Timothy
Naftali, Miller Center of Public Affairs, University of Virginia
Norman J.W. Goda, Ohio University
Richard Breitman, American University
Robert Wolfe, National Archives (ret.)
Introduction
The CIA file on Heinrich
Mueller, chief of Hitler's Gestapo and a major Nazi war criminal, sheds
important new light on U.S. and international efforts to find Mueller after his
disappearance in May 1945. Though inconclusive on Mueller's ultimate fate, the
file is very clear on one point. The Central Intelligence Agency and its
predecessors did not know Mueller's whereabouts at any point after the war. In
other words, the CIA was never in contact with Gestapo Mueller. To assist other
scholars, the press, and the general public in making sense of this new
information about the CIA's investigation of this controversial war criminal,
the authors have drawn on other documents at the National Archives for this
report.
Mueller and the
Nazi Regime
Mueller was born in Munich
on April 28, 1900. After serving as a pilot in World War I, he joined the
police in Munich, soon acquiring a reputation as a skilled anti-communist
investigator who did not feel bound by legal norms of police investigation. As such,
he would draw the attention of Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich, leaders
of Hitler's SS. Following Hitler's rise to power in 1933, Himmler and Heydrich
consolidated German regional police units while creating a national political
police, the Geheime Staatspolizei (Gestapo). Mueller entered the SS in 1934 and
quickly rose through the ranks of that organization as a police official. In
September 1939, when the Gestapo and other police organizations were
consolidated into the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA), Mueller was made the
Chief of RSHA Amt IV -- the Gestapo.
As Gestapo chief, Mueller
oversaw the implementation of Hitler's policies against Jews and other groups
deemed a threat to the state. The notorious Adolf Eichmann, who headed the
Gestapo's Office of Resettlement and then its Office of Jewish Affairs, was
Mueller's immediate subordinate. Once World War II began, Mueller and Eichmann
planned key components in the deportation and then extermination of Europe's
Jews.
Mueller was involved in
other criminal affairs as well. He helped plan the phony Polish attack on
Gleiwitz radio station in 1939 (used to justify Germany's attack on Poland). He
signed the "Bullet Order" of March 1944 (authorizing the shooting of
escaped prisoners of war) and authorized the torture of officers who had
conspired to kill Hitler in July 1944. Mueller's zeal in countering the 20 July
plot earned him the rare military decoration of the Knight's Cross to the War
Service Cross with Swords in October 1944.
Mueller also managed
security and counterespionage operations. His most spectacular counterespionage
success was the development of a double-cross network that fed disinformation
to the Soviet intelligence services between 1942 and 1945. Located in Berlin
and a few other Western European capitals, this network had been extremely
successful in sending sensitive political and military information to Moscow.
Mueller's Gestapo team was able to capture a number of these agents and
"turn" them. Codenamed Rote Kapelle (Red Orchestra), this Gestapo
operation was among the greatest Soviet intelligence setbacks of the war.
Mueller and the End
of the War
In the war's final year, it
seems that Heinrich Mueller stubbornly believed in a Nazi victory. He told one
of his top counterespionage case officers in December 1944 that the Ardennes
offensive (known in the U.S. as the Battle of the Bulge) would result in the
recapture of Paris.1 Mueller also reportedly redoubled efforts to
drive a wedge between the Soviets and the Western allies by using his double
agents.
Not everyone was convinced
of his sincerity. There were rumors among German intelligence officers that
Mueller had himself been turned by the Soviets. Walter Schellenberg, chief of
the RSHA's Foreign Intelligence Branch (Amt VI) and a bitter rival of Mueller,
was the source of some of this speculation. When interrogated by OSS in 1945,
Schellenberg claimed that Mueller had been in friendly radio contact with the
Soviets, and Schellenberg's postwar memoirs contain verbatim exhortations from
1943 by Mueller on Stalin's superiority to Hitler as a leader.2
SS-men close to Mueller considered such rumors unfounded and illogical.
Mueller's immediate superior Ernst Kaltenbrunner (Chief of the RSHA), later
insisted under Allied interrogation that Mueller could never have embraced the
Soviets. Similarly, Heinz Pannwitz, Mueller's Gestapo subordinate who ran Rote
Kapelle, categorized the notion that Mueller had turned as "absolutely
absurd" in a 1959 CIA interrogation.3
The First Search
for Gestapo Mueller
Months before the fall of
Berlin, Anglo-American counterespionage officers began their postwar planning.
