REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING
TEACHING LESSON 10
HANDOUT 10B
HIMMLER SPEAKS TO THE SS LEADERS

Click on the picture to see a larger version

USHMM: courtesy Instytut Pamieci Narodowej Reichsfuehrer SS Heinrich Himmler (center, right) on an official tour of the Janowska concentration camp in Poland, ca. August 1942

Heinrich Himmler was the head of the SS and the senior SS official in charge of carrying out the Final Solution. He was one of Hitler’s main advisers and had been active in the Nazi party since the 1920s. Himmler helped to change the SS from a small band of Hitler bodyguards into an elite army corps that later ran the concentration and death camps. In 1939 he helped organize the Kristallnacht pogroms. Strongly committed to racist Nazi ideology, Himmler believed he was doing a great service for Germany by killing what he considered to be subhuman or inferior races. When the war ended, Himmler tried to escape Germany disguised as a soldier, but was arrested by British troops. In May 1945, he committed suicide. In a 1943 speech he gave to SS leaders in Poznan, Poland, Himmler made the following statement:_________________________

I want to tell you about a very grave matter in all frankness. We can talk about it quite openly here, but we must never talk about it publicly. I mean the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people. Most of you will know what it means to see one hundred corpses piled up, or 500 or 1000. To have gone through this and—except for instance of human weakness—to have remained decent, that has made us tough. This is an unwritten, never to be written, glorious page of our history.  

Evidence Presented at the Trial of Major War Criminals at Nuremberg

Published in cooperation with the North Carolina Council on the Holocaust
Copyright © 2002 by the North Carolina Council on the Holocaust. Updated 2005.
North Carolina Department of Public Instruction
http://www.ncpublicschools.org/holocaust_council/