HIMMLER

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume 80, 25 May 1945, Page 4

HIMMLER

THE only regret felt at the news of the spectacular suicide of Heinrich Himmler will* be that he managed to slip out of an evil life so easily without coming face to face with earthly justice. This mild-look-ing sadist—too young to fight in the last war—whom Hitler called from a poultry farm near Munich to be the chief of his Nazi thugs was the most hated of all the Hitler clique ; even his criminal accomplices despised him. No halo of hero worship shone around his name ; merely the loathing for a Nazi hireling who waded deeper and deeper into the job of organising frightfulness and did the dirty work with a brutal efficiency which allowed him to move from strength to strength within the Nazi hierarchy until he stood next to the Fuhrer. It would be hard to name any other man in modern times who devoted himself with such singleness of purpose to such an inhuman cause. He held firmly to the thesis that the State is all and the individual nothing and practised it with a diabolical thoroughness by making punishment for dissenters so deadly that he cowed the German nation. Some of his grisly work has recently been uncovered : Himmler was the kind of objective monster who could look on these sights, unmoved.