Seeing Himmler Beyond the Monster

For this assignment, students were asked to test Susan Griffin’s hypothesis in “Our Secret” that personal psychological wounds and large-scale political violence shape each other. They did this by analyzing her portrayal of Heinrich Himmler’s early life alongside scholarly research, in order to judge how far current research supports her claims and what she gets right or wrong.

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In “Our Secret,” Susan Griffin explores a difficult, and even unsettling question: how childhood trauma — particularly that inflicted by authoritarian parents — shapes the inner life and, in turn, enables those traumatized individuals to inflict cruelty on the external world on a scale far beyond what the parents ever imagined or intended? The question becomes particularly uneasy when Griffin focuses on Heinrich Himmler, one of the key figures responsible for carrying out the Holocaust, as her argument risks sliding into moral relativism and potentially generating unwarranted sympathy for this “Architect of Terror.” She argues that emotional suppression under his father’s “surveillance” — a strict Catholic school teacher — left a deep hidden psychological wound that later fueled Himmler’s capacity for violence in the orchestration of the Holocaust. Emotional detachment (positively seen as independent back then) and obedience are the two qualities his father (and prevailing German parenting ideal at the time) prized; it is unsurprising then, that Himmler also emphasized these two traits in Nazi youth policy. If correct, Griffin’s analysis forces a reconsideration of our role in horrific events like the Holocaust — we are challenged to reflect how our complicity and failures to address personal pain, harmful parenting, and enabling cultural norms contribute to such tragedies. In this way, her essay insists that these are truly “our” secrets, shared responsibility that we cannot simply deny. However, since Griffin is not writing an academic paper, we must read her account critically: was Himmler's childhood uniquely pathological or merely a harsher version of the widespread parental norms in pre-war Germany? Does established academic research back the link she points out between childhood trauma and brutality, or does she risk oversimplifying a complex case and perhaps lean too empathetically toward Himmler’s perspective? While Susan Griffin persuasively attributes Heinrich Himmler's rigid authoritarian childhood to broader social customs and links that childhood to his adult personality, academic research indicates that such strict parenting was not unique to Germany, pointing to the particularities of his upbringing; still, her broader claim that early emotional injury can account for later his acts of violence remains strongly backed by scientific findings, though some of her arguments require further scrutiny.

To begin, Griffin's most central argument is that Himmler's brutality is not an innate quality but one that is learned and enforced by his father, who expected absolute obedience from Himmler, thereby encouraging emotional suppression. She emphasizes the physical and psychological dominance Himmler's father maintained over his life, describing a scene in which young Himmler writes in his diary under his father's watchful eye, and how “the weight of that hand would not be a warning. A reminder. Heinrich must straighten up now and be still” (Griffin 355). This resulted in the following diary entries becoming “wooden and stiff,” reflecting a child systematically trained to detach from his feelings and expression (Griffin 355). Without a healthy way to express himself, Himmler then redirects his emotions inward, converting them into an unnatural and toxic form of obedience. For Griffin, this buried anger is the very source of his later cruelty in the Holocaust. Research on this psychological mechanism supports her speculation: a large-scale meta-analysis (11 studies synthesized involving 2215 individuals) done by Green, Browne, and Chou (2019), for instance, confirms this disturbing link between early abuse and later violence. The researchers describe how “individuals with psychotic illness who reported historical child maltreatment were at approximately twice the risk of perpetrating violence than patients who reported no early abuse,” and that “traumagenic neurodevelopmental models of psychosis suggest that the heightened physiological response to stress… can be caused by childhood trauma,” leading to paranoia and a tendency to dissociate from their painful reality as a defense mechanism (Green, Browne, and Chou 358; 359). While Himmler was never formally diagnosed, his life and behaviors fit the patterns of trauma-induced dysregulation — a man who alternated between emotional numbness, rigid control, and terrifying outbursts of cruelty.

Based on Griffin's analysis and insights from Green's research, I would argue that Himmler designed systems like mobile killing vans — which physically and emotionally distanced him from violence itself — precisely because subconsciously he needed to compartmentalize (or to dissociate) to avoid the moral pain of realizing what great suffering he caused others. He is capable of empathizing, which can be seen in a scene Griffin describes, where Himmler “is struck by some quality the man possesses” in a young Jewish captive and asks, “Do you have at least one grandparent who was not Jewish?” to try to save the young man — yet ironically, he is the one that led to the young man’s situation in the first place (Griffin 373). His ability to execute brutal plans while showing some form of empathy towards the exact people he persecuted demonstrates his subconscious desire to separate the two distinct sides of himself to avoid confronting the full moral reality of his actions. In part, I think this disintegration is precisely why it was so easy for him to create atrocities — the habitual neglect of his emotions enabled him to dissociate from (or remain indifferent towards) the suffering he created. This is why Griffin's analysis is so critical, as she asks readers to consider the influence behind Himmler’s action, beyond his innate qualities — the influence of his family dynamic. As opposed to absolving his guilt, she is really asking people to consider the impact of toxic family environments (one that promotes blind obedience and emotional suppression) and what they could do to prevent similar tragedies from happening in the future. As in a way, what Himmler did, particularly the systems he designed, is a direct reflection of what he learned as a child — prizing silence and order over messy human feelings — only amplified at a national scale.

