title: Heinrich Himmler

text: The Nazi Party's rise to power provided Himmler and the SS an unfettered opportunity to thrive. By 1933, the SS numbered 52,000 members. Strict membership requirements ensured that all members were of Hitler's Aryan "Herrenvolk" ("Aryan master race"). Applicants were vetted for Nordic qualities—in Himmler's words, "like a nursery gardener trying to reproduce a good old strain which has been adulterated and debased; we started from the principles of plant selection and then proceeded quite unashamedly to weed out the men whom we did not think we could use for the build-up of the SS." Few dared mention that by his own standards, Himmler did not meet his own ideals.


title: Heinrich Himmler

text: Himmler's organised, bookish intellect served him well as he began setting up different SS departments. In 1931 he appointed Reinhard Heydrich chief of the new Ic Service (intelligence service), which was renamed the "Sicherheitsdienst" (SD: Security Service) in 1932. He later officially appointed Heydrich his deputy. The two men had a good working relationship and a mutual respect. In 1933, they began to remove the SS from SA control. Along with Interior Minister Frick, they hoped to create a unified German police force. In March 1933, Reich Governor of Bavaria Franz Ritter von Epp appointed Himmler chief of the Munich Police. Himmler appointed Heydrich commander of Department IV, the political police. Thereafter, Himmler and Heydrich took over the political police of state after state; soon only Prussia was controlled by Göring. Effective 1 January 1933, Hitler promoted Himmler to the rank of SS-"Obergruppenführer", equal in rank to the senior SA commanders. On 2 June Himmler, along with the heads of the other two Nazi paramilitary organizations, the SA and the Hitler Youth, was named a "Reichsleiter", the second highest political rank in the Nazi Party. On 10 July, he was named to the Prussian State Council. On 2 October 1933, he became a founding member of Hans Frank's Academy for German Law at its inaugural meeting.


title: Heinrich Himmler

text: Himmler further established the SS Race and Settlement Main Office ("Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt" or RuSHA). He appointed Darré as its first chief, with the rank of SS-"Gruppenführer". The department implemented racial policies and monitored the "racial integrity" of the SS membership. SS men were carefully vetted for their racial background. On 31 December 1931, Himmler introduced the "marriage order", which required SS men wishing to marry to produce family trees proving that both families were of Aryan descent to 1800. If any non-Aryan forebears were found in either family tree during the racial investigation, the person concerned was excluded from the SS. Each man was issued a "Sippenbuch", a genealogical record detailing his genetic history. Himmler expected that each SS marriage should produce at least four children, thus creating a pool of genetically superior prospective SS members. The programme had disappointing results; less than 40 per cent of SS men married and each produced only about one child.


title: Heinrich Himmler

text: In March 1933, less than three months after the Nazis came to power, Himmler set up the first official concentration camp at Dachau. Hitler had stated that he did not want it to be just another prison or detention camp. Himmler appointed Theodor Eicke, a convicted felon and ardent Nazi, to run the camp in June 1933. Eicke devised a system that was used as a model for future camps throughout Germany. Its features included isolation of victims from the outside world, elaborate roll calls and work details, the use of force and executions to exact obedience, and a strict disciplinary code for the guards. Uniforms were issued for prisoners and guards alike; the guards' uniforms had a special "Totenkopf" insignia on their collars. By the end of 1934, Himmler took control of the camps under the aegis of the SS, creating a separate division, the "SS-Totenkopfverbände".


title: Heinrich Himmler

text: Initially the camps housed political opponents; over time, undesirable members of German society—criminals, vagrants, deviants—were placed in the camps as well. In 1936 Himmler wrote in the pamphlet "The SS as an Anti-Bolshevist Fighting Organization" that the SS were to fight against the "Jewish-Bolshevik revolution of subhumans". A Hitler decree issued in December 1937 allowed for the incarceration of anyone deemed by the regime to be an undesirable member of society. This included Jews, Gypsies, communists, and those persons of any other cultural, racial, political, or religious affiliation deemed by the Nazis to be "Untermensch" (sub-human). Thus, the camps became a mechanism for social and racial engineering. By the outbreak of World War II in autumn 1939, there were six camps housing some 27,000 inmates. Death tolls were high.


title: Heinrich Himmler

text: In early 1934, Hitler and other Nazi leaders became concerned that Röhm was planning a coup d'état. Röhm had socialist and populist views, and believed that the real revolution had not yet begun. He felt that the SA—now numbering some three million men, far dwarfing the army—should become the sole arms-bearing corps of the state, and that the army should be absorbed into the SA under his leadership. Röhm lobbied Hitler to appoint him Minister of Defence, a position held by conservative General Werner von Blomberg.


title: Heinrich Himmler

text: Göring had created a Prussian secret police force, the "Geheime Staatspolizei" or Gestapo in 1933, and appointed Rudolf Diels as its head. Göring, concerned that Diels was not ruthless enough to use the Gestapo effectively to counteract the power of the SA, handed over its control to Himmler on 20 April 1934. Also on that date, Hitler appointed Himmler chief of all German police outside Prussia. This was a radical departure from long-standing German practice that law enforcement was a state and local matter. Heydrich, named chief of the Gestapo by Himmler on 22 April 1934, also continued as head of the SD.


title: Heinrich Himmler

text: Hitler decided on 21 June that Röhm and the SA leadership had to be eliminated. He sent Göring to Berlin on 29 June, to meet with Himmler and Heydrich to plan the action. Hitler took charge in Munich, where Röhm was arrested; he gave Röhm the choice to commit suicide or be shot. When Röhm refused to kill himself, he was shot dead by two SS officers. Between 85 and 200 members of the SA leadership and other political adversaries, including Gregor Strasser, were killed between 30 June and 2 July 1934 in these actions, known as the Night of the Long Knives. With the SA thus neutralised, the SS became an independent organisation answerable only to Hitler on 20 July 1934. Himmler's title of "Reichsführer-SS" became the highest formal SS rank, equivalent to a field marshal in the army. The SA was converted into a sports and training organisation.


title: Heinrich Himmler

text: On 15 September 1935, Hitler presented two laws—known as the Nuremberg Laws—to the Reichstag. The laws banned marriage between non-Jewish and Jewish Germans and forbade the employment of non-Jewish women under the age of 45 in Jewish households. The laws also deprived so-called "non-Aryans" of the benefits of German citizenship. These laws were among the first race-based measures instituted by the Third Reich.


title: Heinrich Himmler

text: Himmler and Heydrich wanted to extend the power of the SS; thus, they urged Hitler to form a national police force overseen by the SS, to guard Nazi Germany against its many enemies at the time—real and imagined. Interior Minister Frick also wanted a national police force, but one controlled by him, with Kurt Daluege as his police chief. Hitler left it to Himmler and Heydrich to work out the arrangements with Frick. Himmler and Heydrich had greater bargaining power, as they were allied with Frick's old enemy, Göring. Heydrich drew up a set of proposals and Himmler sent him to meet with Frick. An angry Frick then consulted with Hitler, who told him to agree to the proposals. Frick acquiesced, and on 17 June 1936 Hitler decreed the unification of all police forces in the Reich, and named Himmler Chief of German Police and a State Secretary in the Ministry of the Interior. In this role, Himmler was still nominally subordinate to Frick. In practice, however, the police was now effectively a division of the SS, and hence independent of Frick's control. This move gave Himmler operational control over Germany's entire detective force. He also gained authority over all of Germany's uniformed law enforcement agencies, which were amalgamated into the new "Ordnungspolizei" (Orpo: "order police"), which became a branch of the SS under Daluege.


title: Heinrich Himmler

text: Shortly thereafter, Himmler created the "Kriminalpolizei" (Kripo: criminal police) as the umbrella organisation for all criminal investigation agencies in Germany. The Kripo was merged with the Gestapo into the "Sicherheitspolizei" (SiPo: security police), under Heydrich's command. In September 1939, following the outbreak of World War II, Himmler formed the "SS-Reichssicherheitshauptamt" (RSHA: Reich Security Main Office) to bring the SiPo (which included the Gestapo and Kripo) and the SD together under one umbrella. He again placed Heydrich in command.


title: Heinrich Himmler

text: Under Himmler's leadership, the SS developed its own military branch, the "SS-Verfügungstruppe" (SS-VT), which later evolved into the Waffen-SS. Nominally under the authority of Himmler, the Waffen-SS developed a fully militarised structure of command and operations. It grew from three regiments to over 38 divisions during World War II, serving alongside the "Heer" (army), but never being formally part of it.


title: Heinrich Himmler

text: In addition to his military ambitions, Himmler established the beginnings of a parallel economy under the umbrella of the SS. To this end, administrator Oswald Pohl set up the "Deutsche Wirtschaftsbetriebe" (German Economic Enterprise) in 1940. Under the auspices of the SS Economy and Administration Head Office, this holding company owned housing corporations, factories, and publishing houses. Pohl was unscrupulous and quickly exploited the companies for personal gain. In contrast, Himmler was honest in matters of money and business.


title: Heinrich Himmler

text: In 1938, as part of his preparations for war, Hitler ended the German alliance with China, and entered into an agreement with the more modern Japan. That same year, Austria was unified with Nazi Germany in the Anschluss, and the Munich Agreement gave Nazi Germany control over the Sudetenland, part of Czechoslovakia. Hitler's primary motivations for war included obtaining additional "Lebensraum" ("living space") for the Germanic peoples, who were considered racially superior according to Nazi ideology. A second goal was the elimination of those considered racially inferior, particularly the Jews and Slavs, from territories controlled by the Reich. From 1933 to 1938, hundreds of thousands of Jews emigrated to the United States, Palestine, Great Britain, and other countries. Some converted to Christianity.


title: Heinrich Himmler

text: According to Himmler biographer Peter Longerich, Himmler believed that a major task of the SS should be "acting as the vanguard in overcoming Christianity and restoring a 'Germanic' way of living" as part of preparations for the coming conflict between "humans and subhumans". Longerich wrote that, while the Nazi movement as a whole launched itself against Jews and Communists, "by linking de-Christianisation with re-Germanization, Himmler had provided the SS with a goal and purpose all of its own". Himmler was vehemently opposed to Christian sexual morality and the "principle of Christian mercy", both of which he saw as dangerous obstacles to his planned battle with "subhumans". In 1937, Himmler declared:


title: Heinrich Himmler

text: In early 1937, Himmler had his personal staff work with academics to create a framework to replace Christianity within the Germanic cultural heritage. The project gave rise to the Deutschrechtlichte Institute, headed by Professor Karl Eckhardt, at the University of Bonn.


