Heinrich Himmler

Heinrich Himmler is never presented through a sustained scene of his own, but his influence runs through the novel’s camp administration, racial persecution, and ideological culture. People invoke his authority to justify policy, describe him as a patron of scholarship, and recall his personal visit to a rabbit-breeding station. The contrast is central to his portrayal: a ruler associated with mass persecution can appear in the same account as an amused spectator applauding a rabbit trained to beg.

Identity and Reach

Himmler appears principally by title, as the Reichsführer-SS, and through the decisions and institutions attached to that office. In one camp discussion, Paul Doll insists that he and Himmler share a political objective: prisoners must not be pampered. Angelus Thomsen endorses the distinction between practical considerations and the camp’s political purpose, while Doll reduces the policy to a rejection of leniency. The conversation does not establish that Himmler personally issued this particular instruction; it shows how Doll invokes supposed agreement with him to lend the camp’s harshness the weight of high authority.

That authority also figures in Doll’s account of an order attributed to Gruppenführer Blobel. Doll tells Wolfram Prufer that the order comes from Blobel and therefore from Himmler, treating the chain of command as an answer to Prufer’s objection that the order cannot be carried out. The exchange reveals Himmler’s power as an administrative fact in the lives of subordinates: his name helps turn a contested demand into an apparently unquestionable command. It also shows how the novel presents responsibility moving down a hierarchy, where appeals to orders can become instruments for imposing violence.

The Visit and the Public Persona

At a dinner seven weeks after a visit in mid-July, Doll recounts taking Himmler to the rabbit-breeding station at Dwory. The station raised angora rabbits by the hundred for fur intended to keep German aircrews warm. Doll singles out Snowball, a rabbit whose prisoner veterinarian had trained it to perform tricks, especially to sit up and beg. According to Doll, Himmler was delighted: he beamed and clapped, and his entourage followed suit, while Snowball sat begging and looked alarmed.

The story gives Himmler no private reflection or explanation. Its force comes instead from the gap between the genial spectacle of the applauding visitor and the coercive setting around it, where a prisoner veterinarian’s skill is folded into an institutional display. The rabbit’s trained gesture becomes a miniature of submission, although the narration does not claim that Himmler understood it that way. The anecdote’s dark comedy depends on the ease with which the dinner conversation treats the visit as charming while the conditions that produced the performance remain visible to the reader.

The same dinner conversation presents Himmler as a patron of the Ahnenerbe. Baldemar Zulz praises his ethnological work; Doll describes teams of anthropologists and archaeologists, and the discussion extends to runologists and heraldists. These remarks are made at a social gathering where the guests avoid discussing the war effort and the Buna-Werke directly. Himmler’s scholarly image is therefore offered through the talk of insiders, not through an independent account of the work or its findings. The novel emphasizes the breadth of the prestige being claimed for him, while the surrounding conversation makes the ideological purpose of such prestige part of the scene.

Ideology, Pseudoscience, and Political Use

Martin Bormann’s private account complicates that scholarly image. He calls Himmler the Quack and says he has little regard for his anthropology, herbalism, laxatives, or yogurts. Yet Bormann distinguishes those interests from cosmic-ice theory, which he considers politically important because Himmler is sympathetic to it. Bormann reports that Himmler’s meteorology department at the Ahnenerbe is supposedly engaged in long-range forecasting but is actually working on cosmic-ice theory. The account is Bormann’s report to Angelus Thomsen, not a direct statement from Himmler, and the novel gives no scientific validation to the theory.

Bormann’s concern is not whether the theory is sound. He says that what matters politically is who believes in it, and reports that Adolf Hitler has become increasingly interested in it, along with runes and horoscopes. In Bormann’s account, Hitler imagines that proving the theory would make Germany’s enemies lay down their arms and apologize, thereby giving the Thousand-Year Reich a mandate from heaven. Bormann consequently tells his nephew to investigate the subject because he cannot afford to be on the wrong side of it. Himmler’s importance here lies partly in how his credulity, as Bormann describes it, can help move an eccentric doctrine into the orbit of political power.

Persecution and the Machinery of Policy

The novel places Himmler’s authority beside the evolving persecution of European Jews, but it distinguishes among the people and institutions in that process. In a retrospective discussion, Konrad Peters dates the beginning of what he calls the crime without a name to July 31, 1941. He describes a letter drafted by Adolf Eichmann and Reinhard Heydrich, sent to Hermann Göring and returned with Göring’s signature, as conveying Adolf Hitler’s wish for a total solution. Peters then describes a shift from contemplated deportation to a colder destination toward the killing of women and children as the territorial alternative receded and pressure mounted among officials in Poland. The passage does not identify Himmler as the writer or signatory of that letter; it places his office within the wider machinery of Nazi power rather than making him the sole author of every decision.

Peters further insists that gas chambers and crematoria accelerated and economized the killing and spared the nerves of killers, but were not necessary to its underlying purpose. He cites the mass shootings carried out by the Einsatzgruppen and argues that bullets and pyres would have served the same intent. Read alongside the earlier exchanges in which Himmler’s authority is invoked to enforce camp demands, this account sets administrative command within a system whose methods could change while its willingness to kill persisted. The novel’s emphasis is not that a single title explains every step, but that institutions, orders, political pressure, and delegated action converge in the same violence.

Himmler’s office is also associated with the persecution of Roma. The narrator describes the Reichsführer-SS’s central office for fighting what Nazi authorities called the Gypsy menace as already active, and notes that Roma had been subjected to coercive treatment since the 1920s. In the camp, a Roma family group is held in a separate camp and classified as internees rather than placed on the labor lists; Alisz Seisser, whose grandmother was Sinti, is described as the only Roma prisoner in the Zone of Interest. This evidence situates Himmler’s administrative reach within racial persecution beyond the treatment of Jewish prisoners, without claiming that he personally ordered Alisz’s individual transfer or classification.

Narrative Significance

Himmler’s characterization is built from other people’s accounts, and those accounts do not settle into a single register. Doll uses Himmler’s supposed agreement to validate a political objective at the camp, then recalls him applauding Snowball. Zulz presents him as an ethnological authority; Bormann mocks his interests but treats his beliefs as politically consequential. Together these fragments portray a figure whose power is real even when the material surrounding him is ridiculous, second-hand, or self-serving.

That indirectness also sharpens the novel’s account of responsibility. Orders are attributed upward, translated into demands by officials below, and defended as political necessity or institutional duty. Yet the retrospective discussion of mass killing resists the notion that machinery alone explains the crime: the methods may facilitate murder, but the will to commit it precedes and exceeds them. Himmler is therefore significant not only as a high-ranking authority named in conversations, but as part of the system that makes ideology actionable—through offices, political endorsement, and the obedient circulation of commands.