Heinrich Müller (28 April 1900; date of death unknown, but evidence points to May 1945) was a high-ranking German Schutzstaffel (SS) and police official during the Nazi era. For most of World War II in Europe, he was the chief of the Gestapo, the secret state police of Nazi Germany. Müller was central in the planning and execution of the Holocaust and attended the January 1942 Wannsee Conference, which formalised plans for the deportation and genocide of all Jews in German-occupied Europe—otherwise known as the "Final Solution to the Jewish question". He was referenced as "Gestapo Müller" to distinguish him from another SS general named Heinrich Müller.
He was last seen at the Reich Chancellery in Berlin on 1 May 1945 and remains the most senior figure of the Nazi regime who was never captured or confirmed to have died.
Early life and career Müller was born in Munich on 28 April 1900 to Catholic parents. His father had been a rural police official. Müller attended a Volksschule and completed an apprenticeship as an aircraft mechanic before the outbreak of the First World War. During the last year of the war, he served in the Luftstreitkräfte as a pilot for an artillery spotting unit. He was decorated several times for bravery (including the Iron Cross 1st and 2nd class, Bavarian Military Merit Cross 2nd Class with Swords and Bavarian Pilots Badge). After the war ended, he joined the Bavarian Police in 1919 as an auxiliary worker. Although not a member of the Freikorps, he was involved in the suppression of the communist risings in the early post-war years. After witnessing the shooting of hostages by the revolutionary "Red Army" in Munich during the Bavarian Soviet Republic, he acquired a lifelong hatred of communism. During the years of the Weimar Republic he was head of the Munich Political Police Department, having risen quickly through the ranks due to his spirited efforts.
SS career It was while serving in a police capacity in Munich that Müller first became acquainted with many members of the Nazi Party (NSDAP) including Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich, although during the Weimar period he supported the Bavarian People's Party. On 9 March 1933, during the Nazi putsch that deposed the Bavarian government of Minister-President Heinrich Held, Müller advocated using force against the Nazis to his superiors. Ironically, these views aided Müller's rise as it guaranteed the hostility of the Nazis, thereby making Müller very dependent upon the patronage of Reinhard Heydrich, who in turn appreciated Müller's professionalism and skill as a policeman, and was aware of Müller's past. Once the Nazis seized power, Müller's knowledge of communist activities placed him in high demand; as a result he was promoted to Polizeiobersekretär in May 1933 and again to Criminal Inspector in November 1933. Historian Richard J. Evans wrote that: Müller was a stickler for duty and discipline, and approached the tasks he was set as if they were military commands. A true workaholic who never took a vacation, Müller was determined to serve the German state, irrespective of what political form it took, and believed it was everyone's duty, including his own, to obey its dictates without question.
Evans also records that Müller was a regime functionary out of ambition, not out of a belief in National Socialism, indicated by an internal Nazi memorandum whose authors inquired how "so odious an opponent of the movement" could become head of the Gestapo, especially since he had once referred to Hitler as "an immigrant unemployed house painter" and "an Austrian draft-dodger". Nazi jurist and former police chief, SS-Obergruppenführer Werner Best opined Müller represented one of the "finest examples" of the limited connection between members of the NSDAP and the police before 1933.
After the Nazis came to power in 1933, Heydrich, as head of the Security Service (SD), recruited Müller, Franz Josef Huber and Josef Albert Meisinger, who were collectively referred to as the "Bajuwaren-Brigade" (Bavarian Brigade). Müller joined the Schutzstaffel (SS) in 1934. By 1936, with Heydrich head of the Gestapo, Müller was its operations chief. On 4 January 1937, an evaluation by the Nazi Party's Deputy Gauleiter of Munich-Upper Bavaria stated:
This assessment did not deter Heydrich from moving Müller along the ranks, particularly since Heydrich believed it was an advantage not to be bound to the influence of the Nazi Party. Functionaries like Müller were the sort of men Heydrich preferred since they were inherently committed to their "area of responsibility" and correspondingly justified any steps they deemed necessary against perceived enemies of the Nazi "racial community." Müller was promoted to the rank of Standartenführer (colonel) in 1937. Engrossing himself often in red-tape and statistics, Müller was a natural administrator who took solace in a "world of notes, memos, and regulations" and then received and transformed Gestapo reports of denouncements, torture, and secret executions into "administrative fodder." Despite the expense of so much mental energy in carrying out his duties, Müller disliked the scholarly types and once told Walter Schellenberg that "intellectuals should be sent down a coal mine and blown up."
