A Review of Heinrich Himmler

I give up! I surrender! I got to page 602 of this 1,050 paqe book and I simply could not proceed onward. It’s flat out BORING!!! I expected to learn gripping, intimate details on Himmler, the SS, Himmler and Hitler, and more. Instead, I was deluged with numbers and statistics, with resettlement in towns and provinces too numerous to mention. Oh God, it was so boring. Okay, so Himmler started out as a quiet youth, unable to deal with females, which made him a prude until he was married in his mid-20s, and which later made him legislate morality to his SS troops. He had to approve each SS marriage personally. I learned he got a degree in agriculture and spent some time working in the field before somehow rising to be the head of the SS. I never figured out how that happened. At some point, he’s working closely with Hitler (we’re never given a good, let alone any, picture of Hitler in this book), yet there are absolutely no details at all as to how they met, when they met, where they met, what lead Hitler to promote this loser to such a vital role. There’s nothing there. It boggles the mind. We learn about Himmer’s hundreds of associates, underlings, and enemies. The name dropping is so intense, it’s a wonder one can remember any names from the book at all. Now, the book does detail Himmler’s vaguely anti-Semitic views in college, his vision of a pure German nation, his grand visions of resettling Europe and eventually ridding Europe and Russia of all Jews. However, it’s hard to connect the dots. How does he go to looking down his nose at Jews to wanting to exterminate all of them, and how does he get tens of thousands of men under his command to murder them? I still don’t know. Apparently, the goal was to relocate the Jews, first to Madagascar, and then later to Poland and Russia. How did that turn into mass murders? Also, Himmler was apparently as opposed to the Christian church as he was to the Jews, particularly the Catholics, of which he was raised. But he felt like he couldn’t act on that because Hitler didn’t want to persecute the Christians. That’s never explained either. The book throws tons of numbers at you — how many Jews from this town, from that ghetto, from this province, from that city are carted away monthly, first for forced labor, later for extermination. The numbers are overwhelming and become so commonplace that the horror of the situation is actually lessened by the deadening weight of giving numbers to the reader. Also, I wanted to read about the attack on Russia, but that was never really addressed. One day there’s an attack, another day Himmler is touring the front lines. How did this happen? I could go on and on, but I’m boring myself now and that pretty much sums up my experience with this book. It could have been and should have been so much more — some life could have been written into it — but instead it reads like an electrical engineering textbook, which would put most people to sleep. Sadly, not recommended.

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