Heinrich Mller (Gestapo)

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Heinrich Mller is at the extreme right in this 1939 photograph, apparently taken for
propaganda purposes. Shown from left to right are a minor SS functionary (Huber), Arthur
Nebe, and then three of the people most responsible for the Holocaust: Heinrich Himmler,
Reinhardt Heydrich and Mller himself. According to the apparently 1939 archival caption,
these men are planning the investigation of the bomb assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler on
8 November 1939 in Munich.

Heinrich Mller (born April 28, 1900, date of death unknown but existing evidence points to
May 1-May 2, 1945), aka "Gestapo Mller", was head of the Gestapo, the political police of
Nazi Germany, and played a leading role in the planning and execution of the Holocaust. He
was last seen in the Fhrerbunker in Berlin on May 1, 1945 and remains one of the few senior
figures of the Nazi regime who was never captured or confirmed to have died.

Contents
[hide]
1 Early career
2 Gestapo chief
3 Disappearance
4 Fictional portrayal
5 Footnotes
6 References

7 See also

[edit] Early career

Mller was born in Munich in Bavaria, the son of working-class Catholic parents. After
service in the last year of World War I as a pilot for an artillery spotting unit, during which he
was decorated several times for bravery (Iron Cross 2nd class), he joined the Bavarian police
in 1919, and-although not a member of the Freikorps- he was involved in the suppression of
the communist risings in the early postwar years. After witnessing the shooting of hostages by
the revolutionary "Red Army" in Munich during the Bavarian Soviet Republic, he acquired a
lifelong hatred of communism. [1] During the years of the Weimar Republic he ran the political
department of the Munich police, and became acquainted with many members of the Nazi
Party including Heinrich Himmler, and Reinhard Heydrich, although Mller himself in the
Weimar period was generally seen as a supporter of the Bavarian People's Party (which at that
time ruled Bavaria). On March 9, 1933, during the Nazi putsch that deposed the Bavarian
government of Minister-President Heinrich Held, Mller had advocated to his superiors using
force against the Nazis[2]. Ironically, these views aided Mller's rise as it guaranteed the
hostility of the Nazis, thereby making Mller very dependent upon the patronage of Reinhard
Heydrich, who in turn appreciated Mller's professionism and skill as a policeman, plus
Mller's past which meant that Mller needed Heydrich's protection[2].

The historian Richard J. Evans wrote: "Mller was a stickler for duty and discipline, and
approached the tasks he was set as if they were military commands. A true workaholic who
never took a holiday, Mller was determined to serve the German state, irrespective of what
political form it took, and believed that it was everyone's duty, including his own, to obey its
dictates without question."[1] Evans also records that Mller was a servant of the regime out of
ambition, not devotion to Hitler:

An internal [Nazi] Party memorandum ... could not understand how "so odious an opponent
of the movement" could become head of the Gestapo, especially since he had once referred to
Hitler as "an immigrant unemployed house painter" and "an Austrian draft-dodger."

On January 4, 1937, a evaluation by the Nazi Party's Deputy Gauleiter of Munich-Upper

Bavaria stated:

Criminal Police Chief Inspector Heinrich Mller is not a Party member. He has also never
actively worked within the Party or in one of its ancillary organizations. He was presented
with an SS Obersturmbannfhrer's uniform in honour of his employment in the State Secret
Police; at the same time, he was permitted to wear the stripe (the sign of membership prior to
the National Uprising). Before the seizure of power Mller was employed in the political
department of the Police Headquarters. He did his duty both under the direction of the
notorious Police President Koch [Julius Koch, the Munich Police President 1929-'33], and
under Nortz and Mantel. His sphere of activity was to supervise and deal with the left-wing
movement. It must be admitted that he fought against it very hard, sometimes in fact ignoring
legal provisions and regulations in the process. But it is equally clear that, if it had been his
task to do so, Mller would have acted against the Right in just the same way. With his
enormous ambition and his marked 'pushiness' he would win the approval of his superiors
under the System [the Nazi name for the Weimar Republic] doing that too. In terms of his
political opinions he belonged to the Nationalist camp and his standpoint varied between the
German National People's Party and the Bavarian People's Party. But he was by no means a
National Socialist. As far as his qualities of character are concerned, these are regarded in an
even poorer light than his political ones. He is ruthless, uses his elbows, and continually tries
to demonstrate his efficiency, but claims all the glory for himself. In his choice of officials for
the Bavarian Political Police he was very concerned to propose either officials who were more
junior than himself or only those who were inferior in ability to himself. In this way he could
keep rivals at bay. In his choice of officials he did not take account of political considerations,
he only had his own egoistical aims in mind.... The Gau leadership of Munich-Upper Bavaria
cannot, therefore, recommend accelerated promotion for Mller because he has rendered no
services to the National Uprising"[2].

