Heinrich Himmler was a failed chicken farmer who became the architect of the most systematic genocide in human history. He built the SS from a small bodyguard unit into a state within a state, designed the concentration camp system, and administered the Holocaust with the organizational precision of a corporate manager overseeing a supply chain. The banality of his evil was not a metaphor — it was his actual method.

This episode traces Himmler from his petit-bourgeois Munich childhood through the SS expansion, the Einsatzgruppen, the Final Solution, and the attempted negotiation with the Allies that even Hitler found contemptible.

• Himmler's unremarkable origins — the chicken farm, the failed agricultural career, the party bureaucrat
• The transformation of the SS from bodyguard unit into the most powerful organization in Na ...