The Architect of Genocide

AMong the Nazi leaders, Heinrich Himmler was, as Richard Breitman observes in this ground-breaking study, an easy man to underestimate short, pudgy, near-sighted, chinless. Yet Himmler holds a particularly memorable place in the roster of Nazi war criminals: he was the man most closely associated with the creation and operation of the Final Solution, the programme of formal mass murder responsible for the murder of six million Jews in death camps. Thus, to understand the Holocaust it is first necessary to understand Himmler, and it is this The Architect of Genocide at last permits us to do. Himmler had plans to murder all Jews who would not or could not leave the country and that as early as 1939, Himmler was considering the use of gas chambers and crematoriums.