Reichsfiihrer Heinrich HimmIer

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1 SS Reichsfiihrer Heinrich HimmIer was head of the entire Nazi police force including SD and the Gestapo, he was Minister of the Interior and commander of the Waffen SS and the Home Army. One of Hitler's most sinister henchmen, he was also in charge of the death camps in the East. The account of Himmler's life and his impact on the rise and fall of the Nazi state make a gripping and horrifying story. Although Adolf Hitler held the ultimate responsibility for what became the Holocaust, it was Heinrich Himmler who essentially laid the plans and devised the schemes that led to the killings of six million Jews. Himmler quickly moved up the ranks, and once Hitler became Chancellor in 1933 Himmler became the head of the Munich police. From this position he organized the first concentration camp at Dachau and began to organize the Nazi political police throughout Germany. In April of 1934 he was named assistant chief of the Prussian Gestapo, the secret police, and in June of 1934, Himmler successfully crushed the paramilitary SA~ headed by Ernst Rohm, making the SS the dominant organization in Germany. From a number ofletters and speeches of Himmler it becomes clear, that he referred to the annihilation of the Jews in Europe - the Holocaust - as a task which he had to carry out on the behalf of the highest authority in the Third Reich - Adolf Hitler. In 1941, Himmler summoned Rudolf Hoess, SS Commandant of the largest killing center ever created, the death camp Auschwitz. He told him that "the FUhrer had given the order for a Final Solution of the Jewish Question" and that "we, the SS, must carry out that order"

2 Reinhard Heydrich was one of Hitler's most ruthless Nazis and second in importance only to Heinrich Himmler in the Nazi SS organization and the principle planner of the Final Solution. There was even talk of his one day succeeding Adolf Hitler. At a villa on the shores of a suburban Berlin lake called the Wannsee, mid-level bureaucrats from a number of Nazi agencies assembled January 20, 1942, at the request of Heydrich. Heydrich and his boss, Heinrich Himmler were in the process of assuming leadership in the Final Solution of the Jewish Question, i.e., the murder of Europe's Jews by the Nazis. This meeting was a part of that process, as bureaucratic coordination would be required for the massive efforts to be undertaken throughout Europe to kill the 11,000,000 Jews described in the document. The Nazis ultimately succeeded in killing six million of Europe's Jews, with hundreds of thousands already dead by the time of this meeting. By mid 1942, mass gassing of Jews using Zyklon-B began at Auschwitz in occupied Poland, where extermination was conducted on an industrial scale with some estimates running as high as three million persons eventually killed through gassing, starvation, disease, shooting, and burning.

3 One of the most feared and hated Nazi leaders of World War II, Adolf Eichmann was responsible for the deaths of millions of Jews. He was born in Solingen on 19 March Later the family moved to Linz, Austria, where Adolf Eichmann spent his youth. A member of the Austrian Nazi party, he quickly rose through the ranks he headed the Austrian office for Jewish emigration where he brought together all the bureaucratic agencies needed for Jewish expulsion. In December 1939 Eichmann was transferred to dealing with Jewish affairs and evacuation, and for the next six years Eichmann's office was the headquarter for the implementation of the Final Solutioll- his assigmmmt was to murder all the Jews in Europe. Eichmann oversaw the deportation to the concentration camps and his efficient organization rounded up and transported millions to their deaths at infamous camps such as Auschwitz, Chelmno, Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec. But only in Budapest after March 1944 did the desk-murderer Adolf Eichmann become a public personality, working in the open and playing a leading role in the massacre of Hungarian Jewry.

4 Rudolf Hoess was history's greatest mass murderer, the architect and SS Commandant of the largest killing center ever created, the death camp Auschwitz, whose name has come to symbolize humanity's ultimate descent into evil. Responsible for exterminating 2.5 million people in World War II, he was a mildmannered, happily married Catholic who enjoyed normal family life with his five children despite his view of the crematoria chimney stacks from his bedroom window. At peak efficiency Auschwitz had the capacity to 'get rid of ten thousand people in 24 hours, 'as RudolfHoess would testify during the War Crimes Trials after WW2. Witness after witness, document after document produced irrefutable evidence of the crimes committed, and no witness was more shocking than RudolfHoess, who calmly explained how he had come to exterminate 2.5 million people. Rudolf Franz Hoess was born in 1900 and joined the SS in In 1934 he was attached to the SS at Dachau, on August I, 1938, he was adjutant of the Sachsenhausen KZ camp until his appointment as Commandant of the newlybuilt camp at Auschwitz early 1940, located nearby the provincial Polish town of Oshwiecim in Galacia. May 1941 the SS commander Heinrich Himmler said to Hoess, that Adolf Hitler had given orders 'for the final solution of the Jewish question. I have chosen the Auschwitz camp for this purpose'. Hoess converted Auschwitz into an extermination camp arid installed gas chambers and crematoria. Auschwitz became the killing centre where the largest numbers of European Jews were killed. After an experimental gassing there in September 1941 of 850 malnourished and ill prisoners, mass murder became a daily routine.

5 SS Hauptsturmfiihrer Alois Brunner - the last leading Nazi still believed to be on the loose and Eichmann's second in command - was a key figure in the planning and execution of the Final Solution, the murder of 6 million Jews during World War II. He actively participated in the mass murder and was often sent by Eichmann as a trouble shooter to areas such as France to expedite the killings. Alois Brunner bears direct responsibility for the deportation to Nazi death camps of 128,500 Jewish men, women and children from Austria, Greece, France, and Slovakia. The arrest and conviction of Alois Brunner remains the top priority ofleading Nazi hunters and war investigators but Brunner has successfully eluded justice. During his many years hiding out reportedly in an apartment on Haddad Street in the Syrian capital of Damascus, he openly assisted the Syrians in establishing their own secret police. The Syrian authorities have covered and continue to cover Alois Brunner and he may never pay for his crimes. Germany, Austria, Slovakia, France and Poland currently seek his extradition, but the Syrians have been totally uncooperative in response to all these requests. Alois Brunner was born in Austria in 1912 and joined the Austrian Nazi Party in 1931 at the age of 19. His anti-semitism was considered to be so extreme that he was swiftly tapped to be Adolf Eichmann's private secretary. As head of the Nazi's Jewish affairs office in prewar Vienna, he organized persecution that forced thousands of Jews to flee to other European countries and the United States. When World War II started, he sent 47,000 Austrian Jews to the KZ camps. After organizing mass roundups in Berlin, he transferred to Greece, where he was responsible for deporting all 43,000 Jews in Salonika within just two months.

6 Josef Mengele During the Holocaust Josef Mengele was the chief provider for the gas chambers at Auschwitz. When it was reported that one block was infected with lice, Mengele solved the problem by gassing all the 750 women assigned to it. The memory of this slightly built man, scarcely a hair out of place, his dark green tunic neatly pressed, his face well scrubbed, his Death's Head SS cap tilted rakishly toone side, remains vivid for those who survived his scrutiny when they arrived at the Auschwitz railhead. Polished boots slightly apart, his thumb resting on his pistol belt, he surveyed his prey with those dead gimlet eyes. Death to the left, life to the right. Four hundred thousand souls - babies, small children, young girls, mothers, fathers, and grandparents - were casually waved to the left hand side with a flick of the cane clasped in a gloved hand. Mengele did a number of medical experiments of unspeakable horror at Auschwitz~ using twins. These twins as young as five years of age were usually murdered after the experiment was over and their bodies dissected. Mengele injected chemicals into the eyes of children in an attempt to change their eye color. Unfortunately a strict veil of secrecy over the experiments enabled Mengele to do his work more effectively.