The Müller Washington Journals- 1948-1951: From Gestapo Chief to the CIA - Part 12

Edited  by Dr. Rainer Scholz

Editor’s Foreword

“The American Army even recruited and evacuated the head of the Gestapo, Heinrich Mueller. To prevent later accusations that the United States government was employing the notorious Mueller, the Americans used Gehlen’s organization to finance his work.”

 Joseph Trento, “The Secret History of the CIA” New York, 2001, p29  

The Müller Journals

Translation from the German by Ernst Gauss

                Since the publication of the first book on Heinrich Müller in 1995, the posture of the CIA has been to maintain a stony public silence. To private or official inquiries about the allegations that their agency employed not only the head of the Gestapo but many other top Third Reich intelligence officials, the CIA simply refused to discuss the matter stating, in private, that the author was probably mad and should not be encouraged by any means whatsoever.

 In September of 1996, Colonel James Critchfield, the retired head of the CIA-controlled Gehlen organization (that later became the official German Bundesnachrichtendienst or BND) wrote to the author, under the misapprehension that he had been a member of the CIA, and discussed his, and the CIA’s employment of Müller and others.  When Critchfield discovered that the author was not a former CIA agent, (the misrepresentation was deliberate but generated by others to embarrass Critchfield) he became vitriolic, demanding the return of his correspondence immediately and forbidding, under threat of vague Federal prosecution for violations of what he termed “national security,” any mention of Critchfield, the Gehlen Organization and their connection with Heinrich Müller.

Critchfield and his former employers, however, were fighting a losing battle as more and more bits of information concerning Gestapo Müller’s postwar employment began to leak out.

In June of 1998, the CIA became alarmed at the thought that the author was in possession of documents that could prove that the Gestapo Chief had been in their employ. There also existed photographs of Müller in the White House at an official function and photographed by the U.S. Army Signal Corps, American driver’s license information, military membership papers, including photo identification, family post war records and other pieces of distinctly unwelcome paperwork.

Since threats seemed to have no effect, the next round bordered on the slapstick and ended up costing the U.S. government several hundred thousand dollars but without any results whatsoever..

The first approach was made to the author by a Ted Landreth of Los Angeles. He put himself forward as a former news director at CBS who owned a small television production company and was deeply interested in doing a story on Müller’s U.S. government employment. In actuality, Landreth had once been a CBS News director but now was reduced to running a Los Angeles soup kitchen for street people, retired prostitutes and hungry winos. Projected very large sums of money as payment were lightly thrown about and eventually, Landreth met with the author upon several occasions.           

In spite of the fact that Heinrich Müller was a man whose files, in the author’s possession, showed him to be a major player in the German intelligence community, all Landreth was interested in was learning as much as he could about the Gestapo chief’s connections with the CIA.

Landreth advised the author that he and an unnamed “associate” had gone to Mainz, Germany, and opened negotiations with ZDF (Zweiten Deutschen Fernsehen), the State-owned television network. Landreth claimed he had met with top officials of ZDF and was prepared to work with them in producing what he called a “blockbuster” television exposé on the subject.

A reporter from TIME magazine, a friend of Landreth, informed the author that he would appear on the cover of that magazine and be “really world-famous!”

As if that stunning accolade were not enough, the second approach was made by a representative of ZDF, a certain Herr Holger Hillesheim, who was to be flown to the United States for a personal meeting with the author both in Washington and later in a suburb of Chicago where the author resides.

Before the arrival of the German ZDF representative, Landreth hastily prepared a contract, signed it and sent it by fax to the author for his immediate signature. It was a fairly brief document filled with a number of misused legal terminology scattered about but in his haste to obtain a signature, Landreth had made a number of typographical errors.

The author informed Landreth that certain alterations would have to be made, mostly, Landreth was assured, of a purely cosmetic nature.

Misspellings and grammatical errors were duly corrected and a few words altered.

The corrected copy was quickly faxed back to Landreth who immediately made all the changes requested and returned the document, signed by himself, to the author.

The contract stated that once the contract was signed, payment would be made and the contract would then be operative.

The funds, in a certified check, arrived and were deposited in the author’s bank.  Immediately after this, a frantic Landreth made numerous calls to determine if the money had arrived and, discovering that it had, then announced in a somewhat different tone of voice that he would be sending a courier to pick up all of the CIA postwar material.

Up to this point in time, the Los Angeles television producer cum soup kitchen executive had always been polite to the point of obsequiousness but now that he possessed a signed contract, which, he assumed, gave him control over the controversial and dangerous post war CIA documents, he became far more businesslike and even demanding.

When the subject of a courier being sent to obtain the CIA papers was broached, it was suggested, gently, to Mr. Landreth that perhaps he might be better served if he read over the contract signed by the author. His attention was specifically drawn to the clause discussing the documents in question.

Landreth initially read from his first copy of the contract but when it was pointed out to him that the operative document that the author had signed was the one to read, it took him some time to locate it.

Finally, he read the paragraph which stated that immediately upon the execution of the contract, the party of the second part, the author, “shall give to the party of the first part (Landreth) all of the below-listed documents.”  Thereupon followed a long list of CIA post-war documents pertaining specifically to Müller’s employment by that agency. He apparently was still reading from the initial copy and when his attention was specifically drawn to the final version of the contract, he became highly enraged. The improved version read…”may give to the party of the first part” and it had to be pointed out to the Harvard graduate that the word “may” is permissive.

He did not get the documents in question.

What the author neglected to inform him was that several months before, a friendly former CIC operative living in New York had passed along the information that the Landreth family were all CIA. His father, Edward, lived on the very wealthy upper east side of New York City and before he retired, had run the Sterling Chemical Company in Havana, Cuba. This company was a CIA front, and Landreth, Sr. was the CIA station chief in Havana. Also, a Landreth niece was still employed by the agency and Landreth himself had even more and stronger connections with Langley.

Forewarned is always forearmed and the author was guided accordingly.

In spite of these revelations, Landreth’s money was gratefully received, however, regardless from where it might have originated, probably from the privy purse of the CIA because Landreth was not a wealthy man and, in fact, soup kitchens in Los Angeles are not considered profitable ventures.

Mr. Landreth had absolutely no interest in any of the wartime Müller papers but shortly after regretting his grammatical alterations, he had a long conversation and, it later emerged, a long personal visit, with various government officials in Germany. As a direct result of this visit, the author was then approached by the German State Television network, the ZDF who expressed an eager hope that they could work with the author in preparing a script based on the papers of one Heinrich Müller. This was supposedly to be part of a series called “Hitler’s Helpers” that was being produced by the network.

The individual in charge of the Müller project was one Holger Hillesheim and he flew, along with his wife, to meet with the author at his home outside of Chicago in July of 1998.

