Untouchable, Who protected Bormann & Gestapo Muller

Müller organized provocations such as bloody incidents on the Polish frontiers, which "justified" the war against Poland. He was directly involved in the "final solution of the Jewish Question" after organizing the famous "conference of Wannsee".

Müller signed the orders requiring, by 31 January 1943, the delivery to Auschwitz of 45.000 Jews for extermination. At the end of March 1944, he gave the order to shoot British officers who had escaped from detention, near Breslau.

The mystery of Gestapo Müller has occupied war crimes investigators for more than 60 years. Pierre de Villemarest, the respected French archivist and historian, who alongside Simon Weisenthal is among the most authoritative investigators of this period, has offered the first convincing theory of Müller’s fate.

According to “Untouchable” a new book soon to be published by Pierre de Villemarest, (Aquilion, London, 2005, £15.90) well before the end of the war, Müller had sold out to the Soviets. After the war, Müller, protected by Stalin's minister for state security, simply reported to a new master, as he was put to work organising the East German communist intelligence apparatus.

Müller's position became precarious after the death of Stalin. Müller was the protégé of Soviet General Viktor Abakumov, minister of security and head of Stalin’s feared Smersh. After Stalin’s death, a bitter power stuggle between Abakumov and Beria ended with Abakoumov’s murder. Müller fled to South America where he hid in the border area between Argentina and Brazil until Czech intelligence officers working on behalf of the KGB kidnapped him and took him back to the Soviet Union, where he died in mysterious circumstances.

Pierre de Villemarest, a former French intelligence officer and resistant who has spent more than half a century on the trail of Gestapo Müller, presents important new new evidence including the testimony of a senior Czech intelligence officer, Rudolf Barak, who was, in 1954, ordered by the Russians to bring Müller ‘in from the cold’ after he had stopped reporting and attending meetings with his controller.

In 1945, in the final hours of the Second World War in Europe, Heinrich “Gestapo” Müller, chief of the SS.

Shameless opportunist

The wacky conspiracy theories surrounding the fate of Nazi war criminals have made this subject a wilderness of mirrors and there is evidence that some of the confusion is deliberate as various things published have been intended to conceal rather than reveal.

One of the attractions of de Villemarest’s explanation is that to believe it you need not accept any far-fetched conspiracy theory such as the one put about by the Russians that Müller was working for the CIA, living in Virginia and a member at all the smartest Washington clubs.

Heinrich Müller was less of a fanatic Nazi than a shameless opportunist. Every aspect of Müller’s behaviour confirms that this was exactly the nature of his character.

As the war started going wrong, Muller had good reason to fear that he would shortly be dangling on the end of an allied rope. The SS chief was ruthless but not stupid. Like many others in Berlin, he had seen the inevitable consequence of the defeat at Stalingrad and the inevitability that the Reich would henceforth weaken as the allies grew stronger. From his view, the strongest strongman of all was no longer Hitler but Stalin. He had unequalled opportunity to ensure his own survival and there is plenty of evidence he used it. So he began to play a double game.

Müller’s intelligence was second to none. He was both smart and well informed and above all ambitious. He imagined that Stalin would always need policemen. His ambition was that, as he was a living encyclopaedia of former nazis, the victory of the Russians would not interupt his profession as a policeman and spy. But the Russians had other ideas for Müller.

De Villemarest has assembled an extraordinary documentary archive and frequently invites readers to draw their own conclusions.

He is careful not to announce anything as proven until he feels the case is incontestable. His technique is perhaps closer to that of a prosecutor, building circumstance on circumstance until it is the totality that is persuasive beyond reasonable doubt, even if individual pieces of it may be hard to know in every particular detail.

De Villemarest’s reconstruction is very impressive even when he admits he has not got the complete story – and since the remaining elements remain locked in the Russian archives, this may be material for which we will have to wait for some time.

It is known that Müller had connections at the very top of Soviet intelligence; he spent weeks with his Soviet counterparts in winter 1937, developing protocols for the Berlin-Moscow pact.

When did Muller turn traitor to Hitler? De Villemarest finds indications Muller had opened a channel with the Russians are early as 1943. So he could well have started playing a double game well before the end of the war. Certainly, his disappearance at the end of the war had a neatness to it – no trace of anyone resembling him was ever found in the wreckage of Berlin.

The testimonial basis of the story

De Villemarest is an indefatigable researcher on Nazi Germany. Working alongside a retired American CIA officer, Tenant Bagley, the most dramatic scoop is the death-bed confession of a former high-ranking Czech intelligence officer.

The important historical implications includee for the first time a suggestion that the post-war Odessa network of renegade Nazis in South America was penetrated, if not controlled, by the Russians.

This would be a good explanation why the Russians have been so reluctant to open their files on this case.