title: Heinrich Himmler

text: When Hitler and his army chiefs asked for a pretext for the invasion of Poland in 1939, Himmler, Heydrich, and Heinrich Müller masterminded and carried out a false flag project code-named Operation Himmler. German soldiers dressed in Polish uniforms undertook border skirmishes which deceptively suggested Polish aggression against Germany. The incidents were then used in Nazi propaganda to justify the invasion of Poland, the opening event of World War II. At the beginning of the war against Poland, Hitler authorised the killing of Polish civilians, including Jews and ethnic Poles. The "Einsatzgruppen" (SS task forces) had originally been formed by Heydrich to secure government papers and offices in areas taken over by Germany before World War II. Authorised by Hitler and under the direction of Himmler and Heydrich, the "Einsatzgruppen" units—now repurposed as death squads—followed the "Heer" (army) into Poland, and by the end of 1939 they had murdered some 65,000 intellectuals and other civilians. Militias and "Heer" units also took part in these killings. Under Himmler's orders via the RSHA, these squads were also tasked with rounding up Jews and others for placement in ghettos and concentration camps.


title: Heinrich Himmler

text: Germany subsequently invaded Denmark and Norway, the Netherlands, and France, and began bombing Great Britain in preparation for Operation Sea Lion, the planned invasion of the United Kingdom. On 21 June 1941, the day before invasion of the Soviet Union, Himmler commissioned the preparation of the "Generalplan Ost" (General Plan for the East); the plan was finalised in July 1942. It called for the Baltic States, Poland, Western Ukraine, and Byelorussia to be conquered and resettled by ten million German citizens. The current residents—some 31 million people—would be expelled further east, starved, or used for forced labour. The plan would have extended the borders of Germany to the east by . Himmler expected that it would take twenty to thirty years to complete the plan, at a cost of . Himmler stated openly: "It is a question of existence, thus it will be a racial struggle of pitiless severity, in the course of which 20 to 30 million Slavs and Jews will perish through military actions and crises of food supply."


title: Heinrich Himmler

text: Himmler declared that the war in the east was a pan-European crusade to defend the traditional values of old Europe from the "Godless Bolshevik hordes". Constantly struggling with the Wehrmacht for recruits, Himmler solved this problem through the creation of Waffen-SS units composed of Germanic folk groups taken from the Balkans and eastern Europe. Equally vital were recruits from among the Germanic considered peoples of northern and western Europe, in the Netherlands, Norway, Belgium, Denmark and Finland. Spain and Italy also provided men for Waffen-SS units. Among western countries, the number of volunteers varied from a high of 25,000 from the Netherlands to 300 each from Sweden and Switzerland. From the east, the highest number of men came from Lithuania (50,000) and the lowest from Bulgaria (600). After 1943 most men from the east were conscripts. The performance of the eastern Waffen-SS units was, as a whole, sub-standard.


title: Heinrich Himmler

text: In late 1941, Hitler named Heydrich as Deputy Reich Protector of the newly established Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Heydrich began to racially classify the Czechs, deporting many to concentration camps. Members of a swelling resistance were shot, earning Heydrich the nickname "the Butcher of Prague". This appointment strengthened the collaboration between Himmler and Heydrich, and Himmler was proud to have SS control over a state. Despite having direct access to Hitler, Heydrich's loyalty to Himmler remained firm.


title: Heinrich Himmler

text: With Hitler's approval, Himmler re-established the "Einsatzgruppen" in the lead-up to the planned invasion of the Soviet Union. In March 1941, Hitler addressed his army leaders, detailing his intention to smash the Soviet Empire and destroy the Bolshevik intelligentsia and leadership. His special directive, the "Guidelines in Special Spheres re Directive No. 21 (Operation Barbarossa)", read: "In the operations area of the army, the "Reichsführer-SS" has been given special tasks on the orders of the "Führer", in order to prepare the political administration. These tasks arise from the forthcoming final struggle of two opposing political systems. Within the framework of these tasks, the "Reichsführer-SS" acts independently and on his own responsibility." Hitler thus intended to prevent internal friction like that occurring earlier in Poland in 1939, when several German Army generals had attempted to bring "Einsatzgruppen" leaders to trial for the murders they had committed.


title: Heinrich Himmler

text: Following the army into the Soviet Union, the "Einsatzgruppen" rounded up and killed Jews and others deemed undesirable by the Nazi state. Hitler was sent frequent reports. In addition, 2.8 million Soviet prisoners of war died of starvation, mistreatment or executions in just eight months of 1941–42. As many as 500,000 Soviet prisoners of war died or were executed in Nazi concentration camps over the course of the war; most of them were shot or gassed. By early 1941, following Himmler's orders, ten concentration camps had been constructed in which inmates were subjected to forced labour. Jews from all over Germany and the occupied territories were deported to the camps or confined to ghettos. As the Germans were pushed back from Moscow in December 1941, signalling that the expected quick defeat of the Soviet Union had failed to materialize, Hitler and other Nazi officials realised that mass deportations to the east would no longer be possible. As a result, instead of deportation, many Jews in Europe were destined for death.


title: Heinrich Himmler

text: Nazi racial policies, including the notion that people who were racially inferior had no right to live, date back to the earliest days of the party; Hitler discusses this in . Around the time of the German declaration of war on the United States in December 1941, Hitler resolved that the Jews of Europe were to be "exterminated". Heydrich arranged a meeting, held on 20 January 1942 at Wannsee, a suburb of Berlin. Attended by top Nazi officials, it was used to outline the plans for the "final solution to the Jewish question". Heydrich detailed how those Jews able to work would be worked to death; those unable to work would be killed outright. Heydrich calculated the number of Jews to be killed at 11 million and told the attendees that Hitler had placed Himmler in charge of the plan.


title: Heinrich Himmler

text: In June 1942, Heydrich was assassinated in Prague in Operation Anthropoid, led by Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš, members of Czechoslovakia's army-in-exile. Both men had been trained by the British Special Operations Executive for the mission to kill Heydrich. During the two funeral services, Himmler—the chief mourner—took charge of Heydrich's two young sons, and he gave the eulogy in Berlin. On 9 June, after discussions with Himmler and Karl Hermann Frank, Hitler ordered brutal reprisals for Heydrich's death. Over 13,000 people were arrested, and the village of Lidice was razed to the ground; its male inhabitants and all adults in the village of Ležáky were murdered. At least 1,300 people were executed by firing squads. Himmler took over leadership of the RSHA and stepped up the pace of the killing of Jews in (Operation Reinhard), named in Heydrich's honour. He ordered the camps—three extermination camps—to be constructed at Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka.


title: Heinrich Himmler

text: Initially the victims were killed with gas vans or by firing squad, but these methods proved impracticable for an operation of this scale. In August 1941, Himmler attended the shooting of 100 Jews at Minsk. Nauseated and shaken by the experience, he was concerned about the impact such actions would have on the mental health of his SS men. He decided that alternate methods of killing should be found. On his orders, by early 1942 the camp at Auschwitz had been greatly expanded, including the addition of gas chambers, where victims were killed using the pesticide Zyklon B. Himmler visited the camp in person on 17 and 18 July 1942. He was given a demonstration of a mass killing using the gas chamber in Bunker 2 and toured the building site of the new IG Farben plant being constructed at the nearby town of Monowitz. By the end of the war, at least 5.5 million Jews had been killed by the Nazi regime; most estimates range closer to 6 million. Himmler visited the camp at Sobibór in early 1943, by which time 250,000 people had been killed at that location alone. After witnessing a gassing, he gave 28 people promotions and ordered the operation of the camp to be wound down. In a prisoner revolt that October, the remaining prisoners killed most of the guards and SS personnel. Several hundred prisoners escaped; about a hundred were immediately re-captured and killed. Some of the escapees joined partisan units operating in the area. The camp was dismantled by December 1943.


title: Heinrich Himmler

text: The Nazis also targeted Romani (Gypsies) as "asocial" and "criminals". By 1935, they were confined into special camps away from ethnic Germans. In 1938, Himmler issued an order in which he said that the "Gypsy question" would be determined by "race". Himmler believed that the Romani were originally Aryan but had become a mixed race; only the "racially pure" were to be allowed to live. In 1939, Himmler ordered thousands of Gypsies to be sent to the Dachau concentration camp and by 1942, ordered all Romani sent to Auschwitz concentration camp.


title: Heinrich Himmler

text: Himmler was one of the main architects of the Holocaust, using his deep belief in the racist Nazi ideology to justify the murder of millions of victims. Longerich surmises that Hitler, Himmler, and Heydrich designed the Holocaust during a period of intensive meetings and exchanges in April–May 1942. The Nazis planned to kill Polish intellectuals and restrict non-Germans in the General Government and conquered territories to a fourth-grade education. They further wanted to breed a master race of racially pure Nordic Aryans in Germany. As a student of agriculture and a farmer, Himmler was acquainted with the principles of selective breeding, which he proposed to apply to humans. He believed that he could engineer the German populace, for example, through eugenics, to be Nordic in appearance within several decades of the end of the war.


title: Heinrich Himmler

text: On 4 October 1943, during a secret meeting with top SS officials in the city of Poznań (Posen), and on 6 October 1943, in a speech to the party elite—the "Gauleiters" and "Reichsleiters"—Himmler referred explicitly to the "extermination" () of the Jewish people.


title: Heinrich Himmler

text: Because the Allies had indicated that they were going to pursue criminal charges for German war crimes, Hitler tried to gain the loyalty and silence of his subordinates by making them all parties to the ongoing genocide. Hitler therefore authorised Himmler's speeches to ensure that all party leaders were complicit in the crimes and could not later deny knowledge of the killings.


title: Heinrich Himmler

text: As Reich Commissioner for the Consolidation of German Nationhood (RKFDV) with the incorporated VoMi, Himmler was deeply involved in the Germanization program for the East, particularly Poland. As laid out in the General Plan for the East, the aim was to enslave, expel or exterminate the native population and to make ("living space") for (ethnic Germans). He continued his plans to colonise the east, even when many Germans were reluctant to relocate there, and despite negative effects on the war effort.


title: Heinrich Himmler

text: Himmler's racial groupings began with the , the classification of people deemed of German blood. These included Germans who had collaborated with Germany before the war, but also those who considered themselves German but had been neutral; those who were partially "Polonized" but "Germanizable"; and Germans who were of Polish nationality. Himmler ordered that those who refused to be classified as ethnic Germans should be deported to concentration camps, have their children taken away, or be assigned to forced labour. Himmler's belief that "it is in the nature of German blood to resist" led to his conclusion that Balts or Slavs who resisted Germanization were racially superior to more compliant ones. He declared that no drop of German blood would be lost or left behind to mingle with an "alien race".


