Himmler’s Diary Discovered in Archive in Russia
The diary of Nazi SS leader Heinrich Himmler was discovered filed in an archive in Russia.
The diary, actually a service calendar including dates, meetings and military decisions, was discovered earlier this year in the Russian Military Archive in Podolsk . It was filed under Dnewnik, which is Russian for diary, the Daily Mail reported.
The diary will be serialized in the German newspaper Bild beginning on Tuesday.
An entry in the 1,000-page diary in August 1941 revealed that Himmler, who was known to be squeamish at the sight of blood, almost fainted when the brains of a Jewish mass shooting victim at the edge of a pit outside of Minsk splattered on his coat, according to the Mail.
He writes in 1943 about witnessing the “effectiveness” of the diesel engines used to gas prisoners at the Sobibor death camp. That same day SS men threw a banquet in his honor, he recorded. He also calls for new guard dogs at the Auschwitz complex “capable of ripping apart everyone but their handlers,” according to the Mail.
In 1945, Himmler was captured by British soldiers in northern Germany, carrying falsified papers. He was recognized during his interrogation, which led him to bite down on a cyanide capsule hidden in one of his teeth. He died moments later.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
