Anthony Storr in Dimensions, vol.6, No 2
Padfield writes clearly, and, judging from Himmler's
reference notes and bibliography, it is apparent that his research is
thorough and his knowledge of his subject encyclopedic. The reader can
be assured that this book contains all the facts that he could possibly
want to know about Himmler, who was one of the four or five most
powerful men in the Third Reich...
...In
June 1936, Hitler promoted Himmler to the position of Chief of the
German Police. Himmler's combined offices gave him unrivaled power,
second only to that of Hitler. He could now proceed with his
acknowledged aim of ridding the Reich of its enemies: 'Jews,
Bolsheviks, priests, homosexuals'. Padfield calls this operation 'the
cleansing of the German nation', and there can be little doubt that
Himmler's anal-sadistic character structure inclined him to look upon
mass murder as a purge, a way of clearing out the poisonous filth which
had accumulated in the bowels of the German nation.
The
story of the decline and fall of the Third Reich, of the von
Stauffenberg plot against Hitler, of Germany's final defeat, and of
Hitler's suicide has often been told, but never, perhaps, more
competently than in these pages. Padfield, for the most, stays with the
facts and declines speculation. He has a gift for narrative, and his
account of Himmler's capture by the Allies is riveting.
...Yet
Himmler was not essentially different from many people whom we daily
encounter. Indeed, many visitors found him charming, considerate, and
unusually polite. I am sure Padfield is correct when he writes:
'There
is no entity 'Himmler' capable of being viewed in isolation; if there
had been it is apparent that that 'Himmler' would have had neither the
self-confidence nor the power to have ordered helotry and genocide. We
are peering dimly into a madhouse, but it is a communal asylum, and the
inmates go home in the evening and discuss homeopathic medicine or read
their children bedtime fairy tales. We are not dealing with individual
psychopaths; we are not dealing with a Reichsführer who was merely the
sum of Heinrich Himmler's genes and experiences, a man who could be
described as either 'indecisive' or 'ruthless' or labelled with any of
the attributes he has been given here.'
...what
Padfield describes as a 'madhouse' and a 'communal asylum' had been in
the making for years. The urge to create a mythical medieval Germany
populated only by the Volk was already evident in
the eighteenth century...Delusional systems which affect nations and
those which affect individuals are closely similar...
I
think it absolutely essential that Holocaust studies continue to remind
us that whole societies, as well as individuals, can become
delusional....
Those
fortunate enough to lead reasonably equable lives in a modern democracy
have no conception of how they might behave in circumstances of extreme
deprivation and demoralization. You and I may complacently assume that
we would never follow a leader like Hitler or succumb to the delusional
system which he promulgated. But we were not there. We cannot be sure.
Book Preview, April 1990
...With the exception of Bradley F.Smith's Heinrich Himmler, A
Nazi in the Making 1900-1926 (1971) [biographies of Himmler]...have
treated his childhood and youth superficially and tended to describe
him in clichés. It is high time a new biography appeared which
considered his formative years in detail and analysed his complex
motives in the psychoanalytical and ideological terms they demand.
Peter Padfield's is such a biography...It is a responsible,
well-written biography which neither flinches from nor wallows in
macabre detail. Padfield's description of Himmler's youth, for which he
acknowledges his debt to Bradley Smith's spadework, is especially
fascinating...
...[It]
is the most compelling biography of any Nazi leader now available, and
will probably be good for another fifty years yet.
Telford Taylor, US Chief of Counsel for War Crimes Office, 1946-49, 1.2.1991
Peter Padfield's book on Heinrich Himmler is the first solid and readable account of Heinrich Himmler's place and purpose as the most destructive of the Nazi leaders. It is a fine piece of historical work.
John Keegan in The Daily Telegraph, 14.7.1990
...the 'SS state' was the engine which made Nazi tyranny work.
