Johannes Hermann Müller

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Johannes Hermann Müller as a witness at the Nuremberg trials

Johannes Hermann Müller (born July 30, 1895 in Gotha ; † March 24, 1961 ) was a German police officer and perpetrator of the Holocaust .

Life

Youth and career start

After attending school in Berlin, which he graduated from high school in spring 1914 , Müller studied philology for one semester . From August 1, 1914 to December 1918, he took part in the First World War, from 1916 as an officer.

Following his discharge from the Prussian army , from which he resigned as a lieutenant, Müller began studying law , which he broke off without a degree. Instead, he entered the police force in September 1919 as a candidate for the higher police career (detective commissioner candidate) at the police headquarters in Berlin . From 1919 to 1930, Müller worked for the criminal police in Berlin and also studied at the Berlin University . In 1921 he passed the state examination (final examination as detective inspector) and was then appointed criminal inspector in August 1921 and was permanently employed as a detective.

From 1921, Müller worked for a short time at a police office in Berlin-Kreuzberg . In 1922 he was appointed head of the Reich Central Office for Combating International Trafficking in Girls . He held this position until 1923. Also in 1922, after a major murder case was uncovered, he was appointed head of a Berlin homicide squad, which he remained until 1930. During this time he served in 1923 as the German representative in the League for Human Rights at the League of Nations in Geneva and from 1930 to 1931 as a murder specialist at the International Criminal Investigation Association.

In 1931 Müller officiated for a short time as deputy head of the criminal police in Mönchengladbach . He was then transferred to Wroclaw on the occasion of a highly acclaimed child murder case , where from 1931 to 1933 he held the post of head of inspection or the head of the murder commission of the criminal police (head of the homicide commission for Lower Silesia ).

time of the nationalsocialism

Shortly after the National Socialists came to power in the spring of 1933, Müller was arrested as a member of the SPD - to which he had been a member since 1927 - and subjected to proceedings under the Professional Civil Service Act. Shortly thereafter, he was reinstated in the police force in a lowly position as a moral officer.

In 1935, Müller was transferred to the Political Police and from there assigned to the Abwehr Police . In the period that followed, he worked for the Abwehrstelle in Saarbrücken . In 1936 he switched to the defense post of the Wehrmacht in Wiesbaden , but was transferred back to the police and punished with a reprimand, since he had taken this step in breach of official channels. During this time, Müller applied for admission to the NSDAP , a member of which became a member of the ban on membership that was imposed in 1933 ( membership number 2.031.230). In addition, he became a member of the SS as a police officer in 1939 (SS No. 337,403). In 1938 he was transferred to Dresden as head of the police department with the rank of criminal director , where he stayed until 1940.

During the Second World War , Müller succeeded Josef Meisinger in German-occupied Poland in early March 1941 as commander of the Security Police and Security Service (KdS) Warsaw . He then acted as the successor to Walter Huppenkothen from July 1941 to September 1943 as KdS in Lublin . In part, there is also a functional description of a "Commissioner for the Office of the Commander of the Lublin Security Police". On August 21, 1942, Odilo Globocnik , at that time Higher SS and Police Leader in Lublin, named Müller in the presence of Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler as one of his "best" men. Müller was then immediately promoted to SS-Obersturmbannführer because of his "services to the extermination of the Jews " by Himmler .

In this position, criminal proceedings for friendliness towards Poland and Jews were initiated against him by a police court, which led to his loss of office. In 1943 he was expelled from the NSDAP .

After a prolonged illness ( angina pectoris ), Müller started working for the Wehrmacht's foreign inspection office in Berlin on January 4, 1944, where he was responsible for mail censorship tasks as the head of the evaluation group for international mail. Later in 1944 he was investigated in connection with the events of July 20, 1944 . In particular, he was interrogated about the whereabouts of Arthur Nebe, who was in hiding. After Müller was retired from the police on January 9, 1945, he became a captain of the 3rd Battalion of the Wehrmacht Infantry Regiment 11 (IR 11 / III) in March 1945.

post war period

At the end of the war, Müller was taken prisoner near Wörlitz . In the following years he was interrogated as part of the Nuremberg Trials , particularly in connection with the activities of the Political Police and the SD . In 1947 he was one of the first to alert the American investigative authorities to the person of the former head of the Jewish department at the RSHA, Adolf Eichmann , whom he described as a "mass murderer", and who he had said: Müller had observed Eichmann during the war in Lublin and Berlin and collected material about him - u. a. Photos and fingerprints - which he made available to the Americans.

During his internment in various camps, Müller successively acted as chief editor of the camp newspaper Ziegenain Camp 95 and then as chief editor of the bridge in Camp 75 .

An extradition request made by the Republic of Poland in August 1949 because of Müller's participation in the "mass extermination of Jews" was not granted by the German authorities. Müller rejoined the police service - from 1952 onwards with the rank of detective commissioner - and in 1953 headed the state identification service in Hesse as well as the Hessian state criminal investigation office . Promoted to the Government and Criminal Police Council, he reported unfit for service in July 1954 and was retired in November 1954. At his place of residence Nonnenroth he was the organist of the local parish, got involved again in the SPD and pursued his passion for hunting. Müller is said to have conspiratorially monitored right-wing extremists for a German intelligence service. On November 23, 1960 Muller was arrested and died on 24 March 1961 in the pre-trial detention .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Johannes Müller on www.dws-xip.pl
  2. ↑ Dieter Pohl : From the "Jewish policy" to the murder of Jews. The District of the General Government 1939–1944. Lang, Frankfurt 1993, p. 185.
  3. ↑ Ruta Sakowska: People in the Ghetto: The Jewish Population in Occupied Warsaw 1939–1943 , Fiber, 1999, p. 47.
  4. ^ A b Ernst Klee: Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich , Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 421.
  5. ^ IfZ: Witness literature Johannes Hermann Müller, p. 98f .: interrogation of November 28, 1947 Müller erroneously attributes Eichmann to the first name Eduard in this interrogation .
personal data
SURNAME Müller, Johannes Hermann
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German police officer
DATE OF BIRTH July 30, 1895
PLACE OF BIRTH Gotha
DATE OF DEATH March 24, 1961