Under the combined leadership of British MI 5 and MI 6 and the X-2
(counterespionage) branch of the American Office of Strategic Services, the
SHAEF G-2 Counter Intelligence (CI) War Room began operating in February 1945.
Using Allied lists of Nazi intelligence officers, the War Room supervised the
hunt for the remnants of Germany's military and police intelligence services.
Initially, the chief concern of the officers of the CI War Room was that Nazi
intelligence units would survive the war and, financed with looted assets,
launch paramilitary operations in the Bavarian Alps. Intelligence reaching the
War Room in the last months of the war did not mention Mueller as a possible
leader of postwar Nazi operations, but given his command of the Gestapo,
Mueller remained an important man to capture.
On May 27, 1945 the Counter
Intelligence War Room issued a statement about its priority targets for
interrogations in what it called the German intelligence service. At the top of
the list were Nazi intelligence officials involved in foreign intelligence
(RSHA Amt VI). Next in priority were security police and SD units in occupied
countries. Gestapo officials came farther down the target list. A War Room
instruction to interrogators of captured RSHA officers listed the top missing
persons: interrogators were to ask: "Where are: SCHELLENBERG, OHLENDORF,
MUELLER, STEIMLE, SANDBERGER?"4 (All but Mueller were
subsequently located and interrogated.) A War Room fortnightly report covering
the period ending June 18, 1945 stated that no leading officials of the Gestapo
had yet been arrested, and "it seems clear from most reports that Mueller
remained in Berlin after the collapse."5 His fate was
contrasted with that of other Gestapo personalities who fled south. A separate
OSS X-2 (counterintelligence) report at the end of the month repeated that no
highranking Gestapo officials had yet been captured and that Mueller had
remained in Berlin.6
A War Room monthly summary
in late July 1945 reported that Amt VI officials had largely surrendered, while
most Amt IV (Gestapo) officials remained at large. Mueller's fate was still
unknown: "Some of our evidence, though it is by no means conclusive,
suggests that Mueller himself may have remained in Berlin until the last
[while]… the greater part of Amt IV collected itself at Hof, near Munich, and
at Salzburg and Innsbruck.7 A War Room intelligence arrest target
list, dated August 21, commented about 'H. Mueller, head of the Gestapo':
"Last reported Berlin, Apr. 1945."8 A later revision to
the arrest target list reported the arrest of several Gestapo officials,
including Walter Huppenkothen who was part of the Red Orchestra team. But not
Heinrich Mueller.9
Ultimately the Allies would
find many Heinrich Muellers in occupied Germany and Austria, but not the right
one. Heinrich Mueller is a very common German name. By the end of 1945,
American and British occupation forces had gathered information on numerous
Heinrich Muellers, all of whom had different birth dates, physical
characteristics and job histories. Documentation on some of them is
included-one might say mistakenly jumbled together-in the "Gestapo"
Mueller Army IRR file, which the National Archives released in 2000. Part of
the problem for U.S. record-keepers stemmed from the fact that some of these
Muellers, including Gestapo Mueller, did not appear to have middle names. An
additional source of confusion was that there were two different SS-Generals
named Heinrich Mueller. In at least one instance, an index card purporting to
collate information on Gestapo Mueller, which was prepared by an American
official after the war, actually contains two different birth dates, as well as
data about a third man of the same name. A Heinrich Mueller was held briefly at
the Altenstadt civilian internment camp in 1945.10 Another killed
himself along with his wife and his children in April 1946.11
Throughout this period the
Counter Intelligence War Room functioned as the ULTRA/top secret collecting
point for information about the locations of the Allies' top intelligence
targets. Although the occupation forces had encountered quite a few men named
Heinrich Mueller, the War Room's verdict was unambiguous: Gestapo Muller had
not been found.
