Heinrich Himmler: A Life

✍ Scribed by Longerich, Peter

• Book ID: 108276617
• Publisher: OUP Oxford
• Year: 2011
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 1 MB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN-13: 9780199592326

✦ Synopsis

As head of the SS, chief of police, 'Reichskommissar for the Consolidation of Germanness', and Reich Interior Minister, Heinrich Himmler enjoyed a position of almost unparalleled power and responsibility in Nazi Germany. Perhaps more than any other single Nazi leader aside from Hitler, his name has become a byword for the terror, persecution, and destruction that characterized the Third Reich. His wide-ranging powers meant that he bore equal responsibility for the repression of the German
people on the home front and the atrocities perpetrated by the SS in the East. Yet, in spite of his central role in the crimes of the Nazi regime, until now Himmler has remained a colourless and elusive figure in the history of the period.

In this, the first-ever comprehensive biography of the SS-Reichsführer, leading German historian Peter Longerich puts every aspect of Himmler's life under the microscope. Masterfully interweaving the story of Himmler's personal life and political career with the wider history of the Nazi dictatorship, Longerich shows how skilfully he exploited and manipulated his disparate roles in the pursuit of his far-reaching and grandiose objectives. In the process, he illuminates the extraordinary
degree to which Himmler's own personal prejudices, idiosyncrasies, and predilections made their mark on the organizations for which he was responsible - especially the SS, which in so many ways bore the characteristic hallmarks of its leader, and whose history remains both incomplete and incomprehensible
without a detailed and intimate knowledge of its deeply sinister commander-in-chief.

Review

"[S]upremely enlightening." --Jacob Heilbrunn, The New York Times Book Review

"Splendid" - The Sunday Telegraph

"Longerich's study of Himmler's banal evil promises to bear the standard." --The Village Voice

"A masterpiece." --Richard J. Evans, author of The Coming of the Third Reich

"Peter Longerich, already the author of a distinguihed history of the Holocaust, has written a biography that tells us everything that the world could ever need to know about this most terrible, yet dreery, of Hitler's creatures....an authoritative record."--Max Hastings, NYORB

"A remarkable and wholly fascinating new book by Peter Longerich, a German historian who is among the world's leading scholars of the Holocaust and the Third Reich." --Jewish Journal

About the Author

Peter Longerich is Professor of Modern German History at Royal Holloway University of London and founder of the College's Holocaust Research Centre. He has published widely on the history of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, including Holocaust: The Nazi Murder and Persecution of the Jews, also published by Oxford University Press, which is widely recognized as the standard account of the Nazi machinery of mass murder and the steps by which it unfolded.