How did Himmler do it ? Peter Padfield, whose biography of Admiral
Dönitz is one of the most important studies of Nazi leadership, labours
at enormous length to supply the answer. He spares the reader nothing
in the process, making this a book which at times is difficult, if not
impossible, to read page for page. Yet he does not in the end provide a
solution, and perhaps no one can.
...[he]
seems to come nearest the truth when he writes that Himmler's ultimate
inability to keep silent about what he himself insisted should be an
eternal secret welled up from a 'primal, childlike understanding that
he had sinned, sinned in the sight of the Lord'.
Giles Macdonogh in Weekend FT, 22.7.1990
It can be no easy job writing the life of a monster like Himmler...Mr Padfield has convincingly sifted the evidence while steering clear of the pitfalls. His is a black biography, as black as the uniforms of Himmler's praetorian guard, the SS...
Richard Overy in The Observer, 17.6.1990
...[Himmler's] story is a chilling reminder of what happens when, by chance more than design, fanatics get their hands on the instruments of state power...
Donald Cameron Watt in The Sunday Times, 24.6.1990
...Padfield is a writer of great power. The scenes he paints of what the SS did in its 'police' role, and in the camps, where it reflected most clearly the effect of unfettering Himmler's mish-mash of café Stammtisch racialism, half-educated conspiratorialism, thwarted sexuality, locker-room machismo and wagon-lit philosophy, are as graphic and horrible as our imaginations can grasp, a hell on earth more terrible than any medieval artist or Calvinist theologian could depict. Padfield is not the first to portray it. But he is not the least effective.
Jeremy Noakes in Jewish Chronicle, 20.7.1990
Peter Padfield' well-written biography captures Himmler's
complex personality extremely well. Through a judicious use of
psychological theory and shrewd psychological insights he paints a very
persuasive portrait of Himmler's development from a comparatively
normal middle-class Bavarian schoolboy into a monster who as
Reichsführer-SS either initiated or supervised the worst Nazi crimes.
The
author describes the personal traits and the context of family, school,
and the wider society which combined to form Himmler's personality,
depicting him as the product as much of a deeply disturbed society as
of his own particular character defects...
A.L.Rowse in The Sunday Telegraph, 12.8.1990
Of all the quite able thugs and gangsters who ran Nazi Germany Himmler has hitherto been thought the most charmless. Also the most mysterious; we knew so little about him...We have no excuse for not knowing about him now, after Peter Padfield's thorough, conscientious and compulsively readable investigation...
Nigel Jones in London Magazine, October/November 1990
...The name Himmler has long been a popular byword for the
bogeyman of nightmares, but the actual historical figure of the
Reichsführer has remained blurred; obscured behind those rimless
spectacles and the feared black uniform of the SS. No longer.
For
this massive biography Peter Padfield has painstakingly documented all
that we need to know about the architect and overlord of the Nazi
empire of terror. It is not, as Padfield readily admits, a work of
original scholarship. There are no interviews with Himmler's surviving
intimates, and no startling new facts are unearthed. Nevertheless,
Padfield has methodically read through a mass of material, organised
the salient details and told the story with just the right historical
objectivity, leavened with an understandable revulsion for his subject.
The
moral left by the book is a chilling one. For what is most striking
about Heinrich Himmler is his desperate ordinariness...
Philip Keer on Book Choice, Channel 4 TV, 29.6.1990
At the end of the week it took me to read Peter Padfield's life of this unlikely mass murderer I found myself reaching for the mouthwash. I shudder to think how Padfield himself must have felt after reputedly spending five years of his life peering into Himmler's diaries, letters, speeches and file notes, but the result, the first full-scale biography of the Reichsführer-SS, as well as being, I think, the most accurate life of any of the Nazi leaders, is also the most chilling portrait of evil that I have ever read.
Richard Heller in The Mail on Sunday, 17.6.1990
Peter Padfield...writes with massive authority and lucidity, and (as far as possible) objectivity...[His] catalogue of Himmler's evil is mind-numbing...
