SS Reichsfiihrer Heinrich HimmIer was head of the entire Nazi police forceincluding SD and the Gestapo, he was Minister of the Interior and commander ofthe Waffen SS and the Home Army. One of Hitler's most sinister henchmen, hewas also in charge of the death camps in the East. The account of Himmler's lifeand his impact on the rise and fall of the Nazi state make a gripping andhorrifying story.

Although Adolf Hitler held the ultimate responsibility for what became theHolocaust, it was Heinrich Himmler who essentially laid the plans and devisedthe schemes that led to the killings of six million Jews.

Himmler quickly moved up the ranks, and once Hitler became Chancellor in 1933Himmler became the head of the Munich police. From this position he organizedthe first concentration camp at Dachau and began to organize the Nazi politicalpolice throughout Germany.

In April of 1934 he was named assistant chief of the Prussian Gestapo, the secretpolice, 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 hereferred to the annihilation of the Jews in Europe - the Holocaust - as a taskwhich 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 largestkilling center ever created, the death camp Auschwitz. He told him that "theFUhrer had given the order for a Final Solution of the Jewish Question" and that"we, the SS, must carry out that order"

Reinhard Heydrich was one of Hitler's most ruthless Nazis and second inimportance only to Heinrich Himmler in the Nazi SS organization and theprinciple planner of the Final Solution. There was even talk of his one daysucceeding Adolf Hitler.

At a villa on the shores of a suburban Berlin lake called the Wannsee, mid-levelbureaucrats from a number of Nazi agencies assembled January 20, 1942, at therequest of Heydrich. Heydrich and his boss, Heinrich Himmler were in theprocess 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 berequired for the massive efforts to be undertaken throughout Europe to kill the11,000,000 Jews described in the document. The Nazis ultimately succeeded inkilling six million of Europe's Jews, with hundreds of thousands already dead bythe time of this meeting.

By mid 1942, mass gassing of Jews using Zyklon-B began at Auschwitz inoccupied Poland, where extermination was conducted on an industrial scale withsome estimates running as high as three million persons eventually killed throughgassing, starvation, disease, shooting, and burning.

One of the most feared and hated Nazi leaders of World War II, Adolf Eichmannwas responsible for the deaths of millions of Jews.

He was born in Solingen on 19 March 1906. Later the family moved to Linz,Austria, where Adolf Eichmann spent his youth. A member of the Austrian Naziparty, he quickly rose through the ranks. 1938 he headed the Austrian office forJewish emigration where he brought together all the bureaucratic agencies neededfor Jewish expulsion.

In December 1939 Eichmann was transferred to dealing with Jewish affairs andevacuation, and for the next six years Eichmann's office was the headquarter forthe implementation of the Final Solutioll- his assigmmmt was to murder all theJews in Europe.

Eichmann oversaw the deportation to the concentration camps and his efficientorganization rounded up and transported millions to their deaths at infamouscamps such as Auschwitz, Chelmno, Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec. But only inBudapest after March 1944 did the desk-murderer Adolf Eichmann become apublic personality, working in the open and playing a leading role in the massacreof Hungarian Jewry.

Rudolf Hoess was history's greatest mass murderer, the architect and SSCommandant 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 mild-mannered, happily married Catholic who enjoyed normal family life with his fivechildren despite his view of the crematoria chimney stacks from his bedroomwindow.

At peak efficiency Auschwitz had the capacity to 'get rid of ten thousand peoplein 24 hours, 'as RudolfHoess would testify during the War Crimes Trials afterWW2. Witness after witness, document after document produced irrefutableevidence of the crimes committed, and no witness was more shocking thanRudolfHoess, who calmly explained how he had come to exterminate 2.5million people.

Rudolf Franz Hoess was born in 1900 and joined the SS in 1933. In 1934 he wasattached to the SS at Dachau, on August I, 1938, he was adjutant of theSachsenhausen KZ camp until his appointment as Commandant of the newly-built camp at Auschwitz early 1940, located nearby the provincial Polish town ofOshwiecim in Galacia.

May 1941 the SS commander Heinrich Himmler said to Hoess, that Adolf Hitlerhad given orders 'for the final solution of the Jewish question. I have chosen theAuschwitz camp for this purpose'.

Hoess converted Auschwitz into an extermination camp arid installed gaschambers and crematoria. Auschwitz became the killing centre where the largestnumbers of European Jews were killed. After an experimental gassing there inSeptember 1941 of 850 malnourished and ill prisoners, mass murder became adaily routine.

SS Hauptsturmfiihrer Alois Brunner - the last leading Nazi still believed to beon the loose and Eichmann's second in command - was a key figure in theplanning and execution of the Final Solution, the murder of 6 million Jews duringWorld War II. He actively participated in the mass murder and was often sent byEichmann as a trouble shooter to areas such as France to expedite the killings.

Alois Brunner bears direct responsibility for the deportation to Nazi death campsof 128,500 Jewish men, women and children from Austria, Greece, France, andSlovakia.

The arrest and conviction of Alois Brunner remains the top priority ofleadingNazi hunters and war investigators but Brunner has successfully eluded justice.During his many years hiding out reportedly in an apartment on Haddad Street inthe Syrian capital of Damascus, he openly assisted the Syrians in establishingtheir own secret police.

The Syrian authorities have covered and continue to cover Alois Brunner and hemay never pay for his crimes. Germany, Austria, Slovakia, France and Polandcurrently seek his extradition, but the Syrians have been totally uncooperative inresponse to all these requests.

Alois Brunner was born in Austria in 1912 and joined the Austrian Nazi Party in1931 at the age of 19. His anti-Semitism was considered to be so extreme that hewas swiftly tapped to be Adolf Eichmann's private secretary. As head of theNazi's Jewish affairs office in prewar Vienna, he organized persecution thatforced thousands of Jews to flee to other European countries and the UnitedStates.

When World War II started, he sent 47,000 Austrian Jews to the KZ camps. Afterorganizing mass roundups in Berlin, he transferred to Greece, where he wasresponsible for deporting all 43,000 Jews in Salonika within just two months.

Josef Mengele

During the Holocaust Josef Mengele was the chief provider for the gas chambersat 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 greentunic neatly pressed, his face well scrubbed, his Death's Head SS cap tiltedrakishly toone side, remains vivid for those who survived his scrutiny when theyarrived at the Auschwitz railhead. Polished boots slightly apart, his thumb restingon his pistol belt, he surveyed his prey with those dead gimlet eyes. Death to theleft, 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 flickof the cane clasped in a gloved hand.

Mengele did a number of medical experiments of unspeakable horror atAuschwitz~ using twins. These twins as young as five years of age were usuallymurdered after the experiment was over and their bodies dissected.

Mengele injected chemicals into the eyes of children in an attempt to change theireye color. Unfortunately a strict veil of secrecy over the experiments enabledMengele to do his work more effectively.