As part of my series of articles on the leadership and major figures in the Axis powers in the Second World War and the various claims that they were jewish or had some kind of jewish ancestry: I thought it would be instructive to 'get ahead of the game' so-to-speak on some of the leaders out there.
Heinrich Himmler - who needs little to no introduction as one of the biggest of all modern bogeymen - is one such example as while occasional rumours do claim he had some jewish ancestry: they do not appear to have taken serious root even among the serially credulous types on the internet. The only opinions about Himmler's ancestry; other than it being what the records suggest, is the ramblings on 'identify Himmler's ancestry by looking at pictures' threads on internet forums.
These we can ignore for the same reason that we can ignore people who claim Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren't nuked in last days before the end of the Second World War: they aren't well-versed in their subject as a rule and also they tend to see what they want to see not what the evidence necessarily suggests.
Lets scotch the rumour mill before it starts and dig into Himmler's family background.
Himmler's father Gebhard was from a family of farmers and craftsmen from Ansbach in northern Bavaria. His grandfather Konrad Himmler was the illegitimate son of Johann Hettinger and Johanna Himmler.
Konrad left home when he was eighteen and joined the armed forces and after leaving the army when he was thirty-five joined the police. He married Agatha Kiene who was the twenty-three year old daughter of a Bavarian watchmaker when he was fifty-nine and she gave birth to Gebhard Himmler three years later. (1)
Gebhard's origins - regardless of what you might think of his ardent respectability and often sneered at 'bourgeoise aspirations' - (2) are decisively German and derived from the very type of people that Himmler later came to lionize as - to paraphrase his intellectual confrere Walther Darre - 'the life blood of the Nordic race'.
Himmler's mother Anna Maria Heyder was the daughter of a Bavarian tradesman and of very similar peasant/craftsman origins to her husband Gebhard. (3) Anna was an extremely pious Catholic (4) and we have no reasons whatsoever for supposing she had any jewish ancestry: although interestingly Himmler did believe he was descended from a convicted witch.
Also if there was any known jewish ancestry in the Himmler family then it would be reasonable to suppose that Himmler's great niece Katrin Himmler would have discovered and mentioned it considering that she married and has children by an Israeli jew (and seemingly delights in adding to myths about her uncle). (5)
Thus we can see that there is absolutely no evidence for supposing that Himmler had any jewish ancestry.
References
(1) Peter Padfield, 1990, 'Himmler: Reichsführer SS', 1st Edition, Henry Holt: New York, p. 20
(2) Ibid., pp. 20-22; Roger Manvell, Heinrich Fraenkel, 1973, 'Heinrich Himmler', 2nd Edition, Mentor: London, pp. 13-14
(3) Padfield, Op. Cit., p. 21
(4) Richard Breitman, 1991, 'The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution', 1st Edition, Alfred A. Knopf: New York, p. 9
(5) Katrin Himmler, 2007, 'The Himmler Brothers: A German Family History', 1st Edition, MacMillan: Basingstoke, p. 4