Hillesheim was reasonably conversant in English but seemed to have absolutely no knowledge of the persona or activities of Heinrich Müller. Acting, as he said, on behalf of the Direction of ZDF, owned entirely by the German government, he was prepared to offer the sum of $30,000 in four equal payments of $7,500 each in return for any important documents prepared by Müller during his tenure as Chief of the Gestapo.

This offer was made in the presence of a number of other persons but when Hillesheim was able to speak to the author in private, he added, confidentially, that actually what ZDF wanted were the CIA papers which, he explained, would be the central point of their Müller documentary.

Would these be available? He understood that there had been an earlier problem with Mr. Landreth but it was now agreed that ZDF would take over where Landreth had left off.

The author advised Hillesheim that any and all documents would be available when a proper contract was prepared but until such an event occurred, he would be unable to permit Hillesheim to photo copy the CIA papers.

ZDF required a listing of Müller documents available for use and the author willingly obliged with a list of over 17,000 pages of wartime Gestapo documents available. There was no problem obtaining this listing because an extensive catalog  existed of such documents, located in the U.S. National Archives and supplied willingly by Robert Wolfe of that institution and this catalog was sitting on the author’s writing desk under a Lenbach portrait of Bismarck while Hillesheim was negotiating.

A list of twenty-five subjects was subsequently prepared from this index for the senior management of ZDF and duly faxed to them. Although many of the subjects had no bearing on Müller’s personal career, they were immediately accepted by the television entity, a contract was drawn up and signed by a Herr Hans-Joachim Hübner. In an accompanying letter, Herr Hübner stated “By the way, please discuss all matters of the material direct with Holger.”

It was interesting to note that the contract contained no mention of any postwar CIA documentation.

The Germans must have been satisfied because on August 11, 1998, the sum of $11,180.18 was forwarded to the author’s account in Paris. In return, Herr Hillesheim was sent 991 pages of the complete records of one Walter Schellenberg, 287 pages of  classified RSHA telegrams sent by Himmler, Müller, Schellenberg and Wolff from August 1941 through January 1943 and a 185 page report on the 1939 bomb attack on Hitler. All of these were on microfilm at the National Archives but since the Germans demanded paper copies, these had to be made from the microfilms.

In this shipment of interesting documentation  there were no CIA documents included, which would explain the fax from Hillesheim of September 21, 1998. Among other things, Hillesheim said: “Please don’t let us forget about the other things we talked when we met last time in Freeport. You promised to show me the originals of the M-material. Just me in person; no accompanying people, no photographs or anything else. We talked about the after-war photographs from you, from Mr. Bender, from the other guy. (These were pictures of Müller in America after 1948: Müller in a U.S. Army Colonel’s uniform; Müller at a White House function and an old driver’s license with a postwar picture of the former Gestapo chief.) We talked about the American name…why don’t you tell it to Bob Wolfe?’ (This was the new name the CIA had given Müller when he was sent to the United States.)

No such material was sent to  Hillesheim because it was not specified in the contract.

The author then called ZDF offices in Mainz, Germany about future shipments, and payments, but was informed that only Hillesheim could address this and further, that he was not actually an employee of ZDF but a contract worker.

Since the postwar Müller CIA papers were not forthcoming, the payments abruptly stopped.

On December 15, 1998, the author sent the following fax to Hillesheim:

‘To: Holger Hillesheim

 ZDF Historical Division

From: Gregory Douglas

Fax No.: 608 325-2316

Date: 15. XII 1998

 Dear Holger:

 I am forwarding to you via fax another selection of the documents you have contracted for.

With reference to my fax of 9. November last, the markings on these are not legible and should, therefore, prove not to present ZDF any trouble.

I have spoken with Mr. Wolfe about these and he has advised me that he no longer has any interest in this project, i.e., the ZDF documentary on Heinrich Müller.

I have had no answer to my last three faxes to you concerning these papers so I would greatly appreciate hearing from you as soon as possible about the following specific points:

1. DF has indicated that it wishes only copies of the microfilms and does not wish printed copies. Please confirm this as soon as possible by fax.

2. I have received from you the Federal Express Shipping Account number for ZDF. Am I still to use this number or does your company wish another form of transmittal. Please confirm this as soon as possible by fax.

3. There is a balance of $22,500 coming to me upon your receipt of these microfilms.

 I have already given you some microfilmed material and the current fax sending is a sample of some of the contracted documents.

       Will the payments be made in increments as we agreed and if so, please list each shipment of documents you require from the contract and in the order in which your firm wishes to receive it.

        Please note that although I have moved, my bank account has remained the same and I assume that payment will be made by direct wire as was the last payment.

         I would like to conclude this venture as soon as conveniently possible so I would request that you respond to my specific questions as set forth above in the text of this message.

         I will be traveling after the first of the year and would greatly like to have you expedite this at your earliest possible convenience.

                                                        Sincerely,”

                There was no answer to this fax and a subsequent telephone call to Hillesheim indicated that his phone had been disconnected. Another call to ZDF in Mainz disclosed that Hillesheim was no longer in the employ of ZDF and further, ZDF was no longer interested in either the author, any existing contract or documents he might have.

                Apparently, Hillesheim was only a temporary employee of ZDF and when the CIA papers were not forthcoming, because they were not included in the contract, the entire operation was disconnected and shut down.

 This, however, did not take ZDF off the hook on the contract and on November 1, 1999, a civil suit [1:99CVO2901] against ZDF and the Federal Republic of Germany was filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia by the author.

                ZDF and its controlling agency, the German government, were charged with fraud and breach of contract.

Up to this point in time, someone had paid out over $15,000 to the author in order to obtain the CIA papers and had received nothing concerning the CIA’s postwar employment of Müller, for their generosity with the U.S. taxpayer’s money.

Upon being served with papers, ZDF and its law firms fought back in the courts. Their basic contention was that as ZDF was an organ of the German government, it had sovereign immunity and could not be sued. This matter was thrashed out in the courts with the result that a court ruling was obtained stating that both ZDF and the German government were to be held liable for their actions and the case was permitted to proceed in the Federal court system.

Once this determination had been made, ZDF at once opened settlement negotiations with the plaintiff’s attorney. One stipulation was that the German government be dropped as a party defendant and the wrangling went on for a number of tedious years. Finally, an agreement was hammered out between the parties in which ZDF would pay the balance of the contract and all of the plaintiff’s legal fees in return for the balance of the documents listed in the contract.

The settlement fees were placed in escrow and the author then made 17,000 paper copies of all the documents requested, from the National Archive microfilms.

At one point in the negotiations, the question of authenticity arose and the author suggested that since most of the captured German records existed in copies in the American National Archives, it was to be agreed by both parties that if a document’s authenticity was questioned, its current existence in the National Archives would constitute proof of authenticity.

