Heinrich Mueller (28 April 1900 – 1 May 1945) was the head of the Gestapo secret police of Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler. Mueller disappeared at the end of the Battle of Berlin in May 1945, although he was likely killed; in 2013, a historian claimed that his body was found by a work crew in August 1945.
Biography[]
Heinrich Mueller was born on 28 April 1900 in Munich, Bavaria, German Empire, the son of a Catholic rural police official. Mueller served as an artillery spotter during the last months of World War I, and he was involved in the fight against communist rings during the German Revolution, acquiring a lifelong hatred of Bolsheviks after witnessing the shooting of hostages by the Bavarian Soviet Republic. Mueller initially opposed the Nazi Party, hoping to use force against them in order to crush them, but Reinhard Heydrich recruited him into the SS. In November 1933, he became a criminal inspector, and he rose through the ranks solely due to ambition; he called Hitler an "Austrian draft dodger" and an "immigrant unemployed house painter".
In 1936, Mueller was appointed the operational chief of the Gestapo secret police under Heydrich, and he ordered the arrest of up to 30,000 Jews during Kristallnacht in 1938. He helped in destroying the Social Democratic Party of Germany and Communist Party of Germany's left-wing resistance cells and in putting down opposition to Nazi Germany, and he staged a false border clash between the Wehrmacht and the "Polish Army" at Gleiwitz, dressing dead concentration camp prisoners in Polish uniforms to make it appear as if a battle had taken place. The Germans invaded Poland, beginning World War II, and Mueller rose in the ranks. Ernst Kaltenbrunner became Mueller's superior after Heydrich's assassination in 1942, and Mueller would later form a rivalry with Heinrich Himmler when Himmler refused to believe Mueller's report that Wilhelm Canaris was a resistance member. Mueller allied with Himmler's rival Martin Bormann, and he proved vital to the effort to capture and execute the Operation Valkyrie plot collaborators in 1944-1945. On 1 May 1945, Mueller likely killed himself in the Fuhrerbunker of Berlin or was killed by the Red Army, although his body was not found. Some believed that he had fled to South America or to the Soviet Union, while another source stated that a work crew had located his dead body in August 1945 while cleaning up the wartorn city of Berlin.