The Decent One

On 6 May 1945, soldiers of the US Army occupied the Himmler family home in Gmund Germany where they discovered hundreds of private letters, documents, diaries and photographs. Through these materials, Vanessa Lapa’s unique film sketches the biography and exposes the inner mind, ideals, plans and secrets of SS commander, the merciless architect of the Final Solution - Heinrich Himmler.

How did this Catholic nationalistic middle-class young man become Hitler’s henchman responsible for master minding, developing and executing the strategies that led to the murder of millions of Jews, homosexuals, Communists and Romany people? Where did his ideology originate? How did he see himself and how was he perceived in private by his wife Margarete, his daughter Gudrun and his mistress Hedwig? How could the man who often referred to so-called German virtues such as order, decency and goodness also write home in the midst of the war and Holocaust: ‘Despite all the work I am doing fine and I sleep well”? How can a man become a hero in his own eyes but a mass murderer in the eyes of the world?