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Tuesday, February 27, 2001

New Questions Arise on Fate of Gestapo Chief

By HENRY WEINSTEIN,
Times Staff Writer

For more than 50 years, Nazi hunters and historians have tried in vain to discover what happened to Gestapo chieftain Heinrich Müller, who vanished in 1945 at the end of World War II. Of all the major Nazis, Müller, who was Adolf Eichmann's immediate superior, is the most important still unaccounted for, according to numerous Holocaust experts.

Now, efforts to solve the mystery are resurfacing, including attempts to answer the most provocative question of all: Was Müller briefly in U.S. custody after the war? If so, did he escape, or was he freed to become a CIA spy?

Müller is officially registered as dead in Berlin. But his grave turned out to contain two unknown soldiers when it was opened more than 30 years ago. His children subsequently removed the headstone from the burial plot.

U.S. Army Intelligence records indicate that Müller -- who was nicknamed "Gestapo Müller" to distinguish him from the hundreds of other Müllers in the Nazi hierarchy -- was captured by Americans in 1945, says historian George Chalou, who worked at the National Archives for 28 years.

But what happened after that "is the $64 question," he said.

According to sometimes contradictory intelligence documents and media reports, over the years Müller was "sighted" in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Switzerland, Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Cairo, Damascus, Moscow, Washington, D.C., and Portsmouth, N.H.

In about a month, the National Archives plans to release a 500-page Central Intelligence Agency file on Müller, which may shed further light on his postwar activities, according to Greg Bradsher, a historian at the archives. So far, the bulk of publicly available material on Müller comes from U.S. Army Intelligence files and material gathered by historians.

Müller "has been the subject of interest for decades, including to this day by my office," said Eli M. Rosenbaum, head of the Office of Special Investigations, the Justice Department's Nazi war criminal unit, who believes it is possible that Müller became a Soviet intelligence agent at the end of World War II and scoffs at the idea that he ever played a similar role for the United States.

The reason for Rosenbaum's interest is clear. Müller rounded up thousands of Jews from the Netherlands, Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia to be deported to Auschwitz for extermination. In addition, one recently released U.S. government document states that Müller ordered the execution of prisoners at Buchenwald, a death camp near Weimar, Germany.

"We've never given up" the hope of finding Müller, "though it is now more a historical question than a law enforcement question," Rosenbaum said. Müller, who was born in 1900, is presumed to be dead.

Last week, a German television network aired a program -- based in part on documents from the U.S. National Archives in Maryland -- claiming that Müller was captured by the U.S. Army, but released for unknown reasons. The program speculated that Müller may have been employed by a U.S. intelligence agency, but offered no substantiation for that assertion.

This weekend, Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, said if there is any possibility that Müller played such a role "the U.S. government should launch a formal inquiry. There is an obligation to those who suffered under the Gestapo."

However, Rosenbaum, who reviewed the same records, said "the conclusion that 'Gestapo' Müller was apprehended by American authorities and used by American intelligence is supported by no credible evidence." Efraim Zuroff, who runs the Wiesenthal Center's office in Israel, said he thought it highly unlikely that the United States would have used Müller after the war.

"It would be surprising if the Americans tried to use someone of Müller's stature. . . . He was an incredibly important player in the implementation of the 'final solution' " -- Hitler's program to exterminate the Jewish people, Zuroff said.

The veteran Nazi hunter said he thought it probable that Müller, who was reportedly in Hitler's secret bunker the day before the Führer killed himself on April 29, 1945, was killed at the end of the war. But he quickly added, "I have no proof." What happened to Müller remains "the big question mark in terms of the perpetrators of the Holocaust," Zuroff said from Jerusalem. Müller was born in Munich, attended elem...

He became a fighter pilot and was awarded several medals. After the war, he joined the Munich police force. In the late 1920s, he became the Munich police's expert in the battle against "leftist movements," according to the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. Müller became a key aide to Reinhard Heydrich, the Bavarian police chief. His reports on Communists brought him to the attention of Heinrich Himmler, who eventually became the second- highest official in Nazi Germany.

