Heinrich Himmler
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50 free Heinrich Himmler trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Heinrich Himmler was a bookish, awkward man with no combat record, yet he built the SS into the most feared organisation in Nazi Germany and became one of the chief architects of the Holocaust. How an unremarkable bureaucrat came to direct a machinery of terror is one of the more unsettling lessons of the twentieth century. This quiz turns the facts of his life into questions. It covers his Bavarian childhood and early failures, his takeover of the police and the camps, his fascination with myth, pseudoscience and the occult, his family, his disastrous turn as a military commander, and his capture and death at the end of the war. A few questions look at how he has been portrayed on screen. It is written for history students, teachers and general readers who want to test what they know about the Third Reich. The subject is a grim one, so the tone is factual throughout, and every answer comes with a short explanation checked against a reliable source.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which poison did Heinrich Himmler bite into as a doctor tried to examine his mouth in Allied custody?
Cyanide
Cyanide from a pill hidden in his mouth killed him within about 15 minutes, despite efforts to save him. He had been detained two days earlier while travelling under a false name.
Q 02Which legendary relic did Heinrich Himmler ask about on a 1940 visit to Spain's Montserrat Abbey?
The Holy Grail
The Holy Grail had gripped Nazi occultists through the books of Otto Rahn. Himmler sponsored Rahn's own search for the relic, which came to nothing.
Q 03Which first official Nazi concentration camp did Heinrich Himmler set up near Munich in March 1933?
Dachau
Dachau opened less than three months after the Nazis took power and at first held political opponents. Its regime of roll calls, work details and brutal discipline became the model for later camps.
Q 04Which secret police force did Hermann Göring hand over to Heinrich Himmler in April 1934?
Gestapo
The Gestapo had been founded in Prussia only the year before. Göring gave it up because he wanted someone ruthless enough to turn it against the rival SA.
Q 05Which German clothing company, later a luxury fashion house, made black uniforms for Heinrich Himmler's SS?
Hugo Boss
Hugo Boss was one of many firms licensed to supply Nazi uniforms, but it did not design them. The black SS uniform was the work of two SS members, Karl Diebitsch and Walter Heck.
Q 06To which Himalayan land did Heinrich Himmler sponsor a 1938 SS expedition led by zoologist Ernst Schäfer?
Tibet
Tibet appealed to Himmler because of his fascination with Asian mysticism. He let the expedition go ahead on condition that every member joined the SS.
Q 07The double lightning-bolt badge of Heinrich Himmler's SS takes its two characters from which alphabet?
Runic
Runic signs for victory make up the badge. They come from a set devised by Guido von List, who renamed an ancient sun symbol 'Sieg'.
Q 08Hitler's nickname for Heinrich Himmler, 'der treue Heinrich', praised him for which quality?
Loyalty
Loyalty was the point of the nickname, which made the ending bitter. On learning of Himmler's secret peace talks in April 1945, Hitler called them the worst treachery he had ever known.
Q 09In the 1976 film The Eagle Has Landed, a fictional Heinrich Himmler backs a plot to kidnap which leader?
Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill is the target of the raid on a quiet Norfolk village. In the film Himmler launches the mission behind Hitler's back, then destroys the letter that authorised it.
Q 10Which subject did Heinrich Himmler study in Munich, later applying its ideas of selective breeding to people?
Agriculture
Agriculture earned him a diploma in 1922, though he ended up in a low-paid office job. As SS chief he proposed using what he had learned as a farmer to engineer the German population.
Q 11Which title did Heinrich Himmler hold from 1929 to 1945 as head of the SS, Hitler's black-uniformed elite?
Reichsführer
Reichsführer was at first just the name of a post in a force of about 290 men. After 1934 it became the highest SS rank, equal to a field marshal in the army.
Q 12Which future deputy, assassinated in Prague in 1942, did Heinrich Himmler hire in 1931 to run SS intelligence?
Reinhard Heydrich
Reinhard Heydrich built the SD and went on to head the whole Nazi security apparatus. At his funeral Himmler was chief mourner, gave the eulogy and took charge of his two young sons.
Q 13Which SA chief, once admired by the young Heinrich Himmler, was shot in the 1934 purge Himmler helped to plan?
Ernst Röhm
Q 21Which daughter of Heinrich Himmler, nicknamed Püppi, stayed devoted to his memory and later aided former SS men?
Gudrun
Gudrun never renounced her father and became a prominent figure in Stille Hilfe, which gave legal and financial help to former SS members. In the early 1960s she also worked for West German intelligence.
Q 22Hedwig Potthast, with whom Heinrich Himmler had two children, first joined his staff in 1936 in which role?
