The diary of one of the most notorious Nazi leaders, Heinrich Himmler, is to be published next year by a Moscow-based institute. The diaries reveal the SS-Reichsführer's day-to-day appointments before and during the war.
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The official diary of SS chief Heinrich Himmler is to be released to the public, the Moscow-based German Historical Institute (DHI) has announced. The diaries, covering the years 1937-38 and 1944-45 were discovered in 2013 in a Russian Defense Ministry archive in Podolsk, outside Moscow.
The typed-out diaries, written ahead of each day by a series of adjutants, list in detail Himmler's day-to-day appointments, and have helped to complete a chronicle partially visible in Himmler's 1941-42 diaries, which were found in the early 1990s and published in 1999.
The documents show a busy schedule of meetings with bureaucrats, SS generals, foreign leaders like Benito Mussolini, and visits to concentration camps, including Auschwitz, Sobibor, and Buchenwald.
Himmler is often considered Adolf Hitler's immediate number two. By the end of the Third Reich twelve years later (and his suicide in British custody in Lüneburg on May 23, 1945), Himmler had accumulated so many different positions - Reichsführer SS, head of the German police, Interior Minister, and commander of the Replacement Army (the part of the Wehrmacht operating inside Germany) - that his power was only superseded by Hitler himself.
Himmler toured the Warsaw Ghetto in January 1943Image: picture-alliance/dpa
Unique discovery
His roles put Himmler in control of the concentration camp network as well as the Nazis' domestic intelligence agency. Given that no other major Nazi leader apart from Josef Goebbels kept a diary of such detail, the impending publication is being viewed as particularly significant.
"Goebbels was really a figure in the second tier [of the Third Reich's power structure]," said Matthias Uhl, the DHI historian who directed the project and has been studying the find for the past three years. "Here one can follow Himmler's day minutely, and reconstruct certain important decisions."
The diaries also make the general picture of Himmler's role in the Holocaust much clearer. "It's now possible to reconstruct [Himmler's] work in the second half of the war," Uhl told DW. The diary shows that Himmler toured a number of concentration camps as well as the Warsaw Ghetto (on January 9, 1943), and took an active role in directing the mass murder of Jews.
"And we see how all of his contacts in his state and economic network fit together to reinforce his position," said Uhl.
Key speech
One of the most important notes, published on Tuesday by "Bild," can be found under the entry for October 4, 1943, when Himmler made a speech to a gathering of SS leaders at 5:30 p.m. at the "Hotel Ostland" in Poznan, a city in occupied Poland.
The Nazi leader witnessed the gas chambers of the Sobibor camp in useImage: Reuters/Kacper Pempel
This entry documents the first of the infamous "Posen speeches,"(the German name for Poznan), one of the few times that a leading Nazi discussed the Holocaust on record. In the three-hour speech, a part of which was read during the Nuremberg trials, Himmler said, "Among us it should be talked about openly, though we will never talk about it in public - I mean the Jewish evacuation, the extinction of the Jewish people."
The new diary shows that the speech was followed by a meal with leading SS officers.
Uhl also confirmed that there was "no doubt" that the document was genuine, both because of the content and because it exactly matched similar documents of the time. "You can't forge something like that," he said.
The document was found in the Russian archive marked simply with the Russian word "Dnewnik," meaning diary, which was one of the reasons why it had been lost for so long. But Uhl underlined that there was no way of knowing how exactly it had fallen into the hands of the Red Army.
The 1,000-page document will be published in two volumes at the end of 2017, though the German mass-circulation daily "Bild" has already serialized parts of it this week.
The Podolsk archive contains some 2.5 million pages of documents seized during the war by the Red Army, which are in the process of being digitalized and released by joint German-Russian institutions.
'Never Again': Memorials of the Holocaust
International Holocaust Remembrance Day is January 27. Numerous memorials across Germany ensure the millions of victims are not forgotten.