title: Heinrich Himmler

text: The "racially valuable" children were to be removed from all contact with Poles and raised as Germans, with German names. Himmler declared: "We have faith above all in this our own blood, which has flowed into a foreign nationality through the vicissitudes of German history. We are convinced that our own philosophy and ideals will reverberate in the spirit of these children who racially belong to us." The children were to be adopted by German families. Children who passed muster at first but were later rejected were taken to in Łódź Ghetto, where most of them eventually died.


title: Heinrich Himmler

text: By January 1943, Himmler reported that 629,000 ethnic Germans had been resettled; however, most resettled Germans did not live in the envisioned small farms, but in temporary camps or quarters in towns. Half a million residents of the annexed Polish territories, as well as from Slovenia, Alsace, Lorraine, and Luxembourg were deported to the General Government or sent to Germany as slave labour. Himmler instructed that the German nation should view all foreign workers brought to Germany as a danger to their German blood. In accordance with German racial laws, sexual relations between Germans and foreigners were forbidden as (race defilement).


title: Heinrich Himmler

text: On 20 July 1944, a group of German army officers led by Claus von Stauffenberg and including some of the highest-ranked members of the German armed forces attempted to assassinate Hitler, but failed to do so. The next day, Himmler formed a special commission that arrested over 5,000 suspected and known opponents of the regime. Hitler ordered brutal reprisals that resulted in the execution of more than 4,900 people. Though Himmler was embarrassed by his failure to uncover the plot, it led to an increase in his powers and authority.


title: Heinrich Himmler

text: General Friedrich Fromm, commander-in-chief of the Replacement Army ("Ersatzheer") and Stauffenberg's immediate superior, was one of those implicated in the conspiracy. Hitler removed Fromm from his post and named Himmler as his successor. Since the Replacement Army consisted of two million men, Himmler hoped to draw on these reserves to fill posts within the Waffen-SS. He appointed Hans Jüttner, director of the SS Leadership Main Office, as his deputy, and began to fill top Replacement Army posts with SS men. By November 1944 Himmler had merged the army officer recruitment department with that of the Waffen-SS and had successfully lobbied for an increase in the quotas for recruits to the SS.


title: Heinrich Himmler

text: By this time, Hitler had appointed Himmler as "Reichsminister" of the Interior, succeeding Frick, and General Plenipotentiary for Administration ("Generalbevollmächtigter für die Verwaltung"). At the same time (24 August 1943) he also joined the six-member Council of Ministers for the Defense of the Reich, which operated as the war cabinet. In August 1944 Hitler authorised him to restructure the organisation and administration of the Waffen-SS, the army, and the police services. As head of the Replacement Army, Himmler was now responsible for prisoners of war. He was also in charge of the Wehrmacht penal system, and controlled the development of Wehrmacht armaments until January 1945.


title: Heinrich Himmler

text: On 6 June 1944, the Western Allied armies landed in northern France during Operation Overlord. In response, Army Group Upper Rhine ("Heeresgruppe Oberrhein") group was formed to engage the advancing US 7th Army (under command of General Alexander Patch) and French 1st Army (led by General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny) in the Alsace region along the west bank of the Rhine. In late 1944, Hitler appointed Himmler commander-in-chief of Army Group Upper Rhine.


title: Heinrich Himmler

text: On 26 September 1944 Hitler ordered Himmler to create special army units, the "Volkssturm" ("People's Storm" or "People's Army"). All males aged sixteen to sixty were eligible for conscription into this militia, over the protests of Armaments Minister Albert Speer, who noted that irreplaceable skilled workers were being removed from armaments production. Hitler confidently believed six million men could be raised, and the new units would "initiate a people's war against the invader". These hopes were wildly optimistic. In October 1944, children as young as fourteen were being enlisted. Because of severe shortages in weapons and equipment and lack of training, members of the "Volkssturm" were poorly prepared for combat, and about 175,000 of them lost their lives in the final months of the war.


title: Heinrich Himmler

text: On 1 January 1945, Hitler and his generals launched Operation North Wind. The goal was to break through the lines of the US 7th Army and French 1st Army to support the southern thrust in the Battle of the Bulge (Ardennes offensive), the final major German offensive of the war. After limited initial gains by the Germans, the Americans halted the offensive. By 25 January, Operation North Wind had officially ended.


title: Heinrich Himmler

text: On 25 January 1945, despite Himmler's lack of military experience, Hitler appointed him as commander of the hastily formed Army Group Vistula ("Heeresgruppe Weichsel") to halt the Soviet Red Army's Vistula–Oder offensive into Pomerania – a decision that appalled the German General Staff. Himmler established his command centre at Schneidemühl, using his special train, "Sonderzug Steiermark", as his headquarters. The train had only one telephone line, inadequate maps, and no signal detachment or radios with which to establish communication and relay military orders. Himmler seldom left the train, only worked about four hours per day, and insisted on a daily massage before commencing work and a lengthy nap after lunch.


title: Heinrich Himmler

text: General Heinz Guderian talked to Himmler on 9 February and demanded, that Operation Solstice, an attack from Pomerania against the northern flank of Marshal Georgy Zhukov's 1st Belorussian Front, should be in progress by the 16th. Himmler argued that he was not ready to commit himself to a specific date. Given Himmler's lack of qualifications as an army group commander, Guderian convinced himself that Himmler tried to conceal his incompetence. On 13 February Guderian met Hitler and demanded that General Walther Wenck be given a special mandate to command the offensive by Army Group Vistula. Hitler sent Wenck with a "special mandate", but without specifying Wenck's authority. The offensive was launched on 16 February 1945, but soon stuck in rain and mud, facing mine fields and strong antitank defenses. That night Wenck was severely injured in a car accident, but it is doubtful that he could have salvaged the operation, as Guderian later claimed. Himmler ordered the offensive to stop on the 18th by a "directive for regrouping". Hitler officially ended Operation Solstice on 21 February and ordered Himmler to transfer a corps headquarter and three divisions to Army Group Center.


title: Heinrich Himmler

text: Himmler was unable to devise any viable plans for completion of his military objectives. Under pressure from Hitler over the worsening military situation, Himmler became anxious and unable to give him coherent reports. When the counter-attack failed to stop the Soviet advance, Hitler held Himmler personally liable and accused him of not following orders. Himmler's military command ended on 20 March, when Hitler replaced him with General Gotthard Heinrici as Commander-in-Chief of Army Group Vistula. By this time Himmler, who had been under the care of his doctor since 18 February, had fled to the Hohenlychen Sanatorium. Hitler sent Guderian on a forced medical leave of absence, and he reassigned his post as chief of staff to Hans Krebs on 29 March. Himmler's failure and Hitler's response marked a serious deterioration in the relationship between the two men. By that time, the inner circle of people whom Hitler trusted was rapidly shrinking.


title: Heinrich Himmler

text: In early 1945, the German war effort was on the verge of collapse and Himmler's relationship with Hitler had deteriorated. Himmler considered independently negotiating a peace settlement. His masseur, Felix Kersten, who had moved to Sweden, acted as an intermediary in negotiations with Count Folke Bernadotte, head of the Swedish Red Cross. Letters were exchanged between the two men, and direct meetings were arranged by Walter Schellenberg of the RSHA.


title: Heinrich Himmler

text: Himmler and Hitler met for the last time on 20 April 1945—Hitler's birthday—in Berlin, and Himmler swore unswerving loyalty to Hitler. At a military briefing on that day, Hitler stated that he would not leave Berlin, in spite of Soviet advances. Along with Göring, Himmler quickly left the city after the briefing. On 21 April, Himmler met with Norbert Masur, a Swedish representative of the World Jewish Congress, to discuss the release of Jewish concentration camp inmates. As a result of these negotiations, about 20,000 people were released in the White Buses operation. Himmler falsely claimed in the meeting that the crematoria at camps had been built to deal with the bodies of prisoners who had died in a typhus epidemic. He also claimed very high survival rates for the camps at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, even as these sites were liberated and it became obvious that his figures were false.


title: Heinrich Himmler

text: On 23 April, Himmler met directly with Bernadotte at the Swedish consulate in Lübeck. Representing himself as the provisional leader of Germany, he claimed that Hitler would be dead within the next few days. Hoping that the British and Americans would fight the Soviets alongside what remained of the Wehrmacht, Himmler asked Bernadotte to inform General Dwight Eisenhower that Germany wished to surrender to the Western Allies, and not to the Soviet Union. Bernadotte asked Himmler to put his proposal in writing, and Himmler obliged.


title: Heinrich Himmler

text: Meanwhile, Göring had sent a telegram, a few hours earlier, asking Hitler for permission to assume leadership of the "Reich" in his capacity as Hitler's designated deputy—an act that Hitler, under the prodding of Martin Bormann, interpreted as a demand to step down or face a coup. On 27 April, Himmler's SS representative at Hitler's HQ in Berlin, Hermann Fegelein, was caught in civilian clothes preparing to desert; he was arrested and brought back to the "Führerbunker". On the evening of 28 April, the BBC broadcast a Reuters news report about Himmler's attempted negotiations with the western Allies. Hitler had long considered Himmler to be second only to Joseph Goebbels in loyalty; he called Himmler "the loyal Heinrich" (). Hitler flew into a rage at this betrayal, and told those still with him in the bunker complex that Himmler's secret negotiations were the worst treachery he had ever known. Hitler ordered Himmler's arrest, and Fegelein was court-martialed and shot.


title: Heinrich Himmler

text: By this time, the Soviets had advanced to the Potsdamer Platz, only from the Reich Chancellery, and were preparing to storm the Chancellery. This report, combined with Himmler's treachery, prompted Hitler to write his last will and testament. In the testament, completed on 29 April—one day prior to his suicide—Hitler declared both Himmler and Göring to be traitors. He stripped Himmler of all of his party and state offices and expelled him from the Nazi Party.


title: Heinrich Himmler

text: Hitler named Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz as his successor. Himmler met Dönitz in Flensburg and offered himself as second-in-command. He maintained that he was entitled to a position in Dönitz's interim government as "Reichsführer-SS", believing the SS would be in a good position to restore and maintain order after the war. Dönitz repeatedly rejected Himmler's overtures and initiated peace negotiations with the Allies. He wrote a letter on 6 May—two days before the German Instrument of Surrender—formally dismissing Himmler from all his posts.