Since all of the documents in question existed on microfilm in the Archive findings, this was an entirely safe offer to make and apparently the defendants agreed with it because it was accepted and became a part of the settlement agreement.

The Germans received over 30 reams of printed document copies, which satisfied the settlement agreement.

These were certainly valuable historical documents and no one knows exactly what their final cost was but it would appear to be well in excess of a hundred thousand dollars, if various legal fees, transportation costs for several German experts, courier fees and other expenses were taken into account.

The microfilms involved in this project cost less than four hundred dollars to purchase as microfilm, the printing of the documents cost another two hundred and fifty and the shipping costs to Washington by UPS no more than a hundred.

At the end of these financial debacles the famous CIA post war employment papers still had not been neutralized and if the Agency had been behind the simplistic manipulations, they apparently had learned a very expensive lesson and no additional attempts were made to lure the author into further business ventures.

It should be fairly evident that if the CIA’s current  statements that, according to their long-held intelligence files, Müller must have died in 1945, are true, someone had spent a very large amount of taxpayer’s  money for nothing.

It is to be hoped that ZDF enjoyed their 17,000 page treasure trove of secret Third Reich documents as much as the author has enjoyed his pleasant new home in Normandy.

There is a saying that sums all of this up very cogently:

Do not teach grandmother to suck eggs.

The Official CIA Report on Heinrich Müller

April 27, 2001

Record Group 263: Records of the Central Intelligence Agency

Records of the Directorate of Operations

Analysis of the Name File of Heinrich Mueller

Prepared at the request of the Central Intelligence Agency by the following persons:

Timothy Naftali, Miller Center of Public Affairs, University of Virginia
Norman J.W. Goda, Ohio University
Richard Breitman, American University
Robert Wolfe, National Archives (ret.)

Introduction

The CIA file on Heinrich Mueller, chief of Hitler's Gestapo and a major Nazi war criminal, sheds important new light on U.S. and international efforts to find Mueller after his disappearance in May 1945. Though inconclusive on Mueller's ultimate fate, the file is very clear on one point. The Central Intelligence Agency and its predecessors did not know Mueller's whereabouts at any point after the war. In other words, the CIA was never in contact with Gestapo Mueller. (Comment: Since Müller and his Deputy, SS Colonel Willi Krichbaum, worked for the so-called Gehlen Org, commanded by the CIA’s James Critchfield, this statement is incorrect) To assist other scholars, the press, and the general public in making sense of this new information about the CIA's investigation of this controversial war criminal, the authors have drawn on other documents at the National Archives for this report.

Mueller and the Nazi Regime

Mueller was born in Munich on April 28, 1900. After serving as a pilot in World War I, he joined the police in Munich, soon acquiring a reputation as a skilled anti-communist investigator who did not feel bound by legal norms of police investigation. As such, he would draw the attention of Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich, leaders of Hitler's SS. Following Hitler's rise to power in 1933, Himmler and Heydrich consolidated German regional police units while creating a national political police, the Geheime Staatspolizei (Gestapo). (Comment: The Gestapo was not created by Heydrich. It existed during the Second Empire under Kaiser Wilhelm II)  Mueller entered the SS in 1934 and quickly rose through the ranks of that organization as a police official. In September 1939, when the Gestapo and other police organizations were consolidated into the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA), Mueller was made the Chief of RSHA Amt IV -- the Gestapo.

As Gestapo chief, Mueller oversaw the implementation of Hitler's policies against Jews and other groups deemed a threat to the state. The notorious Adolf Eichmann, who headed the Gestapo's Office of Resettlement and then its Office of Jewish Affairs, was Mueller's immediate subordinate. Once World War II began, Mueller and Eichmann planned key components in the deportation and then extermination of Europe's Jews. (Comment: Müller and his Gestapo had absolutely nothing to do with running the Concentration camps: They merely oversaw the transportation of persons to these camps. The Gestapo did have a presence in many of these camps but had nothing to do with the running of them)

Mueller was involved in other criminal affairs as well. He helped plan the phony Polish attack on Gleiwitz radio station in 1939 (used to justify Germany's attack on Poland). He signed the "Bullet Order" of March 1944 (authorizing the shooting of escaped prisoners of war) and authorized the torture of officers who had conspired to kill Hitler in July 1944. Mueller's zeal in countering the 20 July plot earned him the rare military decoration of the Knight's Cross to the War Service Cross with Swords in October 1944.

Mueller also managed security and counterespionage operations. His most spectacular counterespionage success was the development of a double-cross network that fed disinformation to the Soviet intelligence services between 1942 and 1945. Located in Berlin and a few other Western European capitals, this network had been extremely successful in sending sensitive political and military information to Moscow. Mueller's Gestapo team was able to capture a number of these agents and "turn" them. Codenamed Rote Kapelle (Red Orchestra), (Comment: The Rote Kapelle was most certainly not a Gestapo operation. This is the code name the Gestapo gave to a Soviet spy ring, operated out of Moscow.) this Gestapo operation was among the greatest Soviet intelligence setbacks of the war.(Comment: Where this information originated is not known. It is not in any of the accounts of the Rote Kapelle published since the end of the war and is certainly not in any official Gestapo, Abwehr or any other official German records of the period.)

Mueller and the End of the War

In the war's final year, it seems that Heinrich Mueller stubbornly believed in a Nazi victory. He told one of his top counterespionage case officers in December 1944 that the Ardennes offensive (known in the U.S. as the Battle of the Bulge) would result in the recapture of Paris.¹     (Comment: The sole and well-known goal of the Ardennes Offensive was to capture the port of Antwerp. Since the SS was heavily involved in the intelligence preparations for this operation, Müller would certainly have known this and it is doubtful in the extreme if he would have made such a statement to anyone)   Mueller also reportedly redoubled efforts to drive a wedge between the Soviets and the Western allies by using his double agents.

Not everyone was convinced of his sincerity. There were rumors among German intelligence officers that Mueller had himself been turned by the Soviets. Walter Schellenberg, chief of the RSHA's Foreign Intelligence Branch (Amt VI) and a bitter rival of Mueller, was the source of some of this speculation. When interrogated by OSS in 1945, Schellenberg claimed that Mueller had been in friendly radio contact with the Soviets, and Schellenberg's postwar memoirs contain verbatim exhortations from 1943 by Mueller on Stalin's superiority to Hitler as a leader.² SS-men close to Mueller considered such rumors unfounded and illogical. (Comment” Schellenberg’s “memoirs” published post-mortem, were forgeries by his wife and literary agent. Comments by Schellenberg about Müller in this book are very much a matter of fiction. ) Mueller's immediate superior Ernst Kaltenbrunner (Chief of the RSHA), later insisted under Allied interrogation that Mueller could never have embraced the Soviets. Similarly, Heinz Pannwitz, Mueller's Gestapo subordinate who ran Rote Kapelle, categorized the notion that Mueller had turned as "absolutely absurd" in a 1959 CIA interrogation.³