Rudolf Barak, former head of the Czecholosovakian communist intelligence service, told de Villemarest an incredible story involving an intelligence operation never before revealed to the public. Adolph Eichmann was not the only Nazi to be kidnapped in South America. Eichmann's boss, Heinrich Müller, met exactly the same fate but it has remained secret for 50 years.

The Czechs were perfect for the job. The Czechs maintained an important commercial presence in South America, and this was used as a cover for Moscow-inspired "false flag" intelligence operations.

Barak said that in 1954, he was ordered by Ivan Serov, the new director general of the KGB, to bring Heinrich Müller in from the cold. Müller, Barak said, had stopped responding to orders. In a daring operation that took a year to prepare, Müller was extracted and taken to the Soviet Union.

The Czech testimony reported by de Villemarest and Tenant Bagley is the crucial piece of a jigsaw which allows all of the other pieces to make sense.

Unlike so much re-treaded World War Two history, de Villemarest presents astonishing and new information on every page - and has invited the world to dispute his conclusions. So far, nobody has stepped forward.

From the Preface by Vladimir Bukovsky*

The two leading Nazi figures most responsible for the Holocaust and other atrocities (Martin Bormann and Gestapo Müller), were Stalin’s agents. For 60 years no one has wanted to talk about it - until now. No government, no international body, no Tribunal of any sort, has ever investigated this fact and none is likely to do so now. Can we believe it? Well, frankly, I am not even surprised.

*Vladimir Bukovsky is a human rights activist and former Soviet prisoner. He was among the first to expose the use of psychiatry against political prisoners in the USSR. Bukovsky was convicted (Article 70-1) in June 1963 for organizing poetry meetings in the center of Moscow (next to the Vladimir Mayakovsky monument) and sent to a psikhushka; freed in February 1964. In January 1965 he was arrested for organizing a demonstration in defense of Alexander Ginzburg, Yuri Galanskov and other dissidents (190-1, 3 years of imprisonment); freed in January 1970. In 1971, Bukovsky smuggled to the West over 150 pages documenting abuse of psychiatric institutions for political reasons in the USSR. The facts galvanized human rights activists worldwide (including inside the country), and was a pretext for his subsequent arrest in January 1972, for contacts with foreign journalists and possession and distribution of samizdat (70-1, 7 years of imprisonment plus 5 years in exile). In December of 1976, while imprisoned, Bukovsky was exchanged for former Chilean Communist leader Luis Corvalan. Adapted from a more comprehensive biography and bibliography at www.wikipedia.com

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Table of Contents

Photographs and Documents between pages 33 and 38, 65 and 70, 97 and
100, 129 and 140, 161 and 164, 193 and 206, 225 and 228, 289 and 296,
410 and 411, 417 and 440

Preface by Vladimir Bukovsky

Introduction by General André Bach

Foreword

Chapter 1
1.1 - “Delius” and “Kent” tell the same story
1.2 - “Delius” and Operation Max.
1.3 - Müller organises “Sleepers” in March 1945
1.4 - Confirmation by a certain Mr Kent
1.5 - A Moscow trial in Paris

Chapter 2
2.1 - Key to a meteoric rise
2.2 - The curious “suicide” of Hitler’s niece
2.3 - In the shadow of Reinhard Heydrich
2.4 - Heydrich’s wife describes the “coup” of 9 March 1933

Chapter 3
3.1 - The rise of the Bavarians
3.2 - A frequently underrated situation
3.3 - Müller is challenged, but promoted
3.4 - The curious case of Colonel Walther Nicolai
3.5 - First steps towards the Pact of 1939

Chapter 4
4.1 - The police versus the army, in Berlin and Moscow
4.2 - Heydrich and Müller become forgers
4.3 - Massacre in the Soviet Union
4.4 - The dismissal of the German Army High Command
4.5 - Nicolai’s spy ring again

Chapter 5
5.1 - Soviet networks under Gestapo Müller’s nose
5.2 - A string of infiltrated agents
5.3 - The legal and illegal apparatus of the USSR in Germany
5.4 - Poland, first victim of the alliance

Chapter 6
6.1 - Manhunts and the Jewish question
6.2 - Joint Gestapo and NKVD units
6.3 - Müller and the Jewish question
6.4 - Some little-known facts
6.5 - Extension into France

Chapter 7
7.1 - Heinrich Müller and the Red Orchestra
7.2 - Who was protecting Greta Kuckhoff?
7.3 - A revealing analysis
7.4 - The game played by Himmler, Bormann and Kaltenbrunner
7.5 - An Austrian heads the administration