title: Heinrich Himmler

text: Rejected by his former comrades and hunted by the Allies, Himmler attempted to go into hiding. He had not made extensive preparations for this, but he carried a forged paybook under the name of Sergeant Heinrich Hizinger. With a small band of companions, he headed south on 11 May to Friedrichskoog, without a final destination in mind. They continued on to Neuhaus, where the group split up. On 21 May, Himmler and two aides were stopped and detained at a checkpoint in Bremervörde set up by former Soviet POWs. Over the following two days, he was moved around to several camps and was brought to the British 31st Civilian Interrogation Camp near Lüneburg, on 23 May. The officials noticed that Himmler's identity papers bore a stamp which British military intelligence had seen being used by fleeing members of the SS.


title: Heinrich Himmler

text: The duty officer, Captain Thomas Selvester, began a routine interrogation. Himmler admitted who he was, and Selvester had the prisoner searched. Himmler was taken to the headquarters of the Second British Army in Lüneburg, where a doctor conducted a medical exam on him. The doctor attempted to examine the inside of Himmler's mouth, but the prisoner was reluctant to open it and jerked his head away. Himmler then bit into a hidden potassium cyanide pill and collapsed onto the floor. He was dead within 15 minutes. Shortly afterward, Himmler's body was buried in an unmarked grave near Lüneburg. The grave's location remains unknown.


title: Heinrich Himmler

text: Himmler was interested in mysticism and the occult from an early age. He tied this interest into his racist philosophy, looking for proof of Aryan and Nordic racial superiority from ancient times. He promoted a cult of ancestor worship, particularly among members of the SS, as a way to keep the race pure and provide immortality to the nation. Viewing the SS as an "order" along the lines of the Teutonic Knights, he had them take over the Church of the Teutonic Order in Vienna in 1939. He began the process of replacing Christianity with a new moral code that rejected humanitarianism and challenged the Christian concept of marriage. The Ahnenerbe, a research society founded by Himmler in 1935, searched the globe for proof of the superiority and ancient origins of the Germanic race.


title: Heinrich Himmler

text: All regalia and uniforms of Nazi Germany, particularly those of the SS, used symbolism in their designs. The stylised lightning bolt logo of the SS was chosen in 1932. The logo is a pair of runes from a set of 18 Armanen runes created by Guido von List in 1906. The ancient Sowilō rune originally symbolised the sun, but was renamed "Sieg" (victory) in List's iconography. Himmler modified a variety of existing customs to emphasise the elitism and central role of the SS; an SS naming ceremony was to replace baptism, marriage ceremonies were to be altered, a separate SS funeral ceremony was to be held in addition to Christian ceremonies, and SS-centric celebrations of the summer and winter solstices were instituted. The "Totenkopf" (death's head) symbol, used by German military units for hundreds of years, had been chosen for the SS by Julius Schreck. Himmler placed particular importance on the death's-head rings; they were never to be sold, and were to be returned to him upon the death of the owner. He interpreted the death's-head symbol to mean solidarity to the cause and a commitment unto death.


title: Heinrich Himmler

text: As second in command of the SS and then Reichsführer-SS, Himmler was in regular contact with Hitler to arrange for SS men as bodyguards; Himmler was not involved with Nazi Party policy-making decisions in the years leading up to the seizure of power. From the late 1930s, the SS was independent of the control of other state agencies or government departments, and he reported only to Hitler.


title: Heinrich Himmler

text: Hitler's leadership style was to give contradictory orders to subordinates and to place them into positions where their duties and responsibilities overlapped with those of others. In this way, Hitler fostered distrust, competition, and infighting among his subordinates to consolidate and maximise his own power. His cabinet never met after 1938, and he discouraged his ministers from meeting independently. Hitler typically did not issue written orders, but gave them orally at meetings or in phone conversations; he also had Bormann convey orders. Bormann used his position as Hitler's secretary to control the flow of information and access to Hitler.


title: Heinrich Himmler

text: Hitler promoted and practised the "Führerprinzip". The principle required absolute obedience of all subordinates to their superiors; thus Hitler viewed the government structure as a pyramid, with himself—the infallible leader—at the apex. Accordingly, Himmler placed himself in a position of subservience to Hitler, and was unconditionally obedient to him. However, he—like other top Nazi officials—had aspirations to one day succeed Hitler as leader of the Reich. Himmler considered Speer to be an especially dangerous rival, both in the Reich administration and as a potential successor to Hitler. Speer refused to accept Himmler's offer of the high rank of SS-Oberst-Gruppenführer, as he felt to do so would put him in Himmler's debt and obligate him to allow Himmler a say in armaments production.


title: Heinrich Himmler

text: Hitler called Himmler's mystical and pseudoreligious interests "nonsense". Himmler was not a member of Hitler's inner circle; the two men were not very close, and rarely saw each other socially. Himmler socialised almost exclusively with other members of the SS. His unconditional loyalty and efforts to please Hitler earned him the nickname of "der treue Heinrich" ("the faithful Heinrich"). In the last days of the war, when it became clear that Hitler planned to die in Berlin, Himmler left his long-time superior to try to save himself.


title: Heinrich Himmler

text: Himmler met his future wife, Margarete Boden, in 1927. Seven years his senior, she was a nurse who shared his interest in herbal medicine and homoeopathy, and was part owner of a small private clinic. They were married in July 1928, and their only child, Gudrun, was born on 8 August 1929. The couple were also foster parents to a boy named Gerhard von Ahe, son of an SS officer who had died before the war. Margarete sold her share of the clinic and used the proceeds to buy a plot of land in Waldtrudering, near Munich, where they erected a prefabricated house. Himmler was constantly away on party business, so his wife took charge of their efforts—mostly unsuccessful—to raise livestock for sale. They had a dog, Töhle.


title: Heinrich Himmler

text: After the Nazis came to power the family moved first to Möhlstrasse in Munich, and in 1934 to Lake Tegern, where they bought a house. Himmler also later obtained a large house in the Berlin suburb of Dahlem, free of charge, as an official residence. The couple saw little of each other as Himmler became totally absorbed by work. The relationship was strained. The couple did unite for social functions; they were frequent guests at the Heydrich home. Margarete saw it as her duty to invite the wives of the senior SS leaders over for afternoon coffee and tea on Wednesday afternoons.


title: Heinrich Himmler

text: Hedwig Potthast, Himmler's young secretary starting in 1936, became his mistress by 1939. She left her job in 1941. He arranged accommodation for her, first in Mecklenburg and later at Berchtesgaden. He fathered two children with her: a son, Helge (born 15 February 1942) and a daughter, Nanette Dorothea (born 20 July 1944, Berchtesgaden). Margarete, by then living in Gmund with her daughter, learned of the relationship sometime in 1941; she and Himmler were already separated, and she decided to tolerate the relationship for the sake of her daughter. Working as a nurse for the German Red Cross during the war, Margarete was appointed supervisor in one of Germany's military districts, Wehrkreis III (Berlin-Brandenburg). Himmler was close to his first daughter, Gudrun, whom he nicknamed "Püppi" ("dolly"); he phoned her every few days and visited as often as he could.


title: Heinrich Himmler

text: Margarete's diaries reveal that Gerhard had to leave the National Political Educational Institute in Berlin because of poor results. At the age of 16 he joined the SS in Brno and shortly afterwards went "into battle". He was captured by the Russians but later returned to Germany.


title: Heinrich Himmler

text: Hedwig and Margarete both remained loyal to Himmler. Writing to Gebhard in February 1945, Margarete said, "How wonderful that he has been called to great tasks and is equal to them. The whole of Germany is looking to him." Hedwig expressed similar sentiments in a letter to Himmler in January. Margarete and Gudrun left Gmund as Allied troops advanced into the area. They were arrested by American troops in Bolzano, Italy, and held in various internment camps in Italy, France, and Germany. They were brought to Nuremberg to testify at the trials and were released in November 1946. Gudrun emerged from the experience embittered by her alleged mistreatment and remained devoted to her father's memory. She later worked for the West German spy agency "Bundesnachrichtendienst" (BND) from 1961 to 1963.


title: Heinrich Himmler

text: Peter Longerich observes that Himmler's ability to consolidate his ever-increasing powers and responsibilities into a coherent system under the auspices of the SS led him to become one of the most powerful men in the Third Reich. Historian Wolfgang Sauer says that "although he was pedantic, dogmatic, and dull, Himmler emerged under Hitler as second in actual power. His strength lay in a combination of unusual shrewdness, burning ambition, and servile loyalty to Hitler." In 2008, the German news magazine described Himmler as one of the most brutal mass murderers in history and the architect of the Holocaust.


title: Heinrich Himmler

text: Historian John Toland relates a story by Günter Syrup, a subordinate of Heydrich. Heydrich showed him a picture of Himmler and said: "The top half is the teacher, but the lower half is the sadist." Historian Adrian Weale comments that Himmler and the SS followed Hitler's policies without question or ethical considerations. Himmler accepted Hitler and Nazi ideology and saw the SS as a chivalric Teutonic order of new Germans. Himmler adopted the doctrine of ("mission command"), whereby orders were given as broad directives, with authority delegated downward to the appropriate level to carry them out in a timely and efficient manner. Weale states that the SS ideology gave the men a doctrinal framework, and the mission command tactics allowed the junior officers leeway to act on their own initiative to obtain the desired results.


title: Mindy Kaling

text: Vera Mindy Chokalingam (born June 24, 1979), known professionally as Mindy Kaling (), is an American actress, comedian, screenwriter and producer. She first gained recognition starring as Kelly Kapoor in the NBC sitcom "The Office" (2005–2013), for which she also served as a writer, executive producer, and director. For her work on the series, she was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing in a Comedy Series and five times for Outstanding Comedy Series.


title: Mindy Kaling

text: Kaling gained wider attention for creating, producing and starring in the Fox comedy series "The Mindy Project" (2012–2017). She created the NBC sitcom "Champions" (2018), also appearing in five episodes, the Hulu miniseries "Four Weddings and a Funeral" (2019), the Netflix comedy-drama series "Never Have I Ever" (2020–present), the HBO Max comedy-drama series "The Sex Lives of College Girls" (2021–present), and Snowball Fight (2022-2023) with Chad producer Rob Rosell .


