Heinrich Müller, called Gestapo Müller to distinguish him from the many other Heinrich Müllers in the regime, was the head of the Gestapo from October 1939 to the end of the war. As chief of Section IV of the Reich Security Main Office, he commanded the German political police across the Reich and the occupied territories. He attended the Wannsee Conference. He oversaw the deportation operations through Eichmann’s office. He disappeared in early May 1945 from the Führerbunker in Berlin and has never been found.
The Gestapo and the deportations
Section IV of the RSHA, the Gestapo, was the part of the German police apparatus that ran the day-to-day operations of the Holocaust. Within Section IV, Müller’s direct subordinate Adolf Eichmann ran the Jewish desk (IV-B-4) and managed the deportations. Müller signed off on the operational orders that flowed from Eichmann’s office. He approved the deportation schedules from each occupied country. He authorised the round-ups in occupied France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, Greece, Hungary and elsewhere. He chaired internal RSHA meetings on Jewish policy. He was, after Heydrich and Kaltenbrunner, the senior figure with day-to-day command of the killing apparatus.
Wannsee
Müller attended the Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942 as one of the fifteen senior officials. The Wannsee Protocol records his presence. He sat with Eichmann at his right hand. He was, in operational terms, the man through whose office the policy decided at Wannsee would have to flow. Eichmann recorded later that Müller had been Heydrich’s closest collaborator at the conference and that the Gestapo chief had been fully informed about the killing programme from the beginning.
The role of the Gestapo in the killings
Beyond the deportations, Müller’s Gestapo was responsible for the broader machinery of state terror that enabled the Holocaust. The Gestapo arrested Jewish refugees attempting to hide on the Aryan side of cities. It pursued and arrested members of Jewish underground organisations. It conducted the interrogations of captured resistance figures, often using torture. It arrested German non-Jews suspected of sheltering Jews and sent them to concentration camps. The Gestapo office in Berlin coordinated with Gestapo branches in every occupied country and across the Reich. The total apparatus was around 32,000 men by 1944. Müller commanded it.
The handling of Sophie Scholl and the White Rose
Müller signed off personally on the prosecution of the White Rose resistance group in Munich in February 1943. Sophie Scholl, her brother Hans, and Christoph Probst were arrested by the Gestapo, interrogated under his direct supervision, tried before the People’s Court four days later, and beheaded the same day. The Gestapo file on Sophie Scholl, which survived, contains Müller’s personal annotations. The case is one of the cleaner pieces of documentary evidence of his direct involvement in the day-to-day operation of the Gestapo terror.
The protection of the killing programme from internal challenge
The Gestapo also handled the small number of internal German cases of officials or military officers who attempted to slow the killing programme. The case of Wehrmacht General Karl Litzmann, who had attempted to mitigate the conditions of Jews in the ghetto named after him in Łódź (later renamed Litzmannstadt), was investigated by Müller’s office. Officers who showed unusual sympathy for Jewish prisoners were investigated, transferred or, in extreme cases, prosecuted. The Gestapo functioned as the enforcer of the killing programme against any internal dissent within the German apparatus.
The disappearance
Müller was last seen in the Führerbunker in Berlin on the evening of 1 May 1945, the day after Hitler’s suicide. He was reportedly preparing to leave the bunker with the rest of the senior staff. He was never seen alive again by anyone whose testimony was reliable. The Soviet investigation of the bunker site in 1945 produced reports of an unidentified body in the Reich Chancellery garden that may have been his, but the identification was never confirmed. Various post-war reports placed him in Switzerland, in South America, in the Soviet Union as a Soviet intelligence asset, in East Germany as an East German intelligence asset. None of the reports has ever been confirmed.
The most credible recent assessment, based on a 2013 German government investigation, is that Müller died during or shortly after the fall of Berlin and was buried in a mass grave on the Tempelhof airfield. The grave was opened in 1945 by Soviet investigators but the bodies were not individually identified. The German Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, which ran the 2013 investigation, concluded that Müller was probably one of the unidentified bodies. The conclusion is plausible but unproven. The case remains officially open.
What he was
Müller was the case of the bureaucratic head of the political police, a career detective who had risen through the German police service before the Nazi takeover and who continued in his profession after 1933 because the work was the same and the career path was good. He was not a senior ideologue. He was an effective administrator of the apparatus of terror that the regime built around him. The deportations would not have functioned without his Gestapo. The Holocaust used him as it used a thousand similar mid-level career officials, and he did the work effectively until the regime collapsed around him.
See also
Sources
- Andreas Seeger, Gestapo-Müller: Die Karriere eines Schreibtischtäters, Metropol, 1996
- The Wannsee Protocol, 20 January 1942
- Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution report on Müller, 2013
- White Rose Foundation Munich, Gestapo files on the Scholl case
- USHMM: Heinrich Müller