Lost letters, photographs and diaries by Heinrich Himmler have been discovered in Israel, shedding new light on one of the men most directly responsible for the Holocaust.

The stash of documents from the Nazi era is currently held in a bank vault in Tel Aviv, but has been authenticated by the German federal archive, considered the world's leading authority on material from the period. Its contents are to be published over eight days in the newspaper Welt am Sonntag, starting on Sunday with Himmler's letters to his wife Margarete.

The letters portray a man whose cheerful mood is often at odds with the historical crime he helped to orchestrate. "I am travelling to Auschwitz. Kisses, your Heini," he wrote to his wife before setting off to inspect the concentration camp where he directed the killing of some 1.5 million people, mostly Jews.

Himmler and his wife shared antisemitic feelings, as well as a joint dislike of Weimar-era Berlin. "Poor sweetie, has to tussle with those wretched Jews over money," the SS leader wrote to his spouse on 16 April 1928.

In November 1938, after the Reichskristallnacht pogroms that her husband had directed, Margarete Himmler wrote in her diary: "All this Jew business, when will this pack leave us so that we can enjoy our lives?"

"I hate and will always hate the Berlin system, which will never latch on to you, you virtuous and pure woman," Himmler wrote in December 1927. "Berlin is contaminated. Everyone only speaks of money," "Marga" wrote a year later.

Himmler, who killed himself in British custody in Lüneberg on 23 May 1945, styled himself as a Landsknecht or servant to his country, "toughened up through 10 years of battle" in a letter of 2 January 1928. Margarete describes her husband as "an evil man with a tough and rough heart", but also writes: "I am so lucky to have such an evil good man, who loves his evil wife as much as she loves him."

Heinrich and Margarete Himmler had a daughter, Gudrun, in 1929. From late 1938, Himmler had an affair with his long-term secretary Hedwig Potthast, with whom he had two children.

The newly discovered collection of documents is thought to have been found by US army officers in May 1945 in one of the Himmler family homes in Gmund, near the Tegernsee lake in the Bavarian Alps.

Some of the documents seized by soldiers were confiscated soon after by the US intelligence service, which was collecting material to be used in the Nuremberg trials. But the cache of letters, photos and diaries is likely to have stayed in private hands.

The archive resurfaced in Israel in the early 1980s but failed to gain public attention, partly thanks to the controversy around the forged "Hitler diaries" published by the news magazine Stern and the Sunday Times in 1983.

They were then sold to the father of the Israeli film-maker Vanessa Lapa, whose documentary about Himmler, Der Anständige (The Decent One), will premiere at the Berlin film festival next month.

Welt am Sonntag claims that the Himmler letters tally with those passed into public hands in 1945 and have been authenticated by a number of experts. "There is no reason to doubt the authenticity of the documents in Tel Aviv," the former federal archivist Josef Henke told the newspaper.