Himmler's Last Days

The gripping story of the fall of Heinrich Himmler--the man who sought to perfect genocide—as he becomes the most hunted war criminal in history during the convulsive final days of the Third Reich

Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, Gestapo, and Waffen-SS, rose to all but supreme power as architect of the concentration camps and commander of the murderous deportations, the mass sterilizations, and the gas chambers. In Himmler’s Last Days, acclaimed historians Wendy Lower and Jonathan Petropoulos deliver an acutely revealing story of the psychic and physical unraveling of the ultimate mastermind of the Nazi terror apparatus.

Himmler leaves the Führerbunker just days before Hitler’s April 1945 suicide, now aspiring to be his successor, and flees a Berlin under siege. The book tracks Himmler’s desperate movements, never before reconstructed, in cinematic detail, to a series of outposts and hiding spots in the north of Germany. Even as the camps are liberated—and the depth of Nazi genocidal evil is revealed through the testimony of living skeletons—Himmler schemes delusionally and in ill faith to parlay concentration camp prisoner releases into a deal with General Eisenhower for a partial German surrender. The capture by the British of a disguised Himmler, his interrogation, his suicide by hidden cyanide capsule, and his consignment to an unmarked grave are vividly illuminated through eyewitness accounts and photographs. A definitive telling that casts light on the universal fate of genocidaires--and puts to rest far-right conspiracy theories regarding Himmler’s supposed murder by the Allies.

Finally, through his own desperate acts and words, Himmler is revealed as clearly as we have ever seen him. A stunning and reverberating account.