PERPETRATOR |
This is Heinrich Himmler, the head of the feared SS and the most powerful man in Germany after Adolf Hitler. The SS were the Nazis' main instrument of terror and control. It was the SS and their collaborators who organised and carried out the Holocaust. It was SS killing squads [called Einsatzgruppen] with helpers that shot one and a half million Jews in massacres in eastern Europe. It was SS doctors who carried out cruel and often fatal medical experiments on camp inmates. And it was the SS who from 1934 ran the concentration camps and later the death camps where four and a half million Jews, three million Soviet Prisoners of War, one million Polish civilians, hundreds of thousands of Gypsies and thousands of homosexuals and opponents of the Nazis were murdered or worked to death. |