The First Search for Gestapo Mueller

Months before the fall of Berlin, Anglo-American counterespionage officers began their postwar planning. Under the combined leadership of British MI 5 and MI 6 and the X-2 (counterespionage) branch of the American Office of Strategic Services, the SHAEF G-2 Counter Intelligence (CI) War Room began operating in February 1945. Using Allied lists of Nazi intelligence officers, the War Room supervised the hunt for the remnants of Germany's military and police intelligence services. Initially, the chief concern of the officers of the CI War Room was that Nazi intelligence units would survive the war and, financed with looted assets, launch paramilitary operations in the Bavarian Alps. Intelligence reaching the War Room in the last months of the war did not mention Mueller as a possible leader of postwar Nazi operations, but given his command of the Gestapo, Mueller remained an important man to capture.(Comment: If there was no mention of Müller in these studies, how could he remain an important man to capture? Müller was a very private man and very little was known about him during the course of the Third Reich.)

On May 27, 1945 the Counter Intelligence War Room issued a statement about its priority targets for interrogations in what it called the German intelligence service. At the top of the list were Nazi intelligence officials involved in foreign intelligence (RSHA Amt VI). Next in priority were security police and SD units in occupied countries. Gestapo officials came farther down the target list. A War Room instruction to interrogators of captured RSHA officers listed the top missing persons: interrogators were to ask: "Where are: SCHELLENBERG, OHLENDORF, MUELLER, STEIMLE, SANDBERGER?"⁴ (All but Mueller were subsequently located and interrogated.) A War Room fortnightly report covering the period ending June 18, 1945 stated that no leading officials of the Gestapo had yet been arrested, and "it seems clear from most reports that Mueller remained in Berlin after the collapse."⁵ His fate was contrasted with that of other Gestapo personalities who fled south. A separate OSS X-2 (counterintelligence) report at the end of the month repeated that no highranking Gestapo officials had yet been captured and that Mueller had remained in Berlin.⁶

A War Room monthly summary in late July 1945 reported that Amt VI officials had largely surrendered, while most Amt IV (Gestapo) officials remained at large. Mueller's fate was still unknown: "Some of our evidence, though it is by no means conclusive, suggests that Mueller himself may have remained in Berlin until the last [while]… the greater part of Amt IV collected itself at Hof, near Munich, and at Salzburg and Innsbruck.⁷ A War Room intelligence arrest target list, dated August 21, commented about 'H. Mueller, head of the Gestapo': "Last reported Berlin, Apr. 1945."⁸ A later revision to the arrest target list reported the arrest of several Gestapo officials, including Walter Huppenkothen who was part of the Red Orchestra team. But not Heinrich Mueller.⁹

Ultimately the Allies would find many Heinrich Muellers in occupied Germany and Austria, but not the right one. Heinrich Mueller is a very common German name. By the end of 1945, American and British occupation forces had gathered information on numerous Heinrich Muellers, all of whom had different birth dates, physical characteristics and job histories. Documentation on some of them is included-one might say mistakenly jumbled together-in the "Gestapo" Mueller Army IRR file, which the National Archives released in 2000. Part of the problem for U.S. record-keepers stemmed from the fact that some of these Muellers, including Gestapo Mueller, did not appear to have middle names. An additional source of confusion was that there were two different SS-Generals named Heinrich Mueller. In at least one instance, an index card purporting to collate information on Gestapo Mueller, which was prepared by an American official after the war, actually contains two different birth dates, as well as data about a third man of the same name. A Heinrich Mueller was held briefly at the Altenstadt civilian internment camp in 1945.¹⁰ Another killed himself along with his wife and his children in April 1946.¹¹

Throughout this period the Counter Intelligence War Room functioned as the ULTRA/top secret collecting point for information about the locations of the Allies' top intelligence targets. Although the occupation forces had encountered quite a few men named Heinrich Mueller, the War Room's verdict was unambiguous: Gestapo Muller had not been found.

In the initial period after the Nazi surrender U.S. counterintelligence attempted to track down all leads to Mueller. Information reached U.S. army intelligence that Gestapo Mueller had taken the assumed name Schwartz or Schwartzer and had gone south from Berlin with another Gestapo official Christian A. Scholz. But no traces of either man were ever found.¹² In 1947, British and American authorities twice searched the home of Gestapo Mueller's mistress Anna Schmid for clues, but found nothing suggesting that Mueller was still alive. With the onset of the Cold War and the shift of resources to the Soviet target, the assumption took hold in U.S. intelligence that Gestapo Mueller was dead.¹³

The West German Investigation

The dramatic Israeli abduction of Mueller's subordinate Adolf Eichmann from Argentina in May 1960 created new interest in Nazi war criminals and particularly in Mueller. Imaginative theories that Mueller (along with Eichmann) had escaped Berlin and were still alive had been in the press for some time, as well as in the best selling memoir by Wilhelm Hoettl, himself a former SS officer.¹⁴ Eichmann himself helped to fan speculation about in Mueller, when during his Jerusalem trial, he voiced his belief that Mueller survived the war. Already in July 1960, the West German office in charge of the prosecution of war criminals [Zentralle Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen] charged local police authorities in Bavaria (Mueller's family still lived in Munich) and Berlin to investigate. The West Germans were skeptical that Mueller was working for the Soviets, but did think it possible that Mueller was corresponding from somewhere with his family or possibly with his former secretary Barbara Hellmuth. All of these West German citizens were closely watched, and in May 1961 the Bavarian police asked the U.S. occupation forces to put Mueller's relatives and Hellmuth under surveillance. West German police also searched the Berlin home of Anna Schmid, Mueller's former mistress, and spoke with her. Schmid told the West German investigators that she had not seen Mueller since 24 April 1945, when he gave her a vial of poison and then disappeared. Her own efforts to find him in the subsequent days and weeks had been fruitless.¹⁵

According to various witnesses interviewed by the West German police in 1961, the last time Mueller was seen alive was the evening of May 1, 1945, the day after Hitler's suicide. Several eyewitnesses placed Mueller at Hitler's Chancellery building that evening while recounting his refusal to leave with the breakout group that night. Hans Baur, Hitler's pilot and an old friend of Mueller's, recounts Mueller as saying, "We know the Russian methods exactly. I haven't the faintest intention of … being taken prisoner by the Russians." Another claimed that Mueller refused to leave with the rest of Hitler's entourage, and was overheard saying "the regime has fallen and…I fall also." He was last seen in the company of his radio specialist Christian A. Scholz.(Comment:Christian Scholz was not Müller’s radio specialist. Scholz, who was a personal friend, worked for the Luftwaffe Radio Interception unit at Wildpark-Werder and was with him just before he vanished.)  And while the bodies of others that remained that night were recovered and identified, no one in the final group witnessed the death of Mueller or Scholz.¹⁶

