Heinrich Himmler headed the elite Nazi Party military unit known as the Schutzstaffel (SS), or protection staff, even before Adolf Hitler's seizure of power in Germany in 1933. A ruthless and efficient bureaucrat, Himmler bore responsibility for the SS as well as the Gestapo, or secret police, both of which implemented genocidal Nazi policy across Europe until 1945. He escaped a death sentence from the International Military Tribunal at the postwar Nuremberg Trials by committing suicide a few weeks after the Reich's collapse.

Himmler was born in Munich in 1900, the son of the former tutor to a Bavarian prince. While still in his teens, he joined Imperial Germany's army during the final year of World War I but because of his frail health was never sent to the front. Nevertheless, he became an enthusiastic member of a veterans' organization after Germany's defeat, one of a number of groups whose right-wing...