Gestapo-Chief: The CIA & Heinrich Müller By Gregory Douglas TBR News Table of Contents Foreword Author’s Acknowledgments Mueller, Heinrich: The official biography Introduction Historical Background The Unmasking of the Interrogator The State of the Union Counter-Intelligence and “Barbarossa” Excerpt on Henry Agard Wallace Admiral Darlan and General Sikorski The Fall of Mussolini Andreas and Bernhard Fine Art as a Commodity Excerpt on Hermann Göring The Knight, Death and The Devil Here Today, Gone Tomorrow The Paranoia of Josef Stalin The Wet World of Josef Stalin Bloody Sunday Gertrude the Screamer An Explosive Career The Jews in the Cellar Rudolf Hess and the Flight to England The Resurrection of Odilo Globocnik The Lion of Münster Kurt Gerstein: A Soul in Torment Paris in the Spring The Trials and Tribulations of the Duke of Windsor Excerpt on Roger Casement July 20th, 1944: Part 1 July 20th, 1944: Part 2 Excerpt on Rommel Betrayal from London Stauffenberg Envoy Müller and the Escape from Berlin The Death and Transfiguration of Heinrich Müller The General, the Company, and the Road to Damascus Bibliography Appendix Foreword Most books on historical personages are only repetition of the subject done by earlier writers. New historical material, especially important material, on controversial individuals rarely appears in print, either because it has been destroyed or deliberately hidden away. If such material does surface, it is generally met with hostility by other published writers in the field if this information makes their own works obsolete. Here we have as a central character, Heinrich Müller, also known as “Gestapo” Müller to differentiate him from another Heinrich Müller of the same rank and in the same department. As his name indicates, “Gestapo” Müller was the permanent chief of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA) Amt IV, the Gestapo. This acronym for the Geheime Staats Polizei (Secret State Police) has struck terror into millions before and during the Second World War and is still used to evoke an image of cruelty and oppression. Heinrich Müller vanished at the end of the war. He was last seen in Hitler’s bunker on April 29, 1945 and was officially stated to have been killed. In the early 1980s, all of Müller’s private correspondence and a number of his most important official files surfaced in Switzerland and passed into the hands of the Munich-based CIA Gehlen Organization and from there, to the CIA officials in Langley. From these files, this book was carefully constructed. It is based, not on wartime Gestapo records but on a postwar interview held in Switzerland between Müller and an American intelligence officer. It should be noted that the former Gestapo chief was not under arrest or even under suspicion. The 800 page post-war CIC interview on which the text is based was not designed to set the stage for a trial but was, quite simply, a job interview. Times change and we must change with them. Once a man who would have been instantly arrested if found, Müller was now someone whose expertise and specific brilliance in anti-Communist counter-intelligence was badly needed by the West. In this position, Müller was under no compulsion to lie, to beg or to apologize. He said what he thought on an enormous number of historically fascinating subjects and obviously regretted nothing. The subjects cover personalities of the Third Reich to include lengthy sections on Müller’s relationship with Hitler, Hermann Göring, Heinrich Himmler, Martin Bormann and other top leaders of the Third Reich, as well as many individuals involved in the plot to murder Hitler in 1944. Müller was in charge of the investigations of this botched attempt and his records and interviews contain material never seen before. Also in the files are lengthy, and often stunning, information on Allied leaders and Soviet penetration of Allied top level military and government agencies. He discusses the concentration camps in detail, the deportation of the Jews, the counterfeiting of US and British money and his personal version of his dramatic escape from Berlin in April of 1945. This is a work, extracted from thousands of pages of secret files, that will jolt the complaisant in every chapter. One section deals with highly classified German intercepts of private trans-Atlantic telephone conversations between Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. Of these, the most shocking is one dealing with Pearl Harbor. The author has carefully edited and annotated enough material to deliver a serious shock to the community of historians. At the same time, the character of ‘Gestapo’ Müller emerges with vivid clarity. This is a study of a highly intelligent and complex man who was at the very center of the Third Reich and who not only lived to tell about it, but managed to turn adversity into personal triumph. Heinrich Müller was present in the opening seconds of the Second World War and left the stage