October 7, 1900: Heinrich Himmler is born.
At first glance, Heinrich Himmler resembled a balding, dull, thoroughly average office worker or banker; in fact he was one of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany and one of the main orchestrators of the Holocaust. As Reichsführer of the SS, Himmler controlled the Allgemeine SS, the SS-Totenkopfverbände (responsible for the administration of concentration camps), the Orpo (the regular police), the Kripo (criminal police), the Gestapo (secret police), the SD (intelligence agency), and, until its mobilization, the Waffen-SS (the armed wing of the SS). In 1943, he was made Minister of the Interior.
Himmler was fascinated with the occult throughout his life. He had his organizations adopt runes as symbols, and he viewed the SS itself as a sort of cult (around which a religion in a post-Christian, Nazi-ruled world would revolve). In 1935 he helped found a group called Ahnenerbe, a self-described “study society for Intellectual Ancient History”, devoted to tracing the cultural and anthropological history of the Aryan race (he could have easily been featured in an Indiana Jones movie). He was also interested in the traditions of Buddhism and Hinduism and apparently owned a copy of the Bhagavad Gita, comparing Hitler to Krishna (and perhaps himself to Arjuna).