"Gestapo" Müller - Hunting Hitler's Secret Police Chief

[Music] the gestapo is known to everyone it is often held up as the example of a totalitarian secret police and is a favorite of novelists tv shows and hollywood movies but few actually know what the gestapo did and fewer still the name of the man who ran it hanoish mueller known to history inevitably as gestapo muller one of the most powerful men in germany during the world war ii and a direct subordinate of reish viewer ss haines mueller simply disappeared in the chaos of berlin in early may 1945 never to be seen again rumors abounded that the 45 year old mueller had escaped to south america perhaps in the company of the equally missing martin bormann head of the nazi party organization and hitler's personal secretary did mueller live on in paraguay or argentina supported by the shadowy odessa organization other rumors said that mueller fell into soviet hands and was used for his intelligence sources and networks until he outlived his usefulness what happened to the head the world's most infamous secret police force so let's first establish what the gestapo was its proper name was gehima stats bulitzai or secret state police created in 1933 by hermann goering the prime minister of prussia and later head of the air force the luftwaffe it was initially limited to prussia only merging all previous security police agencies into one umbrella organization in april 1934 himmler head of the ss gained oversight over the gestapo it became a nationwide organization and subordinated to the security police the zepo alongside the criminal police just after the war began in september 1939 the gestapo was administered by the reich maine security office a new organization headed by ss general reinhard haidloch the gestapo was officially department 4 of the rsha and its sister organization was the sd the zika heidsdenst the ss security service the gestapo had multiple roles before the war it investigated treason espionage sabotage and criminal attacks on both the nazi party and germany after 1936 it operated without judicial review meaning it was above the law in september 1939 with the gestapo's merger into the new rsha under heydrich heinrich mueller was appointed head of the gestapo responsible directly to hydrush mueller remained gestapo head until the end of the war his direct subordinate was lieutenant colonel adolf eichmann who became head of the office of jewish affairs organizing the mass deportations of european jews to the concentration camps the gestapo spread its influence across occupied europe and its department d was responsible for security operations against resistance groups allied spy networks pow escape organizations and the roundups of jews and other enemies of the state its personnel were uniformed depending on their jobs and roles with many agents wearing civilian clothing most famously the long black leather trench coat and fedora hat the gestapo was not ss but subordinated to it although their uniform resembled the ss but without the lightning runes on the right colour patch and they also wore police pattern shoulder boards many officers were nonetheless honorary ss officers as well on the left sleeve was a diamond with the letters sd for zika heightsteinst so who was hainuish muller mueller was a smallish dapper man with piercing gray blue eyes if the devil manufactured administrators then mueller would have been the show model ruthless and efficient mueller even unsettled senior ss officers with his quiet presence one ss general who was investigated by him recalling quote my first impression of him was one of cold curiosity and extreme reserve unquote mueller was an extremely able organizer and a man driven by his work and not the ideology that underpinned it in fact mueller had been a serious opponent of nazism who ironically ended up commanding nazi germany's most feared police organization born into a lower middle class police officials family in bavaria in 1900 mueller had been an apprentice aircraft technician until world war one broke out during the war he became a highly decorated pilot of artillery observation planes on the western front being awarded the iron cross first and second class in 1919 he joined the munich police rising swiftly through the ranks to become head of the political police department in this capacity he vigorously suppressed communists whom he personally loathed and was none too enamored with nazis either describing hitler as quote that unemployed house painter unquote and quote austrian draftdodger unquote how then did someone like mueller end up working for the nazis the answer is pragmatism not his but that of reinhard haidouch himmler's number two after the nazis came to power in january 1933 haidrish invited mueller to work for him in the fledgling gestapo haidoish recognized that someone of mueller's ruthlessness and capacity for work as well as his professional police background was essential the move was very unpopular with many nazis but haidersh got his way by november 1941 mueller was an ss gruppenfuhrer or general and a lieutenant general of police he remained divorced from ideology simply carrying out state policy to the best of his abilities the coldly efficient administrator of the gestapo following heydrich's assassination in 1942 mueller's new boss at the rsha was dr ernst kaltenbrunner a tall scarfaced austrian mueller attended the infamous 1943 vansay conference to decide the final solution to the jewish question he also investigated the assassination attempt on hitler's life of the 20th of july 1944 that resulted in a huge roundup in many trials and executions he remained faithfully at his post until the end of the regime gestapo headquarters was located at number eight prinz albrecht strasse in central berlin within the rsha building this building had been badly damaged in an allied air raid in january 1945 destroying all of the extensive library of files held within mueller and the senior gestapo leadership then operated from other premises until the