Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Himmler by Peter Padfield Himmler by Peter Padfield. Anthony Storr in Dimensions , vol.6, No 2. Padfield writes clearly, and, judging from Himmler 's reference notes and bibliography, it is apparent that his research is thorough and his knowledge of his subject encyclopedic. The reader can be assured that this book contains all the facts that he could possibly want to know about Himmler, who was one of the four or five most powerful men in the Third Reich. . In June 1936, Hitler promoted Himmler to the position of Chief of the German Police. Himmler's combined offices gave him unrivaled power, second only to that of Hitler. He could now proceed with his acknowledged aim of ridding the Reich of its enemies: 'Jews, Bolsheviks, priests, homosexuals'. Padfield calls this operation 'the cleansing of the German nation', and there can be little doubt that Himmler's anal-sadistic character structure inclined him to look upon mass murder as a purge, a way of clearing out the poisonous filth which had accumulated in the bowels of the German nation. The story of the decline and fall of the Third Reich, of the von Stauffenberg plot against Hitler, of Germany's final defeat, and of Hitler's suicide has often been told, but never, perhaps, more competently than in these pages. Padfield, for the most, stays with the facts and declines speculation. He has a gift for narrative, and his account of Himmler's capture by the Allies is riveting. . Yet Himmler was not essentially different from many people whom we daily encounter. Indeed, many visitors found him charming, considerate, and unusually polite. I am sure Padfield is correct when he writes: 'There is no entity 'Himmler' capable of being viewed in isolation; if there had been it is apparent that that 'Himmler' would have had neither the self-confidence nor the power to have ordered helotry and genocide. We are peering dimly into a madhouse, but it is a communal asylum, and the inmates go home in the evening and discuss homeopathic medicine or read their children bedtime fairy tales. We are not dealing with individual psychopaths; we are not dealing with a Reichsf�hrer who was merely the sum of Heinrich Himmler's genes and experiences, a man who could be described as either 'indecisive' or 'ruthless' or labelled with any of the attributes he has been given here.' . what Padfield describes as a 'madhouse' and a 'communal asylum' had been in the making for years. The urge to create a mythical medieval Germany populated only by the Volk was already evident in the eighteenth century. Delusional systems which affect nations and those which affect individuals are closely similar. I think it absolutely essential that Holocaust studies continue to remind us that whole societies, as well as individuals, can become delusional. Those fortunate enough to lead reasonably equable lives in a modern democracy have no conception of how they might behave in circumstances of extreme deprivation and demoralization. You and I may complacently assume that we would never follow a leader like Hitler or succumb to the delusional system which he promulgated. But we were not there. We cannot be sure. Book Preview , April 1990. . With the exception of Bradley F.Smith's Heinrich Himmler, A Nazi in the Making 1900-1926 (1971) [biographies of Himmler]. have treated his childhood and youth superficially and tended to describe him in clich�s. It is high time a new biography appeared which considered his formative years in detail and analysed his complex motives in the psychoanalytical and ideological terms they demand. Peter Padfield's is such a biography. It is a responsible, well-written biography which neither flinches from nor wallows in macabre detail. Padfield's description of Himmler's youth, for which he acknowledges his debt to Bradley Smith's spadework, is especially fascinating. . [It] is the most compelling biography of any Nazi leader now available, and will probably be good for another fifty years yet. Telford Taylor, US Chief of Counsel for War Crimes Office, 1946-49, 1.2.1991. Peter Padfield's book on Heinrich Himmler is the first solid and readable account of Heinrich Himmler's place and purpose as the most destructive of the Nazi leaders. It is a fine piece of historical work. John Keegan in The Daily Telegraph , 14.7.1990. . the 'SS state' was the engine which made Nazi tyranny work. How did Himmler do it ? Peter Padfield, whose biography of Admiral D�nitz is one of the most important studies of Nazi leadership, labours at enormous length to supply the answer. He spares the reader nothing in the process, making this a book which at times is difficult, if not impossible, to read page for page. Yet he does not in the end provide a solution, and perhaps no one can. . [he] seems to come nearest the truth when he writes that Himmler's ultimate inability to keep silent about what he himself insisted should be an eternal secret welled up from a 'primal, childlike understanding that he had sinned, sinned in the sight of the Lord'. Giles Macdonogh in Weekend FT , 22.7.1990. It can be no easy job writing the life of a monster like Himmler. Mr Padfield has convincingly sifted the evidence while steering clear of the pitfalls. His is a black