Heinrich Himmler Archives

A panther tank and panzer grenadiers of the 5th SS Panzer Division Wiking help to break the encirclement of the Russian town of Kowel in the strategically important area of the Pripet Marshes.

Heinrich Himmler

Waffen SS General Felix Steiner’s WWII Legacy

By Pat McTaggart

“Where is Steiner?” Adolf Hitler demanded as his Thousand Year Reich crumbled around him in April 1945. “Is he attacking yet?” Read more

Heinrich Himmler

Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess: Foe or Ally?

By Sherman Gengler

Throughout the reign of the Nazi Party in Germany during the 1930s and 1940s, Adolf Hitler’s inner circle comprised a diverse group of men from many walks of life. Read more

War artist Gary Sheenhan captured the prisoners’ misery, fear, and deprivation at Buchenwald in 1945. The revolts in Sobibor and Treblinka were the last chance for the inmates to survive as the Nazis began to cover up their heinous deeds.

Heinrich Himmler

Revolts in the Death Camps

By Jonathan F. Keiler

By the spring of 1943, the Nazi deaths camps in eastern Poland—Sobibor, Belzac, and Treblinka—were running out of victims. Read more

A throng of mesmerized children attempts to squeeze between smiling SS guards to deliver the Nazi salute during a party rally. Children were intensely indoctrinated in the Third Reich and made to practice the salute along with a “Heil Hitler!” to increase their devotion to the regime.

Heinrich Himmler

The Madman of the Mountain: Adolf Hitler’s Personal Life

By Charles Whiting

Adolf Hitler loved children. Before the war consumed all his energies he entertained children at his holiday home on the “mountain” all the time. Read more

Marching along on the Eastern Front at the head of his men, SS officer Leon Degrelle was a foreign-born politician who became a decorated military leader and saw extensive combat with German forces in World War II.

Heinrich Himmler

Was Leon Degrelle a Traitor of Belgium, or a German Army Hero?

By Richard Rule

Leon Degrelle was born in 1906 in Belgium to a prosperous family in the French-speaking region of Wallonia. Read more

A pitiful Buchenwald inmate lifts a food bowl to his frail mouth, hardly seeming to comprehend that freedom has come at last. For many, the end of the nightmare had come too late.

Heinrich Himmler

WWII Concentration Camps: The Horrific Discovery at Buchenwald

By Flint Whitlock

When Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933, the world changed forever.

Not only was Hitler determined to pay back Germany’s enemies for his country’s defeat during the Great War, but he was also determined to rid Germany and the rest of Europe of persons whom his twisted Aryan ideology believed were “inferior” or “subhuman.” Read more

Heinrich Himmler

Jud Suss: The Film That Fueled the Holocaust

By Gary Kidney

On September 8, 1940, a new German movie, Jud Suss, premiered at the Venice Film Festival. It opened to rave reviews and received the Golden Lion award. Read more

Heinrich Himmler

WWII: German Rations and Feeding the Troops of the Third Reich

By G. Paul Garson

It was Napoleon Bonaparte who purportedly said, “An army travels on its stomach.” Toward the goal of feeding his particular army’s stomach more efficiently, in 1795 the French general came up with an interesting solution to the problem. Read more

Heinrich Himmler

Death of Himmler’s Henchman

By Richard Rule

In a desperate bid to avoid another war in Europe, both Britain and France signed the notorious Munich Agreement in 1938, which annexed the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia to the Nazis. Read more

Heinrich Himmler

The Buchenwald Concentration Camp: Patton’s Bastardly Discovery

By Flint Whitlock

The blue arrows on Lt. Gen. George S. Patton, Jr.’s Third Army situation maps in his mobile headquarters trailer all pointed eastward. Read more

The SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler was formed during the 1930s as Hitler’s personal bodyguard and later grew into a division of the Waffen-SS, the military wing of the organization. In this photo from the early days of the Leibstandarte, soldiers pass in review as their commander gives the Nazi salute.

Heinrich Himmler

The Waffen-SS: Evolution of Armed Evil

By Allyn Vannoy

In 1933, before the Waffen-SS, there was a portion of the Nazi Party’s Schutzstaffel (SS), armed and trained along military lines and served as an armed force. Read more

Heinrich Himmler

The Soviet Winter Offensive: From the Vistula to the Oder

By Henrik Lunde The Situation in the East, Summer 1944

The area between the Baltic Sea and the Carpathian Mountains had been relatively quiet since the end of Operation Bagration late in the summer of 1944. Read more

Heinrich Himmler

The Volkssturm: Last-Ditch Militia of the Third Reich

By Blaine Taylor

On October 18, 1944—the 131st anniversary of the Battle of the Nations’ victory over Napoleon in 1813—Reichsführer-SS (National Leader) Heinrich Himmler stepped up to a microphone to make a national radio address announcing the formation of the Nazi Party-controlled Volkssturm, or People’s Militia. Read more

Heinrich Himmler

The Demyansk Pocket: Disaster For Germany’s Scandinavian Volunteers

By Henrik Lunde

On the surface it may seem odd that men of conquered nations would eagerly sign up to fight for their masters, but that is exactly what happened in Scandinavia in the 1940s. Read more

Heinrich Himmler

Heinrich Himmler: The Rise and Fall of Hitler’s Third Reichsführer-SS

By Blaine Taylor

On the evening of May 23, 1945, in the northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein, five men in a British Army jeep were driving down a dark road. Read more

In this photo published in Signal magazine in August 1943, Albert Speer is shown at the wheel of a prototype tank.

Heinrich Himmler

Albert Speer: Chief Architect of the Third Reich

By Blaine Taylor

On October 6, 1943, Dr. Albert Speer, Reich minister of armaments and war production for the Third Reich, gave a 50-minute address to the assembled top officials of Nazi Germany at Posen Castle in occupied Poland’s Reich Gau (Region) of Wartheland on the critical state of World War II at that point. Read more

An ISU-152 heavy assault gun of the First Polish Division crosses the Oder. The Soviet self-propelled howitzer fired high-explosive rounds that could destroy reinforced bunkers, and also could blow the turret off of a German tank.

Heinrich Himmler

A Masterful German Defense at the Battle of Seelow Heights

By William E. Welsh

The officers huddled in a candlelit cellar in an abandoned farmhouse midway between the Oder River and Berlin. Read more

At Alamogordo, New Mexico, the first atomic explosion sends a billowing mushroom cloud skyward on August 16, 1945.

Heinrich Himmler

Why The Nazi Atomic Bomb Never Happened

By Jonathan F. Keiler

The most nightmarish of World War II alternative history scenarios is the one in which Nazi Germany acquires atomic weapons. Read more

Heinrich Himmler

Soviet Partisans: The Rag-Tag Scourge Along WWII’s Eastern Front

by Pat Mctaggart

The concept of Soviet partisans participating in Russia’s wars was nothing new in 1941. During Napoleon’s invasion of the country in 1812, small bands of civilians harassed the French and their allies both before and after the retreat from Moscow. Read more

Heinrich Himmler

The First Day of World War II

By Michael D. Hull

Just after midnight on September 3, 1939, a stylish young former socialite from Boston, Massachusetts, made her way toward London aboard the Harwich boat train after crossing the English Channel. Read more

From Around the Network

The Ill-Fated Goettge Patrol: General Alexander Vandergrift

Maryland’s Maj. Gen. Nathaniel Towson

March to Destruction: Nicopolis 1396

“Chancellorsville: Lee’s Greatest Battle,” a History by General Edward J. Stackpole