The body of Heinrich Müller, chief of Hitler’s Gestapo secret police, and the most senior Nazi thought to have remained at large after the Second World War, is reported to have been secretly buried in a Jewish cemetery in Berlin in 1945.

“Gestapo Müller” was Adolf Eichmann’s commanding officer and one of the chief architects of the Holocaust. But his fate had baffled Nazi hunters for 68 years.

He was last seen in Hitler’s bunker the day after the Nazi leader’s suicide. In 1949, the post-war German intelligence service reported a sighting of him in Czechoslovakia.

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But Germany’s Bild newspaper quoted a leading historian of the Nazi era, Professor Johannes Tuchel, who said: “Müller never survived the war. His body was buried in 1945 in a mass grave in the Jewish cemetery in Berlin.”

Professor Tuchel, the director of Berlin’s German Resistance Memorial, said he had documentary evidence indicating that Müller was first buried near an airport in Berlin but later moved to the city’s Jewish cemetery.

He said a local registrar had certified that “a body in a general’s uniform with Müller’s identification documents,” was buried there.

The President of Germany’s Central Council of Jews, Dieter Graumann, said he was shocked at the news. “That one of the most brutal Nazi sadists is buried in a Jewish cemetery, of all places, is a tasteless monstrosity,” he said.