Monday, February 26, 2001

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.

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Related documents on this website:

 

New Questions Arise on Fate of Gestapo Chief

 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 101 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.