(1900 – ???)
Heinrich Luitpold Himmler is a former German military officer, ideologue, and occultist, best known for founding and commanding the Schutzstaffel (SS), the most important branch of Adolf Hitler's NSDAP. Though officially declared dead in 1945 following the collapse of the National Socialist Uprising in The German Empire during the later stages of World War II, his fate remains uncertain. Reports suggest he escaped to the Congo basin, where he reorganised SS remnants into a rogue statelet, The Black Zone. Later sightings, increasingly credible by the 1960s, place him on a different planet altogether, ruling The Hyperborean Empire.
Born on October 7th, 1900, Himmler came of age during the instability of the post-war period. Initially involved with agricultural cooperatives and nationalist youth movements, he soon gravitated toward esoteric fascism. Following the failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, he remained loyal to Adolf Hitler and the NSDAP, rising through the party's Bavarian branch during its consolidation of regional power in the late 1920s. With the NSDAP's seizure of power in Bavaria in 1928, Himmler was appointed Reichsführer-SS, tasked with transforming the Schutzstaffel from a paramilitary guard into a parallel state-within-the-state.
Under Himmler's direction, the SS-Verfügungstruppe (SS-VT) emerged as the most disciplined and ideologically unified of Germany’s Freikorps. With support from sectors of the military aristocracy and tacit approval from Kaiser Willhelm II, Himmler oversaw the expansion of the SS into a politically reliable reserve army for future war. By 1939, it numbered in the hundreds of thousands.
Himmler’s interest in the occult was neither performative nor academic. Through the Thule Society, later the Ahnenerbe Institute, he championed a series of expeditions aimed at uncovering the lost heritage of an imagined Aryan master-race. While expeditions to Tibet and Antarctica proved fruitless, ventures into Oceanyka and the Congo produced impressive results. The former revealed the existence of sorcerous power, or “Vril,” while the latter uncovered an inactive ancient artefact referred to as the Congo Gate. These findings were concealed from the Imperial German government and exploited by the SS for independent research and development.
During the early years of World War II, the SS-VT, renamed as Waffen SS in 1940, was instrumental in supplementing the Deutsches Heer's overstretched manpower. However, its presence quickly metastasised across the German government and military, enabled by Wilhelm II’s unwillingness to confront Nazi influence. Himmler’s Einsatzgruppen were authorised under Directive K7 in 1941, ostensibly for counter-partisan operations on the Eastern Front. In reality, they became mobile extermination units tasked with eliminating Jews, Slavs, Romani, and suspected communists. These operations were justified internally as “anti-communist purges,” and were initially tolerated or ignored by the Kaiser’s court. However, for three years they would go unchecked, becoming known to contemporary historians as the Holocaust.
The death of Wilhelm II in 1941 marked a turning point. His successor, Kaiser Willhelm III, was more cautious and less tolerant of fascist influence. In 1942, the Soviet Union accused Germany of genocide, prompting secret diplomatic exchanges between Leon Trotsky and the Kaiser. The two powers reached an understanding: the NSDAP had to be dismantled. The Abwehr, Germany's military intelligence agency, began feeding Soviet partisans data on SS troop movements. In 1944, the Waffen SS began deploying sorcery against Soviet troops, a fact which was covered up by the world's governments. To counter the Ahnenerbe's new, esoteric means of waging war, the Allies formed Task Force THAUMIEL, an elite group of international soldiers trained in counter-magic, supplemented with Oceanykan sanctioned sorcerers and psychics, as well as Secret Society Trackers.
When Hitler’s plan for a coup was discovered in July 1944, Wilhelm III initiated the Imperial Inquiry, resulting in the arrest and prosecution of several SS leaders. Operation Valkyrie followed in December, disbanding the Waffen SS and purging NSDAP elements from government. This accelerated Hitler's plans for a coup, beginning the National Socialist Uprising which would last throughout winter, tying up Allied troops and indirectly facilitating Operation Bagration. In the chaos following the failed coup, Adolf Hitler committed suicide. Himmler and a cadre of loyal SS officers retreated into the Congo. There, they restructured the Schutzstaffel (SS) into a clandestine military-political order, governing what became known as The Black Zone. In 1956, they successfully reactivated the Congo Gate and established The Hyperborean Empire on Planet Alice, a hostile, resource-rich world beyond our own. Himmler was crowned as Heinrich VIII, Emperor of the Aryans.
SS activity surged in the 1960s, with reports of sorcerous warfare in Africa and political manipulation across Earth. Himmler’s exact whereabouts remain unknown, but he is presumed to inhabit Planet Alice. His image, now near-mythological, appears intermittently in intelligence briefings and occultist propaganda, described as gaunt, robed, and sustained by vril, having apparently become a rather skilled Sorcerer himself. Most alarming is that in 1965, an unknown atomic explosion was reported in one of the most isolated regions of the Congo, with Warpstone particles detected in the surrounding area. Political experts at the highest levels of government believe Himmler has acquired warpstone-based nuclear weapons, and rumours point towards his endgame being causing World War III through political subterfuge.