biography, as black as the uniforms of Himmler's praetorian guard, the SS. Richard Overy in The Observer , 17.6.1990. . [Himmler's] story is a chilling reminder of what happens when, by chance more than design, fanatics get their hands on the instruments of state power. Donald Cameron Watt in The Sunday Times , 24.6.1990. . Padfield is a writer of great power. The scenes he paints of what the SS did in its 'police' role, and in the camps, where it reflected most clearly the effect of unfettering Himmler's mish-mash of caf� Stammtisch racialism, half-educated conspiratorialism, thwarted sexuality, locker-room machismo and wagon-lit philosophy, are as graphic and horrible as our imaginations can grasp, a hell on earth more terrible than any medieval artist or Calvinist theologian could depict. Padfield is not the first to portray it. But he is not the least effective. Jeremy Noakes in Jewish Chronicle , 20.7.1990. Peter Padfield' well-written biography captures Himmler's complex personality extremely well. Through a judicious use of psychological theory and shrewd psychological insights he paints a very persuasive portrait of Himmler's development from a comparatively normal middle-class Bavarian schoolboy into a monster who as Reichsf�hrer-SS either initiated or supervised the worst Nazi crimes. The author describes the personal traits and the context of family, school, and the wider society which combined to form Himmler's personality, depicting him as the product as much of a deeply disturbed society as of his own particular character defects. A.L.Rowse in The Sunday Telegraph , 12.8.1990. Of all the quite able thugs and gangsters who ran Nazi Germany Himmler has hitherto been thought the most charmless. Also the most mysterious; we knew so little about him. We have no excuse for not knowing about him now, after Peter Padfield's thorough, conscientious and compulsively readable investigation. Nigel Jones in London Magazine , October/November 1990. . The name Himmler has long been a popular byword for the bogeyman of nightmares, but the actual historical figure of the Reichsf�hrer has remained blurred; obscured behind those rimless spectacles and the feared black uniform of the SS. No longer. For this massive biography Peter Padfield has painstakingly documented all that we need to know about the architect and overlord of the Nazi empire of terror. It is not, as Padfield readily admits, a work of original scholarship. There are no interviews with Himmler's surviving intimates, and no startling new facts are unearthed. Nevertheless, Padfield has methodically read through a mass of material, organised the salient details and told the story with just the right historical objectivity, leavened with an understandable revulsion for his subject. The moral left by the book is a chilling one. For what is most striking about Heinrich Himmler is his desperate ordinariness. Philip Keer on Book Choice , Channel 4 TV, 29.6.1990. At the end of the week it took me to read Peter Padfield's life of this unlikely mass murderer I found myself reaching for the mouthwash. I shudder to think how Padfield himself must have felt after reputedly spending five years of his life peering into Himmler's diaries, letters, speeches and file notes, but the result, the first full-scale biography of the Reichsf�hrer-SS, as well as being, I think, the most accurate life of any of the Nazi leaders, is also the most chilling portrait of evil that I have ever read. Richard Heller in The Mail on Sunday , 17.6.1990. Peter Padfield. writes with massive authority and lucidity, and (as far as possible) objectivity. [His] catalogue of Himmler's evil is mind-numbing. Richard Lamb in The Spectator , 21.7.1990. . Clear writing and much detail about atrocities bring sharply to life the unbelievable horrors of Nazi rule. Himmler gave the superficial impression of good manners and prudishness, but in fact he was a sadistic thug without conscience; he was also corrupt and accumulated a large fortune. Hitler trusted him and allowed him to practise his brutality all over Europe where death camps and slave labour made the impact of this frenzied, half- crazed creature awe-inspiring. Pertinently, Padfield quotes the evidence of a survivor of Auschwitz and Ravensbr�ck at Nuremberg: 'Himmler had a systematic and implacable urge to use human beings as slaves and to kill them when they could no longer work.' . Padfield has used his talents well to shed light upon many shocking facets of this sad period. Publishers' Weekly (U.S.) , 18.1.1991. Impeccably documented, compulsively readable, this is the first full-length biography of the most powerful and coldblooded of Hitler's lieutenants. Before his suicide in 1945 Himmler had ruled the SS and Gestapo, directed the death camps in Poland, headed German intelligence services, and run the slave-labor system in the Reich. He also was responsible for pseudo-medical experiments in the death camps. Delving into the family background and upbringing of this terrible, yet strangely ordinary man, Padfield analyzes the master-race theories that inspired Himmler and comes impressively close to explaining how a priggish, idealistic Bavarian boy turned into history's most ruthless slaughterer. A powerful and horrifying narrative by