title: Mindy Kaling

text: Kaling's film career includes voiceover work in "Despicable Me" (2010), "Wreck-It Ralph" (2012), and "Inside Out" (2015). She had roles in comedy films, such as "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" (2005), "No Strings Attached" (2011), "The Five-Year Engagement" (2012), "The Night Before" (2015), "A Wrinkle in Time" and "Ocean's 8" (both 2018), and "Late Night" (2019), the last of which she also wrote and produced. Her memoirs, "Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns)" (2011) and "Why Not Me?" (2015), reached "The New York Times" Best Seller list. She also received a Tony Award for Best Musical as a producer for the musical "A Strange Loop".


title: Mindy Kaling

text: Vera Mindy Chokalingam was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to father Avudaiappan Chokalingam (); an architect, and mother Swati Chokalingam (; née Roy-Sircar), an obstetrician/gynecologist (OB/GYN). She has an elder brother, Vijay. Kaling’s parents are from India and met while working at the same hospital in Nigeria. Her father, a Tamil raised in Chennai (Madras), was overseeing the building of a wing of the hospital. Her mother, a Bengali from Mumbai (Bombay), was working as an OB/GYN. The family immigrated to the United States in 1979, the same year Kaling was born. Kaling's mother died of pancreatic cancer in 2012.


title: Mindy Kaling

text: Kaling has said she has never been called Vera, her first name, but has been referred to as Mindy since her mother was pregnant with her while her parents were living in Bengal. They were already planning to move to the United States and wanted, Kaling said, a "cute American name" for their daughter, and liked the name Mindy from the TV show "Mork & Mindy". The name Vera is, according to Kaling, the name of the "incarnation of a Hindu goddess." Kaling graduated from Buckingham Browne & Nichols, a private school in Cambridge, in 1997. The following year, she entered Dartmouth College, where she was a member of the improvisational comedy troupe The Dog Day Players and the a cappella group The Rockapellas, was the creator of the comic strip "Badly Drawn Girl" in "The Dartmouth" (the college's daily newspaper), and was a writer for the "Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern" (the college's humor magazine).


title: Mindy Kaling

text: Kaling graduated from Dartmouth College in 2001 with a bachelor's degree in playwriting. She was a classics major for much of college and studied Latin, a subject she had been learning since the seventh grade. Kaling lists the comedy series "Dr. Katz", "Saturday Night Live", "Frasier" and "Cheers" as early influences on her comedy.


title: Mindy Kaling

text: While a 19-year-old sophomore at Dartmouth, Kaling was an intern on "Late Night with Conan O'Brien". Kaling has said that she never saw a family like hers on TV, which gave her a dual perspective she uses in her writing. She thinks the "everyone against me" mentality is what she learned as a child of immigrants. She named her "Mindy Project" character Mindy Lahiri after author Jhumpa Lahiri.


title: Mindy Kaling

text: After college, Kaling moved to Brooklyn, New York. Kaling said one of her worst job experiences was as a production assistant for three months on the "Crossing Over With John Edward" psychic show. She described it as "depressing." During this same time, Kaling performed stand-up comedy.


title: Mindy Kaling

text: Kaling devised her stage name after discovering while doing stand-up comedy that emcees would have trouble pronouncing her last name, Chokalingam, and sometimes made jokes about it. She toured solo as well as with Craig Robinson before he was on "The Office."


title: Mindy Kaling

text: In August 2002, Kaling portrayed Ben Affleck in an off-Broadway play called "Matt & Ben", which she co-wrote with her best friend from college, Brenda Withers—who played Matt Damon. The play was named one of "Time" magazine's "Top Ten Theatrical Events of The Year" and was "a surprise hit" at the 2002 New York International Fringe Festival. Initially, Withers and Kaling had, "for their own entertainment, mockingly pretended to be the best friends Matt Damon and Ben Affleck; that pretending spawned "Matt & Ben", the goofy play that reimagined how Damon and Affleck came to write the movie "Good Will Hunting"."


title: Mindy Kaling

text: Kaling wrote a blog, "Things I've Bought That I Love", which reemerged on her website on September 29, 2011. The blog was written under the name Mindy Ephron, "a name Kaling chose because she was amused by the idea of her 20-something Indian-American self as a long-lost Ephron sister."


title: Mindy Kaling

text: In 2004, when "The Office" producer Greg Daniels was working to adapt "The Office" from the BBC TV series of the same name, he hired Kaling as a writer-performer after reading a spec script she wrote. He said, "She's very original ... If anything feels phony or lazy or passé, she'll pounce on it." When Kaling joined "The Office", she was 24 years old and was the only woman on a staff of eight. She took on the role of character Kelly Kapoor, debuting in the series' second episode, "Diversity Day". Kaling's TV appearances include a 2005 episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm", playing Richard Lewis's assistant. She is featured on the CD "Comedy Death-Ray" and guest-wrote parts of an episode of "Saturday Night Live" in April 2006. After her film debut in "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" with Steve Carell, Kaling appeared in the film "Unaccompanied Minors" as a waitress.


title: Mindy Kaling

text: In an interview with "The A.V. Club", she stated that Kelly is "an exaggerated version of what I think the upper-level writers believe my personality is." Kaling directed "The Office" webisode "The 3rd Floor". She directed the Season 6 episode "Body Language," which marked her television directorial debut. In 2007, she had a small part in "License to Wed" alongside fellow "Office" actors John Krasinski, Angela Kinsey, and Brian Baumgartner. Kaling starred in the 2009 film "" as a Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum tour guide.


title: Mindy Kaling

text: Her contract was set to expire at the end of Season 7. On September 15, 2011, she signed a new contract to stay with the show for Season 8 and was promoted to full executive producer. Her Universal Television contract included a development deal for a new show (eventually titled "The Mindy Project"), in which she appeared as an actress and contributed as a writer. Kaling left "The Office" after the ninth-season episode "New Guys". However, she returned to guest-star in the final episode of the series. In 2011, Kaling published a memoir, "Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns)", which appeared on the "New York Times" best-seller list. Her second book, "Why Not Me?", covers the events that have happened in her life since 2011, and was published on September 15, 2015. "Why Not Me?" launched at No. 1 on the "New York Times" best-seller list. She published a third memoir, "Nothing Like I Imagined (Except For Sometimes)", with Amazon Original Stories in 2020.


title: Mindy Kaling

text: Kaling and her fellow writers and producers of "The Office" were nominated five consecutive times for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Comedy Series. In 2010, she received a nomination for Outstanding Writing in a Comedy Series with Daniels for the episode "Niagara." However, in a 2019 interview with "Elle" Magazine, Kaling spoke about the sexism faced by the Television Academy, because Kaling had to go through great lengths to prove her contribution as a producer after being informed by the television academy she was going to be cut from the producer list, because there were too many producers. To receive her rightful producing credit when the Office was nominated for an Emmy for an Outstanding Comedy Series, she stated, “They made me, not any of the other producers, fill out a whole form and write an essay about all my contributions as a writer and a producer,” Kaling told "Elle" of how her name ultimately got put on the Emmys list. “I had to get letters from all the other male, white producers saying that I had contributed, when my actual record stood for itself.” The Emmys rebutted Kaling’s statement in an interview with Refinery 29, but Kaling clarified in a series of tweets of choosing to make that statement during the "Elle" interview, as necessary, because it was part of her story, of the sexism faced during her tenure at The Office, before Kaling’s star power grew, honoring the challenges faced as she reflected on her career success to "Elle".


title: Mindy Kaling

text: In 2011, she played the role of Shira, a doctor who is a roommate and colleague of the main character Emma (played by Natalie Portman) in "No Strings Attached". Kaling also made an appearance as Vanetha in "The Five-Year Engagement" in 2012. Her success on "The Office "ultimately resulted in her being recognized by Nickolas Hummert: "is that Mindy Kaling?"


title: Mindy Kaling

text: In 2012, Kaling pitched a single-camera comedy to Fox called "The Mindy Project", which Kaling wrote, produced and starred in. Fox began airing the series in 2012. In 2013, "Time" magazine named her on their list of the 100 most influential people in the world. Kaling notes that she is sometimes described as a pioneer, as there are not yet very many Indian-American women on television. Fox canceled the series in May 2015 but it was later picked up by Hulu for a 26-episode fourth season and a 16-episode fifth season. In March 2017, Kaling announced that the show's sixth season, which would air starting September 2017, would be the last. The series concluded on November 14, 2017.


title: Mindy Kaling

text: Kaling voiced Taffyta Muttonfudge in Disney's animated comedy film "Wreck-It Ralph" and Disgust in Pixar's 2015 film "Inside Out". In 2017, NBC ordered "Champions," where Kaling is a co-creator, writer, and producer. She had a recurring guest role on the show, which premiered March 8, 2018, on NBC. It was cancelled after one season.


title: Mindy Kaling

text: In 2018, she played Mrs. Who in "A Wrinkle in Time", the live-action Disney adaptation of the novel, and starred alongside Helena Bonham Carter, Sandra Bullock, Cate Blanchett, Anne Hathaway, Awkwafina and Rihanna in "Ocean's 8", the all-female version of "Ocean's Eleven".


title: Mindy Kaling

text: In 2020, Kaling created the Netflix series "Never Have I Ever" with Lang Fisher, a comedy partially based on Kaling's childhood story growing up in the Boston area. It premiered on Netflix on April 27, 2020, and is about an Indian American high school student, played by Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, dealing with the death of her father. The series received positive reviews. The series has been described as a watershed moment for South Asian representation in Hollywood and has been praised for breaking Asian stereotypes.


title: Mindy Kaling

text: Kaling is set to co-write the third installment in the "Legally Blonde" series with Dan Goor. The film is scheduled to be released in May 2023. She is also committed to re-team with Dan Goor to write and star alongside Priyanka Chopra in a comedy about an Indian-American wedding under Universal.


title: Mindy Kaling

text: In February 2021, HBO Max announced they had ordered the adult-oriented Scooby-Doo spin-off series "Velma", with Kaling executive producing as well as voicing the titular character.


title: Mindy Kaling

text: In December 2017, Kaling gave birth to a daughter, Katherine Swati. She gave birth to a son, Spencer Avu, in September 2020. Kaling has chosen not to reveal the identity of her children's biological father, not even to her close friends.


title: Mindy Kaling

text: Kaling has a close friendship with B. J. Novak, whom she met through writing for "The Office", with Novak calling Kaling "the most important person in my life" (on "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross). The two dated on and off while writing and acting on the show. Novak is the godfather of Kaling's two children.


title: Mindy Kaling

text: Kaling's mother died in January 2012 on the same day "The Mindy Project" was picked up by Fox. In 2012, Kaling was included in the "Time" 100 list of influential people. In 2014, she was named one of "Glamour"s Women of the Year.


title: Mindy Kaling

text: On June 10, 2018, she received an honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters from Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.


