The official diary of SS chief Heinrich Himmler is to be released to the public, the Moscow-based German Historical Institute (DHI) has announced. The diaries, covering the years 1937-38 and 1944-45 were discovered in 2013 in a Russian Defense Ministry archive in Podolsk, outside Moscow.
The typed-out diaries, written ahead of each day by a series of adjutants, list in detail Himmler's day-to-day appointments, and have helped to complete a chronicle partially visible in Himmler's 1941-42 diaries, which were found in the early 1990s and published in 1999.
The documents show a busy schedule of meetings with bureaucrats, SS generals, foreign leaders like Benito Mussolini, and visits to concentration camps, including Auschwitz, Sobibor, and Buchenwald.
Himmler toured the Warsaw Ghetto in January 1943
Himmler is often considered Adolf Hitler's immediate number two. By the end of the Third Reich twelve years later (and his suicide in British custody in Lüneburg on May 23, 1945), Himmler had accumulated so many different positions - Reichsführer SS, head of the German police, Interior Minister, and commander of the Replacement Army (the part of the Wehrmacht operating inside Germany) - that his power was only superseded by Hitler himself.
Unique discovery
His roles put Himmler in control of the concentration camp network as well as the Nazis' domestic intelligence agency. Given that no other major Nazi leader apart from Josef Goebbels kept a diary of such detail, the impending publication is being viewed as particularly significant.
"Goebbels was really a figure in the second tier [of the Third Reich's power structure]," said Matthias Uhl, the DHI historian who directed the project and has been studying the find for the past three years. "Here one can follow Himmler's day minutely, and reconstruct certain important decisions."
The diaries also make the general picture of Himmler's role in the Holocaust much clearer. "It's now possible to reconstruct [Himmler's] work in the second half of the war," Uhl told DW. The diary shows that Himmler toured a number of concentration camps as well as the Warsaw Ghetto (on January 9, 1943), and took an active role in directing the mass murder of Jews.
"And we see how all of his contacts in his state and economic network fit together to reinforce his position," said Uhl.
Key speech
One of the most important notes, published on Tuesday by "Bild," can be found under the entry for October 4, 1943, when Himmler made a speech to a gathering of SS leaders at 5:30 p.m. at the "Hotel Ostland" in Poznan, a city in occupied Poland.
The Nazi leader witnessed the gas chambers of the Sobibor camp in use
This entry documents the first of the infamous "Posen speeches,"(the German name for Poznan), one of the few times that a leading Nazi discussed the Holocaust on record. In the three-hour speech, a part of which was read during the Nuremberg trials, Himmler said, "Among us it should be talked about openly, though we will never talk about it in public - I mean the Jewish evacuation, the extinction of the Jewish people."
The new diary shows that the speech was followed by a meal with leading SS officers.
Uhl also confirmed that there was "no doubt" that the document was genuine, both because of the content and because it exactly matched similar documents of the time. "You can't forge something like that," he said.
The document was found in the Russian archive marked simply with the Russian word "Dnewnik," meaning diary, which was one of the reasons why it had been lost for so long. But Uhl underlined that there was no way of knowing how exactly it had fallen into the hands of the Red Army.
The 1,000-page document will be published in two volumes at the end of 2017, though the German mass-circulation daily "Bild" has already serialized parts of it this week.
The Podolsk archive contains some 2.5 million pages of documents seized during the war by the Red Army, which are in the process of being digitalized and released by joint German-Russian institutions.
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'Never Again': Memorials of the Holocaust
Dachau
The Nazi regime opened the first concentration camp in Dauchau, not far from Munich. Just a few weeks after Adolf Hitler came to power it was used by the paramilitary SS "Schutzstaffel" to imprison, torture and kill political opponents to the regime. Dachau also served as a prototype and model for the other Nazi camps that followed.
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'Never Again': Memorials of the Holocaust
Wannsee House
The villa on Berlin's Wannsee lake was pivotal in planning the Holocaust. Fifteen members of the Nazi government and the SS Schutzstaffel met here on January 20, 1942 to plan what became known as the "Final Solution," the deportation and extermination of all Jews in German-occupied territory. In 1992, the villa where the Wannsee Conference was held was turned into a memorial and museum.
