If Hitler willed the Holocaust, these two men built the machine that carried it out. Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer-SS, commanded the entire SS and police apparatus and was the chief administrator of the genocide — the death camps, the killing squads, the whole industrial murder of six million Jews and millions of others ran through his organisation. His deputy Reinhard Heydrich was colder and more capable still: as head of the Reich Security Main Office he ran the Gestapo and security services, and in January 1942 he chaired the Wannsee Conference that coordinated the "Final Solution" across occupied Europe. Heydrich did not survive the war he helped make monstrous — in May 1942 Czechoslovak agents trained in Britain ambushed him in Prague, and he died of his wounds. The SS answered by erasing the village of Lidice.

K&C's set — here in the black pre-war SS uniforms — shows the pair as they appeared before the war: Himmler in front, bespectacled and mild-looking, giving the salute, with Heydrich a step behind. Two more ordinary-looking mass murderers would be hard to imagine. They belong with the leader whose orders they turned into machinery, Adolf Hitler, the SS apparatus they commanded, seen in the SS Inspection Officer, and their peer at the top of the regime, Hermann Göring. In any historical display of the Third Reich, this is the set that names the men behind the crime at its centre.

Model: LAH197 / King & Country / 1/30 (60mm) scale / matte finish / 2 piece set