Germany publishing SS head Himmler’s diary found in Russian archive!

BERLIN, Germany (PNN) - August 2, 2016 - A diary of high-ranking Nazi Heinrich Himmler discovered in a Russian military archive is being published in Germany by Bild. The 1,000-page document sheds light on the routinely evil everyday activities of the head of the SS and Holocaust supervisor.

The diary, arranged in the form of a calendar, bears dates and contains information about meetings and military decisions made by and in the presence of the SS chief. The diary covers two different periods, pre-war 1938 and the crucial war years of 1943 and 1944.

Over the last 70 years the document remained unnoticed in Russia before finally being discovered at the Military Archive in Podolsk, a city near Moscow. The authenticity of the diary has been verified by experts of the German Historical Institute, a state institution in Moscow, which thoroughly analyzed the records and compared them with Himmler's other documents and known facts.

"The importance of these documents is that we get a better structural understanding of the last phase of the war," said the institute's director, Nikolaus Katzer. The information presented in the diary is "rather dry and not very meaningful," yet provides numerous new details significantly expanding the big picture. "It is therefore a very important and significant testimony," Katzer said.

Damian Imoehl, the journalist who helped Bild get the diaries, says the scariest thing about Himmler is his bureaucratic ordinariness. In an eerily human way, Himmler regularly contacted his wife and daughter, and could spend an evening watching a film or playing cards. "One day he starts with breakfast and a massage from his personal doctor, then he rings up his wife and daughter in the south of Germany, and after that he decides to have 10 men killed or visits a concentration camp," Imoehl said.

The diary contains facts of mass murder in Nazi death camps going along with banquets and dinners with high-ranking SS officers. For example, in August 1941, while witnessing the extermination of Jews outside Minsk, the capital of Belarus, Himmler nearly fainted when the brain matter of one of the victims sprayed on to his coat.

On another occasion, on February 2, 1943, while inspecting the Sobibor death camp to see the efficiency of gassing people with diesel engines, Himmler agreed to wait for 400 women and girls to be brought from Lublin to see the mass murder effects for himself. The very same evening, according to the diary, he attended a banquet with SS officers. Himmler was particularly proud of the guard dogs at the Auschwitz death camp, boasting they are "capable of ripping apart everyone but their handlers."

"Heinrich Himmler was a beast full of contradictions," said Dr. Matthias Uhl of the German Historical Institute. "On one hand, he was the ruthless issuer of death sentences made in passing and the planner of the Holocaust. On the other hand, he was a hypocritical carer for his SS elite, his family, friends and acquaintances."

Himmler was captured by British soldiers in northern Germany after producing forged papers. After being exposed in British custody, he committed suicide on May 23, 1945, biting a capsule with cyanide hidden in his tooth.