Himmler's personal letters found in Tel Aviv

''I'm going to Auschwitz. Kisses, your Heini," reads the final line in a letter from SS commander Heinrich Himmler to his wife, one of hundreds of such letters found in a private collection in Tel Aviv.

Himmler, one of the architects of the Final Solution and one of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany, wrote hundreds of letters to his wife, his mistress and his daughter. The collection, which includes photographs and even recipes, was kept under the bed of Tel Aviv resident Chaim Rosenthal for 40 years. It will be published in a series in the German newspaper Die Welt.

Rosenthal received the letters from two American soldiers who had retrieved them from Himmler's house in Bavaria. In the 1980s, he considered selling the collection, informing Haaretz newspaper of it in 1982. At Rosenthal's request, the German Federal Archives agreed to verify the authenticity of the documents.

Soon afterward, "The Hitler Diaries," published by the German news magazine Stern, were revealed to be forged and the market for Nazi documents dwindled, convincing Rosenthal to keep the letters. Finally, at the age of 90, Rosenthal asked his son to ensure the letters would be published.

The story of Himmler's letters reached filmmaker Vanessa Lapa's family, who bought the collection for a "symbolic fee," and gave them to her to use as the basis for a documentary.

The letters include personal correspondence between Himmler and his wife Margarethe (Marga) from 1927 until five weeks before his suicide in 1945.

According to a Die Welt editorial, the letters do not include much information about Nazi history.

"The hundreds of pages of private correspondence between Heinrich Himmler and Marga only seem mundane at first glance," the editorial reads. "But time and again there were signs of Himmler's immeasurable anti-Semitism and his obsessiveness in these early letters of the years 1927-1928."

'An unmatched collection'

Much of the correspondence is in the form of love letters, often signed "Dein Heini" ("Your Heini") or "Euer Pappi" ("Your Daddy"), revealing the family life of one of the chief orchestrators of the Holocaust.

The letters also reveal the growing distance between Himmler and his wife, when the SS commander took a mistress in 1938. Still, they show that, despite what was previously believed, Himmler kept in close contact with his wife and daughter Gudrun during the war.

Judging by the letters, even as Germany was on the brink of collapse, Himmler continued to believe in the Final Solution.

Berlin historian and Nazi expert Michael Wildt told Die Welt: "There is nothing like it for any other member of the Nazi leadership."

Dr. Haim Gertner, head of the archives department at Yad Vashem, told Israel Hayom: "This collection is important. It helps us understand how a person can turn into an animal. Material like this can help decode this great human enigma."

According to Gertner, there is already considerable documentation on Himmler at Yad Vashem.

"A few years ago, I received a diagram of Auschwitz concentration camp with Himmler's signature," he said. "When this [new] collection arrives at Yad Vashem, it will complete the overall picture."

Himmler was captured in May 1945, while posing as a lowly foot soldier. Three days later, his true identity was discovered, and he committed suicide by swallowing a cyanide capsule.

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