direct soviet attack on berlin forced them into bunkers in the city centre mueller was present in hitler's bunker during the last days of the battle while his boss dr kaltenbrunner had already fled to the austrian tyrol to hide out in the mountains mueller evidently realized that the end of the war was close when he said to another bunker occupant who survived the war quote we know the russian methods exactly i haven't the faintest intention of being taken prisoner by the russians unquote but he nonetheless remained in the furore bunker until the very end when himmler's liaison officer at fuhrer headquarters ss gruppenfuhrer hermann feigerline attempted to abscond after hitler discovered that himmler was secretly negotiating to surrender germany to the western allies behind his back mueller was directed to interrogate fagaline when he was recaptured in a drunken state on the 27th of april 1945. fagaline was shot the next day it appears that with kaltenbrunner's disappearance mueller assumed temporary command of the rsha as well was this why he still hung around in berlin because of the collection of more power one of hitler's secretaries troudour junger and the bunker telephonist ss obashafira rokos mish both said after the war that they had seen mueller in the furobanka or nearby reich chancellery basement on the 30th of april the day that hitler committed suicide mueller was still in his full ss general's uniform mueller was last positively identified in the furore bunker on the evening of the 1st of may 1945 as the occupants prepared to make breakout attempts on foot to reach the american front line west of encircled berlin it seems that mueller did not join any of the several breakout groups that left the bunker that night he simply disappeared without trace obviously the head of the gestapo was a hunted war criminal from the end of the war and would also have been a valuable asset for any of the allied intelligence agencies if they could have apprehended him alive in the two years after the war a joint anglo-american espionage organization called the intelligence war room hunted for information about the fate of mueller in interrogated senior rsha officers all the other rsha officials it hunted were caught all except mueller the british and americans concluded that mueller had not fled to the southern alps like kaltenbrunner and many other senior ss but had remained in berlin to the end one of the problems faced was mueller's name heinrich mueller is a very common german name in fact there was even another ss general with the exact same name one story to emerge was that mueller had changed his name to schwarz or schwarzer and fled south from berlin with a gestapo official called christian schultz but neither man could be found interestingly mueller had last been seen in the upper bunker talking to schultz on the 1st of may 1945. in 1947 mueller's mistress anna schmidt was questioned and her home searched twice nothing no clues as to mueller's fate u.s intelligence concluded that mueller was dead but the plot thickened ss brigada fuhrer walter schellenberg himmler's chief spy who cooperated with allied intelligence during the nuremberg trials reported in 1950 that a german officer he had met who had been held as a prisoner in the soviet union had seen mueller in prison in moscow in 1948. this unnamed german claimed mueller died in captivity shortly afterwards but schellenberg's story could not be corroborated and schellenberg himself died of cancer shortly afterwards with adolf eichmann's dramatic kidnapping from argentina by israeli intelligence in 1960 the hunt for mueller's fate was revived many people believed mueller was still alive somewhere in south america the west german authorities were investigating leads they didn't subscribe to the theory that mueller had been working for the soviets since 1945. they closely watched mueller's relatives and his former secretary his former mistress told west german investigators that she had last seen mueller on the 24th of april 1945 he had given her a vial of cyanide as a parting gift interestingly it had been noted that mueller had not joined one of the breakout groups from the fura bunker on the night of the 1st of may one witness said that mueller had refused saying quote the regime has fallen and i fall also unquote he was as i said last positively seen in the company of gestapo radio specialist christian schultz whose own body was also never found or at least identified suggesting perhaps that mueller and schultz left the bunker together that night however the west german investigators had three potential sources that could explain mueller's fate the first was the testimony of fritz leopold who in 1945 had been a berlin morgue official he had made a report in december 1945 that mueller's body had been recovered from the bomb damaged rsha headquarters building on prince albrecht strasse after the battle of berlin a distance of only one kilometer from hitler's bunker and along with many others ordered buried by the soviets in a grave in a cemetery on lilian strasse in the west of berlin leopold said that identity papers in the name of heinrich mueller had been found on the body the west germans dismissed leopold as unreliable though the burial was registered with berlin authorities and incredibly a headstone was placed on it by mueller's children the second source was senior gestapo officer heinz panvits turned over to the soviets by the americans after he was captured in austria at the end of the war panvits came home from moscow in 1957. he told the west german intelligence agency that the soviets had told him that mueller was dead they had found mueller's body in may 1945 in a subway entrance a few blocks from the reich chancellery he had shot himself through the head soviet investigators had found mueller's identity papers on the corpse the last source of information came from avogster or home guard soldier named walter ludas he said that in may 1945 he had been in charge of a burial unit ordered by the soviets to