British author and translator Edward Crankshaw described Müller as "the arch-type non-political functionary" who was "in love with personal power and dedicated to the service of authority, the State." General Walter Dornberger, the chief over the rocket research at Peenemünde, (under alleged Gestapo suspicion) was one of the few to ever interview with Müller and characterized him as "the unobtrusive type of police official who leaves no personal impression on the memory", but added that "all I could remember was a pair of piercing grey-blue eyes, fixed on me with an unwavering scrutiny. My first impression was one of cold curiosity and extreme reserve." American journalist and war correspondent William L. Shirer called Müller "a dapper-looking fellow" but shortly thereafter described him as "a cold, dispassionate killer".
Himmler biographer Peter Padfield wrote: "he [Müller] was an archetypal middle rank official: of limited imagination, non-political, non-ideological, his only fanaticism lay in an inner drive to perfection in his profession and in his duty to the state—which in his mind were one ... A smallish man with piercing eyes and thin lips, he was an able organiser, utterly ruthless, a man who lived for his work." Such was his dedication to the job that Auschwitz Commandant Rudolf Höss claimed one could reach Müller "any time of the day or night, even Sundays and public holidays."
He was made Inspekteur der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD for all of Austria following the 1938 Anschluss, while his close friend Franz Josef Huber took charge of the Gestapo office in Vienna. One of Müller's first major acts occurred during the unprecedented Kristallnacht pogrom of 9–10 November 1938, when he ordered the arrest of between 20,000 and 30,000 Jews. Heydrich also tasked Müller during the summer of 1939 to create a centrally organized agency to deal with the eventual emigration of the Jews. Müller became a member of the Nazi Party in 1939 for the purely opportunist reason of improving his chances of promotion and only after Himmler insisted he do it. Indeed, according to Walter Schellenberg, in a 1943 conversation Müller lauded the Stalinist system as superior to Nazism, which he believed compromised on too much. Schellenberg even alleged when Müller compared Stalin against Hitler, his (Müller's) opinion was that Stalin did things better. According to other sources, Müller was notorious in Nazi circles for admiring the Soviet police.
While the chief of the subsequent Reich Central Office for Jewish Emigration was indeed Heydrich, it was Müller who took care of the office's administrative details. Shortly thereafter, Müller took charge of this office but then handed control over to Adolf Eichmann. Once the war began, the possibility of Jewish emigration ended and caused the office's dissolution.
Gestapo chief
In September 1939, when the Gestapo and other police organizations were consolidated under Heydrich into the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), Müller was made chief of the RSHA "Amt IV" (Office or Dept. 4): Gestapo. To distinguish him from another SS general named Heinrich Müller, he was referred to as "Gestapo Müller".
As Gestapo chief of operations and later (September 1939 forward) head of the organization, Müller played a leading role in the detection and suppression of all forms of resistance to the Nazi regime. Trusted by both Heydrich and Himmler, Müller was pivotal in making the Gestapo the "central executive organ of National Socialist terror" according to historians Carsten Dams and Michael Stolle. Under his leadership, the Gestapo succeeded in infiltrating and to a large extent, destroying groups opposed to the Nazis, such as the underground networks of the left-wing Social Democratic Party and Communist Party. Along these lines, historian George C. Browder asserts that Müller's "expertise and his ardent hate for Communism guaranteed his future".
When Hitler and his army chiefs asked for a pretext for the invasion of Poland in 1939, Himmler, Heydrich, and Müller masterminded and carried out a false flag project code-named Operation Himmler. During one of the operations, the clandestine mission to a German radio station on the Polish border, Müller helped collect a dozen or so condemned men from camps, who were then dressed in Polish uniforms. In exchange for their participation, the men were told by Müller that "they would be pardoned and released." Instead, the men were given a lethal injection and gunshot wounds to make them appear to have been killed in action during a fake attack. These incidents (particularly the staged attack on the Gleiwitz radio station) were then used in Nazi propaganda to justify the invasion of Poland, the opening event of World War II.
Thereafter, Müller continued to rise quickly through the ranks of the SS: in October 1939 he became an SS-Oberführer, in November 1941 – Gruppenführer and Lieutenant General of the police. During the Second World War, Müller was heavily involved in espionage and counter-espionage, particularly since the Nazi regime increasingly distrusted the military intelligence service—the Abwehr—which under Admiral Wilhelm Canaris was a hotbed of activity for the German Resistance. In 1942 he successfully infiltrated the "Red Orchestra" network of Soviet spies and used it to feed false information to the Soviet intelligence services.