The interview between the thirty-one-year-old Gestapo agent and the man who was ultimately his boss, Heinrich Himmler, the chief policeman for the Third Reich and head of the SS and Gestapo, who was a mere six years his senior, could not have been more in keeping with the climate of the times. In a regime which deified the Aryan ideal of manhood, these two, like their leader, seemed to exemplify almost the precise opposite.

Himmler was a small man, in all ways—short of height, thin of personal attributes, unappealing and uninteresting. His round face, soft high-pitched voice, thin-rimmed spectacles, and timid, hesitant carriage were not such as to convey leadership or authority. Added to this, a certain fussy, fastidious formality gave a stilted quality to his demeanor and seemed to qualify him more for some dusty professorial post than for running a country. He did possess, however, the single attribute most necessary to the Nazi cause: a heart of frozen stone.

What but being something less than human could allow such cruelties of prejudice and ambition so thoroughly to possess the vessel where love was intended to reside? A disciple unto fanaticism of the theory of race superiority, Himmler hated Jews, blacks, Asians, Russians, Serbs, and Arabs. He had already masterminded the June 1934 Blood Purge of the German military and government, and had more recently been secretly drawing up plans in his demented mind for the imprisonment and eventual extermination of Jews and Slavs. He would, of course, perform certain hideous “experiments” on the subjects first, in the interest of science and race purification, much as he had done at the small chicken farm he had operated before joining the Nazi movement.

In truth, Himmler was a perfect reflection of his Führer. Physically and intellectually limited, relationally unfit for intimacy, emotionally, morally, and spiritually bankrupt, Adolf Hitler was drawn to others as dwarfed in character as himself, and by the sheer compulsion of fear and brutality they had succeeded in enslaving an entire nation to carry out their evil bidding. He had gathered around himself an influential clique—including Himmler, Hermann Göring, and Martin Bormann—known as the Midnight Club. The name could not have been more suitably chosen, for indeed, rather than ushering in the glorious thousand-year Reich they dreamed of, under their demonic leadership Germany was swiftly careening toward the blackest midnight of its long and colorful history.