clear up bodies around the ruined reich chancellery area ludas said one body had stood out it wore an ss general's uniform though the uniform carried no medals or decorations it did have identity papers in the name of heinrich mueller the body was later moved to a cemetery in the soviet sector of berlin and interred in a mass grave in 1955 the german armed forces information office had made a request to the east german authorities about information concerning mueller and an official confirmed that gestapo muller had been buried in east berlin in a mass grave but of course corroboration was impossible and also the source was communist and therefore suspicious in the eyes of the west being thorough the west germans first checked out the fritz leopold story there being an actual grave with a headstone in 1963 an exhumation order was made but when the grave was excavated the remains of three people were found not one and none of the bones matched mueller's height or build the other two stories those of panvets and looters could not be corroborated luda's alleged grave formula was on the wrong side of the berlin wall next the cia became involved in 1961 richard golinevsky a senior polish intelligence officer defected to the west he revealed several moles in western military intelligence he said in 1948-52 that he had been an interrogator of captured nazi officials in poland he claimed that the kgb had captured mueller sometime in the early 1950s and taken him to moscow this contradicted panvitza's testimony the soviets having told him that mueller had died in berlin in may 1945. it also went against schellenberg's story that had mueller dying in moscow in 1948 the cia tried to find more evidence the israelis too were hunting formula in 1967 two of their agents were caught by west german police breaking into mueller's wife's munich apartment plenty of disinformation came from behind the iron curtain as well further muddying the search for mueller the cia investigation ended in december 1971 no closer to an answer however in 2008 german historian peter longerich published a biography of heinrich himmler claiming that mueller was in fact with himmler at flensburg on the 11th of may 1945. during grand admiral carl dernice's rump nazi government in northern germany dernitz who was hitler's nominated successor managed to run a small enclave in northern germany as a nazi state for a few weeks after the surrender of germany itself the story of this strange state of affairs is covered in another of my videos see the end screen for a link professor longuric stated that mueller accompanied himmler during his final attempt to head south from flensburg through british lines to southern germany that resulted in himless capture and later suspicious death in british hands mueller he claimed left himmler's party at the town of mainstat and subsequently disappeared however longerik doesn't say where this information came from and has no explanation for how mueller managed to get out of berlin on the 1st to 2nd of may 1945 when nearly all the other furo bunker personnel failed to achieve this and were captured by the soviets or killed themselves attempting to escape in 2013 according to newspapers mueller's fate was apparently solved german professor johannes tukel claimed that mueller's body was found in may 1945 identified by papers on the body and first buried in the garden of the air ministry a complex of buildings a stone's throw from the old gestapo headquarters this body was then transferred to another cemetery in august 1945 and buried in a mass grave where it lies today the source for this information the two aforementioned germans who were members of burial parties clearing up bodies around the reich chancellery area in may 1945. tukel discovered some old archival documents to support the stories this body is interred with two thousand seven hundred others in one of sixteen mass graves where berlin's old jewish cemetery the same place the east german authorities confirmed to the west germans in writing in 1955 as hainush muller's burial place could it be that the feared head of the gestapo and the man who administered the holocaust now lies in a jewish cemetery we may never know as exumation is forbidden by jewish religious laws we can based on the scanty evidence available suggest two possible solutions to the mystery of what happened to heinous muller there is circumstantial evidence that mueller indeed died in berlin on the 1st or 2nd of may 1945. a body dressed in an ss general's uniform which mueller was still wearing when he was last seen alive was identified at least twice if not three times if one believes falter schellenberg's story each time by low-ranking personnel who would not have known who mueller was each time identity papers were found the location for one sighting was close to or in the ruins of mueller's old headquarters the other two identifications placed the corpse in the vicinity of the building in the reich chancellery's area i've walked the route myself the distance from the fura bunker to where gestapo headquarters once stood is about one kilometer a walk of around 13 minutes under safe modern conditions muller was last seen with one of his senior officials schultz in the furabanka on the night of the 1st of may 1945 when the other bunker personnel broke out obviously mueller could not have brought civilian clothes and other escape paraphernalia into the furo bunker here manfeigerline whom he had interrogated had been shot for attempting such an escape where better to have an escape kit money mobile wealth etc stashed than his old headquarters building just one kilometer away we could theorize that mueller left the fiora bunker on the night of the 1st of may perhaps in company with schultz and headed for gestapo headquarters on prince albrecht strasse on the way he removed his decorations and metal ribbon bar from his uniform perhaps to take them with him into hiding the uniform itself to be ditched but something happened that compelled mueller to kill himself