If you thought you’ve heard the last about Nazi atrocities, it appears reality in those terrible times can still defy our imagination – at times with irony, of the repulsive kind. A case in point: Heinrich Mueller, head of the Gestapo, was buried in a Jewish cemetery in Berlin in 1945, the mass circulation newspaper Bild reported Thursday.
Johannes Tuchel, head of the Memorial to the German Resistance, told the newspaper “Mueller didn’t survive the end of the war, his body was interred in 1945 in the Jewish cemetery in Berlin-Mitte in a mass grave.”
Many thought Mueller had survived the War, and Bild quotes a file of the Bundesnachrichtendienst, the German intelligence agency, stating that Mueller was in Carlsbad in former Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1949.
But Tuchel insists that the secret service was wrong.
“Mueller’s body was already found in August 1945 in a provisional grave near the former Reich’s aviation ministry by a burial commando,” he told Bild.
According to Tuchel, Mueller’s body was dressed in a general’s uniform. “In the inner left breast pocket was, among other things, his service certificate with a photo,” he said.
Bild also published a document it said was from the registrar’s office in Berlin-Mitte showing Mueller was buried in the district’s Jewish cemetery.
As soon as the article came out, there were angry reactions to what appears like the ultimate, cosmic chutzpah. Dieter Graumann, leader of Germany’s Jewish community, told Bild: “That one of the most brutal Nazi sadists is buried in a Jewish cemetery is a distasteful monstrosity. The memory of the victims is being treated here with contempt.”
Mueller was a perfectly evil Nazi criminal, who attended the 1942 Wannsee Conference that designed the “Final Solution,” the plan to exterminate all the Jews of Europe.