He was the head of the SS, Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler. He believed himself to be a reincarnation of the first German King Henry I. His name became a synonym for evil. He ruled supreme over the shadowy world of the death squads and the extermination camps. He personally inspected the murder factories. He had the exact death figures reported to him on a daily basis.

Himmler managed the mass genocide like an act of administration; systematically, mechanically, thoroughly. In appearance he was inconspicuous. Eyewitnesses had the impression they were standing before a primary school teacher or a tax official.

In Himmler's mind anti-Semitism was mingled with a crude blood-and-soil mysticism. The "mixed-race" German people, he noted as early as 1924, must once again become a "pure Germanic race". Himmler, who had a diploma in agriculture, believed that he would be able to instigate the "breeding" of the new race by using the same methods as on his chicken farm.

He regarded his SS as the nucleus of the future race of heroes. He promoted their reproduction with all means: at the beginning of the Second World War, he exhorted the soldiers of the Waffen-SS , in view of the threat of a  pending "hero's death", to ensure that they fathered "Nordic" offspring - also, explicitly, with women in the occupied territories, in as much as they complied with the "racial" criteria of the Nazis.

When an SS geneologist discovered that among Himmler's ancestors was a witch who had been burnt at the stake, the SS leader's enthusiasm for black magic and the occult became a veritable mania. Thereafter he launched a feverish search for the "Holy Grail". Fortune-tellers checked his most important decisions. At the Wewelsburg, the sinister cult site of his SS he celebrated pseudo-religious ceremonies, reminiscent of primeval rituals.

To what extent did Himmler's penchant for the occult determine his barbaric politics? What was the secret of his close relationship with Hitler? With hitherto unpublished film material from the former archives of the SS, the film shows how a cold-blooded apparatchik managed to become the most powerful of Hitler's helpers.