before he changed out of his uniform perhaps red army troops were close by in the ruins and he feared imminent capture something he was not prepared to accept as he had said did he in fact shoot himself like gestapo official panvits reported the soviets saying to him or perhaps take poison we know mueller had cyanide on his person because he gave a vial of it to his girlfriend on the 24th of april all the senior nazis were carrying poison at this stage at the end of the war the other two reports of mueller's body do not mention a visible cause of death suggesting cyanide poisoning the spot where the body was reported to have been temporarily buried the air ministry garden is just down the street from gestapo headquarters in fact it's closer to gestapo headquarters than to the fuhrer bunker so what happened to his medals perhaps they were taken as souvenirs by red army troops or kept by the german burial detail as they had some value one report has them being returned anonymously to mueller's family after the war but this is impossible to corroborate in this scenario the failure of anyone to find christian schultz after the war suggests that he died with mueller and his body too ended up in the old jewish cemetery mass burials there are two points to raise about this scenario firstly on the 1st of may red army forces had captured gestapo headquarters and the air ministry building along with most of the area around the reich chancellery the german troops did continue to hold out in many pockets of territory and individual buildings in the area as well as the u-bahn underground railway system slipping through the chaos of combat and burning buildings to reach the area of gestapo headquarters would not have been impossible in the fluidity of street fighting and at night the soviets planned to assault the reich chancery on the 2nd of may and by then the fury bunker occupants plan to be long gone one point about the scenario that i've outlined raises the possibility that the body in the ss general's uniform was a plant what better way to cover your tracks and prevent anyone looking for you than to have apparently died due to mueller's great power even in the dying days of nazi germany he could have fairly easily had his minions procure a corpse of the same approximate height age and weight and had it dressed in one of his uniforms and dumped close to his headquarters to ensure it would be found identification aided by a set of mules papers conveniently placed in the pocket this might explain why mueller was wearing his decorations and metal ribbons the last time he was seen in the bunker on the 1st of may but they were missing from the tunic of the corpse identified as mueller a few days later when tunics had cleaned decorations were removed and pinned to the uniform that was to be worn that day by his orderly did someone take one of mueller's spare clean uniforms from his baggage to adorn the corpse but didn't replicate the decorations because mueller was still wearing them until the last minute it may sound like something out of a jack higgins novel but affecting a body's switch would not have been difficult a further point is that the corpse's head was intact no effort had been made to destroy the facial features or dentition which probably would have drawn more suspicion to the corpse than if it had been left intact in the street with the identification papers you have to remember that a battle was still raging in central berlin the soviets had yet to capture the furore bunker and the reich chancellery and the shmirch county intelligence detachment was searching primarily for hitler and other very senior nazis such as martin bormann and joseph goebbels the soviet priority was to locate the most senior nazis bodies or at least to explain what had become of them was of course two rungs down the food chain from himmler and hitler the second scenario is mueller's successful escape from berlin on the 1st to 2nd of may 1945 a feat accomplished by few from the fiora bunker only with great luck and daring did hitler youth leader artur axman managed to get through the soviet lines to the u.s zone of course mueller as head of the gestapo had access to enormous resources and great numbers of people to ensure his escape but the fact of his hanging around in berlin to the bitter end while his boss and many of his subordinates actually fled in good time into hiding in austria and elsewhere suggests mueller was caught off guard by the sudden speed of the soviet encirclement of the city and the collapse of german resistance if mueller did get away neither hide nor hair of him was ever heard from again investigations by u.s british israeli and german intelligence organizations never found a single piece of credible evidence that he lived after the 1st of may 1945 but with someone as wily and organized as heinrich mueller never say never an outsider to the nazi establishment for his whole career he would have had little desire to socialize with ideological nazis in hiding in south america perhaps he lived out the last year's somewhere incomplete anonymity as we can't dig up 2 700 bodies at the old jewish cemetery define mueller and positively identify him with dna we are left with little but intelligent guesswork and supposition in this intriguing mystery one final word about hainuish muller he and reinhard haidlish often played chess together and hailesh commented that mueller nearly always won that should tell you something [Music] thanks for watching please subscribe and share and also visit my audiobook channel war stories with mark felton you can also help to support both of my channels at paypal and patreon which is very much appreciated please see the 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Channel: Mark Felton Productions

Views: 799,415

Rating: 4.9280233 out of 5

Keywords: Mark Felton Productions, Gestapo Mueller, Heinrich Müller, Battle of Berlin, Martin Bormann

Id: j--Ci3d9RWU

Length: 28min 13sec (1693 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 06 2020