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The description of Europe's greatest previous secret policeman—Napoleon's Minister of Police Joseph Fouché—as a "cold, selfish, remorseless fanatic" fits Policeman Himmler too. Of all the Nazi leaders, he is the most uncompromising, the least likely to show mercy or kindness. He is also unique among Nazi big shots in that he literally grew up with the Party, never knew or worked at much of anything else.
Student. Born in Munich in 1900, the son of a Catholic schoolteacher, he became an ensign-bearer in the Eleventh Bavarian Infantry Regiment at 17, but saw no active service at the World War front. The War over, he joined Fhrer Hitler's struggling German Labor Party at 19, was noted more for his regular attendance at Munich beer-hall powwows than for any great forcefulness. To his parents he was a problem child; in his Party he had the reputation of a hellraiser. In the famed—and abortive—beer-hall Putsch of 1923 he marched along with the boys (as the Party's flag-bearer), but the Republican police considered him so unimportant that they did not bother to arrest him. While Hitler was serving time in Landsberg Prison and Göring was recovering from his wounds in Sweden, the youthful Heinrich was a student of experimental agriculture at the University of Munich.
When the Führer was released from jail, young, jobless Himmler joined up with the slowly forming Storm Troops. Soon Storm Troop Leader Ernst Roehm (a notorious homosexual) and the Führer quarreled. Roehm quit the country, became military adviser to Bolivia. The Führer saw the weakness of the loosely organized, unwieldy mob of Brown Shirts and decided to form, within the Storm Troopers, a carefully chosen elite group of men to be known as the Schutzstaffel ("Protective Corps"), better known as the 55 Guards. Their primary function at first was to guard the Führer. First 55 leader was the late Julius Schreck, the Führer's adjutant and chauffeur. In the next four years the leadership was changed three times; in 1929 Himmler got his crack at the job and the organization began to hum. He and it have hummed ever since.
Stripling. Ernst Roehm was persuaded to return to Germany in 1930. He found that during his absence a formidable black-uniformed army of 100,000 had come into being, that the Führer's affections had been shifted away from the 2,000,000 Storm Troops to the 55, that the Storm Troops were being relegated back to the gutter whence they had originally sprung. And although Leader Himmler was nominally Leader Roehm's subordinate, actually Heinrich Himmler took his orders direct from Adolf Hitler himself.