the author of D�nitz: The Last F�hrer. Marc Fisher in Washington Post Book World , 6.9.1991. . Padfield. works hard to place Himmler not on the lunatic fringe, but closer to the center of a society that had demonstrated its attachment to a racial view of the world long before the rise of the National Socialists. He repeatedly turns to evidence that the German public knew more about Nazi oppression than many Germans today wish to concede. . the biography is a convincing collection of evidence that serves up sometimes numbing detail in a clear,unobtrusive style. William Mathewson in Wall Street Journal , 25.6.1991. . Himmler is a valuable addition to the annals of modern history's most horrifying period. For while der treue Heinrich (faithful Heinrich), as he was called by Hitler before the betrayal, cheated the judges at Nuremberg by means of a cyanide capsule, he is brought before the bar of history by Mr. Padfield and found guilty - with no extenuating circumstances. Professor Larry V.Thompson in Chicago Tribune , 19.5.1991. . Padfield insists that Himmler's transformation from romantic idealist to racial revolutionary cannot be understood solely in psycopathic terms, or as an unbridled lust for power, or as the acts of an efficient bureaucratic sycophant gone amok. He suggests that Himmler became a racial executioner primarily because those surrounding him encouraged it and German society sanctioned it. 'A man is not what he does so much as what he is allowed to do; otherwise what would each of us not do to change the world and ourselves ?' Having posed this question, Padfield. demonstrates that Himmler institutionalized evil with considerable social approval. Padfield thinks Himmler's metamorphosis occurred in his early 20s, when he absorbed the shock of a lost war while undergoing doubts about his manhood. His country had no future, and neither did he. In a diary, he equated personal with national humiliation. Too young to serve in the war, he agonized over his inability to discipline himself in social or sexual intercourse. Often retreating into heroic and maudlin fantasies, he immersed himself in racist literature and became a political activist. Politics convinced Himmler that his and Germany's misfortune were caused by Jews, Freemasons, Bolshevism and modernism in general. Padfield superbly analyzes Himmler's patient and calculated campaign for personal and organizational stature. [he] stalks an elusive figure and defines him better than any effort to date. Himmler by Peter Padfield. Completing the CAPTCHA proves you are a human and gives you temporary access to the web property. What can I do to prevent this in the future? If you are on a personal connection, like at home, you can run an anti-virus scan on your device to make sure it is not infected with malware. If you are at an office or shared network, you can ask the network administrator to run a scan across the network looking for misconfigured or infected devices. Another way to prevent getting this page in the future is to use Privacy Pass. You may need to download version 2.0 now from the Chrome Web Store. Cloudflare Ray ID: 6618ac7e6b5805b7 • Your IP : 116.202.236.252 • Performance & security by Cloudflare. Margarete Himmler. Margarete (Marga) Siegroth, the daughter of Hans Siegroth, a landowner, was born at Goncerzewo in West Prussia, on 9th September, 1893. During the First World War she worked as a nurse in a military hospital. She married briefly but she later divorced her husband. Marga Boden ran a clinic in Berlin that was purchased for her by her father. In 1926 she met Heinrich Himmler in a hotel lobby at a Bavarian resort, Bad Reichenhall. He immediately saw her as his ideal woman. His brother, Gebhard Himmler, claimed he was particularly attracted to her blonde hair and her blue eyes. According to Peter Padfield, the author of Himmler: Reichsfuhrer S.S. (1991): "Undoubtedly she impressed him as truly Aryan, although there was a width to her face and frame more suited to Wagnerian opera than to the ideal of Nordic womanhood." It has been claimed by Hugh Thomas that Himmler had great difficulty in finding girlfriends: "The simple truth was that despite the moral bluster of the diaries, he lacked confidence. His timidity was probably largely based on his awareness of his looks. However, any potential sense of inadequacy was translated into contempt for those who did not share his limitations. Rather than consider his want of sexual success as undermining his masculinity, he grandly assumed the role of heroic defender of both men's and women's purity." At the age of twenty-one he had written in his diary: "I have experienced what it is like. to get all fired up. The girls are so far gone they no longer know what they are doing. It is the hot unconscious longing for the whole individual, for the satisfaction of a really powerful natural urge. For this reason it is also dangerous for the man, and involves so much responsibility. Depraved as they are of their will power, one could do anything with these girls and, at the same time one has to struggle with oneself." Otto Strasser claims that Marga, aged thirty-four, and therefore eight years older than Himmler, seduced him. Himmler told Strasser that she was the first woman with whom he