SS Reichsfiihrer Heinrich HimmIer was head of the entire Nazi

SS Reichsfiihrer Heinrich HimmIer was head of the entire Nazi police force
including SD and the Gestapo, he was Minister of the Interior and commander of
the Waffen SS and the Home Army. One of Hitler's most sinister henchmen, he
was also in charge of the death camps in the East. The account of Himmler's life
and his impact on the rise and fall of the Nazi state make a gripping and
horrifying story.
Although Adolf Hitler held the ultimate responsibility for what became the
Holocaust, it was Heinrich Himmler who essentially laid the plans and devised
the schemes that led to the killings of six million Jews.
Himmler quickly moved up the ranks, and once Hitler became Chancellor in 1933
Himmler became the head of the Munich police. From this position he organized
the first concentration camp at Dachau and began to organize the Nazi political
police throughout Germany.
In April of 1934 he was named assistant chief of the Prussian Gestapo, the secret
police, and in June of 1934, Himmler successfully crushed the paramilitary SA~
headed by Ernst Rohm, making the SS the dominant organization in Germany.
From a number ofletters and speeches of Himmler it becomes clear, that he
referred to the annihilation of the Jews in Europe - the Holocaust - as a task
which he had to carry out on the behalf of the highest authority in the Third Reich
- Adolf Hitler.
In 1941, Himmler summoned Rudolf Hoess, SS Commandant of the largest
killing center ever created, the death camp Auschwitz. He told him that "the
FUhrer had given the order for a Final Solution of the Jewish Question" and that
"we, the SS, must carry out that order"
Reinhard Heydrich was one of Hitler's most ruthless Nazis and second in
importance only to Heinrich Himmler in the Nazi SS organization and the
principle planner of the Final Solution. There was even talk of his one day
succeeding Adolf Hitler.
At a villa on the shores of a suburban Berlin lake called the Wannsee, mid-level
bureaucrats from a number of Nazi agencies assembled January 20, 1942, at the
request of Heydrich. Heydrich and his boss, Heinrich Himmler were in the
process of assuming leadership in the Final Solution of the Jewish Question, i.e.,
the murder of Europe's Jews by the Nazis.
This meeting was a part of that process, as bureaucratic coordination would be
required for the massive efforts to be undertaken throughout Europe to kill the
11,000,000 Jews described in the document. The Nazis ultimately succeeded in
killing six million of Europe's Jews, with hundreds of thousands already dead by
the time of this meeting.
By mid 1942, mass gassing of Jews using Zyklon-B began at Auschwitz in
occupied Poland, where extermination was conducted on an industrial scale with
some estimates running as high as three million persons eventually killed through
gassing, starvation, disease, shooting, and burning.
One of the most feared and hated Nazi leaders of World War II, Adolf Eichmann
was responsible for the deaths of millions of Jews.
He was born in Solingen on 19 March 1906. Later the family moved to Linz,
Austria, where Adolf Eichmann spent his youth. A member of the Austrian Nazi
party, he quickly rose through the ranks. 1938 he headed the Austrian office for
Jewish emigration where he brought together all the bureaucratic agencies needed
for Jewish expulsion.
In December 1939 Eichmann was transferred to dealing with Jewish affairs and
evacuation, and for the next six years Eichmann's office was the headquarter for
the implementation of the Final Solutioll- his assigmmmt was to murder all the
Jews in Europe.
Eichmann oversaw the deportation to the concentration camps and his efficient
organization rounded up and transported millions to their deaths at infamous
camps such as Auschwitz, Chelmno, Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec. But only in
Budapest after March 1944 did the desk-murderer Adolf Eichmann become a
public personality, working in the open and playing a leading role in the massacre
of Hungarian Jewry.
Rudolf Hoess was history's greatest mass murderer, the architect and SS
Commandant of the largest killing center ever created, the death camp Auschwitz,
whose name has come to symbolize humanity's ultimate descent into evil.
Responsible for exterminating 2.5 million people in World War II, he was a mildmannered, happily married Catholic who enjoyed normal family life with his five
children despite his view of the crematoria chimney stacks from his bedroom
window.