Himmler's biographer Peter Padfield wrote: "He [Mller] was an archetypal middle-rank
official: of limited imagination, non-political, non-ideological, his only fanaticism lay in an
inner drive to perfection in his profession and in his duty to the state--which in his mind were
one... A smallish man with piercing eyes and thin lips, he was an able organizer, utterly
ruthless, a man who lived for his work."[3]
Mller did become a member of the Nazi Party in 1939.[4]

[edit] Gestapo chief

After the Nazis came to power in 1933, Reinhard Heydrich as head of the Security Service
(SD) recruited Mller and his staff into his organisation. He joined the SS in 1934. By 1936,
with Heydrich head of the Gestapo, Mller was it's chief of operations. Muller continued to
rise quickly through the ranks of the SS: by 1939 he was a Gruppenfhrer (lieutenant
general). In September 1939, when the Gestapo and other police organizations were
consolidated under Heydrich into the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA), Mller was chief
of the RSHA "Office 4": the Gestapo. To distinguish him from several other officials called
Heinrich Mller (a very common German name), he became known as "Gestapo Mller."

As Gestapo chief of operations and later (after 1939) it's chief, Mller played a leading role in
the detection and suppression of all forms of resistance to the Nazi regime. Under his
leadership, the Gestapo succeeded in infiltrating and to a large extent destroying the
underground networks of the Communist Party and the Social Democratic Party by the end of
1935. He was also involved in the regime's policy towards the Jews, although Heinrich
Himmler and Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels drove this area of policy. Adolf
Eichmann, who headed the Gestapo's Office of Resettlement and then its Office of Jewish
Affairs, was Mller's subordinate. Reinhard Heydrich was Mller's direct superior until his
assassination in 1942. For the remainder of the war, Ernst Kaltenbrunner took over as Mller's
superior.

During World War II, Mller was heavily involved in espionage and counter-espionage,
particularly since the Nazi regime increasingly distrusted the military intelligence service - the
Abwehr - which under Admiral Wilhelm Canaris was indeed a hotbed of activity for the
German Resistance. In 1942 he successfully infiltrated the "Red Orchestra" network of Soviet
spies and used it to feed false information to the Soviet intelligence services.

Mller occupied a position in the Nazi hierarchy between Himmler, the overall head of the
Nazi police apparatus and the chief architect of the plan to exterminate the Jews of Europe,
and Eichmann, the man entrusted with arranging the deportations of Jews to the eastern
ghettoes and death camps. Thus, although his chief responsibility was always police work
within Germany, he must have been aware of both the plan of its general outlines and many of
its details. During 1941 he dispatched Eichmann on tours of inspection of the occupied Soviet
Union, and received detailed reports on the work of the Einsatzgruppen, who killed an
estimated 1.4 million Jews in 12 months. In January 1942 he attended the Wannsee
Conference at which Heydrich briefed senior officials from a number of government
departments of the plan, and at which Eichmann took the minutes.

In May 1942 Heydrich was assassinated in Prague by Czech agents sent from London. Mller
was sent to Prague to head the investigation into "Operation Anthropoid". He succeeded
through a combination of bribery and torture in locating the assassins, who killed themselves
to avoid capture. Despite this success, his influence within the regime declined somewhat
with the loss of his original patron, Heydrich. During 1943 he had differences with Himmler
over what to do with the growing evidence of a resistance network within the German state
apparatus, particularly the Abwehr and the Foreign Office. In February 1943 he presented
Himmler with firm evidence that Canaris was involved with the resistance; however, Himmler
told him to drop the case.[5] Offended by this, Mller became an ally of Martin Bormann, the
head of the Nazi Party Chancellery, who was Himmler's main rival.[6]

After the assassination attempt against Adolf Hitler on 20 July 1944, Mller was placed in
charge of the arrest and interrogation of all those suspected of involvement in the resistance.
Over 5,000 people were arrested and about 200 executed, including Canaris. In the last
months of the war Mller remained at his post, apparently still confident of a German victory
- he told one of his officers in December 1944 that the Ardennes offensive would result in the
recapture of Paris.[7] In April 1945 he was among the last group of Nazi loyalists assembled in
the Fhrerbunker in central Berlin as the Red Army fought its way into the city. One of his
last tasks was the sharp interrogation of Hermann Fegelein in the cellar of the Church of the
Trinity. Fegelein was Himmler's liaison officer to Hitler, who was shot after Hitler had
Himmler expelled from his posts for negotiating with the western allies behind Hitler's back.

[edit] Disappearance
Mller was last seen in the bunker on the evening of May 1, 1945, the day after Hitler's
suicide.[7] Hans Baur, Hitler's pilot, later quoted Mller as saying, "We know the Russian
methods exactly. I haven't the faintest intention of being taken prisoner by the Russians."
From that day onwards, no trace of him has ever been found. He is the most senior member of
the Nazi regime about whose fate nothing is known. Possible explanations for his
disappearance include:

That he was killed, or killed himself, during the chaos of the fall of Berlin, and that his
body was never found.
That he escaped from Berlin and made his way to a safe location, possibly in South
America, where he lived the rest of his life undetected, and that his identity was not
disclosed even after his death.
That he was recruited and given a new identity by either the United States or the
Soviet Union, and employed by them during the Cold War, and that this has never
been disclosed.