Equally important to Griffin's analysis is the imbalanced family hierarchy that became Himmler's template for understanding power. In a family photograph, Gebhard (the father) “towers in the background” with “the face of one who looks for mistakes” while Himmler's mother “looks very small…almost as if she is cowering” (Griffin 360). This visual powerlessness, then, becomes a template for how Himmler understands the world — the weak submit to the strong and the powerless accommodate themselves to authority. With no alternative ideology or counterbalance and refuge from his mother, Himmler can only learn that hierarchical cruelty was natural and not abnormal — the way power works. Historical research does complicate Griffin's claim that this hierarchy was distinctly German. According to Koomen's cross-national analysis of parental control before World War II, “before 1935 the amount of parental control concerning sons was approximately the same in the two countries” — United States and Germany (Koomen 634). Koomen states that “if the German family at that time was authoritarian, so was its American counterpart, at least concerning sons,” meaning that millions of American and European boys were raised in similarly rigid, emotionally constrained households without becoming committed Nazis or architects of genocide (Koomen 636). Since shared parenting practices across Western societies did not produce equivalent results, other factors like individual temperament, specific family dynamics, socioeconomic pressures, and historical events must have influenced Himmler’s trajectory in ways Griffin fails to account for in her analysis. That being said, Griffin's core claim still holds, only that the influence is far more personal than cultural. For instance, Himmler's view of entire Jewish populations as inherently subordinate, expendable, “pests” to be managed and eliminated can be attributed directly to his family dynamic. He had internalized the idea that people automatically lose their personhood when they are weak and powerless — exactly how his mother was overpowered by his father.

Himmler's imbalanced family hierarchy and authoritarian upbringing did not only shape his own psyche — it also extended itself throughout German society and culture, influencing generations to come. When a man who is in power has a particular mindset, his ideas leak out into every aspect of his policy. Therefore, the rigid emotional suppression and demand for absolute obedience that Himmler internalized from his father’s instruction became not just personal traits but values he actively promoted on a national scale. While German culture, or western society in general, encouraged this emotional detachment, there's no doubt that Himmler reinforced this trend in Germany. As Griffin notes, German child-rearing philosophy of the era, overall, called to “Crush the will. Establish dominance. Suppress everything in the child,” insisting that “the child should be permeated by the impossibility of locking something in his heart” (Griffin 355; 358). Johanna Haarer's 1934 Nazi-era manual confirmed this pattern by advocating the raising of “tough, unemotional, and unempathetic children” (Kratzer). This book, which was championed by Himmler during his rise to power, was so popular at the time that it can be said almost every German mother had this in the house, leading to aggressive spread of these authoritarian values. In reality, this parenting styles creates psychological conditioning that tends to produce men primed for totalitarianism, as seen in Himmler's deference to Hitler, for a man trained since infancy to subordinate his will to authority must have found obeying a dictator to be the natural order of things. Decades of psychological research support the long-term consequences of such harsh emotional suppression. As Nelson, Fox, and Zeanah observe in their study of institutionalized Romanian children, those raised without emotional warmth or stability often develop insecure attachment patterns, struggle to trust others, and exhibit higher rates of emotional dysregulation and psychopathology — the very traits that, as Griffin suggests, made individuals vulnerable to authoritarian manipulation (Nelson, Fox, and Zeanah). The end result of this prevalent parenting style in Germany, then, was the creation of generations struggling with emotional connection and trust, exactly the kinds of traits that make people ideal soldiers and followers for totalitarian regimes.

