Norman Miller, German refugee who helped in the arrest of a high-level Nazi, 99

Norman Miller was visiting the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1999 with his sons, Steven and Michael, when they stopped at an exhibit that described the top Nazi leaders who had carried out the extermination of 6 million Jews. When he pointed to a picture of Arthur Seyss-Inquart, a highlevel but not widely known Nazi, he made a stunning admission.

“I told you I arrested him, didn’t I?” Norman Miller said.

“We were incredulous,” Steven Miller recalled in an interview. “We turned to him and said, ‘What?’”

Until then, the elder Miller had not said a word to them about Seyss-Inquart, who, as the Reich commissioner of the German-occupied Netherlands, was responsible for deporting thousands of Dutch Jews to concentration camps. He had held a similar job in Poland, where he was known for policies that favored Jewish persecution.

The chance encounter between Mr. Miller, a German refugee who was serving in the British army, and Seyss-Inquart happened on May 7, 1945, the day Germany surrendered to the Allies to end the war in Europe. Mr. Miller was part of the Royal Welch Fusiliers regiment, which was guarding a checkpoint between the American and British sectors in Hamburg.

When a brown Opel, which had been driving erratically, was forced to stop at the checkpoint, one of the four men in the vehicle said that he had papers for Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery to sign. One of the soldiers asked a German policeman if the papers were in order, according to a newspaper published by the regiment after the incident. The officer said the papers, which were in German, looked all right. But the fusilier was not satisfied with the response.

So he asked Mr. Miller, who read German, for help.

“He came over to me, showed me the paper,” Mr. Miller said in an oral history interview with the Holocaust museum in 2013. (The regiment’s newspaper said that the fusilier brought all four men to Mr. Miller.) And then, he said, he realized that “we have a big Nazi fish here.”

Mr. Miller, who knew SeyssInquart’s name and face from newspapers, recalled that he had him arrested and sent to the battalion commander. He was convicted of war crimes by the Allied military tribunal in Nuremberg and hanged on Oct. 16, 1946.

But Mr. Miller did not get a lot of satisfaction from the arrest.

“I mean, I wasn’t overjoyed,” he said in an interview last year with WNBC-TV in New York. “It didn’t help bring my parents back, my family back.”

Mr. Miller died on Feb. 24 in a hospital in Manhattan. He was 99.

His son Steven confirmed the death.

Mr. Miller was born Norbert Müller on June 2, 1924, in Tann in der Rhön, Germany, and moved with his family to Nuremberg in 1930. His father, Sebald, was a teacher, and his mother, Laura (Jüngster) Müller, managed the home.

The Müllers’ desire to leave Germany became even more urgent during the pogroms of Kristallnacht in November 1938. Nazis entered the family’s apartment and used axes to smash furniture, musical instruments, including a piano and cello, featherbeds, and a cupboard with jars filled with jams and pickles.

The next year, Norbert, his parents, and his sister, Susanne, moved to another building in Nuremberg designated for Jews only. They shared an apartment with an older couple.

Despite their desire to keep their family intact, Norbert’s parents could secure safe passage for Norbert only through the Kindertransport, the British rescue effort that brought some 10,000 children to safety from German-occupied countries.

On one stop in the journey, in Cologne, Germany, Mr. Miller’s father realized that his son didn’t have the correct paperwork to reach the Netherlands. Mr. Miller said that his father sneaked into the closed British consulate and emerged with the signed document that he needed to board the Kindertransport train and later enter Britain on a ship from the Dutch seaport of Vlissingen. (Mr. Miller believed that his father most likely bribed someone to get the document.)

It was late August 1939. Only a few days were left before Germany would invade Poland on Sept. 1 to start World War II. Fifteen-year-old Norbert’s family would never get the visas they needed.

In London, Mr. Miller lived in an orphanage and later in rented rooms. He also learned to weld.

In 1944, when he was 20, Norbert joined the British army — he believed that it was the best way to learn what happened to his family after their correspondence ended — and Anglicized his name to Norman Albert Miller. A sergeant, he was assigned to the intelligence section because he was fluent in German, which explains why he was at the checkpoint in Hamburg.

In addition to his son Steven, Mr. Miller is survived by his son Michael and two grandchildren, one of whom is named Suzanna, for his sister.