SS chief Heinrich Himmler was the mastermind of what’s known as the “final solution” the deliberate and systematic plan for the mass murder of the Jewish people via camps like Auschwitz.

Among the Nazi leaders, Heinrich Himmler was, as Richard Breitman observes in this ground- breaking study, an easy man to underestimate—short, pudgy, near-sighted, chinless. Yet Himmler holds a ...