"Himmler was neither flashy like Göring nor educated like Goebbels. Mousy and awkward as a young man, he read voraciously and had developed his own conspiratorial view of the world even before he met Hitler in 1926. Like Hitler, Himmler feared and hated Jews and believed in the superiority of the so-called Aryan race. Himmler too was convinced that Germany had to expand to the east. Dogged and capable of meticulous attention to detail, Himmler involved himself directly in projects that targeted homosexual men and Roma as well as Poles and Jews. With justification the historians Richard Breitman and Peter Longerich consider Himmler the "architect" of the Nazi genocide."