Gestapo leader in Jewish cemetery
GERMANY
THE head of the Gestapo and one of the main organisers of the Holocaust, who disappeared at the end of World War II, was buried in a Jewish cemetery in 1945, according to research published yesterday.
The fate of Heinrich Muller, who was said to have organised the execution of the 50 Stalag Luft ‘‘Great Escape’’ prisoners on the orders of Adolf Hitler, caused uproar among the German Jewish community yesterday.
Muller was last seen alive in Hitler’s bunker on May 1, 1945, the day after the defeated Fuhrer committed suicide, and what subsequently happened to him became one of the most enduring of postwar mysteries.
However, researchers have discovered a handwritten document in the archive of a Berlin district office which confirmed that his body was recovered from a temporary grave in August 1945 and reburied in Berlin’s oldest Jewish cemetery.
This backed up a claim dating from 1963 of a wartime gravedigger who said that he recognised Muller. At the time, this was discounted.
Dieter Graumann, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said he was horrified by the likelihood that Muller was buried among members of a community he had tried to exterminate.
‘‘That one of the most brutal Nazi sadists is buried in a Jewish cemetery is a distasteful monstrosity. The memory of the victims is being treated here with contempt.’’
Like several other leading Nazis whose bodies were never formally identified, Muller was long rumoured to
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have survived the war. Tales of him having escaped the Red Army were fuelled by an official report from the German Foreign Intelligence Service stating that he was seen in the former Czechoslovakia, in 1949.
Evidence of his resting place was tracked down by Johannes Tuchel, head of the German Resistance Memorial Centre, an exhibition and re- search body in Berlin.
‘‘Muller did not survive the end of the war,’’ Professor Tuchel said. ‘‘His body was interred in 1945 in the Jewish cemetery in Berlin-Mitte in a mass grave. Muller’s body was found in August 1945 in a provisional grave near the former Reich Aviation Ministry by a burial squad.’’
His body, which was dressed in a general’s uniform, was then moved to the mass grave in the Jewish cemetery.
‘‘In the inner left breast pocket was, among other things, his service certificate with a photo,’’ Tuchel added.
Muller, who was born in 1900, was a ruthless career police officer who joined the Nazi Party in 1939, the year he became head of the Gestapo.
He was personally entrusted with the investigations into the killing of the senior Nazi Reinhard Heydrich in 1942 and into the failed attempt to blow up Hitler in July 1944, which led to the execution of about 200 people.
Muller attended the Wannsee Conference at a villa on the outskirts of Berlin in January 1942 at which senior Nazis plotted the Final Solution, their plan to exterminate all Jews in Nazioccupied Europe. He was the immediate superior of Adolf Eichmann, the man in day-today charge of transporting Jews to death camps during the Holocaust.