5 – Heinrich Müller
Karadzic was not alone in escaping on charges of war crimes. Some of the most infamous of disappeared criminals of the 20th century was those fleeing justice after atrocities in wartime and among those, few have provoked such intrigue and speculation as Heinrich Müller. He would last be sighted in the Führerbunker in 1945 and never seen again, with no body confirmed and no traces ever found. That such a prominent figure could have escaped without a trace is unthinkable, and has provoked a whole raft of conspiracy theories that continue to be debated to this day.
Some would allege that he has never been found because there was nothing to find, that he died along with so many others in the ruins of Berlin as the Soviet troops arrived, while others would claim that he got out and followed the famed rat lines that lead to South America, where he lived in relative comfort under an assumed name and a false identity. A third, altogether more intriguing theory holds that he was captured by the Allies at the end of the war, but possessed so much information that he was repurposed and reused by them to help fight the nascent Cold War. From the 1st of May 1945 until the present day, the arguments rage and the subject is notable by his absence.
Let us first backtrack and discuss Heinrich Müller, the man. That he was one of the most senior members of the Nazi regime is unquestionable – he was in the Führerbunker after all, where only the closest to Hitler were allowed – and his friendships with the likes of Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich went back to the very origins of National Socialism. He was noted even among the virulently anti-communist Nazi Party for his hatred of leftists: he had witnessed executions committed by the short-lived Bavarian Soviet in 1919 and subsequently dedicated his life to fighting what he saw as Red Terror.
That led him into the Munich police, and when the Nazis came to power in 1933, he was quick to come to prominence. He was not necessarily the biggest Nazi – many questioned his commitment to the cause and Müller did not become a party member until 1939 – but few could quibble with his discipline, adherence to rules and in-depth knowledge of the left-wing opposition that the new regime under Hitler wanted to viciously crush. Indeed, he only ever joined the party for career reasons, after Himmler personally told him that he could not be promoted without party membership. Müller was a copper to the core, a stickler for rules and a lover of the administration and paperwork that went into enforcing the rules. When the Nazi rules became increasingly strict and arbitrary, he was only too happy to go along.
Not that a lack of Nazi Party membership had stopped Müller from committing atrocities. Even before the war began, he had been part of the state-sponsored Kristallnacht pogrom that led to the arrest of over 20,000 Jews, while he also worked in Eichmann’s office for Jewish Emigration, overseeing the deportation of thousands from Germany. In 1939 he took over the newly reconstituted Gestapo, taking on the name Gestapo Müller to avoid confusion with another high-ranking SS-man of the same name. As the war took hold, Müller was increasingly tasked with intelligence and counterintelligence across all of the lands that Germany conquered, as well as taking a leading role in the organization of the Holocaust. While Eichmann – another who long evaded capture after the war – would become associated with the “banality of evil” in relation to the murder of Jews, he often reported directly to Heinrich Müller. Among his other jobs of note during the war were the investigation of the murder of Reinhard Heydrich in Prague (Heydrich having been his political patron and friend of many years) as well as finding those who attempted to assassinate Hitler in the latter stages of the conflict.
As the Soviet tentacles began to encircle Berlin, Müller and his ilk retreated deeper and deeper into the center of the city and relations became more fraught. Müller in particular was terrified: he had sadistically executed many Soviet spies and prisoners of war and was well aware of what was in store for him, were he captured. A fellow high-ranking Nazi, Hitler’s personal pilot Hans Baur, later recounted a conversation in which Müller stated: “We know the Russian methods exactly. I haven’t the faintest intention of being taken prisoner by the Russians.”. As that situation became more and more likely, the Gestapo head went to the ground. He was last seen alive on May 1, the day of Hitler’s suicide. With Berlin in ruins and the Nazi regime in tatters, it was every man for himself. Whether Müller ever made it out is unknown, but it has never stopped speculation and sightings.
The various theories that support the idea that he survived have some credence. Firstly, his name was very much in his favor. Heinrich Müller is one of the most common names in Germany – as mentioned, there was another leading SS general also called Heinrich Müller – and a body with that name would have been wholly unremarkable. A middle-aged man with an ID card in that name would have been hardly remarkable either, and a nightmare to chase back to the Gestapo head. Were he identified, it certainly would have been possible for his capturers to keep him for their own gain rather than declare who he was. Müller was a treasure trove of information about other high-ranking Nazis, an overseer of countless foreign spies and a man with intimate knowledge of how the regime operated, while also being widely regarded as partially disloyal to the regime. Anyone who held him would have had plenty of reasons to use him for their own ends.
The search for Müller has been continuous since the end of the war. Around the time that Adolf Eichmann was captured in Argentina and put on trial in Israel, many suspected that his former boss had made the same trip. Eichmann himself stated that he thought Müller to still be alive. The Americans had a file on him well into the 2000s, and a Freedom of Information request lead to several snippets being released to the public that told of attempts made by the CIA among others to find him, clearly a sign that they thought he had survived the Battle of Berlin. The British also organized their own searches, motivated by the so-called Stalag III murders, committed under Müller’s command and later immortalized in the film The Great Escape. None, however, were ever able to find out anything about him. With Müller now surely dead, the mystery remains and will likely remain forever.
Also Read: These Nazi War Criminals Escaped Justice Because They Were Useful to the US.
