To the young Himmler, still only in his mid-twenties, and hopelessly adrift in the choppy seas of post-putsch paramilitary politics, Hitler offered certainty, a leader to admire, a cause to follow. From 1925 onwards, when he joined the newly reconstituted Nazi Party, Himmler developed a boundless hero-worship of the Nazi leader; he kept a portrait of Hitler on his office wall and is even on occasion said to have engaged it in conversation.