In the initial period after
the Nazi surrender U.S. counterintelligence attempted to track down all leads
to Mueller. Information reached U.S. army intelligence that Gestapo Mueller had
taken the assumed name Schwartz or Schwatzer and had gone south from Berlin
with another Gestapo official Christian A. Scholz. But no traces of either man
were ever found.12 In 1947, British and American authorities twice
searched the home of Gestapo Mueller's mistress Anna Schmid for clues, but
found nothing suggesting that Mueller was still alive. With the onset of the
Cold War and the shift of resources to the Soviet target, the assumption took
hold in U.S. intelligence that Gestapo Mueller was dead.13
The West German
Investigation
The dramatic Israeli
abduction of Mueller's subordinate Adolf Eichmann from Argentina in May 1960
created new interest in Nazi war criminals and particularly in Mueller.
Imaginative theories that Mueller (along with Eichmann) had escaped Berlin and
were still alive had been in the press for some time, as well as in the best
selling memoir by Wilhelm Hoettl, himself a former SS officer.14
Eichmann himself helped to fan speculation about in Mueller, when during his
Jerusalem trial, he voiced his belief that Mueller survived the war. Already in
July 1960, the West German office in charge of the prosecution of war criminals
[Zentralle Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen] charged local police
authorities in Bavaria (Mueller's family still lived in Munich) and Berlin to
investigate. The West Germans were skeptical that Mueller was working for the
Soviets, but did think it possible that Mueller was corresponding from
somewhere with his family or possibly with his former secretary Barbara
Hellmuth. All of these West German citizens were closely watched, and in May
1961 the Bavarian police asked the U.S. occupation forces to put Mueller's
relatives and Hellmuth under surveillance. West German police also searched the
Berlin home of Anna Schmid, Mueller's former mistress, and spoke with her.
Schmid told the West German investigators that she had not seen Mueller since
24 April 1945, when he gave her a vial of poison and then disappeared. Her own
efforts to find him in the subsequent days and weeks had been fruitless.15
According to various
witnesses interviewed by the West German police in 1961, the last time Mueller
was seen alive was the evening of May 1, 1945, the day after Hitler's suicide.
Several eyewitnesses placed Mueller at Hitler's Chancellery building that
evening while recounting his refusal to leave with the breakout group that
night. Hans Baur, Hitler's pilot and an old friend of Mueller's, recounts
Mueller as saying, "We know the Russian methods exactly. I haven't the
faintest intention of … being taken prisoner by the Russians." Another
claimed that Mueller refused to leave with the rest of Hitler's entourage, and
was overheard saying "the regime has fallen and…I fall also." He was
last seen in the company of his radio specialist Christian A. Scholz. And while
the bodies of others that remained that night were recovered and identified, no
one in the final group witnessed the death of Mueller or Scholz.16
West German authorities
pursued three major leads in an effort to confirm Mueller's death and burial in
Berlin in 1945. First, there was the testimony of Fritz Leopold, a Berlin
morgue official who had reported in December 1945 that Mueller's body was moved
(along with many others) from the RSHA headquarters at Prinz Albrecht Strasse
(2000 feet from the Chancellery) for reburial in a local municipal cemetery on
Lilienthalstrasse (Berlin-Neukoelln) in the Western half of the city. Leopold
was later deemed an unreliable source, but the burial was officially registered
with the Berlin authorities and a headstone would be placed at Mueller's
"grave" which read, "Our loving father Heinrich Mueller - Born
28 April 1900 - Died in Berlin May 1945." A second story came from
Mueller's ex-subordinate Heinz Pannwitz, who had been captured by the Soviets
and returned to West Germany in 1957, whereupon he told the German Secret
Service [Bundesnachrichtendienst - BND] that his Soviet interrogators revealed
to him that "your Chief [Mueller] is dead." The body, they said, had
been found in a subway shaft a few blocks from the Chancellery with a bullet
through the head and with its identity documents intact.17
The final story came from
Walter Lueders, a former member of the German Volkssturm (civilian fighters)
who maintained that he had headed a burial detail in the summer of 1945. Of the
hundreds of bodies buried by the detail, only one, said Lueders, wore an
SS-General's uniform, and it was found in the garden of the Reich Chancellery
with a large wound in the back. Though the body had no medals or decorations,
Lueders recalled with certainty that the identity papers were those of Gestapo
Mueller. It was moved to the old Jewish Cemetery on Grosse Hamburgerstasse in
the Soviet Sector, where it was placed in one of three mass graves. In fact, in
1955 the German Armed Forces Information Office (Wehrmachtsauskunftsstelle -
WASt) inquired with district authorities in East Berlin and received
confirmation that Gestapo Mueller was buried at the Grosse-Hamburgerstrasse
cemetery in 1945. Since the grave was a mass grave, however, there was no
actual plot.
