Himmler took cyanide to commit suicide

LONDON - Heinrich Himmler, the Nazi leader who headed the feared Gestapo, committed suicide by taking cyanide and “dropped dead on one of the beds and kicked two or three times and lay still” before Allied soldiers could get to him.

Seventy-five years after Himmler’s death, his final moments have been revealed through a soldier’s diaries, The Sun reported Monday.

Corporal Harry Oughton Jones was a witness to the 1945 cyanide suicide by Himmler, the man who established Nazi concentration camps.

Himmler was disguised in a sergeant’s uniform and eye-patch after he fled Berlin. He was among the German soldiers captured by the Allies following the surrender by Nazis.

Harry said Himmler lambasted a captain sent to question his identity and he sneered: “You, my boy, are just a young captain and to take me I want to see your colonel in charge.”

The corporal, who was just 27 then, wrote: “As we made to get him he just put his hand to his mouth and before we got to him he dropped dead on one of the beds and kicked two or three times and lay still.”

German soldiers had blown Himmler’s disguise when they told their British captors at Luneburg Barracks that he was SS Chief Field Marshal Himmler.

Durham Light Infantryman Harry revealed he helped bury Himmler.

Harry died in April, aged 92.

His grandson Jason Renshaw of Newcastle wants to turn his diaries into a book.

“To think my grandfather, just a fella from Durham, was involved in an historic moment like that,” he was quoted as saying.