On This Day: Nazi SS chief Himmler kills himself in British captivity

MAY 23, 1945: Holocaust mastermind Heinrich Himmler committed suicide in British captivity on this day in 1945.

The former SS chief, who organised the murder of six million Jews, bit down on a cyanide capsule after refusing to open his mouth during a medical inspection.

A British Pathé newsreel, which also showed the Nazis’ plundered art, filmed the former chicken farmer’s corpse after his instant collapse and quick death.

His body was buried in an unmarked grave near the headquarters of the Second British Army in Lüneburg, northern Germany, and has yet to be discovered.

Himmler, who hoped to flee to his native Bavaria, had tried to pass himself off as demobilised Sergeant Heinrich Hitzinger when stopped at a British checkpoint.

He had also shaved off his moustache, removed his pince-nez glasses and put a patch over his left eye in a bid to disguise his appearance.

But Adolf Hitler’s trusted confidante looked instantly suspicious as he was wearing civilian clothing while being escorted by two SS officers in long military overcoats.

The following day, he asked to speak to Captain Thomas Selvester, the commandant of an internment camp, and revealed his true identity.

Yet only hours after his arrival in Lüneburg – at 10.45pm – he had killed himself using one of the cyanide capsules given to all senior SS officers.

His death came only three weeks after Hitler’s own suicide as Soviet troops came within 300 yards of his bunker in Berlin on April 30.

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Two days before his death, the Führer flew into a rage when he learned that Himmler had tried to make peace with the Western Allies while posing as provisional leader.

In his last will and testament, Hitler branded Himmler a ‘traitor’ and Grand Admiral Dönitz, who inherited power, fired him from all German government positions.

But this belied the fact that Himmler had been among the Führer’s most devoted disciples and had carried out the Nazis’ dirtiest deeds.

On Hitler’s orders he organised the execution of hundreds of the Nazi-supporting brownshirts in the Night of the Long Knives.

The destruction of the Sturmabteilung (‘storm division’) or SA paramilitary force ensured the dominance of Himmler’s own Schutzstaffel (‘protection squad’).

The SS grew from being Hitler’s personal bodyguard into one of the most powerful organisations in the Third Reich.

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During World War II it was enlarged to include a fighting force of a million of the most ideologically committed Nazis.

Members of the SS also ran the extermination camps that sprouted across Poland after Hitler ordered the ‘Final Solution’, the murder of all Jews in Europe, in 1942.

Himmler was instrumental in formulating the manner of execution in which most Holocaust victims died.

He watched hundreds of Jews being killed by firing squads and later saw them being poisoned by vans that fed exhaust gasses into the back.

He decided that Zyklon B gas fed into a mock shower room was the best method after a trial at Auschwitz, the deadliest camp where 1.1million Jews were murdered.

In 1943, during a secret meeting of SS chiefs, he told them that the Holocaust would be a ‘glorious chapter that has not and will not be spoken of’.

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Himmler also masterminded the Lebensborn (‘fount of life’) programme in which a new Aryan master race was to have been created.

Under the belief that pure Germanic blood was superior, SS men were instructed to father numerous children with thousands of volunteer women.

More sickeningly yet, as many as 200,000 children with blonde hair and blue eyes were kidnapped in Eastern Europe and sent to live with German parents.