The Fritz Leopold story was
checked first, and in September 1963, the Mueller "grave" at the
Lilienthalstrasse cemetery in West Berlin was exhumed. Investigation revealed
that in fact, the grave contained the remains of three different people, none
of whom were Mueller. The skull, moreover, belonged to a man ten years younger
than Mueller would have been in 1945. The German authorities had no means by
which to verify either Pannwitz's or Lueders' story. Pannwitz's information had
come from Moscow, and there was no official liaison between Soviet intelligence
and the West Germans on the Mueller case. Lueders's story could not be checked
since Grosse Hamburgerstrasse was on the other side of the two-year old Berlin
Wall. Adding to the confusion was the mystery of Mueller's effects. WASt,
according to its own records, returned to Mueller's family in 1958 not only the
Gestapo Chief's papers, some of which Lueders claimed to have found on the
body, but also Mueller's decorations, which neither Leopold not Lueders claimed
to have found. These items were never checked for authenticity.18
The CIA
investigation
The CIA started its
involvement in the hunt for Mueller at roughly the same time as the German
search, albeit from a different source base. The January 1961 defection and
interrogation of a Polish intelligence officer brought Western
counterintelligence tips that led to several Soviet and Polish agents active in
the West, including George Blake, a mole in the British MI6, Harry Houghton, a
clerk in the British navy, and Heinz Felfe, a highlevel West German
intelligence officer. The defector surely was Lt. Col. Michal Goleniewski [TN],
the Deputy Chief of Polish Military Counter Intelligence until 1958, who had
also operated as a mole for the KGB in the Polish service. In recounting his
work as an interrogator of captured German officials in Poland from 1948 to
1952, Goleniewski revealed information about the fate of some Nazi intelligence
officials, including Gestapo Mueller. Goleniewski had not actually met Mueller.
However, he had heard from his Soviet supervisors that sometime between 1950
and 1952 the Soviets had picked up Mueller and taken him to Moscow.19
There was little with which to evaluate this claim, and some reason to be
skeptical of this hearsay. Pannwitz, after all, had recently dismissed as
"nonsense" to CIA interrogators the idea that Mueller worked for the
Soviets while claiming that his own Soviet interrogators repeatedly said that
Mueller was dead.20
The CIA tried to track down
the men Goleniewski named as having worked with Mueller in Moscow. The CIA
determined that Jakob Loellgen, the former Gestapo chief of Danzig, was alive
and resided in West Germany. In 1945 the Soviets had captured Loellgen but then
released him, whereupon he returned to West Germany, working as a local police
chief and as a private investigator. The CIA turned this information over to
the Germans and the BND located Loellgen in 1961.
The Germans dropped the
ball. Although the BDN apparently began assembling material for his arrest,
Loellgen was never arrested. The CIA never quite figured out what had happened.
The BND seemed to be preoccupied throughout 1961 with another of Goleniewski's
leads, Heinz Felfe. Felfe was a highlevel BND officer, who had already provided
thousands of West German secrets including names of agents, cover names,
addresses, and documents, to Moscow. In the midst of the Felfe scandal, West
German investigation of Loellgen just fell between the cracks.21
The CIA did collect some information
on its own that bore on the "Mueller in Moscow" thesis. In June 1961,
another source was asked to assess Goleniewski's information on Soviet contacts
with former Nazis. The source, who appears to have been a KGB officer, reported
having read a "Mueller file," in which Mueller is described as having
been captured by Soviet intelligence at the end of World War II. The identity
of this source is not given in the CIA file, but is likely Petr Deriabin [TN].