West German authorities pursued three major leads in an effort to confirm Mueller's death and burial in Berlin in 1945. First, there was the testimony of Fritz Leopold, a Berlin morgue official who had reported in December 1945 that Mueller's body was moved (along with many others) from the RSHA headquarters at Prinz Albrecht Strasse (2000 feet from the Chancellery) for reburial in a local municipal cemetery on Lilienthalstrasse (Berlin-Neukoelln) in the Western half of the city. Leopold was later deemed an unreliable source, but the burial was officially registered with the Berlin authorities and a headstone would be placed at Mueller's "grave" which read, "Our loving father Heinrich Mueller - Born 28 April 1900 - Died in Berlin May 1945." A second story came from Mueller's ex-subordinate Heinz Pannwitz, who had been captured by the Soviets and returned to West Germany in 1957, whereupon he told the German Secret Service [Bundesnachrichtendienst - BND] that his Soviet interrogators revealed to him that "your Chief [Mueller] is dead." The body, they said, had been found in a subway shaft a few blocks from the Chancellery with a bullet through the head and with its identity documents intact.¹⁷

The final story came from Walter Lueders, a former member of the German Volkssturm (civilian fighters) who maintained that he had headed a burial detail in the summer of 1945. Of the hundreds of bodies buried by the detail, only one, said Lueders, wore an SS-General's uniform, and it was found in the garden of the Reich Chancellery with a large wound in the back. Though the body had no medals or decorations, Lueders recalled with certainty that the identity papers were those of Gestapo Mueller. It was moved to the old Jewish Cemetery on Grosse Hamburgerstasse in the Soviet Sector, where it was placed in one of three mass graves. In fact, in 1955 the German Armed Forces Information Office (Wehrmachtsauskunftsstelle - WASt) inquired with district authorities in East Berlin and received confirmation that Gestapo Mueller was buried at the Grosse-Hamburgerstrasse cemetery in 1945. Since the grave was a mass grave, however, there was no actual plot.

The Fritz Leopold story was checked first, and in September 1963, the Mueller "grave" at the Lilienthalstrasse cemetery in West Berlin was exhumed. Investigation revealed that in fact, the grave contained the remains of three different people, none of whom were Mueller. The skull, moreover, belonged to a man ten years younger than Mueller would have been in 1945. The German authorities had no means by which to verify either Pannwitz's or Lueders' story. Pannwitz's information had come from Moscow, and there was no official liaison between Soviet intelligence and the West Germans on the Mueller case. Lueders's story could not be checked since Grosse Hamburgerstrasse was on the other side of the two-year old Berlin Wall. Adding to the confusion was the mystery of Mueller's effects. WASt, according to its own records, returned to Mueller's family in 1958 not only the Gestapo Chief's papers, some of which Lueders claimed to have found on the body, but also Mueller's decorations, which neither Leopold not Lueders claimed to have found. These items were never checked for authenticity.¹⁸

The CIA investigation

The CIA started its involvement in the hunt for Mueller at roughly the same time as the German search, albeit from a different source base. The January 1961 defection and interrogation of a Polish intelligence officer brought Western counterintelligence tips that led to several Soviet and Polish agents active in the West, including George Blake, a mole in the British MI6, Harry Houghton, a clerk in the British navy, and Heinz Felfe, a highlevel West German intelligence officer. The defector surely was Lt. Col. Michal Goleniewski [TN], the Deputy Chief of Polish Military Counter Intelligence until 1958, who had also operated as a mole for the KGB in the Polish service. In recounting his work as an interrogator of captured German officials in Poland from 1948 to 1952, Goleniewski revealed information about the fate of some Nazi intelligence officials, including Gestapo Mueller. Goleniewski had not actually met Mueller. However, he had heard from his Soviet supervisors that sometime between 1950 and 1952 the Soviets had picked up Mueller and taken him to Moscow.¹⁹ There was little with which to evaluate this claim, and some reason to be skeptical of this hearsay. Pannwitz, after all, had recently dismissed as "nonsense" to CIA interrogators the idea that Mueller worked for the Soviets while claiming that his own Soviet interrogators repeatedly said that Mueller was dead.²⁰

The CIA tried to track down the men Goleniewski named as having worked with Mueller in Moscow. The CIA determined that Jakob Loellgen, the former Gestapo chief of Danzig, was alive and resided in West Germany. In 1945 the Soviets had captured Loellgen but then released him, whereupon he returned to West Germany, working as a local police chief and as a private investigator. The CIA turned this information over to the Germans and the BND located Loellgen in 1961.

The Germans dropped the ball. Although the BDN (sic. BND )apparently began assembling material for his arrest, Loellgen was never arrested. The CIA never quite figured out what had happened. The BND seemed to be preoccupied throughout 1961 with another of Goleniewski's leads, Heinz Felfe. Felfe was a highlevel BND officer, who had already provided thousands of West German secrets including names of agents, cover names, addresses, and documents, to Moscow. In the midst of the Felfe scandal, West German investigation of Loellgen just fell between the cracks.²¹

The CIA did collect some information on its own that bore on the "Mueller in Moscow" thesis. In June 1961, another source was asked to assess Goleniewski's information on Soviet contacts with former Nazis. The source, who appears to have been a KGB officer, reported having read a "Mueller file," in which Mueller is described as having been captured by Soviet intelligence at the end of World War II. The identity of this source is not given in the CIA file, but is likely Petr Deriabin [TN]. (Deriabin had worked on counterintelligence matters in the Austro-German department of the First Chief Directorate of the KGB.) The defector wrote in a 1971 memorandum for the record that in 1952 he had heard from his own superiors that Moscow had recruited Mueller and that he himself had read excerpts from an interrogation. He even included the names of four Soviet officers who had once debriefed Mueller in 1951.²²   Comment: As Heinrich Müller was an expert in Soviet espionage and had wrought terrible havoc in the ranks of Stalin’s spies, executing the ones he could not turn, there is no conceivable reason for the Soviets to wish to “turn” Müller. Had he extensive knowledge of Western intelligence operations equal to his knowledge of Soviet operations, then the Soviets would have found a use for him.)

Despite the partial corroboration of the information from Goleniewski, the CIA appears to have relied on the West Germans to take the lead in the investigation of Mueller's whereabouts and did little follow-up in the 1960s. The remainder of the decade saw various news reports that Mueller had escaped to various points in the West (Argentina, Cuba), as well as tragicomic episodes. In 1967, a false sighting of Mueller in Panama led to the arrest there of one Francis Keith, who was released once fingerprints revealed he was not Mueller. (Comment: Keith was an American citizen working on construction projects in Panama.) Later the same year, two Israeli operatives were caught by West German police in an attempted break-in at the Munich apartment of Mueller's wife. Reams of newspaper copy were produced by such episodes, but there was only limited CIA interest. (Comment: The Mossad agents were instructed to search for letters from Müller and to plant electronic listening devices in Frau Müller’s flat. This information was published in several period  Munich newspapers. The Mossad agents were jailed for common burglary and later released at the urgent request of the Israeli Ambassador in Bonn. If Müller was dead, as the American authorities wished so badly to prove, why would Israel go to so much trouble to locate a dead man over twenty years after his alleged death?)

