Table of Contents

Abbreviatons and Glossary
Prologue
Part I: Himmler's Early Years
1: Childhood and Youth
2: The Student of Agriculture
3: Struggle and Renunciation
4: A New Start in Lower Bavaria
5: The Party Functionary
6: Reichsführer SS
Part II: Inside the Third Reich
7: The Take-Over of the Political Police
8: From Inspector of the Prussian Gestapo to Chief of the German Police
9: The State Protection Corps
Part III: The Order
10: Ideology and Religious Cult
11: Himmler's Leadership Style
12: Himmler as Educator
13: The SS Family
Part IV: Into War: Ambition and Disappointment
14: War Preparations and Expansion
15: War and Settlement in Poland
16: A New Racial Order
17: Repression in the Reich
18: Shifting Borders: The Year 1940
Part V: The Greater Germanic Reich: Living Space and Ethnic Murder
19: An Ideological War of Annihilation
20: From Mass Murder to the 'Final Solution'
21: The Murder of the European Jews
22: Settlement Policy and Racial Selection
23: The 'Iron Law of Ethnicity': Recruitment into the Waffen-SS
24: A Europe-wide Reign of Terror
Part VI: Downfall in Stages
25: A Turn in the War - A New Opportunity?
26: Collapse
Conclusion
Endnotes
Bibliography
Index

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.

Reviews

`The standard - indeed the only - reliable and thorough biography of the head of the SS and German police... a masterpiece
'
Richard J. Evans, University of Cambridge, and author of The Third Reich trilogy
`In this highly impressive biography of Himmler, resting upon exhaustive exploration of available sources, Peter Longerich shows more plainly than ever before how this bizarre personality could gain such immense power and stamp his own imprint on the entire SS organisation, with horrendous consequences for millions throughout Europe

'
Sir Ian Kershaw, author of Hitler
`The book's] bulk is consummate with the seriousness of its subject matter and, as the definitive life of this whey-faced monster of terror, it is unlikely to be bettered'
History Today
`Excellent ... well crafted and engaging ... comfortably surpassing the offerings of previous biographers, it is surely set to become the definitive work for a generation'
Roger Moorhouse, BBC History
`Supremely enlightening
'
New York Times Book Review
`There have been many attempts to describe the life and opinions of Heinrich Himmler, but this one ... is the first thorough scholarly biography to appear
'
New Statesman
`Very well documented'
Mail on Sunday
`A superbly researched account
'
Booklist
`A work of staggering scholarship'
Literary Review
`Gigantic'
The Sunday Times
`Splendid...Longerich gives it a depth and breadth it has previously lacked'
Sunday Telegraph