(Deriabin had worked on counterintelligence matters in the Austro-German
department of the First Chief Directorate of the KGB.) The defector wrote in a
1971 memorandum for the record that in 1952 he had heard from his own superiors
that Moscow had recruited Mueller and that he himself had read excerpts from an
interrogation. He even included the names of four Soviet officers who had once
debriefed Mueller in 1951.22
Despite the partial
corroboration of the information from Goleniewski, the CIA appears to have
relied on the West Germans to take the lead in the investigation of Mueller's
whereabouts and did little follow-up in the 1960s. The remainder of the decade
saw various news reports that Mueller had escaped to various points in the West
(Argentina, Cuba), as well as tragicomic episodes. In 1967, a false sighting of
Mueller in Panama led to the arrest there of one Francis Keith, who was
released once fingerprints revealed he was not Mueller. Later the same year,
two Israeli operatives were caught by West German police in an attempted
break-in at the Munich apartment of Mueller's wife. Reams of newspaper copy
were produced by such episodes, but there was only limited CIA interest.
Yet one particular report
did catch CIA's attention. In the aftermath of the Eichmann trial, the West
German weekly Stern ran two articles by the journalist Peter Staehle that
appeared in January and August 1964. Staehle said that after having followed a
path after the war that included the Soviet Union, Romania, Turkey, and South
Africa, Mueller became a senior police official in Albania before fleeing for
South America.23 From the very start, CIA suspected that Staehle's
articles were a "plant" - part of a "clever bit of
[disinformation] work" to mislead the public, as well as intelligence
agencies.24 The CIA checked - and disproved Staehle's claim that
Mueller was in fact an Albanian police official named Abedin Bekir Nakoschiri.25
The BND and CIA also discovered that Staehle had failed to get his articles
printed in the more respected weekly Die Zeit thanks to a suspect source base
about which Staehle had reportedly lied.26
In May 1970 a Czech
defector, very likely Ladislas Bittman [TN], a disinformation specialist
himself, weighed in.27 Bittman said that the Stern article was
planted from Prague in order to neutralize rumors that Mueller might in fact be
in Czechoslovakia. Bittman added for good measure that within Czech
intelligence circles, it was common knowledge that the KGB had used Nazi war
criminals for intelligence purposes and that key sections of Nazi archives had
also been captured by the Soviets for use in "operational aims."28
These comments caught the
eye of the CIA's Counter-Intelligence (CI) Staff, headed by the legendary James
Angleton. If Mueller really had been in the USSR or elsewhere in Eastern
Europe, and if he had taken RSHA central files with him (many of which had
indeed vanished after the war), then numerous leading West Germans (presumably
on the political right) could still be compromised. It was crucial to discover
what had happened, not necessarily to Mueller, who well might have been dead in
any case, but to the files. Angleton also had a special interest in Soviet
disinformation. The CI Staff undertook a through-going inquiry of Mueller
starting in late 1970, and it is likely that this inquiry resulted in Mueller's
name file (along with the above-mentioned material on the West German search)
being assembled by CIA at all. It certainly resulted in a forty-page Counter
Intelligence Brief - "The Hunt for 'Gestapo' Mueller" - which was circulated
as an internal report of the Directorate of Plans in December 1971. A memo in
the file dated 9 December 1971 explaining the purpose of the report states
that:
Our principal original objective in preparing
the attached study of the MUELLER case was to produce a training aid
illustrating the vagaries and pitfalls of protracted investigations. In the
past, MUELLER had been viewed mainly as a missing war criminal. As the material
was collected, however, we became aware of another important possibility: that
MUELLER had defected to World War II Soviet counterintelligence (SMERSH) and
had taken with him a large assortment of files. (The central files of the
German National Security Service (RSHA), of which Mueller was de facto chief…in
the last weeks of the war, were never recovered by the Western Allies….) If
SMERSH actually seized MUELLER and the best part of the RSHA records, Soviet
capabilities to control important Germans and some other Europeans would far
exceed those heretofore attributed to them."29
In the process of putting
together the report, the CI staff undertook some new inquiries of its own. A
re-reading of a 1963 article in the German weekly Der Spiegel, which discussed
the exhumation of Mueller's West Berlin "grave" that year, revealed
that a mysterious woman in Berlin unrelated to Mueller had purchased the
headstone. 30 Perhaps this purchase too was part of a disinformation
campaign designed to hide the fact that Mueller was used by the Soviets after
the war.31 In December 1970 the West Germans allowed CIA to examine
the exhumation records for the identity of the mysterious woman who had
purchased the Mueller tombstone, albeit with no results. CI also hoped that the
West German government would locate and interview Walter Lueders (who had found
the body buried in the Grosse-Hamburgerstrasse cemetery) and verify, if they
could, the authenticity of the personal effects returned to Mueller's family in
1957.32 German memoirs from the 1950s with cryptic clues on Mueller
were reread.33 CI also asked Soviet defector Peter Deriabin to write
a memorandum for the file in November 1971.