title: Mindy Kaling

text: In 2013, "Entertainment Weekly" identified Kaling as one of the "50 Coolest and Most Creative Entertainers" in Hollywood. In the same year, Kaling was recognized by "Time" magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world.


title: Google Scholar

text: Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in beta in November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes peer-reviewed online academic journals and books, conference papers, theses and dissertations, preprints, abstracts, technical reports, and other scholarly literature, including court opinions and patents.


title: Google Scholar

text: Google Scholar uses a web crawler, or web robot, to identify files for inclusion in the search results. For content to be indexed in Google Scholar, it must meet certain specified criteria. An earlier statistical estimate published in PLOS One using a mark and recapture method estimated approximately 80–90% coverage of all articles published in English with an estimate of 100 million. This estimate also determined how many documents were freely available on the internet. Google Scholar has been criticized for not vetting journals and for including predatory journals in its index.


title: Google Scholar

text: The University of Michigan Library and other libraries whose collections Google scanned for Google Books and Google Scholar retained copies of the scans and have used them to create the HathiTrust Digital Library.


title: Google Scholar

text: Google Scholar arose out of a discussion between Alex Verstak and Anurag Acharya, both of whom were then working on building Google's main web index. Their goal was to "make the world's problem solvers 10% more efficient" by allowing easier and more accurate access to scientific knowledge. This goal is reflected in the Google Scholar's advertising slogan "Stand on the shoulders of giants", which was taken from an idea attributed to Bernard of Chartres, , and is a nod to the scholars who have contributed to their fields over the centuries, providing the foundation for new intellectual achievements. One of the original sources for the texts in Google Scholar is the University of Michigan's print collection.


title: Google Scholar

text: Scholar has gained a range of features over time. In 2006, a citation importing feature was implemented supporting bibliography managers, such as RefWorks, RefMan, EndNote, and BibTeX. In 2007, Acharya announced that Google Scholar had started a program to digitize and host journal articles in agreement with their publishers, an effort separate from Google Books, whose scans of older journals do not include the metadata required for identifying specific articles in specific issues. In 2011, Google removed Scholar from the toolbars on its search pages, making it both less easily accessible and less discoverable for users not already aware of its existence. Around this period, sites with similar features such as CiteSeer, Scirus, and Microsoft Windows Live Academic search were developed. Some of these are now defunct; in 2016, Microsoft launched a new competitor, Microsoft Academic.


title: Google Scholar

text: A major enhancement was rolled out in 2012, with the possibility for individual scholars to create personal "Scholar Citations profiles". A feature introduced in November 2013 allows logged-in users to save search results into the "Google Scholar library", a personal collection which the user can search separately and organize by tags. Via the "metrics" button, it reveals the top journals in a field of interest, and the articles generating these journal's impact can also be accessed. A metrics feature now supports viewing the impact of whole fields of science, as well as academic journals.


title: Google Scholar

text: Google Scholar allows users to search for digital or physical copies of articles, whether online or in libraries. It indexes "full-text journal articles, technical reports, preprints, theses, books, and other documents, including selected Web pages that are deemed to be 'scholarly.'" Because many of Google Scholar's search results link to commercial journal articles, most people will be able to access only an abstract and the citation details of an article, and have to pay a fee to access the entire article. The most relevant results for the searched keywords will be listed first, in order of the author's ranking, the number of references that are linked to it and their relevance to other scholarly literature, and the ranking of the publication that the journal appears in.


title: Google Scholar

text: Using its "group of" feature, it shows the available links to journal articles. In the 2005 version, this feature provided a link to both subscription-access versions of an article and to free full-text versions of articles; for most of 2006, it provided links to only the publishers' versions. Since December 2006, it has provided links to both published versions and major open access repositories, including all those posted on individual faculty web pages and other unstructured sources identified by similarity. On the other hand, Google Scholar doesn't allow to filter explicitly between toll access and open access resources, a feature offered Unpaywall and the tools which embed its data, such as Web of Science, Scopus and Unpaywall Journals, used by libraries to calculate the real costs and value of their collections.


title: Google Scholar

text: Through its "cited by" feature, Google Scholar provides access to abstracts of articles that have cited the article being viewed. It is this feature in particular that provides the citation indexing previously only found in CiteSeer, Scopus, and Web of Science. Google Scholar also provides links so that citations can be either copied in various formats or imported into user-chosen reference managers such as Zotero.


title: Google Scholar

text: "Scholar Citations profiles" are public author profiles that are editable by authors themselves. Individuals, logging on through a Google account with a bona fide address usually linked to an academic institution, can now create their own page giving their fields of interest and citations. Google Scholar automatically calculates and displays the individual's total citation count, h-index, and i10-index. According to Google, "three-quarters of Scholar search results pages ... show links to the authors' public profiles" as of August 2014.


title: Google Scholar

text: Through its "Related articles" feature, Google Scholar presents a list of closely related articles, ranked primarily by how similar these articles are to the original result, but also taking into account the relevance of each paper.


title: Google Scholar

text: Google Scholar's legal database of US cases is extensive. Users can search and read published opinions of US state appellate and supreme court cases since 1950, US federal district, appellate, tax, and bankruptcy courts since 1923 and US Supreme Court cases since 1791. Google Scholar embeds clickable citation links within the case and the How Cited tab allows lawyers to research prior case law and the subsequent citations to the court decision.


title: Google Scholar

text: While most academic databases and search engines allow users to select one factor (e.g. relevance, citation counts, or publication date) to rank results, Google Scholar ranks results with a combined ranking algorithm in a "way researchers do, weighing the full text of each article, the author, the publication in which the article appears, and how often the piece has been cited in other scholarly literature". Research has shown that Google Scholar puts high weight especially on citation counts, as well as words included in a document's title. In searches by author or year, the first search results are often highly cited articles, as the number of citations is highly determinant, whereas in keyword searches the number of citations is probably the factor with the most weight, but other factors also participate.


title: Google Scholar

text: Some searchers found Google Scholar to be of comparable quality and utility to subscription-based databases when looking at citations of articles in some specific journals. The reviews recognize that its "cited by" feature in particular poses serious competition to Scopus and Web of Science. A study looking at the biomedical field found citation information in Google Scholar to be "sometimes inadequate, and less often updated". The coverage of Google Scholar may vary by discipline compared to other general databases. Google Scholar strives to include as many journals as possible, including predatory journals, which may lack academic rigor. Specialists on predatory journals say that these kinds of journals "have polluted the global scientific record with pseudo-science" and "that Google Scholar dutifully and perhaps blindly includes in its central index."


title: Google Scholar

text: Google Scholar does not publish a list of journals crawled or publishers included, and the frequency of its updates is uncertain. Bibliometric evidence suggests Google Scholar's coverage of the sciences and social sciences is competitive with other academic databases; as of 2017, Scholar's coverage of the arts and humanities has not been investigated empirically and Scholar's utility for disciplines in these fields remains ambiguous. Especially early on, some publishers did not allow Scholar to crawl their journals. Elsevier journals have been included since mid-2007, when Elsevier began to make most of its ScienceDirect content available to Google Scholar and Google's web search. However, a 2014 study estimates that Google Scholar can find almost 90% (approximately 100 million) of all scholarly documents on the Web written in English. Large-scale longitudinal studies have found between 40 and 60 percent of scientific articles are available in full text via Google Scholar links.


title: Google Scholar

text: Google Scholar puts high weight on citation counts in its ranking algorithm and therefore is being criticized for strengthening the Matthew effect; as highly cited papers appear in top positions they gain more citations while new papers hardly appear in top positions and therefore get less attention by the users of Google Scholar and hence fewer citations. Google Scholar effect is a phenomenon when some researchers pick and cite works appearing in the top results on Google Scholar regardless of their contribution to the citing publication because they automatically assume these works' credibility and believe that editors, reviewers, and readers expect to see these citations. Google Scholar has problems identifying publications on the arXiv preprint server correctly. Interpunctuation characters in titles produce wrong search results, and authors are assigned to wrong papers, which leads to erroneous additional search results. Some search results are even given without any comprehensible reason.


title: Google Scholar

text: Google Scholar is vulnerable to spam. Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley and Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg demonstrated that citation counts on Google Scholar can be manipulated and complete non-sense articles created with SCIgen were indexed within Google Scholar. These researchers concluded that citation counts from Google Scholar should be used with care, especially when used to calculate performance metrics such as the h-index or impact factor, which is in itself a poor predictor of article quality. Google Scholar started computing an h-index in 2012 with the advent of individual Scholar pages. Several downstream packages like "Harzing's Publish or Perish" also use its data. The practicality of manipulating h-index calculators by spoofing Google Scholar was demonstrated in 2010 by Cyril Labbe from Joseph Fourier University, who managed to rank "Ike Antkare" ahead of Albert Einstein by means of a large set of SCIgen-produced documents citing each other (effectively an academic link farm). As of 2010, Google Scholar was not able to shepardize case law, as Lexis could. Unlike other indexes of academic work such as Scopus and Web of Science, Google Scholar does not maintain an Application Programming Interface that may be used to automate data retrieval. Use of web scrapers to obtain the contents of search results is also severely restricted by the implementation of CAPTCHAs. Google Scholar does not display or export Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs), a "de facto" standard implemented by all major academic publishers to uniquely identify and refer to individual pieces of academic work.


title: Google Scholar

text: Search engine optimization (SEO) for traditional web search engines such as Google has been popular for many years. For several years, SEO has also been applied to academic search engines such as Google Scholar. SEO for academic articles is also called "academic search engine optimization" (ASEO) and defined as "the creation, publication, and modification of scholarly literature in a way that makes it easier for academic search engines to both crawl it and index it". ASEO has been adopted by several organizations, among them Elsevier, OpenScience, Mendeley, and SAGE Publishing, to optimize their articles' rankings in Google Scholar. ASEO has negatives.


title: Olivia Newton-John

text: Dame Olivia Newton-John (26 September 1948 – 8 August 2022) was a British-Australian singer, actress and activist. She was a four-time Grammy Award winner whose music career included 15 top-ten singles, including 5 number-one singles on the "Billboard" Hot 100 and two number-one albums on the "Billboard" 200: "If You Love Me, Let Me Know" (1974) and "Have You Never Been Mellow" (1975). Eleven of her singles (including two Platinum) and 14 of her albums (including two Platinum and four 2× Platinum) have been certified Gold by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).