At peak efficiency Auschwitz had the capacity to 'get rid of ten thousand people
in 24 hours, 'as RudolfHoess would testify during the War Crimes Trials after
WW2. Witness after witness, document after document produced irrefutable
evidence of the crimes committed, and no witness was more shocking than
RudolfHoess, who calmly explained how he had come to exterminate 2.5
million people.
Rudolf Franz Hoess was born in 1900 and joined the SS in 1933. In 1934 he was
attached to the SS at Dachau, on August I, 1938, he was adjutant of the
Sachsenhausen KZ camp until his appointment as Commandant of the newlybuilt camp at Auschwitz early 1940, located nearby the provincial Polish town of
Oshwiecim in Galacia.
May 1941 the SS commander Heinrich Himmler said to Hoess, that Adolf Hitler
had given orders 'for the final solution of the Jewish question. I have chosen the
Auschwitz camp for this purpose'.
Hoess converted Auschwitz into an extermination camp arid installed gas
chambers and crematoria. Auschwitz became the killing centre where the largest
numbers of European Jews were killed. After an experimental gassing there in
September 1941 of 850 malnourished and ill prisoners, mass murder became a
daily routine.
SS Hauptsturmfiihrer Alois Brunner - the last leading Nazi still believed to be
on the loose and Eichmann's second in command - was a key figure in the
planning and execution of the Final Solution, the murder of 6 million Jews during
World War II. He actively participated in the mass murder and was often sent by
Eichmann as a trouble shooter to areas such as France to expedite the killings.
Alois Brunner bears direct responsibility for the deportation to Nazi death camps
of 128,500 Jewish men, women and children from Austria, Greece, France, and
Slovakia.
The arrest and conviction of Alois Brunner remains the top priority ofleading
Nazi hunters and war investigators but Brunner has successfully eluded justice.
During his many years hiding out reportedly in an apartment on Haddad Street in
the Syrian capital of Damascus, he openly assisted the Syrians in establishing
their own secret police.
The Syrian authorities have covered and continue to cover Alois Brunner and he
may never pay for his crimes. Germany, Austria, Slovakia, France and Poland
currently seek his extradition, but the Syrians have been totally uncooperative in
response to all these requests.
Alois Brunner was born in Austria in 1912 and joined the Austrian Nazi Party in
1931 at the age of 19. His anti-Semitism was considered to be so extreme that he
was swiftly tapped to be Adolf Eichmann's private secretary. As head of the
Nazi's Jewish affairs office in prewar Vienna, he organized persecution that
forced thousands of Jews to flee to other European countries and the United
States.
When World War II started, he sent 47,000 Austrian Jews to the KZ camps. After
organizing mass roundups in Berlin, he transferred to Greece, where he was
responsible for deporting all 43,000 Jews in Salonika within just two months.
Josef Mengele
During the Holocaust Josef Mengele was the chief provider for the gas chambers
at Auschwitz. When it was reported that one block was infected with lice,
Mengele solved the problem by gassing all the 750 women assigned to it.
The memory of this slightly built man, scarcely a hair out of place, his dark green
tunic neatly pressed, his face well scrubbed, his Death's Head SS cap tilted
rakishly toone side, remains vivid for those who survived his scrutiny when they
arrived at the Auschwitz railhead. Polished boots slightly apart, his thumb resting
on his pistol belt, he surveyed his prey with those dead gimlet eyes. Death to the
left, life to the right.
Four hundred thousand souls - babies, small children, young girls, mothers,
fathers, and grandparents - were casually waved to the left hand side with a flick
of the cane clasped in a gloved hand.
Mengele did a number of medical experiments of unspeakable horror at
Auschwitz~ using twins. These twins as young as five years of age were usually
murdered after the experiment was over and their bodies dissected.
Mengele injected chemicals into the eyes of children in an attempt to change their
eye color. Unfortunately a strict veil of secrecy over the experiments enabled
Mengele to do his work more effectively.