Gestapo Chief : The 1948 Interrogation of Heinrich Muller Review

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(More customer reviews)This is one of four books that have appeared since 1995 on the postwar association of former SS-Gruppenfuehrer Heinrich ("Gestapo"-)Mueller with the American Intelligence community. From the outset, it is well worth having by every scholar or educated laymen interested in the last phase of World War II in Europe and its aftermath. The content is, to put it mildly, volatile, or certainly would be in an age less indifferent to such revelations. The public, particularly the academic public, has a right to be skeptical. Recall, after all, what embarrassment was visited upon the British historian, Hugh Trevor-Roper, when seventeen years ago he pronounced the "Hitler Diaries" authentic. Douglas clearly is not impressed with academics. Perhaps rightly so, given the 1983 fiasco. One recalls Hegel's allusion to the "Hofhistoriker," the "court historians," and all of the ramifications of such a designation. Douglas provides photocopies of documents from the US Army and several Intelligence agencies, all of which, were they fakes, might easily have been refuted over four years ago. That has not happened. People are named whose relatives, where the statements made in this volume and those that followed not true, would most certainly have had recourse to litigation. That, apparently, has also not happened. The revelations concerning Mueller should be seen within the wider context of CIA engagement of former Gestapo agents such as Klaus Barbie (a small fish, in comparison to Mueller) as experts in the West's anti-communist efforts, which reached a fever pitch in the late 1940s. It is, of course, a paradox that, while the Army CIC (Counter Intelligence Corps) continued to search for Mueller as a war criminal, the CIA had already recruited him as one of their top agents, moved him to the Washington area (where he entertained in his home the 33rd President of the United States and became a card-carrying member of the Democratic Party), and protected his identity for decades. To be sure, there is much here that will require greater study by scholars. Few will accept the idea that Hitler left the Reichskanzlei with others on April 26th bound for Spain, four days prior to the day on which he is assumed to have committed suicide in the bunker of the Reichskanzlei. The German playwright Rolf Hochhuth and the French writer Pierre Joffroy will be astounded to learn that the SS officer, Kurt Gerstein, according to volume 1 of this series, was the man originally responsible for the mass slaughter of Jews by gassing in Poland, and not quite the "just man" anxious to expose the crimes of others as which he has been described by Joffroy.If there is anything "troubling" about Douglas's volume and those which have followed about "Gestapo"-Mueller in the interim, it is the fact that no compelling counter-evidence has emerged from any quarter in the past four years or more to contest the material contained therein. The silence is, in fact, deafening.

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