Yet one particular report did catch CIA's attention. In the aftermath of the Eichmann trial, the West German weekly Stern ran two articles by the journalist Peter Staehle that appeared in January and August 1964. Staehle said that after having followed a path after the war that included the Soviet Union, Romania, Turkey, and South Africa, Mueller became a senior police official in Albania before fleeing for South America.²³ From the very start, CIA suspected that Staehle's articles were a "plant" - part of a "clever bit of [disinformation] work" to mislead the public, as well as intelligence agencies.²⁴ The CIA checked - and disproved Staehle's claim that Mueller was in fact an Albanian police official named Abedin Bekir Nakoschiri.²⁵ The BND and CIA also discovered that Staehle had failed to get his articles printed in the more respected weekly Die Zeit thanks to a suspect source base about which Staehle had reportedly lied.²⁶

In May 1970 a Czech defector, very likely Ladislas Bittman [TN], a disinformation specialist himself, weighed in.²⁷ Bittman said that the Stern article was planted from Prague in order to neutralize rumors that Mueller might in fact be in Czechoslovakia. Bittman added for good measure that within Czech intelligence circles, it was common knowledge that the KGB had used Nazi war criminals for intelligence purposes and that key sections of Nazi archives had also been captured by the Soviets for use in "operational aims."²⁸

These comments caught the eye of the CIA's Counter-Intelligence (CI) Staff, headed by the legendary James Angleton. If Mueller really had been in the USSR or elsewhere in Eastern Europe, and if he had taken RSHA central files with him (many of which had indeed vanished after the war), then numerous leading West Germans (presumably on the political right) could still be compromised. It was crucial to discover what had happened, not necessarily to Mueller, who well might have been dead in any case, but to the files. Angleton also had a special interest in Soviet disinformation. The CI Staff undertook a through-going inquiry of Mueller starting in late 1970, and it is likely that this inquiry resulted in Mueller's name file (along with the above-mentioned material on the West German search) being assembled by CIA at all. It certainly resulted in a forty-page Counter Intelligence Brief - "The Hunt for 'Gestapo' Mueller" - which was circulated as an internal report of the Directorate of Plans in December 1971. A memo in the file dated 9 December 1971 explaining the purpose of the report states that:

Our principal original objective in preparing the attached study of the MUELLER case was to produce a training aid illustrating the vagaries and pitfalls of protracted investigations. In the past, MUELLER had been viewed mainly as a missing war criminal. As the material was collected, however, we became aware of another important possibility: that MUELLER had defected to World War II Soviet counterintelligence (SMERSH) and had taken with him a large assortment of files. (The central files of the German National Security Service (RSHA), of which Mueller was de facto chief…in the last weeks of the war, were never recovered by the Western Allies….) If SMERSH actually seized MUELLER and the best part of the RSHA records, Soviet capabilities to control important Germans and some other Europeans would far exceed those heretofore attributed to them."²⁹

In the process of putting together the report, the CI staff undertook some new inquiries of its own. A re-reading of a 1963 article in the German weekly Der Spiegel, which discussed the exhumation of Mueller's West Berlin "grave" that year, revealed that a mysterious woman in Berlin unrelated to Mueller had purchased the headstone. ³⁰ Perhaps this purchase too was part of a disinformation campaign designed to hide the fact that Mueller was used by the Soviets after the war.³¹ In December 1970 the West Germans allowed CIA to examine the exhumation records for the identity of the mysterious woman who had purchased the Mueller tombstone, albeit with no results. CI also hoped that the West German government would locate and interview Walter Lueders (who had found the body buried in the Grosse-Hamburgerstrasse cemetery) and verify, if they could, the authenticity of the personal effects returned to Mueller's family in 1957.³² German memoirs from the 1950s with cryptic clues on Mueller were reread.³³ CI also asked Soviet defector Peter Deriabin to write a memorandum for the file in November 1971.

The CI team found fault with how Goleniewski's leads had been handled in 1961 and wanted to return to that trail. Loellgen, wrote one CI investigator, "must have an interesting tale to tell about what happened to Heinrich Mueller and how the [Soviet] operation to penetrate the Nazi stay-behind operation fared"³⁴ "How do we get Loellgen to talk?" asked another. "Have we [an] interviewer that might 'accidentally' look [him] up?" But reasons for skepticism remained. "It seems to me," the same agent said, "that [Soviet intelligence] would never have let LOELLGEN go back to the West if in fact they had MUELLER. The scandal of sheltering this number one war criminal would have been too risky."³⁵ In any event, Loellgen was not questioned.

The 40-page CI report ended on a note of skepticism. "No one appears to have tried very hard," it said,

to find MUELLER immediately after the war while the trail was still hot, either in the West or the East….The presumption is that Allied officials searching for MUELLER soon stumbled over the…holdings of his effects and the…burial record and considered these sufficient proof that he was dead….There is little room for doubt, however, that the Soviet and Czech services circulated rumors to the effect that MUELLER had escaped to the West. These rumor were apparently floated to offset the charges that the Soviets had sheltered the criminal….There are strong indications but no proof that MUELLER collaborated with [the Soviets]. There are also strong indications but no proof that MUELLER died [in Berlin]….One thing appears certain. MUELLER and SCHOLZ had some special reason for entering the Berlin death trap and remaining behind in the Chancellery. If their object was to carry out a memorable and convincing suicide, they really bungled the job.

The CI Staff requested a deeper CIA investigation to find proof that would confirm or disprove these competing theories. Yet it appears that the CI Staff's request for a full-fledged investigation of the Mueller matter was not accepted.³⁶ The Mueller file itself ends in December 1971 with the circulation of the CI Staff report.