Richard Lamb in The Spectator, 21.7.1990
...Clear writing and much detail about atrocities bring
sharply to life the unbelievable horrors of Nazi rule...
Himmler
gave the superficial impression of good manners and prudishness, but in
fact he was a sadistic thug without conscience; he was also corrupt and
accumulated a large fortune...Hitler trusted him and allowed him to
practise his brutality all over Europe where death camps and slave
labour made the impact of this frenzied, half-crazed creature
awe-inspiring. Pertinently, Padfield quotes the evidence of a survivor
of Auschwitz and Ravensbrück at Nuremberg: 'Himmler had a systematic
and implacable urge to use human beings as slaves and to kill them when
they could no longer work.'
...Padfield
has used his talents well to shed light upon many shocking facets of
this sad period.
Publishers' Weekly (U.S.), 18.1.1991
Impeccably documented, compulsively readable, this is the first full-length biography of the most powerful and coldblooded of Hitler's lieutenants. Before his suicide in 1945 Himmler had ruled the SS and Gestapo, directed the death camps in Poland, headed German intelligence services, and run the slave-labor system in the Reich. He also was responsible for pseudo-medical experiments in the death camps. Delving into the family background and upbringing of this terrible, yet strangely ordinary man, Padfield analyzes the master-race theories that inspired Himmler and comes impressively close to explaining how a priggish, idealistic Bavarian boy turned into history's most ruthless slaughterer...A powerful and horrifying narrative by the author of Dönitz: The Last Führer.
Marc Fisher in Washington Post Book World, 6.9.1991
...Padfield...works hard to place Himmler not on the lunatic
fringe, but closer to the center of a society that had demonstrated its
attachment to a racial view of the world long before the rise of the
National Socialists. He repeatedly turns to evidence that the German
public knew more about Nazi oppression than many Germans today wish to
concede...
...the
biography is a convincing collection of evidence that serves up
sometimes numbing detail in a clear,unobtrusive style
William Mathewson in Wall Street Journal, 25.6.1991
...Himmler is a valuable addition to the annals of modern history's most horrifying period. For while der treue Heinrich (faithful Heinrich), as he was called by Hitler before the betrayal, cheated the judges at Nuremberg by means of a cyanide capsule, he is brought before the bar of history by Mr. Padfield and found guilty - with no extenuating circumstances.
Professor Larry V.Thompson in Chicago Tribune, 19.5.1991
...Padfield insists that Himmler's transformation from
romantic idealist to racial revolutionary cannot be understood solely
in psycopathic terms, or as an unbridled lust for power, or as the acts
of an efficient bureaucratic sycophant gone amok. He suggests that
Himmler became a racial executioner primarily because those surrounding
him encouraged it and German society sanctioned it.
'A
man is not what he does so much as what he is allowed to do; otherwise
what would each of us not do to change the world and ourselves ?'
Having posed this question, Padfield...demonstrates that Himmler
institutionalized evil with considerable social approval...
Padfield
thinks Himmler's metamorphosis occurred in his early 20s, when he
absorbed the shock of a lost war while undergoing doubts about his
manhood. His country had no future, and neither did he. In a diary, he
equated personal with national humiliation. Too young to serve in the
war, he agonized over his inability to discipline himself in social or
sexual intercourse. Often retreating into heroic and maudlin fantasies,
he immersed himself in racist literature and became a political
activist.
Politics
convinced Himmler that his and Germany's misfortune were caused by
Jews, Freemasons, Bolshevism and modernism in general...
Padfield
superbly analyzes Himmler's patient and calculated campaign for
personal and organizational stature...[he] stalks an elusive figure and
defines him better than any effort to date...
Peter Padfield comments that, although Himmler
has been translated into several European languages, and reviews have
generally been very favourable, no German-language publisher has been
willing to take it on; Germans have had no opportunity to purchase this
biography of one of the most significant Germans of the twentieth
century except in U.K. or U.S. or other European language editions.
This
is evidently significant, but of what precisely ?