The former Gestapo chief, Heinrich Mueller, is in Tiranna, Albania, working for that country’s secret police, it was reported here today in Der Stern, Germany’s largest illustrated magazine.
In a well-documented article based on information from an unidentified western security service, the magazine charged that Mueller, long the subject of speculation, has been in Albania since 1956 and uses the name, Nakoschiri. He is reported to be a captain in the secret police but with the authority of a general.
Details about Mueller’s escape from Nazi territory in 1945 and his whereabouts, the magazine said, will be made available to the West German Government during the course of this week by a “West European intelligence service.”
Reports that Mueller, Eichmann’s Gestapo superior, did not die during the last days of the Second World War, have been circulating in Germany for several months. In September, a court ordered that his body be exhumed from a grave in West Berlin that bears his name but medical experts determined that bones in the grave belonged to three separate individuals and no positive identification was made that any of them belonged to Mueller.
According to the magazine, Mueller, reported to have been killed by artillery fire in early May 1945, actually survived and surrendered to the Soviet forces in Berlin after having made contact with Russian officials several weeks earlier. For a few years after the war, according to the article, Mueller was active in the Soviet security service.
Because of his close connections with Hungary’s former Communist party boss Ernce Geroe, he moved to Budapest to train agents. After the Hungarian uprising in 1956, the article said, Mueller moved to Albania, the last citadel of European Stalinism, where he has remained.
The publication said that an old-line Communist who had spent many years in a German concentration camp, spotted Mueller in the Albanian port city of Durazzo about a year ago and, on his return to East Germany, where he lives, he filed charges against the ex-Gestapo boss with the East German secret police. East German authorities quashed the charges, however, and ordered the complainant not to talk about the case
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