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'Never Again': Memorials of the Holocaust
Bergen-Belsen
The Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Lower Saxony was initially established as a prisoner of war camp before becoming a concentration camp. Prisoners too sick to work were brought here from other concentration camps, so many also died of disease. One of the 50,000 killed here was Anne Frank, a Jewish girl who gained international fame posthumously after her diary was published.
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'Never Again': Memorials of the Holocaust
Buchenwald Memorial
Buchenwald near the Thuringian town of Weimar was one of the largest concentration camps in Germany. From 1937 to April 1945, the National Socialists deported about 270,000 people from all over Europe here and murdered 64,000 of them.
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'Never Again': Memorials of the Holocaust
Nazi party rally grounds
Nuremberg hosted the biggest Nazi party propaganda rallies from 1933 until the start of the Second World War. The annual Nazi party congress as well as rallies with as many as 200,000 participants took place on the 11-km² (4.25 square miles) area. Today, the unfinished Congress Hall building serves as a documentation center and a museum.
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'Never Again': Memorials of the Holocaust
Memorial to the German Resistance
The Bendlerblock building in Berlin was the headquarters of a military resistance group. On July 20, 1944, a group of Wehrmacht officers around Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg carried out an assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler that failed. The leaders of the conspiracy were summarily shot the same night in the courtyard of the Bendlerblock, which is today the German Resistance Memorial Center.
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'Never Again': Memorials of the Holocaust
Hadamar Euthanasia Center
From 1941 people with physical and mental disabilities were killed at a psychiatric hospital in Hadamar in Hesse. Declared "undesirables" by the Nazis, some 15,000 people were murdered here by asphyxiation with carbon monoxide or by being injected with lethal drug overdoses. Across Germany some 70,000 were killed as part of the Nazi euthanasia program. Today Hadamar is a memorial to those victims.
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'Never Again': Memorials of the Holocaust
Holocaust Memorial
Located next to the Brandenburg Gate, Berlin's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe was inaugurated sixty years after the end of World War II on May 10, 2005, and opened to the public two days later. Architect Peter Eisenman created a field with 2,711 concrete slabs. An attached underground "Place of Information" holds the names of all known Jewish Holocaust victims.
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'Never Again': Memorials of the Holocaust
Memorial to persecuted homosexuals
Not too far from the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, another concrete memorial honors the thousands of homosexuals persecuted by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945. The four-meter high monument, which has a window showing alternately a film of two men or two women kissing, was inaugurated in Berlin's Tiergarten on May 27, 2008.
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'Never Again': Memorials of the Holocaust
Sinti and Roma Memorial
Opposite the Reichstag parliament building in Berlin, a park inaugurated in 2012 serves as a memorial to the 500,000 Sinti and Roma people killed by the Nazi regime. Around a memorial pool the poem "Auschwitz" by Roma poet Santino Spinelli is written in English, Germany and Romani: "gaunt face, dead eyes, cold lips, quiet, a broken heart, out of breath, without words, no tears."
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'Never Again': Memorials of the Holocaust
'Stolpersteine' - stumbling blocks as memorials
In the 1990s, the artist Gunther Demnig began a project to confront Germany's Nazi past. Brass-covered concrete cubes placed in front of the former houses of Nazi victims, provide details about the people and their date of deportation and death, if known. More than 45,000 "Stolpersteine" have been laid in 18 countries in Europe - it's the world's largest decentralized Holocaust memorial.
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'Never Again': Memorials of the Holocaust
Brown House in Munich
Right next to the "Führerbau" where Adolf Hitler had his office, was the headquarters of the Nazi Party in Germany, in the "Brown House" in Munich. A white cube now occupies its former location. A new "Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism" opened on April 30, 2015, 70 years after the liberation from the Nazi regime, uncovering further dark chapters of history.
Author: Max Zander, Ille Simon
