Diary reveals Hitler’s henchman Heinrich Himmler enjoyed a back rub before killings… and nearly fainted when victim’s brain spattered on his clothes

IT could be any businessman’s desk diary, with its neatly typed lists of mundane appointments, travel arrangements and lunch meetings. But Heinrich Himmler’s business was genocide. The former chicken farmer was the head of the SS, put in charge of the Holocaust byAdolf Hitler and the creator of the system of extermination camps where millions of people were murdered.

His office diaries, lost for 71 years, have now been discovered lying in a Russian military archive.

And the sheer banality of the entries provides a chilling insight into the life of a doting father who started each day with a massage before heading off to organise the nitty-gritty of mass murder.-read more