The Integrity of the CIA File

The heart of the file comprises documentary support for all the key judgments in the 1971 CI Staff report "The Hunt for Gestapo Mueller." Whatever confidence one can have in the integrity of the file's declassified contents thus hinges on judgments regarding the CI Staff's objectives in assembling and writing its report. In 1971 the United States was not being accused of having harbored Gestapo Mueller. Instead it seems that the CI Staff was prompted to investigate the Mueller case both as a possible example of Soviet deception and as a check on the reliability of key CIA defectors and West German informants. If the CIA had evidence that Mueller had been contacted by the West and not the Soviets, then the CI Staff's handling of theses defector cases that most likely involved Bittman, Deriabin, and Goleniewski makes no sense. In the 1960s and early 1970s, the CIA was riddled with doubt over the reliability of its stable of Soviet defectors. There were fears that Moscow had sent agents to the West to mislead the Allies about Soviet capabilities and intentions. It was in the interest of the CI Staff in particular and the CIA in general to determine whether high profile defectors like Bittman, Deriabin and Goleniewski were telling the truth about Mueller. Moreover, in assembling materials for its report, the CI Staff had no reason to believe that these documents would eventually be declassified. Therefore it is reasonable to assume that the CI Staff report, and by extension the CIA Mueller name file, represents a compilation of the best information on Gestapo Mueller available to CIA at that time.

More information about Mueller's fate might still emerge from still secret files of the former Soviet Union. The CIA file, by itself, does not permit definitive conclusions. Taking into account the currently available records of the War Room as well as other documents in the National Archives, the authors of this report conclude that Mueller most likely died in Berlin in early May 1945.”

 (Comment:  In a signed letter to the author under date of  11 January, 1995, Mr. John H. Wright, Information and Privacy Coordinator for the CIA, wrote the following:

                    “We located two documents (on Müller. Ed), a report dated 18 December 1959 and one undated report, reviewed them, and determined that they must be denied in their entirely on the basis of  (b) (1) and (b) (3) exemptions of the FOIA. An explanation of exemptions is enclosed.

                    (b) (1)  applies to material which is properly classified pursuant to an Executive order (by the President. Ed) in the interest of national defense or foreign policy.

                    (b) (3) applies to the Director’s statutory obligations to protect from disclosure intelligence sources and methods, as well as the organization, functions, names, official titles, salaries or numbers of personnel employed by the Agency….” (emphasis added)

                     Now, from the current official account, the CIA has a considerable number of reports on Müller in its files, not just two. The word ‘integrity’ ought not to be used on conjunction with anything emanating from the CIA or its paid, subservient, researchers. The great bulk of evidence is that Müller did not die in Berlin in 1945 and at least one report in the US Army’s files, now open to one and all, states that Müller escaped to the south, using the name of Schwartz or Schwartzer.

                    But then, these individuals were not paid to question Müller’s death but to affirm that he must have died in Berlin and therefore, was not in a position to work for the CIA between 1948 and 1952. 

                    The prevarications and obfuscations uncovered in the 9/11 investigations on the part of the CIA are not a recommendation for their veracity in the Müller or any other matter.

Notes of Sources Used Not from Mueller's Name File

1. Excerpts from interrogation of Heinz Pannwitz, cited in CIA, Directorate of Plans, "The Hunt for 'Gestapo Mueller,'" a Counterintelligence Brief issued in December 1971, CIA Name File, Heinrich Mueller, (hereafter Mueller File), vol. 2. The origins of this brief are explained below.
2. Walter Schellenberg, The Labyrinth, trans. Louis Hagen (New York: Harper Brothers, 1956 [1951]), pp. 319-20. Excerpts from the debriefing are in memo 201-742896 of 10 February 1965, Mueller file, vol. 1.
3. For Kaltenbrunner's interrogation, see the excerpts in memo 201-742896 of 10 February 1965, Mueller file, vol. 1. On Pannwitz, see [CIA/EUR] to Chief, EE and Chief SR, [A]-44835, 24 September 1959, Mueller file, vol. 1. Pannwitz's name is redacted in this document but it is clear who he is from other evidence in the file.
4. War Room Publication, G. I. S. Priorities for Interrogation, 27 May 1945, NA RG 226, Entry 119A, Box 22, Folder 621. War Room Publication, Tactical Interrogation of Members of the RSHA, 21 May 1945, NA RG 226, E119A, B 22, F 621.
5. W. R. C.3 Fortnightly Report for the period ending 18th June, 1945, NA RG 226, E 119A, B 25, F 639.
6. Progress Report, X-2 Branch, 1 June-30 June 1945, attached to Saint (London) to Saint, Stockholm, 13 July 1945, NA RG 226, Entry 125A, B 7, F 76.
7. War Room Monthly Summary No. 4, 23 July 1945, NA RG 226, E 119A, B 24, F 629.
8. NA RG 226, Entry 119A, B 22, F 621.
9. Arrest Target List-Revision Note, 1 November 1945, NA RG 226, E 122, B 1, tab 6.
10. Two consecutive index cards, probably prepared in 1946, are reproduced in Gestapo Mueller's IRR File and give two birth dates: the correct date and 7 June 1896. Card #2 includes the misinformation that Heinrich Mueller was being detained at Civilian Internment Enclosure #10, Altenstadt. It is quite possible that a Heinrich Mueller was there, but neither of those two whose birth dates were listed. U.S. Army did not list any further dealings with the Altenstadt Mueller. NA RG 319, IRR File Mueller, File XE 23 55 39.
11. See note by the Intelligence Bureau, C.C. G. (British Element), Bad Oeynhausen to G-2 (CI), USFET, 23 May 1946. There is also a reference to this information in "Subject: Mueller, Heinrich,"5 May 1961, the same U.S. Army consolidated report that lists Mueller as having been in Altenstadt in December 1945. NA RG 319, IRR File Mueller, XE 23 55 39. This report was easily dismissed because Gestapo Mueller's wife and children were still alive.
12. See Cards photocopied in the U.S. Army's Mueller File. NA RG 319, IRR File Mueller, XE 23 55 39.
13. See "The Hunt for 'Gestapo Mueller,'" p. 12.
14. The 1950 book, Die geheime Front: Organisation, Personen und Aktionen der deutschen Geheimdienstes was published under the pseudonym Walter Hagen and translated into numerous languages including English. It argued that Mueller had escaped through a secret passageway known only to him and Eichmann.
15. On the paragraph above see Landeskriminalamt Baden-Württemberg Sonderkommission Zentrale Stelle, Tgb. Nr. SK. ZSt. III/I-79/60, 29 July 1960 to Barnett at the U.S. Consulate, IRR, XE 23 55 39; Landeskriminalamt Baden-Württemberg Sonderkommission Zentrale Stelle, SK ZSt. I/1-79/60 to Zentrale Stelle Ludwigsburg, 27 February 1961, ibid. The U.S. Army helped for ninety days beginning in May 1961 with the surveillance of Mueller's father and children, but this surveillance yielded no results.
16. The witnesses, questioned in connection with a West German police investigation in 1961, are quoted in "The Hunt for 'Gestapo Mueller,'" pp. 16, 18.
17. [CIA/EUR] to Chief, EE and Chief SR, [A]-44835, 24 September 1959, Mueller file, vol. 1.
18. On the details above, see the lengthy German police reports of 1960 and 1961 submitted to U.S. Army Counter Intelligence and contained in Mueller's IRR file, NA RG 319, IRR File Mueller, XE 23 55 39. Fainter copies of these reports were made available by the Army to the CIA in 1970 and are included in the CIA Mueller File, vol. 2; See also "The Hunt for 'Gestapo Mueller,'" pp.19-26, 32-3, 34-37. On the effects, see "The Hunt for 'Gestapo Mueller'", p. 33.
19. Memo [A]-744, 10 May 1961, Mueller file, vol. 2; Memo of 17 March 1961, Mueller File, vol. 2. The defector's name is redacted.
20. To: Chief, EE, Chief SR, A[Excised] LCIMPROVE/[Excised]/[Excised] /Operations Further [Excised] Reports on Rote Kapelle Personalities, 24 September 1959, Mueller File, Vol. 1. The informant is revealed by name as Pannwitz in "The Hunt for 'Gestapo Mueller,'" pp. 14-16, Mueller File, Volume 2.
21. On Felfe, see Mary Ellen Reese, General Reinhard Gehlen: The CIA Connection (Fairfax, Va.: George Mason University Press, 1990), pp. 143-72. On Loellgen's non-arrest, see Review of File: Jakob LOELLGEN, 9 February 1971, Mueller File, vol. 2.
22. See CIA/Eur, June 23, 1961 in Mueller file , vol. 1. Regarding the defector's comments in 1971 see "The Hunt for 'Gestapo Mueller,'" pp. 25, 25a and the Memorandum for the Record of 18 November 1971 in Mueller file, vol. 1. This defector had never seen Mueller himself.
23. "Gestapo-Müller lebt in Albanien," Stern, January 1964; "Die Spur nach amerika," Stern, 16 August 1964. The latter article in full is xeroxed in Mueller file, vol. 1.
24. On the possibility of disinformation, see [CIA/EUR] dispatch [A] - 3564 CS, 31 January 1964.
25. Memo [A]-13564, 31 January 1964, Mueller file, vol. 1.
26. [CIA/EUR] to Chief, EE, [A]-63831, 5 February 1964.
27. Staff memorandum December 9, 1970, Mueller File, Volume 1. This is a debriefing of a defector with inside knowledge of Czech intelligence and KGB active measures. The 1971 CI Staff history further identifies this source as an apparently reliable Czechoslovak defector. See "The Hunt for 'Gestapo Mueller,'" p. 38. The information which this defector provided and the timing of this defection strongly suggests that this source was Ladislas Bittman.[TN]
28. Memo [A]-19267, 9 December 1970, Mueller file, vol. 1.
29. The 9 December 1971 memo is in Mueller file, vol. 2.
30. "Gestapo-Müller - Kein Nazi," Der Spiegel, 16 October 1963, copy in Mueller file.
31. Chief, WOMUSE, via Chief, EUR, to [CIA/EUR], [CIA/EUR] 22899, 7 October 1970, Mueller file, vol. 1.
32. Memo [CIA/EUR] 22984, 15 December 1970, Mueller file, vol 1.
33. See the xeroxed copies of Schellenberg, The Labyrinth, and Hagen, Die geheime Front, dated December 1970 in Mueller file, vol. 1.
34. Memorandum for the Record, 10 February 1971, "The Man who probably knows what became of Heinrich (Gestapo) Mueller," Mueller File, vol. 2.
35. "How do we get LOELLGEN to talk?" 10 February 1971, Mueller file, vol 2.
36. As a part of the CI Staff's investigation, the CIA requested files from the U.S. Army on some of Mueller's associates. Those documents were released to NARA, but are largely illegible.”