The Central Intelligence Agency's file on Mller was released under the Freedom of
Information Act in 2001, and documents several unsuccessful attempts by U.S. agencies to
find Mller. The U.S. National Archives commentary on the file concludes: "Though
inconclusive on Mller's ultimate fate, the file is very clear on one point. The Central
Intelligence Agency and its predecessors did not know Mller's whereabouts at any point after
the war. In other words, the CIA was never in contact with Mller."[7]

The CIA file shows that an extensive search was made for Mller, among many other wanted
Nazi officials, in the months after the German surrender. The search was led by the
counterespionage branch of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (forerunner of the CIA). The
search was complicated by the fact that "Heinrich Mller" is a very common German name.
The National Archives comment: "By the end of 1945, American and British occupation
forces had gathered information on numerous Heinrich Mllers, all of whom had different
birth dates, physical characteristics and job histories... Part of the problem stemmed from the
fact that some of these Mllers, including Gestapo Mller, did not appear to have middle
names. An additional source of confusion was that there were two different SS Generals
named Heinrich Mller." [7]
The U.S. was still looking for Mller in 1947, when agents searched the home of his wartime
mistress Anna Schmid, but found nothing suggesting that he was still alive. With the onset of
the Cold War and the shift of priorities to meeting the challenge of the Soviet Union, interest
in pursuing missing Nazis declined. By this time the conclusion seems to have been reached
that Mller was most likely dead.

The seizure in 1960 and subsequent trial in Israel of Adolf Eichmann sparked new interest in
Mller's whereabouts. Although Eichmann revealed no specific information, he told his Israeli
interrogators that he believed that Mller was still alive. This prompted the West German
office in charge of the prosecution of war criminals to launch a new investigation. The West
Germans investigated the possibility that Mller was working for the Soviet Union, but
gained no definite information. They placed his family and his former secretary under
surveillance in case he was corresponding with them.

In 1967 in Panama City, Francis William Keith was accused of being Heinrich Mller, the
former head of the Gestapo. West German diplomats pressed Panama to extradite him to
Berlin for trial. German prosecutors said Mrs. Sophie Mller, 64, identified the man as her
husband. However he was released once fingerprints revealed he was in fact not Mller.[7]

The West Germans investigated several reports of Mller's body being found and buried in the
days after the fall of Berlin. None of the sources for these reports were wholly reliable; the
reports were contradictory, and it was not possible to confirm any of them. The most
interesting of these came from Walter Lders, a former member of the Volkssturm, who said
that he had been part of a burial unit which had found the body of an SS General in the garden
of the Reich Chancellery, with the identity papers of Heinrich Mller. The body had been
buried, Lders said, in a mass grave at the old Jewish Cemetery on Grosse Hamburger Strasse
in the Soviet Sector. Since this location was in East Berlin in 1961, this gravesite could not be
investigated, nor has there been any attempt to excavate this gravesite since the reunification
of Germany in 1990.

The CIA also conducted an investigation into Mller's disappearance in the 1960s, prompted
by the defection to the West of Lieutenant-Colonel Michael Goleniewski, the Deputy Chief of
Polish Military Counter Intelligence. Goleniewski had worked as an interrogator of captured
German officials from 1948 to 1952. He did not claim to have met Mller, but said he had
heard from his Soviet supervisors that sometime between 1950 and 1952 the Soviets had
picked up Mller and taken him to Moscow. The CIA tried to track down the men
Goleniewski named as having worked with Mller in Moscow, but were unable to confirm his
story, which was in any case no more than hearsay. Israel also continued to pursue Mller: in
1967 two Israeli operatives were caught by West German police attempting to break into the
Munich apartment of Mller's wife.

The CIA investigation concluded: "There is little room for doubt that the Soviet and Czech
[intelligence] services circulated rumors to the effect that Mller had escaped to the West... to
offset the charges that the Soviets had sheltered the criminal... There are strong indications but
no proof that Mller collaborated with [the Soviets]. There are also strong indications but no
proof that Mller died [in Berlin]." The CIA apparently remained convinced at that time that
if Mller had survived the war, he was being harboured within the Soviet Union. But when
the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and the Soviet archives were opened, no evidence to
support this contention emerged. By the 1990s it was in any case increasingly unlikely that
Mller, who was born in 1900, was alive even if he had survived.
The National Archives commentary concludes: "More information about Mller's fate might
still emerge from still secret files of the former Soviet Union. The CIA file, by itself, does not
permit definitive conclusions. Taking into account the currently available records, the authors
of this report conclude that Mller most likely died in Berlin in early May 1945."[7]

A photograph of Muller from Russian Wikipedia is here at [1]

[edit] Fictional portrayal

In the Soviet TV series Seventeen Moments of Spring, Mller was portrayed by Leonid
Bronevoy. The film became extremely popular in the Soviet Union and Mller became
a subject of many Russian jokes along with his counterpart Stirlitz.
In Philip Pullman's book Count Karlstein or, "The Ride of the Demon Huntsman"
Count Karlstein's former name was Heinrich Muller, and, like his real-life counterpart,
disappears suddenly at the end of the book (although this Heinrich Muller was taken
by the Demon Huntsman).
In the 2001 TV movie Conspiracy about the Wannsee Conference, the part of Heinrich
Mller was played by Brendan Coyle.