- Believed Adolf Hitler was the Messiah, appointed by God to lead Germany back to greatness and its "rightful" role as protector of the Christian faith and the Aryan race.
- He was the leader of the SS (Schutzstaffel), which began as Adolf Hitler's personal "Praetorian Guard" and was expanded by Himmler into a ruthless and murderous internal security apparatus that not only ran the concentration camps but also kept an eye on the regular army and even fielded its own military units, the famous Waffen-SS.
- One daughter: Gudrun Margarete Elfriede Emma Anna Himmler ( Munich, Germany, 8 August1929-- 24 May 2018, Munich, Germany) married Wulf-Dieter Burwitz .
- Was a poultry farmer.
- Although he was the mastermind of the Holocaust, Himmler was, oddly enough, remembered by contemporaries as an inconspicuous, even amiable person.
- Adolf Hitler made him the leader of his personal detail, the Schutzstaffel (SS), in January 1929. At that time the SS had only 280 members; by the time the Nazi Party seized power on 30 January 1933, the SS had grown to 52,000 fanatical and devoted protectors of Hitler and National Socialism.
- Although forever remembered as the commander of the Schutzstaffel (SS), he actually had nothing to do with the formation of the organization in 1925; he only became Reichsführer-SS in 1929. An associate of Adolf Hitler, Emil Maurice, was the original member #2 of the SS, effectively crediting him with the founding of the SS, and Julius Schreck was its first commander.
- In order to avoid being recognized, he shaved off his trademark mustache while attempting to escape from Bavaria after the Allied defeat of Nazi Germany.
- Although widely criticized as a military commander in January-March 1945 it is unlikely anyone could have performed successfully at that late stage in the war when Germany lacked an air force, fuel and tanks.
- The film Der Vater eines Mörders (1987) ("The Father of a Murderer") is based on the autobiographical novel by Alfred Andersch, who attended the Bavarian school run by Himmler's father (the murderer's father of the title).
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