"Himmler's name and title have come to evoke images of a demonic evil contained within a frame of steely iciness, rigor, and discipline, unloosed not in the passion of rage or hate, but on calculation. Yet his early life, shaped by familial authoritarianism, seemed ordinary and dull, never suggestive of the sinister role he would later assume. Born in 1900 in Munich, the second son of middle-class Catholic parents, Himmler had an unexceptional youth. The diary that he started to keep in 1914 shows him as pedantic, pedestrian, and unimaginative, already molded according to the parental tradition of rigid self-discipline. When war broke out, he was stricken with patriotic passion. At seventeen, when he reached the age of eligibility, he applied to an officer training program and was eventually admitted, but while he was still in training the armistice was signed. However, the cadets in training were not discharged until after the military had suppressed the revolution, dissolved its institutions, and regained political control. Here the young Himmler may have had his first lessons in the uses of the military for political suppression."