That said, it would be a gross simplification to argue that Himmler and Hitler alone bear responsibility for the Holocaust. As Milgram observed in his 1963 obedience experiments, the atrocities “could only be carried out on a massive scale if a very large number of persons obeyed orders” (Milgram 603). In these experiments, ordinary people, told by an authority figure to administer electric shocks to another person, mostly continued even when they heard the victim in distress. Milgram therefore concluded that his experiment revealed the “banality of evil” — ordinary people readily inflict harm while seeing themselves as merely doing their jobs under orders (Milgram 605). This seemingly validates Griffin's analysis that Himmler's emotional suppression and authoritarian mindset help shape a culture in which millions of “ordinary” Germans are primed to follow orders. Yet this explanation is fundamentally misleading. As shown by later analyses of Milgram’s data, most participants did not go to the maximum voltage, and the experimenter’s fourth prod (“you have no other choice, you must continue”) was actually the least effective at producing obedience, suggesting that people continued more because they identified with the experiment’s scientific goals than because of life‑or‑death pressure (Hale 77-78). Similarly, unlike what most people believed, historians like Hale find “no evidence… that refusing to kill unarmed civilians resulted in police or soldiers (or their families) being killed” (Hale 75). In the specific case of the 1942 Józefów massacre in Poland, for instance, when the commander of Reserve Police Battalion 101 explicitly offered his men the option to step out of the firing squad and avoid participating in the mass shooting, only “a small minority did this,” while the rest chose to carry out the killings (Browning 57; Hale 81). Indeed, there were social and career pressures; however, no guns were pointing to their heads, meaning that we cannot excuse these perpetrators as solely passive victims of authority. They were active participants driven by something deeper than fear of punishment. Political psychologist Kristen Renwick Monroe’s work on the moral psychology of genocide helps clarify what that “something deeper” looks like. In her interviews with Holocaust survivors, rescuers, and Nazi supporters, Monroe finds that rescuers operated from a broad, inclusive identity that saw all humans as connected and worthy of protection, whereas Nazis and bystanders held a narrow, exclusionary identity. Nazis were indoctrinated to see themselves as threatened by Jews, whom they deemed vermin, diseased, and threats rather than fellow human beings, a belief that allowed them to maintain a sense of moral righteousness and to tell themselves they were protecting their community rather than murdering innocents (Monroe 703–704, 711–713). This psychological distancing was reinforced by the systems Himmler designed and the broader Nazi bureaucracy. While mobile killing vans and death camps enabled Himmler to remove himself from the immediate sight of violence and maintain his self-image as only a “good official” carrying out necessary policy, the bureaucracy gave people at every level excuses to deny their involvement. As Griffin explains, officials could “speak in detail of the mass arrests that he himself supervised as if… he had no other part in these murders except as a kind of spiritless cog in a vast machine” (Griffin 375). Each layer of bureaucracy diffused responsibility — soldiers blamed officers, officers blamed “the system,” and administrators claimed they were “just processing paperwork” — until the denial became so extreme that these perpetrators reframed themselves as victims, burdened with this difficult and bloody task, and Jews became convenient scapegoats for their moral discomfort: without the “Jewish problem,” they would not have to bear this burden.

What's also worth discussing, in addition to the common misconception that Himmler and Hitler, or other high-ranking officers, bear the main responsibility for the Holocaust, is how Griffin's personal background makes her a potentially unreliable narrator — one who sympathizes deeply with Himmler and perhaps projects her own wounds onto him. While historians also write about the impact of perpetrators' childhoods and traumas, they usually do so from a clear analytical distance, to explain how ordinary people become capable of atrocity, not to invite readers into emotional identification. I would argue, however, that Griffin's narration crosses that line. In both “Our Secret” and on multiple occasions where she talks about this topic, she repeatedly folds Himmler's story into her own. She writes that the “polite manner of young Heinrich's diaries reminds me of life in my grandmother's home,” then explains that her family “was not comfortable with ourselves,” that there was “great shared suffering and yet we never wept together,” and that “under my grandmother's tutelage, we kept up appearances. Her effort was ceaseless,” directly pairing her own household with his (Griffin 358-359). She goes even further, saying that “just as in my family, the Himmlers' gentility was a thinly laid surface, maintained no doubt only with great effort,” making the shared shame and denial between her family and his explicit rather than implied (Griffin 359). As Richard Gilbert notes, Griffin uses Himmler here less as a distant historical subject and more as a mirror for her own struggle with “false selves,” blurring the line between analysis and self‑portrait (Gilbert). Griffin's own life helps explain why this identification feels so natural to her: her parents divorced when she was six, she was “moved around from one member of the family to another,” and later she described her work as dealing with “denial, the psychology of denial and the kind of schizoid division of the self” (Moffet). While this overlap between her own life and Himmler's makes the essay powerfully persuasive and intimate, these are precisely the qualities that make it dangerous for general readers. Just as many psychology students have misread Milgram's obedience studies and come away convinced that perpetrators would have been shot if they refused orders (which led to overwhelming empathy and misplaced innocence attributed to those perpetrators), Griffin's intensely sympathetic portrait of “Heinrich” risks giving general audiences the impression that his trauma explains, and almost excuses, his later choices (Hale 76–77; Foster et al. 163). Most people, including me, will not go on to read the historians who stress that perpetrators had real alternatives. They will instead remember the voice that invites them to see themselves in Himmler, leading to unwarranted sympathy. While I agree with Griffin that it is important to understand and recognize the formation of such a character, Griffin's background made her a risky guide, as her identification with him is so strong that it can pull readers towards a level of sympathy most historians generally work hard to avoid when writing about a chief architect of genocide, for it is important to consider the influence a text leaves behind to its audience.

