Heinrich Müller

Background

Müller voluntarily enlisted in the German army in 1917. After the end of the First World War, he joined the Munich police, of which he was secretary of the political police unit in 1929 with the task of fighting communist organizations. In 1934 he joined the SS and was transferred to Berlin, where he worked for the Gestapo and held various high posts. In 1938 he also became a member of the National Socialist German Workers' Party.

Head of the Gestapo

Müller was a protégé of Reinhard Heydrich and Müller's rank in the SS did not rise until after the Night of the Long Knives on June 30, 1934. As head of the Gestapo, Müller was directly under Heydrich and, after his death, under Ernst Kaltenbrunner.

Heinrich Müller was a key player in the organization of the worst war crimes committed by the Nazi regime. For example, he was present at the Wannsee Conference at which the massacre of the Jewish people was elaborated. One of his direct reports was Adolf Eichmann, the logistical organizer of the Holocaust. He was also involved in the plans of the false Polish attack on radio station Gleiwitz in 1939, which marked the beginning of the Second World War, and in March 1944 he signed Aktion Kugel, which gave permission to shoot escaped prisoners of war.

Müller's end

In 1945, Müller was presumed dead, but in 1963 his grave was opened and found empty. The usual conspiracy theories circulated about his life after the war. At the end of 2013, however, German newspapers reported on the findings of researcher Johannes Tuchel: Müller's body had already been found in August 1945 and transferred to a mass grave in a Jewish cemetery in Berlin-Centrum (Grosse Hamburgerstrasse), near the site of the former Gestapo headquarters. According to the announcement of a gravedigger, he was initially buried in a hurry in his uniform with his identity papers in his pocket. His subsequent burial in a mass grave is confirmed by a document from the archives of the Berlin Centre Population Register. It seems that Müller committed suicide on the night of 1 to 2 May 1945, during the Battle of Berlin, but he may also have died like so many others in the last convulsions of the Third Reich.