During Himmler’s sixteen years as head of the SS, he built it “into a vast empire, and in the process, he acquired the power of life and death over millions” of people by expanding
The SS, a bodyguard unit whose membership originally totalled 280, into an enormous, coldblooded military and economic empire totaling 50,000 members. Along the way, he acquired a number of new titles, including Chief of Police, Reich Commissioner for the Solidification of German Peoplehood, and Commander of the Political Police.46
Himmler also developed a “policy of turning Poland into a nation of illiterates” in an attempt
To “sift out those with valuable blood and those with
Worthless blood.” Polish children between the ages of six and ten would be examined, and those who were thought racially acceptable would be snatched from their families and raised in Germany; they would not see their biological parents again. The Nazi policy of stealing children in Poland is significantly less well known than is the extermination of the Jews, but it fits into the same pattern. It demonstrates how seriously a man like Himmler believed in identifying the value of a human being through racial composition. Removing these children was not for him—as it might seem today—some evil eccentricity, but an essential part of his warped worldview.47
One of the first direct steps that lead to the Holocaust was for the Einsatzgruppen in the occupied territories to murder select Jewish males. Many Jewish males were also sent to concentration camps. As more and more males died from overwork or were shot, Himmler was forced to begin the next step. Once you kill the family’s breadwinner, the Nazis were faced with the problem of what to do with the women and children that were left behind. In the summer of 1941, Himmler made a watershed decision to murder the Jewish women and children as well, a decision authorized by Hitler that permeated down through the ranks to the mobile killing units, the Einsatzgruppen.
World History
