Could a Jewish memorial site in Berlin be the burial place for the head of the Gestapo who disappeared after World War II?<br /><br />There are claims from a German historian in a tabloid newspaper that Heinrich Mueller, who ran the Nazis’ secret police, did not escape the fall of the Third Reich as was rumoured.<br /><br />Professor Johannes Tuchel, head of the German Resistance Memorial Centre, says Mueller died in Berlin where he ended up in a mass grave in what had been a Jewish cemetery in Grosse Hamburger Strasse. <br /><br />Destroyed by the Nazis during the war, it is now a memorial site. <br /><br />“He (Mueller) was responsible with Himmler, Hitler and Heydrich up to 1942 for a lot of mass crimes. He was deeply involved in the Holocaust, he was a member of the Wannsee Conference in 1942 and he was also responsible for the mass killings of Soviet prisoners of war,” Tuchel said.<br /><br />Senior Nazis used the Wannsee Conference to plan the implementation of the extermination of the Jews. <br /><br />After the war, various reports said the Gestapo chief had either died in Berlin, or that he had escaped to ex-Czechoslovakia or South America.<br /><br />The historian says he found new identity documents showing the Gestapo chief did indeed perish in the German capital during the final days of the war in 1945. <br /><br />He also re-examined evidence from a grave-digger after the war who remembered burying a man in a general’s uniform.<br /><br />A prominent Nazi hunter, Efraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, has said that only DNA evidence will provide proof of what happened to Mueller.<br /><br />Germany’s main Jewish federation, the Central Council of Jews, issued a statement saying that a “brutal Nazi” buried in a Jewish cemetery was “an insult to the memory of the victims”.<br /><br />Jewish religious law forbids exhumations, and so the air of mystery surrounding Mueller looks set to continue.
