International: A Grave on the Heath

Heinrich Himmler's last journey was different. Before, wherever he had travelled, death followed him like a shadow—and the shadow fell on many, at Maidanek. Oswiecim, Buchenwald. "You find people there," he once said of his concentration camps, "with hydrocephalus, cross-eyed and deformed ones . . . a lot of cheap trash . . . the prisoners are made up of slave souls."

On his last trip, from Berlin to Flensburg to the north German moors, his shadow caught up with him. Heinrich Himmler, whom his fellow Nazis had ironically nicknamed "gentle Heinrich," had...

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