of history in the final battle for Berlin. This is a work that stands on its own feet and will certainly be impossible to put down. Frank Thayer, PhD. New Mexico State University Las Cruces Gregory Douglas has produced a historical tour de force. Meticulously researched and authoritatively edited. Anyone, regardless of their intellectual orientation, who dismisses the reality and contents of Müller’s files and his relationship with American Intelligence out of hand, does so at their own risk. Dr. William R. Corson, LTC, USMC ret. William R. Corson was been involved with the intelligence community for most of his adult life. Corson, who held a Ph.D. in economics, was a retired Colonel of the USMC and was executive secretary of the joint Department of Defense/Central Intelligence Agency commission on anti-terrorism. He worked with the CIA on the highest levels and in 1977 published a book, “The Armies of Ignorance,” the standard work on the history of US intelligence. Where possible, each revelation has been challenged and examined using all available resources to include: individual, military records, released US communications intercepts and captured documents. To date, the Müller documents have met every challenge. Robert T. Crowley Deputy Director of Clandestine Affairs CIA, ret. Robert T. Crowley attended the US Military Academy at West Point and served in both the Army Military Intelligence and the Office of Naval Intelligence. Following his tours of duty, Crowley joined the Central Intelligence Agency and rose to a high-level advisory position within it. He was Deputy Director of Clandestine Operations. One of his fields of expertise was the Soviet KGB and he was co-author of the acclaimed work “The New KGB.” Author’s Acknowledgments As this work progressed, the author looked further and further afield to locate obscure information and confirmation. FOIA requests proved to be largely unproductive in spite of extensive official US files on Heinrich Müller. I concentrated on Müller’s postwar persona as a Washington-based employee of the CIA, on those who worked with him after the war, on family members, on real estate holdings and fine art auction catalogs, to mention only a few areas of investigation. There are, however, specific persons to whom the author is indebted and they are: Mr. Robert Wolfe, formerly of the US National Archives and later a researcher for the CIA who supplied hundreds of pages of documents and files, without which this series could never have been written; Karl Müller, grandson of Heinrich Müller, whose assistance has been noteworthy in tracking down postwar connections and personas, and who certainly possesses all of his grandfather’s Bavarian charm and intelligence; Robert Trumbull Crowley, former Deputy Director of Clandestine Operations of the CIA who provided the author with hundreds of files from his records concerning Heinrich Müller, a CIA employee, and a great deal of hitherto unpublished material on the CIA-controlled Gehlen Organization, Dr. William R. Corson; Mr. Paul Elston of the BBC who made very helpful suggestions, that the author was pleased to act upon; Dr. Frank D. Thayer for his overviews; Mr. Willi Korte for his suggestions about stolen art; Ms Lucy Allwood, a British researcher in historical and intelligence issues, has proven to be invaluable in helping verify information about British intelligence matters; Christian Wehrschutz of Vienna for his research on Swiss bank accounts and CIA operations in Switzerland; Lt. Col. Ed Milligan USA (Ret.) of Alexandria, VA; Col. James Critchfield, USA (Ret.) of Williamsburg, VA for important material concerning Reinhard Gehlen and his CIA-run organization as well as his own close post-war associations with Müller while in both Switzerland and the United States; Mr. Thomas Belknap, for an in-depth discussion about the “Paperclip” operation, and a number of former associates, and employees, of Heinrich Müller in the United States, Canada and Germany who have been most helpful, if demanding of anonymity Mueller, Heinrich: The official biography 1901-1945? Head of Amt IV in the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA) from 1939, and one of the most influential officials of the SS involved directly in the extermination of European Jewry. Served in the air force during World War I where he won the Iron Cross, 1st Class, on the Russian front. After the war he served in the Bavarian political police where he developed expertise in surveillance of communists and other potentially subversive groups, including the NSDAP. Brought to Berlin by Reinhard Heydrich, he was initially in charge of the Secret Political Police, Dept II, with responsibilities for surveillance and control of communists, Marxists, oppositional groups, Austrian affairs, and the concentration camps. He was, according to Padfield, "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 his duty to the state-which in his mind were one.