Before becoming one of the top leaders in Nazi Germany, what did Heinrich Himmler do for a living?

Heinrich Himmler (1900-1945) was one of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany and an architect of the Nazi genocide.

Born in Munich, the son of a schoolteacher. He served in the German army at the end of World War One and then held a variety of jobs. He first studied agronomy at a university and then worked as a chicken farmer from 1925 to 1929, before deeming the venture as unsuccessful. He also joined the fledgeling Nazi Party in 1925.

After the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, Himmler became police president in Munich and head of the political police in Bavaria. He used his position to build a state within a state, establishing autonomy within the Nazi party and its dominance in Germany. In 1933, he set up Dachau, the first Nazi concentration camp. By 1936, he had moved himself into a position where he was head of a newly unified national police.

His chicken farming days long behind him, Himmler guided organizations which would become the foremost agencies of security, surveillance, and terror within Germany and German-occupied Europe until the regime's collapse in 1945.

History states that Heinrich Himmler, to cheat the gallows, bit on a cyanide tablet embedded in one of his teeth and died as a result. Himmler, after the death of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, was probably the most prized catch out of all the senior figures in Nazi Germany.