Shock at report Gestapo chief Mueller buried in Jewish cemetery
Evidence that Heinrich Mueller, an architect of the Holocaust, was interred in a Jewish mass grave in Berlin stuns the city and Nazi hunters
Berliners and Nazi hunters have reacted with sorrow, outrage and shock to evidence Heinrich Mueller, the chief of Adolf Hitler’s dreaded Gestapo, or secret police, is buried in a Jewish cemetery in the heart of the German capital – even if, for now, the claim lacks forensic verification.
The news “makes my stomach turn”, said Dieter Graumann, the chairman of the Central Council of Jews in Germany. “It is devastating for everybody, but especially for a Jew.”
He expressed complete bafflement that the apparent fate of Mueller, “a technocrat of terror”, senior even to Adolf Eichmann, the war criminal tried and executed in Israel in 1962, could have gone unreported for so long.
Efraim Zuroff, chief Nazi hunter of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, was incredulous when told. “I can’t think of a worse desecration of a Jewish cemetery than to bury Heinrich Mueller there,” he said.
The fate of Mueller, one of the prime architects of the Holocaust, has long eluded authorities and historians.
He was one of the most senior Nazis to escape capture or certified death at the end of the second world war.