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40 Fascinating Facts About the Relatives of Nazis After WWII

Khalid Elhassan March 14, 2019 24 min

4. Himmler, the Most Horrible Nazi Next to Hitler

With his common everyday man looks, receding chin, and office clerk glasses, Heinrich Himmler could have modeled for a stock image of the innocuous bureaucrat. Yet, Himmler was probably the most feared man in Germany, and second only to Hitler in responsibility for Germany’s wartime atrocities. Indeed, in his capacity as Reichsfuhrer-SS, Himmler was the man in charge of overseeing and carrying out the Holocaust. Captured after the war, he escaped trial and certain execution by swallowing cyanide.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.