The CI team found fault
with how Goleniewski's leads had been handled in 1961 and wanted to return to
that trail. Loellgen, wrote one CI investigator, "must have an interesting
tale to tell about what happened to Heinrich Mueller and how the [Soviet]
operation to penetrate the Nazi stay-behind operation fared"34
"How do we get Loellgen to talk?" asked another. "Have we [an]
interviewer that might 'accidentally' look [him] up?" But reasons for
skepticism remained. "It seems to me," the same agent said,
"that [Soviet intelligence] would never have let LOELLGEN go back to the
West if in fact they had MUELLER. The scandal of sheltering this number one war
criminal would have been too risky."35 In any event, Loellgen
was not questioned.
The 40-page CI report ended
on a note of skepticism. "No one appears to have tried very hard," it
said,
to find MUELLER immediately after the war while
the trail was still hot, either in the West or the East….The presumption is
that Allied officials searching for MUELLER soon stumbled over the…holdings of
his effects and the…burial record and considered these sufficient proof that he
was dead….There is little room for doubt, however, that the Soviet and Czech
services circulated rumors to the effect that MUELLER had escaped to the West.
These rumor were apparently floated to offset the charges that the Soviets had
sheltered the criminal….There are strong indications but no proof that MUELLER
collaborated with [the Soviets]. There are also strong indications but no proof
that MUELLER died [in Berlin]….One thing appears certain. MUELLER and SCHOLZ
had some special reason for entering the Berlin death trap and remaining behind
in the Chancellery. If their object was to carry out a memorable and convincing
suicide, they really bungled the job.
The CI Staff requested a
deeper CIA investigation to find proof that would confirm or disprove these
competing theories. Yet it appears that the CI Staff's request for a full-fledged
investigation of the Mueller matter was not accepted.36 The Mueller
file itself ends in December 1971 with the circulation of the CI Staff report.
The Integrity of
the CIA File
The heart of the file
comprises documentary support for all the key judgments in the 1971 CI Staff
report "The Hunt for Gestapo Mueller." Whatever confidence one can
have in the integrity of the file's declassified contents thus hinges on
judgments regarding the CI Staff's objectives in assembling and writing its report.
In 1971 the United States was not being accused of having harbored Gestapo
Mueller. Instead it seems that the CI Staff was prompted to investigate the
Mueller case both as a possible example of Soviet deception and as a check on
the reliability of key CIA defectors and West German informants. If the CIA had
evidence that Mueller had been contacted by the West and not the Soviets, then
the CI Staff's handling of theses defector cases that most likely involved
Bittman, Deriabin, and Goleniewski makes no sense. In the 1960s and early
1970s, the CIA was riddled with doubt over the reliability of its stable of
Soviet defectors. There were fears that Moscow had sent agents to the West to
mislead the Allies about Soviet capabilities and intentions. It was in the interest
of the CI Staff in particular and the CIA in general to determine whether high
profile defectors like Bittman, Deriabin and Goleniewski were telling the truth
about Mueller. Moreover, in assembling materials for its report, the CI Staff
had no reason to believe that these documents would eventually be declassified.
Therefore it is reasonable to assume that the CI Staff report, and by extension
the CIA Mueller name file, represents a compilation of the best information on
Gestapo Mueller available to CIA at that time.
More information about
Mueller'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 of the War Room as well as other
documents in the National Archives, the authors of this report conclude that
Mueller most likely died in Berlin in early May 1945.
Notes of Sources Used
Not from Mueller's Name File
Anmerkung: Wer kein Englisch
kann oder wem das Lesen längerer Texte in englischer Sprache zu anstrengend
sind, der kann sich über das Buch Gregory Douglas: “Geheimakte Gestapo-Müller”,
Druffel-Verlag, Berg am Starnberger See 1995 schlau machen. Man reibt sich nur
noch die Augen, insbesondere, weil doch Heinrich Müller der Vorgesetzte von
Adolf Eichmann war und den hat man doch in Israel aufgehängt.