Image: picture-alliance/AP Photo/M. Schreiber
Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site
A large sculpture stands in front of Dachau. Located just outside Munich, it was the first concentration camp opened by the Nazi regime. Just a few weeks after Adolf Hitler came to power, it was used by the paramilitary SS Schutzstaffel to imprison, torture and kill political opponents of the regime. Dachau also served as a prototype and model for the other Nazi camps that followed.
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Wannsee House
The villa on Berlin's Wannsee lake was pivotal in the planning of the Holocaust. Fifteen members of the Nazi government and the SS Schutzstaffel met here on January 20, 1942 to devise what became known as the "Final Solution," the deportation and extermination of all Jews in German-occupied territory. In 1992, the villa where the Wannsee Conference was held was turned into a memorial and museum.
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Holocaust Memorial in Berlin
Located next to the Brandenburg Gate, Berlin's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe was inaugurated 60 years after the end of World War II on May 10, 2005, and opened to the public two days later. Architect Peter Eisenman created a field with 2,711 concrete slabs. An attached underground "Place of Information" holds the names of all known Jewish Holocaust victims.
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Memorial to Persecuted Homosexuals
Not too far from the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, another concrete memorial honors the thousands of homosexuals persecuted by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945. The 4-meter high (13-foot) monument, which has a window showing alternately a film of two men or two women kissing, was inaugurated in Berlin's Tiergarten on May 27, 2008.
Image: picture alliance/Markus C. Hurek
Documentation center on Nazi Party rally grounds
Nuremberg hosted the biggest Nazi party propaganda rallies from 1933 until the start of World War II. The annual Nazi Party congress, as well as rallies with as many as 200,000 participants, took place on the 11-square-kilometer (4.25-square-mile) area. Today, the unfinished Congress Hall building serves as a documentation center and a museum.
Image: picture-alliance/Daniel Karmann
German Resistance Memorial Center
The Bendlerblock building in Berlin was the headquarters of a military resistance group. On July 20, 1944, a group of Wehrmacht officers around Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg carried out an assassination attempt on Hitler that ultimately failed. The leaders of the conspiracy were summarily shot the same night in the courtyard of the Bendlerblock. Today, it's the German Resistance Memorial Center.
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Bergen-Belsen Memorial
The Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Lower Saxony was initially established as a prisoner of war camp before becoming a concentration camp. Prisoners too sick to work were brought here from other concentration camps, and many also died of disease. One of the 50,000 people killed here was Anne Frank, a Jewish girl who gained international fame after her diary was published posthumously.
Image: picture alliance/Klaus Nowottnick
Buchenwald Memorial
Located near the Thuringian town of Weimar, Buchenwald was one of the largest concentration camps in Germany. From 1937 to April 1945, the National Socialists deported about 270,000 people from all over Europe to the camp and murdered 64,000 of them before the camp was liberated by US soldiers in 1945. The site now serves as a memorial to the victims.
Image: Getty Images/J. Schlueter
Memorial to the Sinti and Roma Victims
Opposite the Reichstag parliament building in Berlin, a park inaugurated in 2012 serves as a memorial to the 500,000 Sinti and Roma people killed by the Nazi regime. Around a memorial pool, the poem "Auschwitz" by Roma poet Santino Spinelli is written in English, Germany and Romani. "Gaunt face, dead eyes, cold lips, quiet, a broken heart, out of breath, without words, no tears," it reads.
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'Stolpersteine' — stumbling blocks as memorials
In the 1990s, artist Gunter Demnig began the project to confront Germany's Nazi past. The brass-covered concrete cubes placed in front of the former homes of Nazi victims show their names, details about their deportation, and murder, if known. As of early 2022, some 100,000 "Stolpersteine" have been laid in over 25 countries across Europe. It's the world's largest decentralized Holocaust memorial.
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Brown House in Munich
Right next to the "Führerbau," where Adolf Hitler had his office in Munich, was the headquarters of the Nazi Party, called the Brown House. A white cube now occupies the place where it once stood. In it, the "Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism" opened on April 30, 2015, 70 years after the defeat of the Nazi regime.