While research supports Griffin's argument that childhood emotional wounds and authoritarian parenting can lead to violent tendencies, her analysis of Himmler risks being overly empathetic, blurring the line between explaining how someone became a monster and making excuses for his monstrous acts. As Milgram's studies and later work by Hale and Monroe show, perpetrators weren’t simply “just following orders.” They often had real alternatives, yet, in spite of that, still chose to participate. Griffin's portrayal similarly ignores this, focusing mostly on Himmler's childhood through an excessively empathetic view (whether it's she calls him “Heinrich” or comparing his family's shame to hers), which can mislead general readers into seeing his trauma as a kind of moral alibi rather than one factor among many. She does make a crucial point, though, that societies have too often normalized harmful parenting and social practices by treating them as insignificant or even admirable at times — for instance, calling emotional suppression “toughness” and hierarchical control “character-building.” When schools encourage toxic hyper-competitiveness, workplaces reward emotional detachment, and families praise obedience over critical thinking, we are, in essence, teaching and encouraging children to disconnect feeling from action, which is exactly the psychological pattern that Milgram, Monroe, and Griffin, all, in different ways, trace in perpetrators. Griffin’s insistence that “our secret” lies in these ordinary, overlooked habits, then, remains a necessary warning, even if her treatment of Himmler himself goes too far toward humanization. After all, rejecting her sympathy for Himmler does not mean rejecting and overlooking the challenge she poses. We need to ask whether our own “ordinary” parenting, schooling, and institutional norms are training people to follow rather than think. We need to consider what it would mean to raise children — and adults — who can recognize propaganda and manipulation. And eventually, we need to reflect upon the balance of discussing honestly the traumas that may shape people like Himmler without letting those factors overshadow the suffering they inflict on others.

Works Cited

Browning, C.R. 1992. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland.New York: Harper Collins.

Foster, S.J., Pettigrew, A., Pearce, A., Hale, R., Burgess, A., Salmons, P. and Lenga, R.- A. 2016.What Do Students Know and Understand about the Holocaust? Evidence from English secondaryschools. London: UCL Institute of Education.

Gilbert, R. (2012, February 27). “our secret” by Susan Griffin. Draft No. 4. https://richardgilbert.wordpress.com/2012/02/15/our-secret-by-susan-griffin/

Griffin, S. (2020). SUSAN GRIFFIN, OUR SECRET. In Ways of Reading (pp. 351–386). essay, Bedford/St. Martins, Macmillan Learning.

Green, Kathleen, et al. “The Relationship Between Childhood Maltreatment and Violence to Others in Individuals With Psychosis: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.” Trauma, Violence & Abuse, vol. 20, no. 3, 2019, pp. 358–73. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27010972. Accessed 10 Nov. 2025.

Hale, Rebecca. “‘They Were Just Following Orders’: Relationships between Milgram’s Obedience Experiments and Conceptions of Holocaust Perpetration.” Holocaust Education: Contemporary Challenges and Controversies, edited by Stuart Foster et al., UCL Press, 2020, pp. 74–94. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv15d7zpf.10. Accessed 18 Dec. 2025.

Nelson, Charles A et al. “Romania's Abandoned Children: The Effects of Early Profound Psychosocial Deprivation on the Course of Human Development.” Current directions in psychological science vol. 32,6 (2023): 515-521. doi:10.1177/09637214231201079.

Milgram, Stanley. “The Dilemma of Obedience.” The Phi Delta Kappan, vol. 55, no. 9, 1974, pp. 603–06. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20297701. Accessed 18 Dec. 2025.

Moffet, P. (1990, February 16). In life as in writing, Susan Griffin addresses large themes. Los Angeles Times. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-02-16-li-869-story.html

Monroe, Kristen Renwick. “Cracking the Code of Genocide: The Moral Psychology of Rescuers, Bystanders, and Nazis during the Holocaust.” Political Psychology, vol. 29, no. 5, 2008, pp. 699–736. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20447159. Accessed 18 Dec. 2025.

Koomen, Willem. “A Note on the Authoritarian German Family.” Journal of Marriage and Family, vol. 36, no. 3, 1974, pp. 634–36. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/350737. Accessed 10 Nov. 2025.

Kratzer, Anne. “Harsh Nazi Parenting Guidelines May Still Affect German Children of Today.” Scientific American Mind, vol. 30, no. 2, 2019, pp. 24–28. JSTOR, (“Ways of Reading_Bartholomae_12e (1)”)