http://thescotsman.co.uk/world.cfm?id=51563
CIA documents may reveal that top Nazi was recruited as US spy
Allan Hall in Berlin and Tim Cornwell
‘Why would they keep documents secret so many years after, and still play
games?’
THE planned release this month of CIA "personality" files on top Nazi
figures, including Adolf Hitler, has fuelled new speculation about the
mysterious fate of "Gestapo Müller".
The Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller was one of the key architects of the Final
Solution. He was also accused in the executions of 50 British and colonial
air force officers who joined a mass escape from a German POW camp.
Sentenced to death in absentia in a Nuremberg war crimes court, he
disappeared from the pages of the official history books, with the suggestion
that he died either in the last days of the war or shot himself a year later.
His last known whereabouts were in Hitler’s bunker - the day before the war
ended.
But documents showing that a Heinrich Müller was held in two post-war
internment camps run by US forces has fuelled new speculation that the
Gestapo boss was recruited as a US agent. Claims that a man who was listed as
a top wanted Nazi as late as 1987 cut a deal with US intelligence have
prompted demands for a new official investigation.
Historians, journalists, and Jewish groups in the US are eagerly awaiting the
release of 500 pages from a file on Müller held by the CIA, promised later
this month, along with files on more than 20 Nazi figures. The Nazi-hunting
Simon Wiesenthal Centre has demanded that the US government come clean with
everything it knows.
No one suggests that Müller, born 101 years ago, could still be alive. But 50
years on, the question of whether he played on his intelligence knowledge of
the Soviets to elude the clutches of allied prosecutors is still shrouded in
second-guessing and official secrecy.
The latest round of speculation over Müller’s fate was fuelled by a
documentary screened days ago in Germany.
It drew on US army intelligence files, declassified and released with little
fanfare more than a year ago, including index cards showing the Müller was in
custody first near the town of Ilmenau, Thuringia, and then in a second camp
in Altenstadt, Bavaria. The last record of his internment ends with the
sentence, "case closed 29 January 1946", but it is unclear what this refers
to.
Müller was one of just 15 people at the infamous Wannsee conference of 1942
where the final extermination of the Jews was planned. Official documents
demonstrate his personal enthusiasm for rounding up Jews, signing one order
for the delivery of 45,000 people to Auschwitz in 1943.
A loyalist to Hitler to the very end, Müller played a leading role in the
savage investigation and executions that followed the abortive July 1944 plot
to kill the Führer. But from early in his career, as he rose through the
ranks of the German police and then the SS, Müller had also specialised in
the surveillance of communists and leftists. It was that knowledge, it is
suggested, that may have made Müller an attractive asset to the Americans -
or to their Cold War enemies, the Soviets, who are also suspected of taking
him in.
Alleged post-war sightings reported of Müller run from Czechoslovakia to
South America. As late as 1987, he remained on the Simon Wiesenthal Centre’s
top ten wanted list of Nazi criminals.
Rabbi Marvin Hier, the centre’s founding head, has called for a full
investigation of what involvement, if any, the US had with Heinrich Müller.
He cites the fact that US intelligence helped convicted Nazi war criminal
Klaus Barbie escape to South America. Other leading Nazi figures were also
captured and released.
Rabbi Hier told The Scotsman that the CIA’s 500 pages on Müller, due to be
released later this month, may not prove anything. But "intelligence agencies
contribute to these fantastic theories by holding back this material instead
of releasing it", he said. Earlier documents released to the centre had
sections blacked out or removed, purportedly on intelligence grounds.
"Why in the world would they keep documents secret so many years after and
still ‘redact’ them and play games rather than say, take a look for
yourself?", Rabbi Hier asked.
The CIA’s Nazi files, Rabbi Hier noted, may be of interest for other reasons.
It has long been claimed, for example, that the Soviets had a high-level
agent inside Hitler’s immediate entourage.
One account says Müller killed himself and his family in 1946. But a grave in
Berlin where Müller’s relatives claimed he might have been buried was opened
up in the 1950s and found to contain the skeletons of two ordinary German
soldiers.
The German documentary cited the evidence of Peter Malkin, a Mossad agent who
was put on the trail of wanted Nazis in Europe in the 1960s. He told his
superiors that he saw Müller alive in Munich. "It was him, I would swear my
life on it," he said. When Mossad planned an Eichmann-style operation to
kidnap Müller, he was never seen at the same location again.
Under the US Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act of 1998, signed into law by
President Bill Clinton with the intent of laying bare any US involvement with
Nazi war criminals, some 2.5 million pages of records have been declassified
and released.
However, this month would bring some of the first releases from the files of
the Central Intelligence Agency, founded in 1947, and likely to include files
from two post-war agencies, the Strategic Services Unit and the Central
Intelligence Group, which it replaced.
Müller "was definitely a known war criminal", observes Greg Bradsher, with
the US National Archives, which has overseen the release of documents to
date.
"Anybody that was a member of the SS was detained automatically. He was
definitely detained, and he was definitely released in January 1946; the
question is why. On that same file there is a reference to him being an
expert in communism," Mr Bradsher said.
"On the surface, from the documents released so far, doesn’t make complete
sense," he said.
The army intelligence files indicated that Müller was not working for them;
that just left the CIA predecessor, the SSU, he said. "The other possibility,
and you can speculate for ever, is that we turned him over to the British or
the French."