During the 1930s, Müller won a rapid series of promotions in the SS, the German secret police that served as the Nazi regime's principal tool of terror, and his power continued to grow. He was one of 15 people who participated in the January 1942 Wannsee conference, where the "final solution" was planned.

Within a few months, the first gas chamber camps were set up in Poland, according to professor Louis L. Snyder's Encyclopedia of the Third Reich. Müller also played a key role in investigating a plot by a group of German army officers to kill Hitler in 1944 and remained loyal to Hitler until the end, according to Holocaust historians. Whether Müller lived past April 29, 1945, has been the subject of intense speculation for years.

There have been unconfirmed reports that he served as an "enforcer" for former Nazis living in South America and that he was kidnapped from Argentina in 1956 by Czech agents. When famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal issued a list of the 10 most wanted former Nazis in 1987, Müller was on it.

In December 1999, the National Archives issued a one-paragraph news release stating that it was opening 135 pages of files on Müller, primarily covering the period from 1945 to 1963, but also including some earlier Nazi government documents.

The files contain tantalizing material, including many items that contradict one another. Despite the fact that the files were opened more than 50 years after the end of World War II, numerous portions have been redacted.

In February 1999, eight months before the Army records were made public by the National Archives, Army officials sent Rabbi Hier a letter saying some of his requests for information on Müller were being denied on grounds of "national security," including the possibility that more complete disclosure could compromise intelligence-gathering methods.

Among the materials the National Archives made public are the following:

• A December 1945 interview with a former Nazi stating that Müller escaped from Berlin through a secret underground passage that only he and Eichmann knew about.
• A July 1946 Army Counter-Intelligence Corps document saying "reports from the Russian zone of Berlin seem to indicate" that Müller shot and killed his wife and three children and then himself, two days before Hitler died.
• Index cards stating that Müller was in custody first in the town of Ilmenau and then in December 1945 in a "civilian internment" camp in Altenstadt in Upper Bavaria. The card does not state what happened to Müller at Altenstadt. It ends with the cryptic and provocative sentence, "case closed 29 Jan 46." It is unclear who placed the information on the card, which states that a Müller dossier was to be sent to Frankfurt.
• Another U.S. Army document dated July 11, 1946, states that British officials requested an investigation of Müller in the Wurzburg area, saying that it was believed he was dead. But the document ends with: "results negative."
• A 1951 document, saying an informant had said Müller was in Czechoslovakia where he "is supposedly directing intelligence activities for the Soviets against the U.S. zone of Germany."
• An August 1960 document saying Müller was believed to be corresponding with relatives.
• Numerous other documents from the 1950s and early 1960s indicating the belief that Müller was alive and that U.S. officials were interested in finding him.

There are no new reports after 1963. Hier said he hopes that the soon- to-be-released CIA files will shed new light on Müller. Rosenbaum, who has spent nearly two decades in the Justice Department's Nazi war crimes unit, said he has reviewed those files and they provide no definitive answer. "If ever a Nazi just disappeared into the mist, it was Müller," Rosenbaum said. "It's one of the great unsolved mysteries of World War II. The answer may be in Soviet files," he said.

Related items on this website:

•  Dec 16, 1999: U.S. Doubted Gestapo Chief Died
•  Feb 26, 2001: Group Demands Gestapo Files Released
•  Nov 1, 2013: Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller "buried in Jewish mass grave"

Website Real History service:

1. These "Fort Meade" documents on Müller, Eichmann, Himmler and others have been available to researchers in the US National Archives for over ten years; the Wiesenthal researchers need to buck up. We can't think WHY they have just resuscitated the Müller affair.
2. Perhaps AP should have mentioned that Müller was born on April 28, 1900 (i.e., he would be nearly 100 years old now); Rabbi Hier's admission that he may be dead now seems remarkably generous. He is believed to have died on May 17, 1945.