Nazi day planner reveals how mass murder institutionalized

BERLIN – Nazi SS leader Heinrich Himmler’s day planner reinforces historians’ views of how mass murder was institutionalized and routine in Adolf Hitler’s Germany.

Bild newspaper this week has been publishing excerpts from the calendar, which was found in a Russian archive in 2013 and is being prepared for publication next year.

The Jan. 3, 1943, entry published Wednesday shows Himmler ate a late breakfast followed by a massage, then chatted on the phone with his wife and daughter. He ends his day ordering civilians in Poland executed in retaliation for a partisan attack on a police station, and the families of the policemen, who didn’t fight back, to be sent to concentration camps.

Political theorist Hannah Arendt once famously called Himmler underling Adolf Eichmann an example of the “banality of evil.”