In April 1945, Müller was among the last of the Nazi loyalists assembled in the
Reich Chancellery complex as the Red Army
fought its way into the centre of Berlin. According to RSHA official Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Malz, Müller was among the many Gestapo officials ordered to aid in the defense of Berlin by Himmler and was almost certainly killed since he had been in the Reich Chancellery from about 23 April. Both Kurt Pomme (Reinhard Heydrich's adjutant) and Horst Kopkow avowed in November 1945 that Müller died when the Russians made their way into Berlin. One of Müller's last tasks was the interrogation of
Hermann Fegelein, Himmler's SS liaison officer, in the cellar of the
Church of the Trinity after Himmler's attempted peace negotiations with the Western Allies behind Hitler's back. Fegelein was shot after Hitler expelled Himmler from all his posts. Hitler's secretary
Traudl Junge stated that she first saw Müller on 22 April; having assumed Kaltenbrunner's duties as RSHA head, he stayed in the
Führerbunker until
Hitler's death, sometimes meeting with the dictator.
Oberscharführer Rochus Misch, the telephone operator for the
Führerbunker, recalled seeing Müller on the afternoon of 30 April, shortly before Hitler committed suicide.
Disappearance According to some witnesses, Müller was last seen at the Reich Chancellery on the evening of 1 May 1945. According to Hitler's pilot
Hans Baur, Müller stated of his intention not to break out: "We know the Russian methods exactly. I haven't the faintest intention of being taken prisoner by the Russians." From that day onward, no trace of Müller has ever been found. He is the most senior member of the Nazi government whose fate remains a mystery. Author and former British intelligence officer
Adrian Weale claims that the evidence about Müller indicates that he was most likely killed or committed suicide during the chaotic fall of Berlin, but his body was never identified. Despite not having confirmed Müller's demise, Berlin issued a death certificate for him dated 15 December 1945, listing his cause of death as "killed in action". The United States
Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) file on Müller was released under the
Freedom of Information Act in 2001 and documents several unsuccessful attempts by U.S. agencies to find him. The
U.S. National Archives commentary on the file concludes: "Though inconclusive on Müller's ultimate fate, the file is very clear on one point. The Central Intelligence Agency and its predecessors did not know Müller's whereabouts at any point after the war. In other words, the CIA was never in contact with Müller." The CIA file shows an extensive search, led by the counterespionage branch of the U.S.
Office of Strategic Services (forerunner of the CIA), was made for Müller in the months after Germany's surrender. The search was complicated by the fact that "Heinrich Müller" is a very common German name. A further problem arose because "some of these Müllers, including Gestapo Müller, did not appear to have middle names. An additional source of confusion was that there were two different SS generals named Heinrich Müller". In 1947, American and British agents searched the home of Müller's wartime mistress, Anna Schmid, but found nothing suggesting that he was still alive. With the onset of the
Cold War and the shift of priorities to meeting the challenge of the USSR, interest in pursuing missing Nazis declined. By this time, the conclusion seemed to have been reached that Müller was most likely dead. The
Royal Air Force Special Investigation Branch also had an interest in Müller with regard to the
Stalag Luft III murders, for which he was presumed to have responsibility given his position in the Gestapo. In a brief passage in his memoirs, Walter Schellenberg alleged that Müller joined the
Communists in 1945. He also wrote that in 1950, an unnamed German officer who had been a prisoner of war in the USSR said he saw Müller in
Moscow in 1948 and that he died shortly afterward. The capture and subsequent trial of
Adolf Eichmann in 1960 sparked new interest in Müller's whereabouts. Although Eichmann revealed no specific information, he told his Israeli interrogators that he believed that Müller was still alive. The
West German office in charge of prosecuting war criminals requested investigation by local police in Bavaria and Berlin. The possibility that Müller was working for the USSR was considered, but no definite information was gained. Müller's family and his former secretary were placed under surveillance by the Allies in case he was corresponding with them. The West Germans investigated several reports of Müller's body being found and buried in the days after the fall of Berlin. The reports were contradictory, not wholly reliable, and it was not possible to confirm any of them. One such report came from Walter Lüders, a former member of the
Volkssturm, who said he had been part of a burial unit which had found the body of an SS general in the Reich Chancellery garden with the identity papers of Heinrich Müller. The body had been buried in a mass grave at the old Jewish Cemetery on
Grosse Hamburger Strasse in the
Soviet Sector. Since this location was in
East Berlin in 1961, the gravesite could not be investigated by West German authorities, nor has there been any attempt to excavate the site since the