had sexual relations. Himmler was a close friend of Adolf Hitler, the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) and at this time was Gauleiter (district leader) in Lower Bavaria. Margarete and Heinrich Himmler. They married in July 1928 and decided to buy a a poultry farm. Peter Padfield has pointed out: "Margarete ran a clinic she had opened with her father's money in Berlin. Apparently she distrusted conventional medicine; she was more interested in homeopathy, hypnosis, the old herbal remedies of the country. Despite having set herself up in Berlin, a sink of decadence according to his ideas, she apparently shared all his views of the good life of the land, so much so that she was prepared to sell her clinic and buy a smallholding to work with him." A daughter, Gudrun Himmler, was born on 8th August, 1929. She was named after a character in a novel written by Himmler's favourite writer, Werner Jansen. Seven months earlier Himmler had become the new leader of Hitler's personal bodyguard, the Schutzstaffel (SS). At that time it consisted of 300 men. Himmler personally vetted all applicants to make sure that all were good "Aryan" types. Himmler later remembered that: "In those days we assembled the most magnificent Aryan manhood in the SS-Verfugungstruppe. We even turned down a man if he had one tooth filled." Gundrun with her father, Heinrich Himmler. In 1932 Himmler sold the house and poultry farm in Waldtrudering and moved into a flat close to Hitler's apartment. He also purchased a large villa at Gmund on the Tegernsee, a lake south-east of Munich enclosed by mountains. Marga Himmler established herself there with Gudrun, whom they called "Puppi". The following year they adopted a boy named Gerhard von Ahe. He was the son of Kurt von der Ahe, a senior figure in the SS, who had been killed in Berlin in 1933. Peter Padfield, the author of Himmler: Reichsfuhrer S.S. (1991) has claimed that Himmler was jealous that the two men under him in the Schutzstaffel (SS), Reinhard Heydrich and Karl Wolff, both had attractive wives. Himmler spent very little time with his wife. Lina Heydrich suggested that Himmler was embarrassed by her appearance: "Size 50 knickers, that's all there was to her." Bella Fromm, a journalist commented in July 1937 she saw Himmler with his "dirty-blonde, insipid, fat wife" and "the pleasures of the table are apparently about the pleasures she gets, since Himmler keeps her at home." In 1939 Heinrich Himmler began an affair with his young secretary, Hedwig Potthast. The couple set up home in Mecklenburg. Hedwig gave birth to a son, Helge (born 1942) and a daughter, Nanette Dorothea (born 1944). Although separated from his wife, Himmler remained close to his daughter, Gudrun Himmler, who he phoned every few days and wrote to her at least once a week. Himmler adored his young, blue-eyed, blonde- haired daughter and would often take her to official state functions. In 1941 he even took his daughter to visit the Dachau Concentration Camp. Gudrun wrote in her diary: "Today, we went to the SS concentration camp at Dachau. We saw everything we could. We saw the gardening work. We saw the pear trees. We saw all the pictures painted by the prisoners. Marvelous. And afterwards we had a lot to eat. It was very nice." According to Stephan Lebert, the author of My Father' s Keeper: Children of Nazi Leaders - An Intimate History of Damage and Denial (2001): "At fourteen. she cut out every picture of him from the newspapers and glued them into a large scrapbook" In April 1945 Marga Himmler and her daughter were taken into custody. She later complained that they were held in various camps and were "treated as though they had to atone for the alleged sins of her father". They were forced to testify at the Nuremberg Trials and eventually released in November 1946. Gudrun Himmler remained active in far-right politics and helped form Wiking-Jugend, an organization patterned on the Hitler Youth program of the 1930s. In 1955 she moved in with her sister Lydia in Heepen. Margarete Himmler died on 25th August, 1967. Primary Sources. (1) Peter Padfield, Himmler: Reichsfuhrer S.S. (1991) Margarete ran a clinic she had opened with her father's money in Berlin. Apparently she distrusted conventional medicine; she was more interested in homeopathy, hypnosis, the old herbal remedies of the country. Despite having set herself up in Berlin, a sink of decadence according to his ideas, she apparently shared all his views of the good life of the land, so much so that she was prepared to sell her clinic and buy a smallholding to work with him. (2) Allan Hall, The Daily Mail (17th June, 2011) Waving goodbye to her grandchildren, Gudrun Burwitz has the look of a woman ready to live the rest of her days in peace and quiet. Instead, the 81-year-old daughter of Heinrich Himmler still works at a ruthless pace to keep the Nazi flame alive. Mrs Burwitz has always nurtured the memory of her father, believing the man who ran the Gestapo, the SS and the extermination programme which murdered six million Jews, to be good and worthy. And despite her advanced years, she continues to help the ageing remnants of the Nazi regime to evade justice. As the leading figure in the shadowy and sinister support group Stille Hilfe - Silent