14 million people in Eastern Europe.