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Real History and the search for Gestapo’s Heinrich Müller The Group Demands Gestapo Files Released By Robert Jablon Associated Press Writer LOSANGELES (AP) — Congress on Monday was urged to demand the release of U.S. intelligence files on Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller to determine if he was ever in U.S. custody.
“I would like to know if the United States had him and let him go,” said Rabbi Marvin Hier , dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights group . Hier said about 500 pages of CIA files on Müller are to be released in the next few weeks.
But he said the center will ask Congress to press for the declassification of files from all security agencies, including the FBI and military. “The victims of the Holocaust deserve to know the truth,” Hier said. “If you have the documents, make them all public.” Müller was one of the most feared Nazis of the Third Reich.
He was at the 1942 [Wannsee] conference where the “final solution” of exterminating Jews was planned and the Gestapo was responsible for carrying out some of the worst atrocities of the Nazi regime. Müller disappeared after World War II and his fate is shrouded in mystery. There have been reports that he was a spy forthe Soviet Union’s client states, that he turned up in Brazil and that he killed himself at the end of the war. In 1999, 128 pages of U.S.
Army counterintelligence documents on Müller were made public. They included an index card from 1961 noting that a man with Müller’s birth date and war record had been held in 1945 in Altenstadt, a U.S. camp for German civilians located in Bavaria. Another intelligence report, from 1960, concluded: “It is more likely that at the end of the war, Müller fled and now lives either inside or outside Germany under a false name.”
Eli Rosenbaum , director of the Justice Department’s Nazi-hunting Office of SpecialInvestigations, said U.S. intelligence files simply show that attempts to trace Müller were unsuccessful. “I wouldguess that he died in the last days of the war,” he said. Efraim Zuroff , the Wiesenthal Center’s coordinator of Nazi war crimes research, agrees “there’s no proof” that Müller was in U.S. custody. “There’s no question that some really big fish got away.
But in this case, it’s a shark,” he said in a telephone call from Efrat, Israel. . ©