reunification of Germany. In 1961, Lieutenant-Colonel
Michael Goleniewski, the Deputy Chief of
Polish Military Counter Intelligence, defected to the U.S. Goleniewski had worked as an interrogator of captured German officials from 1948 to 1952. He never met Müller, but said he had heard from his Soviet superiors that sometime between 1950 and 1952, the Soviets had "picked up Müller and taken him to Moscow". The CIA tried to track down the men Goleniewski named as having worked with Müller in Moscow but were unable to confirm his story. Israel also continued to pursue Müller: in 1967, two Israeli operatives were caught by West German police attempting to break into the
Munich apartment of Müller's wife. In 1967, after an alleged sighting of Müller in
Panama, a man working as an insecticide peddler in
Panama City was arrested on suspicions of being Müller. According to his identity papers, he was a
Missouri-born man named Francis Willard Keith who had entered Panama with a U.S. passport in 1952. West Germany cited
handwriting analysis and visual recognition by his ex-wife, Sophie, from 12 photographs, although she noted that the man had more hair than her husband. West German diplomats pressed Panama to
extradite the man, but he was released after the Panamanian police matched his
fingerprints to those of a Francis W. Keith who first visited Panama in the early 1940s and worked in the
Panama Canal Zone for several months; his account was supported by a diary and a family who said he had lived with them for years. Although the police noted that he had a German accent and spoke little English or Spanish, he defended his identity at a press conference in English, spoken with a U.S. accent. Nazi hunter
Simon Wiesenthal, who asserted that Müller had recently lived in South America, doubted that Keith was Müller because
the wealth of an
escaped Nazi would not require him to peddle goods. The CIA investigation concluded: "There is little room for doubt that the Soviet and
Czechoslovak [intelligence] services circulated rumors to the effect that Müller had escaped to the West ... to offset the charges that the Soviets had sheltered the criminal ... There are strong indications but no proof that Müller collaborated with [the Soviets]. There are also strong indications but no proof that Müller died [in Berlin]." The CIA apparently remained convinced at that time that if Müller had survived the war, he was being harboured within the USSR. However, when the USSR collapsed in 1991 and the Soviet archives were opened, no evidence to support this belief emerged. The U.S. National Archives commentary concludes: "More information about Müller'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, the authors of this report conclude that Müller most likely died in Berlin in early May 1945." In 2007, the British MI5 file on Müller was declassified and much like the CIA file it showed that they did not capture nor recruit him. Further, that their post-war investigations could not establish his whereabouts. In 2008, German historian
Peter Longerich published a biography of Himmler—translated into English in 2012—that contained an unsubstantiated account of Müller's last known whereabouts. According to reports from Himmler's adjutant,
Werner Grothmann, Müller was with Himmler at
Flensburg on 11 May 1945 and accompanied Himmler and other SS officers as they attempted to escape the Allies on foot. Himmler and Müller parted company at Meinstedt, after which Müller was not seen again. In 2013, Johannes Tuchel, the head of the
Memorial to the German Resistance, stated that Müller's body was found in August 1945 by a work crew cleaning up corpses and was one of 3,000 buried in a mass grave on the site of a former Jewish cemetery in
Berlin-Mitte. While Tuchel was confident he had solved the mystery, whether Müller is actually there has not been confirmed. Nonetheless, the uncertainty of Müller's ultimate end and/or whereabouts has only served to nourish the "mysterious power" that the Gestapo elicits even to the present.
Alleged CIC dossier In July 1988, author
Ian Sayer received from an anonymous individual a 427-page document, purported to be a photocopy of a U.S. Army
Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) file that had been inadvertently released by the
U.S. National Archives. The dossier alleged that Heinrich Müller had survived the war and had worked for the CIC as an intelligence adviser. It further asserts that Müller claimed that
Hitler's death was faked using
a body double. Sayer and co-author
Douglas Botting were working on a comprehensive history of the CIC at that time. The dossier had also come to the attention of the
U.S. Department of Justice's Nazi-hunting unit, the
Office of Special Investigations, who subsequently sought Sayer's opinion on the veracity of the documents. By this time the anonymous individual (later identified as "Gregory Douglas") had managed to interest
Time magazine and
The Times newspaper in his story. Historian Richard Evans delved into the matter and uncovered that "Gregory Douglas" was a false name used by Peter Stahl, who had far-right connections. He was a known fringe conspiracy theory author who also dealt in Nazi memorabilia; much of which was fake. Historians such as
Anton Joachimsthaler and
Luke Daly-Groves regard the dossier, particularly its fringe claims about Hitler's death, as examples of concocted "myths". ==See also==