Eichmann’s boss, Gestapo Chief Heinrich Müller, had been in the bunker with Hitler in April 1945. Nothing definite was known about his death.
He had participated in the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942, when the murder of Europe’s Jews was decided.
Holocaust historians say that Western investigators looked for Müller intensively for years after 1945, and there were reports placing him everywhere from Czechoslovakia to the Soviet Union or even Brazil.
Now, the question of Müller’s fate has taken a disturbing twist, as Professor Johannes Tuchel, head of an association that watches over memorials to German resistance fighters, claims to have uncovered a document indicating that Müller was killed, probably on May 1, 1945, hastily buried in a provisional grave near the Nazi Air Force ministry, and later reburied in a mass grave in the Jewish cemetery in Mitte, in the heart of Berlin.
While the claim is not definitive – lacking, for instance, any forensic verification – it was credible enough to stir a mixture of sorrow, outrage and shock in this city where so much blood and treasure have been spent, and beyond.
Efraim Zuroff, chief Nazi hunter of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, was incredulous when reached by telephone. “I can’t think of a worse desecration of a Jewish cemetery than to bury Heinrich Müller there,” he said.
Professor Tuchel said in a telephone interview that he stumbled on the discovery after investigating Müller’s role in the suppression of a rebellion in the Moabit district of central Berlin on April 22–23, 1945. As the Nazi Reich was crumbling under sustained Allied bombing, and Soviet tank and infantry advances, the Gestapo leader, Professor Tuchel said, ordered 18 resistance fighters in Moabit shot.
His interest piqued, Professor Tuchel said, he scoured archives and found out that Müller was killed in the dying days of the war in May 1945, and buried and reburied, he said.
An estimated 70,000 civilians and soldiers are said to have been killed in the last three weeks of the war in Berlin. In the months after fighting ended, each city district organized non-professional teams of gravediggers to collect corpses and bury them in mass graves, Professor Tuchel said, adding that there were 16 such graves containing an estimated 2,700 bodies in the Mitte Jewish cemetery, which was not used for burials after 1829.
It is the resting place of the 18th-century philosopher – and grandfather of the composer – Moses Mendelssohn.
Source: The New York Times, October 31