Help - she helps bring succour and financial help to those still at large. Said to have been formed in 1951 by a clique of high-ranking SS officers and right-wing clergy in Germany, it exists ‘to provide quiet but active assistance to those who lost their freedom during or after the war by capture, internment or similar circumstance and who need help to this day’. Now it is in the hands of Mrs Burwitz. And her work has taken an even more sinister turn. She has become ‘grandmother’ to a new breed of female Nazis on the radical right. User Search limit reached - please wait a few minutes and try again. In order to protect Biblio.com from unauthorized automated bot activity and allow our customers continual access to our services, we may limit the number of searches an individual can perform on the site in a given period of time. 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Ex-sailor's film shows Mayflower II's colorful 1957 voyage. LONDON -- The sea voyage that changed Peter Padfield’s life more than six decades ago started with an act of chance. In 1956, Padfield was third officer aboard a British cruise liner in Sri Lanka when he stumbled across a magazine in a ship wardrobe. A story inside introduced Padfield to a new sailing ship dubbed the Mayflower II, a replica of the square-rigged English merchant vessel that carried a group of dissatisfied Protestants across the Atlantic Ocean in 1620. The reproduction soon would make the same trip the Pilgrims did when they sailed west to start a colony. Padfield, then a sailor for shipping company P&O in his 20s, already had a obsession with square-riggers, the ships with great, billowing sails popularized in pirate stories. He immediately wrote to the Mayflower II's captain to plead for a place on board in the spring when the ship embarked toward its planned home at a Plymouth, Massachusetts, museum. To Padfield's surprise, the captain, Alan Villiers, wrote back and asked the young sailor to come to Oxford for an interview. “He said he wasn’t going to have any people with double-barreled (hyphenated) surnames, he wasn’t going to have any sea-lawyers, and he wasn’t going to have any women,” Padfield, now 88, told The Associated Press from his home in Suffolk, eastern England. “I didn’t come into any of those categories, so he adopted me.” In April the following year, the 25-year-old joined a crew of about 30 that included the editor of Life magazine, an architect, an Irish rigger who spent his shifts dancing and singing at the top of his voice, as well as some seasoned deck hands who actually knew what they were doing. While he was a self-described “square-rig nut,” Padfield had never stepped foot on one of the big wooden beauties before, so his job essentially entailed following orders and staying out of trouble. But he assigned himself another role: voyage filmmaker. Armed with a sketch pad and an amateur movie camera, he captured the Mayflower II's Atlantic crossing in color film. Padfield shared the 1957 footage with The Associated Press. In one of the early scenes, a group of boisterous young men grab hold of a pale, disheveled-looking man, tie him to a door at the side of the ship, and put a coat over his head. Even though Padfield's camera didn't record sound, it's clear the hazing has them laughing their heads off. Padfield recalled the incident as he flipped through a photo album and saw a newspaper clipping with the headline, “I Say The Mayflower Has An Even Chance of Getting There." The journalist who wrote it was the pale man in the film footage. “The Daily Mail reporter said that we had an ‘even chance’ of getting to America. So we tied him to the fo’c’sle (crew quarters) door post, put a sack over his head and poured dishwater over that,” Padfield said. “He gave us a very good report next day.” The captain tried to impress upon his crew the significance of being a Mayflower replica. Every Sunday, Villiers ordered his men to dress up in Pilgrim outfits and attend a short church service. After the service, he “would try and tell us why we were doing this,” reading from the journal of Plymouth Colony's first governor and talking about the challenges the early English settlers encountered. The Mayflower II did have a deeper significance beyond 17th century history and the camaraderie of her crew. The ship replica was built to honor the friendship between British and American troops as they fought side-by-side during World War II. While Padfield disclaims thinking of anything so lofty at the time, he reflects now on the the important symbolism of the voyage. “The meaning is that we must stick together, the two Anglo-American countries," he said. We must stick together as the bastions of democracy and the rule of law.” Padfield also has come to reflect on why the trip to America was life-changing for him personally. His answer would resonate well with many 25- year-olds today. “I think the voyage changed my life because the crew was so varied. I met so many different people who did different things,” he said. “I realized after that that I didn’t have to continue in P&O, up the ladder, to wherever I got to. That I could do what I wanted. It sort of turned me from someone who was going on a certain path to someone who thought he could do anything.”