National Archives and Records Administration News Release
| FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE | December 14, 1999 |
National Archives to Open Heinrich Mueller
and Arthur Rudolph FilesCollege Park, MD. . . On Wednesday, December 15, 1999, the National Archives and Records Administration will open for research case files on Gestapo Chief Heinrich Mueller and German and American Rocket Scientist Arthur Rudolph. The records will be available in the Central Research Room, beginning at 9 A.M., at the National Archives at College Park, located at 8601 Adelphi Road.
The file relating to Heinrich Mueller, containing some 135 pages, covers the period from 1945 to 1963. It also contains copies of Nazi-Government produced documents that pre-date 1945. During World War II, Mueller was the head of the Gestapo and the leading administrator in mass killing operations during the period of late 1942 to late 1944. In the files, there were reports, rumors, and allegations that he was working for the Czech, Argentine, Russian and Cuban governments. Rumors are also noted in the files that he was killed in the last days of the war or that he killed himself and his family in 1946.
The file relating to Arthur Rudolph, contains some 165 pages. It primarily covers the period 1945-1958, when he was employed by the Department of the Army to work with its missile program. During World War II, Rudolph served as a production engineer for the German V-2 rocket project. After the creation of NASA in 1958, Rudolph went to work for that agency, where he served as the project director of the Saturn V rocket program. He left the United States in 1984 and surrendered his U.S. citizenship following the discovery, by the Office of Special Investigations (Department of Justice), of his role in the persecution of slave laborers at an underground V-2 missile factory.
These files were received from the Investigative Records Repository (IRR) of the U.S. Army Intelligence Command (INSCOM), Ft. Meade, Maryland, and are component parts of the Records of the Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence (G-2), Records of the Army Staff (Record Group 319). In opening these files, Dr. Michael Kurtz, the IWG Chair and Assistant Archivist of the United States, noted that the IWG has worked this year to open nearly 300,000 pages of documentation. These records contain information about Nazi war criminals; the work of the Tripartite Gold Commission; Project Paperclip (foreign scientists); the Safehaven Project to identify, locate, and recover looted Nazi assets; and, postwar Allied negotiations with wartime neutral nations regarding the restitution of gold looted by the Nazis. Dr. Kurtz believes a significantly larger quantity of records will be declassified and opened for researchers in 2000.
These files were declassified and made available for research under the auspices of the Nazi War Criminal Records Interagency Working Group (IWG), established in accordance with the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act of 1998 by Executive Order 13110 of January 11, 1999. This law and executive order directs the IWG to locate, identify, inventory, recommend for declassification, and make available all classified Nazi war criminal records, subject to certain specified restrictions, and to coordinate with Federal agencies and expedite the release of such records to the public.
For information regarding the work of the IWG, including recent declassifications of records, please see its website: www.nara.gov/iwg. For access to the Mueller and Rudolph files please contact the Modern Military records unit on 301-713-7250 or in room 2400 of the National Archives at College Park, Maryland.
* * * * For additional PRESS information, please contact the National Archives Public Affairs staff at (301) 713-6000 or by e-mail. Visit the National Archives Home Page on the World Wide Web at http://www.nara.gov.
00-19
National Archives and Records Administration