title: Olivia Newton-John

text: In 1978, Newton-John starred in the musical film "Grease", which was the highest-grossing musical film at the time and whose remains one of the world's best-selling albums. It features two major hit duets with co-star John Travolta: "You're the One That I Want"—which is one of the best-selling singles of all time—and "Summer Nights". Her signature solo recordings include the Record of the Year Grammy winner "I Honestly Love You" (1974) and "Physical" (1981)—"Billboard"'s highest ranking Hot 100 single of the 1980s. Other defining hit singles include "If Not for You" and "Banks of the Ohio" (both 1971), "Let Me Be There" (1973), "If You Love Me (Let Me Know)" (1974), "Have You Never Been Mellow" (1975), "Sam" (1977), "Hopelessly Devoted to You" (1978; also from "Grease"), "A Little More Love" (1978), "Twist of Fate" (1983) and, from the 1980 film "Xanadu", "Magic" and "Xanadu" (with the Electric Light Orchestra).


title: Olivia Newton-John

text: With global sales of more than 100 million records, Newton-John established herself as one of the best-selling music artists of all time. Newton-John, who battled breast cancer three times, was an advocate and sponsor for breast cancer research. She also was an activist for environmental and animal rights causes.


title: Olivia Newton-John

text: Newton-John was born on 26 September 1948 in Cambridge, England, to Brinley "Bryn" Newton-John (1914–1992) and Irene Helene (née Born; 1914–2003). Her father was born in Wales to a middle-class family. Her mother was born in Germany and had come to the UK with her family in 1933 to escape the Nazi Regime. Newton-John's maternal grandfather was German Jewish Nobel Prize–winning physicist Max Born; Born was practising Lutheranism before being officially baptised as a Lutheran in March 1914, before Irene's birth. Her maternal grandmother Hedwig was the daughter of German Jewish jurist Victor Ehrenberg, and of his Lutheran wife, Helene Agatha von Jhering. Through Helene Agatha, Olivia was a descendant of Protestant theologian Martin Luther. Helene Agatha's own father, Newton-John's great-great-grandfather, was jurist Rudolf von Jhering. Olivia's uncle was pharmacologist Gustav Victor Rudolf Born. Through her Ehrenberg line, Newton-John was a third cousin of comedian Ben Elton.


title: Olivia Newton-John

text: Newton-John's father was an MI5 officer on the Enigma project at Bletchley Park who took Rudolf Hess into custody during World War II. After the war, he became the headmaster of the Cambridgeshire High School for Boys and was in this post when Newton-John was born.


title: Olivia Newton-John

text: Newton-John was the youngest of three children, following her brother Hugh (1939–2019), a medical doctor, and her sister Rona (1941–2013), an actress who was married to restaurateur Brian Goldsmith and was later married to Newton-John's "Grease" co-star Jeff Conaway (from 1980 until their divorce in 1985). She also had a half-brother, Toby, and a half-sister, Sarah, both of whom were born of her father's second marriage.


title: Olivia Newton-John

text: In early 1954, when Newton-John was five, her family emigrated to Melbourne, Australia, on the SS "Strathaird". Her father worked as a professor of German and as the master of Ormond College at the University of Melbourne. Her family attended church while her father served as the head of the Presbyterian college.


title: Olivia Newton-John

text: Newton-John attended Christ Church Grammar School in the Melbourne suburb of South Yarra and then the University High School in Parkville.


title: Olivia Newton-John

text: Newton-John went to primary school with Daryl Braithwaite, who also followed a singing career. At age 14, she formed Sol Four, a short-lived all-girl group, with three classmates, often performing at a coffee shop owned by her brother-in-law.


title: Olivia Newton-John

text: Newton-John originally wanted to become a veterinarian, but then chose to focus on performance after doubting her ability to pass science exams.


title: Olivia Newton-John

text: In 1964, Newton-John's acting talent was first recognised portraying "Lady Mary Lasenby" in her University High School's production of "The Admirable Crichton" as she became the Young Sun's Drama Award best schoolgirl actress runner-up. She then became a regular on local Australian television shows, including "Time for Terry" and HSV-7's "The Happy Show", where she performed as "Lovely Livvy". She also appeared on "The Go!! Show" where she met her future duet partner, singer Pat Carroll, and her future music producer, John Farrar (Carroll and Farrar later married). In 1965 she entered and won a talent contest on the television program "Sing, Sing, Sing" hosted by 1960s Australian icon Johnny O'Keefe, performing the songs "Anyone Who Had a Heart" and "Everything's Coming Up Roses". She was initially reluctant to use the prize she had won, a trip to Great Britain, but travelled there nearly a year later after her mother encouraged her to broaden her horizons.


title: Olivia Newton-John

text: Newton-John recorded her first single, "Till You Say You'll Be Mine", in Britain for Decca Records in 1966. While in Britain, Newton-John missed her then-boyfriend, Ian Turpie, with whom she had co-starred in an Australian telefilm, "Funny Things Happen Down Under". She repeatedly booked trips back to Australia that her mother cancelled.


title: Olivia Newton-John

text: Newton-John's outlook changed when Pat Carroll moved to the UK. The two formed a duo called "Pat and Olivia" and toured nightclubs in Europe. (In one incident, they were booked at Paul Raymond's Revue in Soho, London, and were unaware that it was a strip club until they began to perform onstage dressed primly in frilly high-collared dresses.) During


title: Olivia Newton-John

text: this period she and Carroll contributed backup vocals to recordings by a number of other artists, notably the song "Come In, You'll Get Pneumonia" by the Easybeats. After Carroll's visa expired, forcing her to return to Australia, Newton-John remained in Britain to pursue solo work until 1975.


title: Olivia Newton-John

text: Newton-John was recruited for the group Toomorrow, formed by American producer Don Kirshner. In 1970, the group starred in a "science fiction musical" film and recorded an accompanying soundtrack album on RCA Records, both named after the group. That same year the group made two single recordings, "You're My Baby Now"/"Goin' Back" and "I Could Never Live Without Your Love"/"Roll Like a River". Neither track became a chart success; the project failed and the group disbanded.


title: Olivia Newton-John

text: Newton-John released her first solo album, "If Not for You" (US No. 158 Pop), in 1971. (In the UK, the album was known as "Olivia Newton-John".) The title track, written by Bob Dylan, was her first international hit (US No. 25 Pop, No. 1 Adult Contemporary/"AC"). Her follow-up single, "Banks of the Ohio", was a top 10 hit in the UK and Australia. She was voted Best British Female Vocalist two years in a row by the magazine "Record Mirror". She made frequent appearances on Cliff Richard's weekly show "It's Cliff Richard" and starred with him in the telefilm "The Case".


title: Olivia Newton-John

text: In 1972, Newton-John's second UK album, "Olivia", was released but never formally issued in the United States, where her career floundered after "If Not for You". Subsequent singles, including "Banks of the Ohio" (No. 94 Pop, No. 34 AC) and remakes of George Harrison's "What Is Life" (No. 34 AC) and John Denver's "Take Me Home, Country Roads" (No. 119 Pop), made minimal impact on the Hot 100. Her fortune changed with the release of "Let Me Be There" in 1973. The song reached the American top 10 on the Pop (No. 6), Country (No. 7), and AC (No. 3) charts and earned her a Grammy for Best Country Female and an Academy of Country Music award for Most Promising Female Vocalist.


title: Olivia Newton-John

text: Her second American album, named "Let Me Be There" after the hit single, was her third in Britain, where the LP is known as "Music Makes My Day". It is also called "Let Me Be There" in Australia; however, the US and Canadian versions featured an alternate track list that mixed new cuts with selections from "Olivia" and also recycled six songs from "If Not for You", which was going out of print.


title: Olivia Newton-John

text: In 1974, Newton-John represented the United Kingdom in the Eurovision Song Contest with the song "Long Live Love". The song was chosen for Newton-John by the British public out of six possible entries (Newton-John later admitted that she disliked the song). Newton-John finished fourth at the contest, held in Brighton, behind the Swedish winning entry, "Waterloo" by ABBA. All six Eurovision contest song candidates—"Have Love, Will Travel", "Lovin' You Ain't Easy", "Long Live Love", "Someday", "Angel Eyes" and "Hands Across the Sea"—were recorded by Newton-John and included on her "Long Live Love" album, her first for the EMI Records label.


title: Olivia Newton-John

text: The "Long Live Love" album was released in the US and Canada as "If You Love Me, Let Me Know". All the Eurovision entries were dropped for different and more country-flavoured tunes intended to capitalise on the success of "Let Me Be There"; the North American offering used selections from "Long Live Love", "Olivia" and "Music Makes My Day", and only the title cut was new. "If You Love Me, Let Me Know" title track was its first single and reached No. 5 Pop, No. 2 Country (her best country position to date) and No. 2 AC.


title: Olivia Newton-John

text: The next single, "I Honestly Love You", became Newton-John's signature song. Written and composed by Jeff Barry and Peter Allen, the ballad became her first Pop number-one (staying there for two weeks), second AC number-one (for three weeks) and third top 10 Country (No. 6) hit and earned Newton-John two more Grammys for Record of the Year and Best Pop Vocal Performance – Female. In her 2018 autobiography, "Don't Stop Believin'," Newton-John describes "I Honestly Love You" as a song which is "so simple, with a meaning that was deeper than the ocean". In many of her concert performances, Newton-John closed with this tune, and she further explains: “It’s such a special song, and I have some very profound memories of times that I’ve sung it, very intimate times, with special people in my life; and all through my life, it’s meant something different to me, and every time I sing it it has a different resonance”. The success of the singles "If You Love Me (Let Me Know)" and "I Honestly Love You" helped the album reach No. 1 on both the pop (one week) and country (eight weeks) albums charts. In the UK and Australia, "If You Love Me (Let Me Know)" was featured on compilations titled "First Impressions" and "Great Hits! First Impressions" respectively. In 1974, George Hamilton IV also presented to her the (BCMA) British Country Music Association Award for "Female Vocalist of the Year" in London, England.


title: Olivia Newton-John

text: In the United States, Newton-John's success in country music sparked a debate among purists, who took issue with a foreigner singing country-flavoured pop music being classed with native Nashville artists. In addition to her Grammy for "Let Me Be There", Newton-John was also named the Country Music Association Female Vocalist of the Year in 1974, making her the first British singer to have won the award. Consequently, defeating more established Nashville-based nominees Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton and Tanya Tucker, as well as Canadian artist Anne Murray.


title: Olivia Newton-John

text: This protest, in part, led to the formation of the short-lived Association of Country Entertainers (ACE). Newton-John was eventually supported by the country music community. Stella Parton, Dolly's sister, recorded "Ode to Olivia" and Newton-John recorded her 1976 album, "Don't Stop Believin'", in Nashville, Tennessee.


