Over 1,000 pages of diaries belonging to Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler have been found in Russian military archives
By Allan Hall | Daily Mail | August 1, 2016
BERLIN -- A newly uncovered diary kept by Nazi mass murderer and SS monster Heinrich Himmler has revealed how he took a massage before ordering 10 Poles to their deaths and almost fainted when a Jew's brain splattered on his coat after they were shot.
Covering the years 1938, 1943 and 1944, the paperwork vanished at end of the Second World War and into the hands of the Red Army.
Now it has been discovered in the Russian Military Archive in Podolsk filed under Dnewnik - Russian for diary.
It is his service calendar where he recorded dates, places, meetings and his decision to send millions of people to their deaths.
It also reveals gruesome details of how he ordered the murder of thousands of people including the deaths of 10 Poles, just after he received a massage from his personal doctor.
He was known to be squeamish at the sight of blood and one diary entry in August 1941, details how when witnessing the mass shooting of Jews into a pit outside the city of Minsk in what is now Belarus, he almost fainted when the brains of a victim splashed on to his coat.
Director Professor Nikolaus Katzer of the German Historical Institute (DHI) in Moscow described it as 'a document of shudderingly outstanding historical significance.'
It contains more than 1,000 pages and has surfaced 71 years after Himmler was caught by British soldiers wandering around northern Germany dressed in the uniform of an ordinary serviceman with false papers.
Recognised when he was taken for interrogation, he bit down on a cyanide capsule contained in a tooth and was dead within minutes.
Himmler was in charge of the entire terror apparatus of the Nazi state from the policeman on the beat and the Gestapo to the concentration camps and the extermination plants like Auschwitz and Treblinka.
The diary shows that between 1943 and 1945 he met 1,600 people and records details of his life.
On a visit to the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany, for instance, he writes: 'Took a snack at the cafe in the SS-Casino.'
Another time he writes of witnessing the 'effectiveness' of the diesel engines at the Sobibor death camp in Nazi occupied Poland where 400 people were put to death for the exhibition. In total some 250,000 people were gassed in the camp, most within two hours of arrival.
Later the same day in 1943 he records that he was 'feted' at a banquet thrown by SS men.
The diary is dotted with references to Puppi - his nickname for his daughter Gudrun, a diehard Nazi who is still alive, living in a suburb of Munich, where she aids former Nazis with a charity called 'Stille Hilfe' - Silent Help.
He also calls for new watchdogs at the Auschwitz complex 'capable of ripping apart everyone but their handlers.'
The diary also contains many references to Margarethe Sieghroth, the woman he married in 1928 and who bore him his daughter Gudrun. It also mentions their adoptivde son Gerhard.
One page of the diary, dated 3 June 1944 - three days before the Allied armada landed on the beaches of Normandy to begin the western assault on Germany - Himmler was concerned about more pressing social matters.
The diary details the wedding details on that day between SS General Major Hermann Fegelein and Gretl Braun at Hitler's holiday retreat at the Obersalzberg in Bavaria.
Fegelein was a favourite of Himmler's and Hitler while Gretl was the sister of Eva Braubn, the woman who lived in the shadows of the Third Reich as the Nazi leader's mistress.
Fegelein was arrested by the SS on Hitler's orders three days previously because he had fled his post in the Fuehrerbunker and was suspectecd of treason. Being the husband of Eva Braun's vister did not save him; he was shot.
In the wedding day protocol Himmler describes events from 9.00am in the morning to 7.00pm at night, beginning with greeting guests in Berchtesgaden, a lunch at Haus Bormann - the residence on the mountainside of Hitler's sinister secretary - a party there in the afternoon before going on to the Berghof, the Fuehrer's mountainside residence.
The wedding was to culminate with a trip to the tea house at the top of the mountain - the only relic from Nazi times that exists there to this day and visited by tens of thousands of tourists a year.
The last few metres to the mountaintop are completed for visitors in the same bronze lift that Bormann built for Hitler in the 1930's.
The diaries, found earlier this year are to be serialised in the German newspaper Bild from tomorrow. A member of the DHI team said: 'The archive documents are the key to fully understand Himmler and all his cruel works.'
The discovery of the diaries comes two years after letters to his wife and daughter, photos and even a recipe book belonging to Himmler were discovered in Israel.
They revealed he kept the mass Jewish extermination programme he directed from his wife and mistress in case it upset them.
In the letters and diaries that were serialised by Germany’s Die Welt newspaper, he comes across as a foppish, even diffident accomplice to mass slaughter.
Historians spent three years studying the archive, which belonged to a Jewish man before it was sealed in a bank vault in Tel Aviv, in order to test its authenticity, before coming to the conclusion that it was genuine.
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