Heinrich Himmler

Heinrich Himmler is an absent ruler whose plans and words continue to govern the living: after his death in an aircraft explosion, his successor Reinhard Heydrich inherits the SS leadership, while Himmler’s demographic ambitions and a record of his speech expose the violence concealed beneath the Reich’s political language. The novel presents him less through direct action than through the machinery and testimony that survive him—settlement figures, bureaucratic continuity, and an address that calls mass murder a page of glory.

Leadership and Political Legacy

Himmler had been Reichsführer-SS until an aircraft carrying him exploded in midair two years before the scene in which Xavier March confronts Heydrich’s portrait. Heydrich has taken over the office and is said to be in line to succeed Adolf Hitler. Himmler’s death therefore appears not as the end of his power but as a transfer: the regime’s central institutions remain in place, and his successor can pursue policies that Himmler had set in motion.

The future Heydrich claims for his leadership is framed as change from within. Karl Krebs tells March that the Reichsführer takes a personal interest in the younger generation, promotes restructuring and greater openness, and favors talking to the Americans; Krebs contrasts this promised new order with the declining influence of Odilo Globocnik. The political language of reform does not erase Himmler’s inheritance. Krebs’s own appeal to the successor’s interest in change sits beside evidence that the regime’s expansionist settlement scheme has produced a population unwilling to remain where it was sent.

The Eastern Settlement Plan

In a conversation with March, Artur Nebe describes the scale of Himmler’s plans: twenty million settlers in the East by 1960, rising to ninety million by the end of the century. Nebe says that the Reich had succeeded in shipping people out, but that half of them wanted to return. The blunt arithmetic turns a grand project of territorial transformation into an admission of failure: the Reich can impose displacement, but it cannot make its supposed living space desirable to those it has moved there.

Nebe connects that contradiction to the regime’s present crisis. He says terrorism has become serious and that the Americans supply money, weapons, and training to the insurgents, whom he says they have kept fighting for twenty years. He adds that the young do not want to fight and the old do not want to work. His account makes Himmler’s plan part of a larger inheritance of coercion and instability: the settlements are not merely a completed act of population transfer but a continuing source of resistance, while the state lacks the will and labor it needs to sustain its rule.

The Speech and the Record of Atrocity

A dated passage reproduces words attributed to Himmler in a secret speech to senior SS officers. He speaks of men standing beside one hundred, five hundred, or one thousand corpses and remaining, with some exceptions caused by human weakness, decent fellows. He calls this endurance a page of glory in the SS’s history, one that must never be written. The passage’s horror lies in its reversal of moral terms: the killing is not denied, but recast as a test of discipline and as grounds for institutional pride.

The speech’s insistence that the page must remain unwritten also gives the novel’s act of quotation a particular force. The secret address is presented to the reader as evidence of the very history its speaker says should never be recorded. Its numbers make mass death unmistakable, while its language reveals the work required to make perpetrators’ endurance sound virtuous. In this way, Himmler’s words expose both the crime and the attempt to control how the crime will be remembered.

Succession, Complicity, and Meaning

Himmler’s legacy reaches the investigation not only through population policy and the speech but through the chain of command surrounding the deaths of Josef Buhler and Wilhelm Stuckart. When March asks whether Odilo Globocnik killed them, Krebs acknowledges that Globocnik did so and says he knew the man’s reputation. He then argues that Globocnik was acting on Heydrich’s orders and that, if Heydrich had chosen to spare the Party a public scandal, Krebs had no standing to object. Himmler’s former office is not itself identified as the source of this order; rather, the exchange shows how the apparatus he once led continues to function under Heydrich, with subordinates using superior authority to excuse their own acquiescence.

Across these fragments, Himmler is constructed through the gap between monumental schemes and their consequences, and between the perpetrators’ self-image and the evidence they seek to suppress. His settlement figures promise a future measured in millions, but Nebe describes return and insurgency; his speech calls the endurance of killing honorable, but its own language preserves an indictment. Though dead before March’s investigation, Himmler remains consequential as the author of a political inheritance and as the voice in a secret record that the Reich would prefer unwritten.