A Forgotten Hero by Shelley Emling

Author:Shelley Emling
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ECW Press
Published: 2019-05-20T16:00:00+00:00

Oddly enough, Folke and Himmler actually had quite a bit in common. Both, in spite of enjoying the outdoors and exercise, suffered from constant stomach issues. Both, while diligent, were never brilliant students. Both attended church and were fairly prim and proper as young men. Both enjoyed helping people, with Himmler often visiting the sick and assisting old people as a young man. The men even married in the same year, 1928, while harboring military career aspirations.

And yet Himmler went on to become Hitler’s number two and the architect of the Holocaust, a man who fit mass murder and occasional visits to his mistress, Bunny, in between curling matches, sauna sessions, and phone calls to his family.

Although many of Himmler’s diary pages were discovered shortly after the war, some 1,000 pages that had been missing for more than 70 years were discovered in 2016 in an archive in Moscow, where they were stashed in a folder labeled only with the word “diary.” The diaries were published by Germany’s Bild newspaper, with many of the details translated in the British press. The documents are being studied by the director of the German Historical Institute in Moscow, Nikolaus Katzen, who told Bild they are of “outstanding historical significance” and made him “shudder.”

In them, Himmler noted everything from the banal details about his various working trips and leisure activities to his thoughts on the gassing of hundreds of prisoners and a lavish SS banquet he attended immediately after observing one such execution. In one entry, Himmler referred to a “comradely” lunch at the Dachau concentration camp, the scene of 41,500 murders. In another, he “took a snack in the café at the SS casino” at Buchenwald, where 56,000 people were killed. Himmler wrote of playing cards, gazing at the stars, or watching films in between meetings with Hitler and senior Nazi officials, during which they plotted and hashed over details of the Endlösung.

The paper reported that Himmler often began his days with two-hour massage sessions, and called home to speak with his wife, Margarete, and blond pigtailed daughter, Gudrun Burwitz — whom he called “Puppi” or little doll — nearly every day. (That ever-loyal daughter, who referred to her beloved father as “Papi,” remained an unrepentant neo-Nazi until her death on May 24, 2018 at the age of 88.) One entry outlined how, one day in 1944, Himmler had a massage before overseeing the shooting of 10 Polish detainees. On the same day, he called for new guard dogs at Auschwitz “capable of ripping apart everyone but their handlers.”

The diaries illustrate how Himmler was obsessed with astrology. He was absolutely captivated by the Aryan myths on which Nazi propaganda was built. He was also fascinated by strange diets and, in 1943, told Hitler that the trapped SS soldiers in Stalingrad should be fed the same dried rations as the ones that Genghis Khan gave his warriors.

“The most interesting thing for me is this combination of doting father and cold-blooded killer,” Damian Imöhl, the journalist who helped track down the diaries for Bild, told the Times of London.

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