                Frantic and very expensive attempts on the part of the CIA to distance themselves from their hiring of large numbers of Nazi Gestapo and SS figures by Critchfield’s Gehlen Organization are typical of that thoroughly disorganized and grossly incompetent organization. Following the publishing of the first book on the CIA’s Müller in 1995 it took six years for the CIA to defend itself, typically by hiring a group of undistinguished but very obedient, but also very peripheral,  historical writers to produce a turgid and badly strained apolgia.

Information on Müller and his ex-Gestapo associates who came to the United States after the end of the war can be found in US National Archive files. “Operation Applepie” was a joint American-British intelligence project to  use former members of the Gestapo and SD. Still classified (for obvious reasons) Top Secret, these files can be located at: P&O File 311.5 TS (Sections I, II and III), 1948 in the 1946-1948 top secret decimal file, Records of the Army General Staff, RG 319. These are located in the Suitland Archive Annex of the National Archive. Information on Heinrich Müller¹s post-war U.S. Army career is in the National Archive records stored in St. Louis, Missouri. Apparently, the CIA’s apologists overlooked these documents in their determined effort to clear their employers of complicity in hiring top Nazis.

Documentation concerning Heinrich Müller from official U.S. sources

A subject as serious as the postwar career of SS-Gruppenführer Heinrich Müller requires a much higher threshold of proof than would be required for other accounting.

U.S. intelligence agencies and their friends, sources and associates are certainly not pleased with the thought of having to cope with the fact that the chief of Hitler¹s Gestapo was hired by one of these agencies, worked with others and moved at considerable altitude in the nation¹s capital in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

The CIA, who hired Müller (as his journals clearly show) has said nothing at all publicly about the matter but a great deal in private. It is generally whispered to questing members of the print and television media that the books are entirely spurious and that there is not a single scrap of documentary evidence that Müller did not die in Berlin in 1945.

The U.S. Army who had knowledge of Müller¹s postwar career, although not as his employer, was willing to release what files they had on the former Gestapo chief but were constrained by law as to what they must keep secret. Finally, in March 1998, they released their entire intelligence file on Müller with only a few addresses blacked out and this for reasons of privacy of their sources.

It becomes obvious in reading the entire file, that the Army CIC originally thought that Müller might have died in Berlin but had a strong suspicion that he may well have survived.

This file, which is a matter of public record and can be obtained from the intelligence facility at Ft. George Meade in Maryland is listed as: XE 235539 WJ.

Previously in this series, the publisher included only a few of these documents in places where it was felt they belonged. However, with the release of this file, and other Army papers, it is the intention to set forth for the reader a much larger and significant selection of official papers. In this collection of twenty-seven documents, all come from official files with the sole exception of a formal request of Senator Alfonse D¹Amato (R. New York) for information on Müller who he states worked for the United

States in the postwar years.

There is a rule followed by all government agencies, to include intelligence and archival entities, which needs to be clearly defined:

1. Admit nothing.

2. Deny everything.

3. Demand to see the proof, and

4. Refuse to accept it.

To date, all four of these time-honored and often-practiced rules have been observed in this instance.

The documents in this section, and their relatives in files open now to public inspection, cannot logically be denied by those with the most to lose, but be assured that they will. It is most reasonable for the reader to make their own determination and to remember that something is not true unless it is officially denied in Washington.

To be continued…