Secretary
Secretary to Himmler from 1936, she became his mistress within a few years and left her job in 1941. His wife learned of the affair and chose to tolerate it for the sake of their daughter.
Q 23What was the job of Felix Kersten, who eased Heinrich Himmler's stomach pains and became a go-between in 1945?
Masseur
Ernst Röhm refused the offer to kill himself and was shot by two SS officers. With his three-million-strong SA neutralised, the SS became independent and answerable only to Hitler.
Q 14Which admiral, named Hitler's successor in 1945, refused Heinrich Himmler a place in his short-lived government?
Karl Dönitz
Karl Dönitz turned down Himmler's repeated offers to serve as his second-in-command. He dismissed him from all his posts on 6 May 1945, two days before Germany's surrender.
Q 15In which Christian tradition was Heinrich Himmler raised, before he set the SS the task of replacing Christianity?
Catholic
Catholic belief stayed with him through his student years, but in 1923–24 he abandoned it for the occult and Germanic myth. He later said the SS must give Germans a non-Christian basis for their lives.
Q 16What was the original job of the SS, the small force Heinrich Himmler joined in 1925 and later made an empire?
Acting as bodyguards
Acting as bodyguards for Hitler was the task of the early SS, a small arm of the far larger SA. Under Himmler it came to run the police, the concentration camps and an army of its own.
Q 17Which mobile SS killing squads under Heinrich Himmler followed the German army into the Soviet Union?
Einsatzgruppen
Einsatzgruppen had begun as teams that secured government papers in newly occupied territory. Repurposed as death squads, they had already murdered some 65,000 civilians in Poland by the end of 1939.
Q 18Which last-ditch militia of boys and older men did Hitler order Heinrich Himmler to raise in September 1944?
Volkssturm
Volkssturm units took in all males from sixteen to sixty, over the protests of Armaments Minister Albert Speer. Poorly armed and barely trained, about 175,000 of them died in the war's final months.
Q 19Soldiers of which Allied country were holding Heinrich Himmler prisoner when he killed himself in May 1945?
Britain
Britain's Second Army held him in northern Germany after former Soviet prisoners of war stopped him at a checkpoint. His forged papers bore a stamp that fleeing SS men were known to use.
Q 20What was the profession of Margarete Boden, seven years his senior, whom Heinrich Himmler married in 1928?
Nurse
Nurse and part owner of a small private clinic, she shared his interest in herbal medicine and homoeopathy. She sold her share to buy the plot where the couple tried, mostly in vain, to raise livestock.
Masseur Felix Kersten won Himmler's trust by relieving his chronic pain. Having moved to Sweden, he served as an intermediary in the SS chief's secret contacts with the Swedish Red Cross.
Q 24Which Swedish count did Heinrich Himmler ask in April 1945 to carry a surrender offer to the Western Allies?
Folke Bernadotte
Folke Bernadotte, head of the Swedish Red Cross, met him at the Swedish consulate in Lübeck. Himmler posed as Germany's provisional leader and offered to surrender in the west but not to the Soviets.
Q 25Which SS programme, founded by Heinrich Himmler, ran maternity homes to raise the number of 'racially pure' births?
Lebensborn
Lebensborn, meaning 'fount of life', was set up to counter Germany's falling birth rate. It encouraged unmarried women to give birth anonymously and arranged adoptions by SS families.
Q 26Which SS research society did Heinrich Himmler found in 1935 to seek proof of an ancient Germanic master race?
Ahnenerbe
Ahnenerbe means 'ancestral heritage'. Its academics were sent around the globe to find evidence that Germans descended from a superior Aryan race, a claim mainstream scholars rejected.
Q 27Which Renaissance castle in Westphalia did Heinrich Himmler take over in 1934 as a ceremonial centre for the SS?
Wewelsburg
Wewelsburg was leased for 100 years at a symbolic rent of one Reichsmark a year. Himmler meant to expand the triangular castle into the central cult site of the SS.
Q 28Which medieval military order did Heinrich Himmler treat as a model for the SS, seizing its Vienna church in 1939?
Teutonic Knights
Teutonic Knights supplied the image Himmler wanted: he saw the SS as a chivalric order of new Germans. The real order had been outlawed by the Nazis a year earlier, in 1938.
Q 29Which skull-decorated item did Heinrich Himmler award to SS men and insist was returned when its owner died?
A ring
A ring bearing a death's head was Himmler's personal gift to SS men, engraved inside with his signature. From 1938 those of the dead were to be stored in a chest at an SS castle.
Q 30Which luxury goods did Allach, an SS-run factory prized by Heinrich Himmler, make with concentration camp labour?
Porcelain
Porcelain figurines of soldiers and animals from Allach were one of Himmler's favourite projects. The double-lightning mark on them has been described as a play on the crossed swords of Meissen.