It often is assumed that those who carried out the orders to murder over 11 million innocent non-combat men, women and children must have been monsters. This label actually separates these humans from ourselves, causing many to conclude that normal people never would have voluntarily carried out the crimes of the Nazis.
In fact, as we will document, many of the high level Nazi officers were outwardly very normal, family-oriented human beings. Interviews with Himmler’s family show that Himmler and other leading Nazis were in many ways normal, if not exceptional, persons. The story of Joseph Goebbels’ courtship of his wife is suitable for a touching Hollywood story. They were an attractive family that won the hearts of many within in the Reich. According to historians Rochus Misch (Der Letzte Zeuge) and Bernd Freytag von Loringhoven (Mit Hitler im Bunker), Goebbels and his wife killed their children, then themselves. Magda Goebbels said she could not bear to live in, or to have her children live in, a world without Hitler.
Himmler and the other leading Nazis also travelled fairly freely within both German and European society and were, as a whole, well liked by the Germanspeaking population.23
Himmler’s daughter, Gudrun, his brother, Gebhard, and other family members found it very difficult to reconcile the public post-war image of Himmler as a monster with the kind and affectionate man that they knew and loved for almost five decades. For this reason, Roger Manvell and Heinrich Fraenkel strove in their research to “try to achieve this reconciliation, to try to understand why this simple, unassuming man became a mass-murderer convinced of the essential rightness of his actions.”24
As will be documented, the Holocaust was an essential step required “in order to fulfil a false dream of racial purity which obsessed both Himmler and his master” Adolf Hitler.25 No theme has dominated the Holocaust and the entire Nazi movement more than racism and the quest to achieve a pure superior race, a goal inspired by the eugenic ideas of Darwinism.
This is best illustrated by the fact that, forced to make a choice between winning the war or exterminating the Jews, Hitler chose extermination of the Jews. The fact is, “Hitler believed that killing Jews was more important than winning the war.”26 Hitler was confident that the world would some day thank him for eliminating this inferior parasitic race, even if Germany lost the war.
World History
