A former Czechoslovak communist leader says his agents kidnapped the former Gestapo chief Heinrich Mueller from Argentina in 1956 and turned him over to the KGB.
The KGB said other Germans later killed Mueller in a Russian prison, Rudolf Barak, the 82-year-old former Czechoslovak interior minister, said in an interview published Saturday in the German newsmagazine Focus.Mueller, one of the top Nazis whose postwar fate was never confirmed, was chief of the Gestapo, or secret police, from 1935 until the end of World War II and oversaw the extermination of European Jews.
Barak, as interior minister from 1953 to 1961, headed the Czechoslovak secret services. Partially paralyzed from a stroke, he was unable to come to the phone for an interview with The Associated Press in Prague, the Czech capital.
But his son, journalist Pavel Barak, confirmed that Barak had made the claim.
According to Barak, Czech agents located Mueller in Cordoba, Argentina in 1955, and turned him over to the KGB in Prague the following year.
Serge Klarsfeld, the French Nazi hunter, called Barak's story "absurd," saying Mueller would have been no use to the KGB except for propaganda purposes.
"If the KGB had kidnapped Mueller from Argentina, they would have told the world, because it would have been to the greater glory of communism," Klarsfeld said in a telephone interview from Paris.
"Besides, when someone is kidnapped there are witnesses, and no one has come forward before," said Klarsfeld.
Mueller last was seen in Hitler's bunker on April 29, 1945. His family said he died in the Soviet capture of Berlin.