Chapter 8
8.1 - Playing a double game to serve the enemy
8.2 - The silence of the “expert”
8.3 - Behind Max and the others: General V.S. Abakumov
8.4 - The Sonderkommando confronts the Red Orchestra
8.5 - Mysterious breakouts, but the jailers go unpunished
8.6 - Interrogators give away more than their prisoners

Chapter 9
9.1 - Viktor Abakumov on the line
9.2 - The birth of Hacke
9.3 - Defector Michel Goleniewski’s testimony
9.4 - The Spetsburo intervenes
9.5 - “Pete” Bagley listens to Piotr Deriabin

Chapter 10
10.1 - The Red Three
10.2 - The strange motorcade to Moscow
10.3 - The Sonderkommando crosses into the East
10.4 - Viktor Abakumov at the controls
10.5 - The silence of Gestapo Müller
10.6 - The suspicions of the GRU in 1943
10.7 - Martin Bormann’s stenographers

Chapter 11
11.1 - The convulsions of summer 1944
11.2 - The Joseph Goebbels memorandum
11.3 - A true bureaucratic frenzy
11.4 - ... But Communist mistresses, too
11.5 - Müller and the Plot of 20 July 1944

Chapter 12
12.1 - Operation Survival
12.2 - The inventor of industrial espionage
12.3 - The art of camouflaging people
12.4 - A multi-layered treasury
12.5 - The Strasbourg conference, August 1944
12.6 - Networks concealing other networks

Chapter 13
13.1 - Escape from Berlin
13.2 - The inner circle know where to meet
13.3 - Heinrich Müller’s personal bunker
13.4 - The evacuation of the Führer bunker
13.5 - Bormann out in the open
13.6 - Gestapo Müller’s final arrangements
13.7 - The final meetings

Chapter 14
14.1 - Establishing their position
14.2 - TICOM demolishes illusions
14.3 - Confirmation from the archives
14.4 - Soviet sympathisers keep watch in Germany
14.5 - On the trail of a gamekeeper
14.6 - Müller plays his own game
14.7 - Kaltenbrunner’s luck runs out

Chapter 15
15.1 - The Saragossa Dossier
15.2 - A well-placed informant
15.3 - Direct Quotations
15.4 - The Bormann network’s South American activities
15.5 - French collaboration with Hacke
15.6 - Nostalgia for the idyllic days of the Pact
15.7 - The Risks taken by Ric

Chapter 16
16.1 - Freude puts through a call to Bormann in Argentina
16.2 - Confirmation from a Russian expert
16.3 - Under cover of Manuel de Falla’s coffin
16.4 - Operation Brandy
16.5 - K5 hangs on to information
16.6 - Evita Peron’s mission to Europe
16.7 - The future wife of Kirk Douglas
16.8 - Change of tack to the Middle East
16.9 - Death at the end of the trail

Chapter 17
17.1 - The Müller saga
17.2 - Laying it on thick...
17.3 - Abakumov dominates German affairs
17.4 - An East German springboard against the West
17.5 - Müller and Rattenhuber at the controls of a secret police force

Chapter 18
18.1 - Flight to South America
18.2 - Rattenhuber under the microscope
18.3 - The first agents sent into the West
18.4 - Panzinger and Pannwitz return to the West
18.5 - The end of Abakumov
18.6 - The flight of Gestapo Müller

Chapter 19
19.1 - Ivan Serov to Rudolf Barak, “Kidnap Müller!”
19.2 - Unlimited Sovietisation
19.3 - A superficial relaxation
19.4 - The approach and abduction
19.5 - The end of a “top policeman”
19.6 - Curious campaigns and loyal admirers

Chapter 20
20.1 - Sharing the loot in Adenauer’s shadow
20.2 - Schacht, Abs, Pferdmenges, Achenbach...
20.3 - A surprising symbiosis behind Konrad Adenauer
20.4 - Playing double and multiple games under cover of the Cold War
20.5 - The Gauleiter Circle in 1953
20.6 - Ernst Achenbach, lawyer and negotiator
20.7 - The Thyssen affair

Chapter 21
21.1 - Deafening silence in the East and in the West
21.2 - Mossad bans further operations
21.3 - Moscow’s silence

Appendix 1 - I G Farben, worldwide economic espionage and the “Zefis”

Appendix 2 - Bormann, the committees of bankers, the intermediaries

Appendix 3 - Karl Oberg and Helmut Knochen

Appendix 4 - A German-Soviet Medal from the year 1934

Appendix 5 - Olga Ivanovna Förster-Shkarina

Appendix 6 - Olga Chekhova

Appendix 7 - Secrets of an Immersion
Kommando 306 is hot on my heels
Target de Gaulle
In the Boulevard Suchet, Paris
Light is shed on an epoch
A helping hand from Gustave Bertrand
On the staff of the Governor of Württemberg
The Schnaufer communications route
Self-financing an adventure
Clear warnings

Index