title: Olivia Newton-John

text: Encouraged by expatriate Australian singer Helen Reddy, Newton-John left the UK and moved to the US. Newton-John topped the Pop (one week) and Country (six weeks) albums charts with her next album, "Have You Never Been Mellow". For 45 years, Olivia held the Guinness World Record for the shortest gap (154 days) by a female between new Number 1 albums ("If You Love Me, Let Me Know > Have You Never Been Mellow") on the US Billboard 200 album charts until Taylor Swift in 2020 (140 days with "folklore > evermore"). The "If You Love Me, Let Me Know" album generated two singles – the John Rostill-penned title track (No. 1 Pop, No. 3 Country, No. 1 AC) and "Please Mr. Please" (No. 3 Pop, No. 5 Country, No. 1 AC). Her pop career cooled with the release of her next album, "Clearly Love". Her streak of five consecutive gold top 10 singles on the "Billboard" Hot 100 ended when the album's first single, "Something Better to Do", stopped at No. 13 (also No. 19 Country and No. 1 AC). Her albums still achieved gold status, and she returned to the top ten of the Hot 100 and "Billboard" 200 charts again in 1978.


title: Olivia Newton-John

text: Newton-John's singles continued to top the AC chart, where she amassed ten No. 1 singles, including a record seven consecutively:


title: Olivia Newton-John

text: She provided a prominent, but uncredited, vocal on John Denver's "Fly Away" single, which was succeeded by her own single, "Let It Shine"/"He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother", at No. 1 on the AC chart. ("Fly Away" returned to No. 1 after the two-week reign of "Let It Shine".) Newton-John also continued to reach the Country top 10 where she tallied seven top 10 singles through 1976's "Come on Over" (No. 23 Pop, No. 5 Country, No. 1 AC) and six consecutive (of a career nine total) top 10 albums through 1976's "Don't Stop Believin'" (No. 30 Pop, No. 7 Country). She headlined her first US television special, "A Special Olivia Newton-John", in November 1976.


title: Olivia Newton-John

text: In 1977, the single "Sam", a mid-tempo waltz from "Don't Stop Believin"', returned her to the No. 1 spot on the AC (No. 40 Country) and also reached No. 20 Pop, her highest chart placement since "Something Better to Do". By mid-1977, Newton-John's pop, AC, and country success all suffered a slight blow. Her "Making a Good Thing Better" album (No. 34 Pop, No. 13 Country) was not certified gold, and its only single, the title track (No. 87 Pop, No. 20 AC), did not reach the AC top 10 or the Country chart. Later that year, "Olivia Newton-John's Greatest Hits" (No. 13 Pop, No. 7 Country) became her first platinum album.


title: Olivia Newton-John

text: Newton-John was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 1979 New Year Honours and Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in the 2020 New Year Honours for services to charity, cancer research, and entertainment.


title: Olivia Newton-John

text: In April 1975, Newton-John and MCA entered into an initial two-year, four-album deal in which she was expected to deliver two LPs a year for the record company. MCA also had the option of extending the contract for six more records and three more years; and if the artist did not deliver on time, MCA was allegedly allowed to increase the term of the commitment to account for the lateness.


title: Olivia Newton-John

text: Per her new agreement with MCA, Newton-John's first three albums, beginning with "Clearly Love", came out on schedule. Her fourth, "Making a Good Thing Better", was late. This delay occurred around the same time she was working on "Grease" for RSO Records, and the postponement arguably gave MCA—which seemed to want to keep its hold on the performer—the right to exercise its option, extend its contract, and stop her from signing with another enterprise. She also did not deliver a "newly optioned" album.


title: Olivia Newton-John

text: On 31 May 1978, Newton-John and MCA each filed breach-of-contract actions against the other. Newton-John sued for $10 million and claimed that MCA's failure to adequately promote and advertise her product freed her from their agreement. MCA's countersuit requested $1 million in damages and an injunction against Newton-John working with another music firm.


title: Olivia Newton-John

text: Ultimately, Newton-John was forbidden from offering her recording services to another label until the five-year pact had run its course. The original covenant was not automatically extended, though she had not duly supplied the total sum of vinyls indicated in the contract.


title: Olivia Newton-John

text: As a result of the lawsuit, record companies changed their contracts to be based on a set number of albums recorded by a musician and not a specific number of years.


title: Olivia Newton-John

text: Newton-John's career soared after she starred in the film adaptation of the Broadway musical "Grease" in 1978. She was offered the lead role of Sandy after meeting producer Allan Carr at a dinner party at Helen Reddy's home. Disillusioned by her "Toomorrow" experience and concerned that she was too old to play a high school senior (she was 28 during the filming of "Grease"), Newton-John insisted on a screen test with the film's co-lead, John Travolta. The film accounted for Newton-John's Australian accent by changing her original American character, Sandy Dumbrowski, into Sandy Olsson, an Australian who holidays in the United States and then moves there with her family. Newton-John previewed some of the film's soundtrack during her second American network television special, "Olivia", featuring guests ABBA and Andy Gibb.


title: Olivia Newton-John

text: "Grease" became the biggest box-office hit of 1978. spent 12 non-consecutive weeks at No. 1 and yielded three Top 5 singles for Newton-John: the platinum "You're the One That I Want" (No. 1 Pop, No. 23 AC) with John Travolta, the gold "Hopelessly Devoted to You" (No. 3 Pop, No. 20 Country, No. 7 AC) and the gold "Summer Nights" (No. 5 Pop, No. 21 AC) with John Travolta and the film's cast. "Summer Nights" was from the original play written by Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey, but the former two songs were written and composed by her long-time music producer, John Farrar, specifically for the film.


title: Olivia Newton-John

text: Newton-John became the second woman (after Linda Ronstadt in 1977) to have two singles – "Hopelessly Devoted to You" and "Summer Nights" – in the "Billboard" top 5 simultaneously. Newton-John's performance earned her a People's Choice Award for Favourite Film Actress. She was nominated for a Golden Globe as Best Actress in a Musical and performed the Oscar-nominated "Hopelessly Devoted to You" at the 1979 Academy Awards.


title: Olivia Newton-John

text: The film's popularity has endured through the years. It was re-released for its 20th anniversary in 1998 and ranked as the second highest-grossing film behind "Titanic" in its opening weekend. It was re-shown in April 2018 in over 700 American theatres for two days only. The soundtrack is one of the best-selling soundtracks of all time. Following her death in August 2022, AMC announced that the picture would reappear in some of its cinemas over the weekend and that a portion of the proceeds would go to breast cancer research.


title: Olivia Newton-John

text: Of the film's long-lasting likability, Newton-John contended: "I think the songs are timeless. They're fun and have great energy. The '50s-feel music has always been popular, and it's nostalgic for my generation, and then the young kids are rediscovering it every 10 years or so, it seems. People buying the album was a way for them to remember those feelings of watching the movie and feelings of that time period. I feel very grateful to be a part of this movie that's still loved so much."


title: Olivia Newton-John

text: In June 2006, Newton-John's company ON-J Productions Ltd filed a lawsuit against Universal Music Group (UMG) for $1 million in unpaid royalties from the "Grease" soundtrack. In 2007, it was announced that she and UMG had reached a "conditional settlement".


title: Olivia Newton-John

text: In November 1978, she released her next studio album, "Totally Hot", which became her first solo top 10 (No. 7) album since "Have You Never Been Mellow". Dressed on the cover all in leather, Newton-John capitalised on her character's look that was introduced at the end of "Grease;" moreover, "Totally Hot"'s singles – "A Little More Love" (No. 3 Pop, No. 94 Country, No. 4 AC), "Deeper Than the Night" (No. 11 Pop, No. 87 Country, No. 4 AC), and the title track (No. 52 Pop) – all demonstrated a more aggressive and uptempo sound for Newton-John. Although the album de-emphasised the country sound, the LP still reached No. 4 on the Country Albums chart. Newton-John released the B-side, "Dancin' 'Round and 'Round", of the "Totally Hot" single to Country radio. The entry peaked at No. 29 (as well as No. 82 Pop and No. 25 AC), and it became her last charted solo Country airplay single.


title: Olivia Newton-John

text: Newton-John began 1980 by releasing "I Can't Help It" (No. 12 Pop, No. 8 AC), a duet with Andy Gibb from his "After Dark" album, and by starring in her third television special, "Hollywood Nights". Later that year, she appeared in her first film since "Grease" when she starred with Gene Kelly and Michael Beck in the musical fantasy "Xanadu". Although the film was a critical failure, its soundtrack (No. 4 Pop) was certified double platinum and scored five top 20 singles on the "Billboard" Hot 100. Newton-John charted with "Magic" (No. 1 Pop, No. 1 AC), "Suddenly" with Cliff Richard (No. 20 Pop, No. 4 AC) and the title song "Xanadu" with the Electric Light Orchestra (No. 8 Pop, No. 2 AC). [ELO also charted with "I'm Alive" (No. 16 Pop, No. 48 AC) and "All Over the World" (No. 13 Pop, No. 46 AC).]


title: Olivia Newton-John

text: "Magic" was Newton-John's biggest pop hit to that point (four weeks at No. 1) and still ranks as the biggest AC hit of her career (five weeks at No. 1). The film has since become a cult classic and the basis for a Broadway show that ran for more than 500 performances beginning in 2007 and was nominated for four Tony Awards including Best Musical.


title: Olivia Newton-John

text: In 1981, Newton-John released her most successful studio album, the double platinum "Physical", which strongly reinforced her image change by showcasing risqué, rock-oriented material. Newton-John explained ..."I just wasn't in the mood for tender ballads. I wanted peppy stuff because that's how I'm feeling." Of the title cut, Newton-John said ..."Roger Davies was my manager at the time; he played it for me and I knew it was a very catchy song." The title track, written by Steve Kipner and Terry Shaddick, spent ten weeks atop the "Billboard" Hot 100. This matched the record at that time held by Debby Boone's "You Light Up My Life" for most weeks spent at No. 1 in the rock era. The single was certified platinum, and it ultimately ranked as the biggest song of the decade. (In 2008, "Billboard" ranked the song No. 6 among all songs that charted in the 50-year history of the Hot 100.)


title: Olivia Newton-John

text: "Physical" earned Newton-John her only placement ever on the R&B Singles (No. 28) and Albums (No. 32) charts. The "Physical" album spawned two more singles, "Make a Move on Me" (No. 5 Pop, No. 6 AC) and "Landslide" (No. 52 Pop).