Heinrich Müller. Photo: Wikipedia.

The head of the Gestapo, the feared Nazi secret police, was buried in a Jewish cemetery, Germany’s The Bild news website reported Thursday, leading to an outcry from Jewish leaders.

One of the chief architects of the “Final Solution,” the Nazi effort to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe, Heinrich Müller was said to have been present in Adolf Hitler’s bunker in the days leading up to the Nazi leader’s suicide; but thereafter little is known of his fate.

The Bild newspaper, however, says it has seen documents confirming his death and burial at a mass Jewish grave in Berlin.

The paper quotes Prof Johannes Tuchel, an historian, who says he discovered archive evidence showing that Mueller died at the end of the war.

“Müller never survived the war. His body was buried in 1945 in a mass grave in the Jewish cemetery,” he said.

The president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Dieter Graumann, told The Bild he was shocked by the news.

“That such a brutal Nazi sadist is buried in a Jewish cemetery of all places is a tasteless monstrosity. The memory of victims is being heavily trampled on,” he said.

Heinrich Müller was long thought to have survived the war. In 1949 Germany’s intelligence agency (BND)  reported seeing him in Czechoslovakia.

Prof Tuchel, who is also the head of the German Resistance Memorial in Berlin, said that that the BND was mistaken. He said newly unearthed documents indicate that Müller was first buried near an airport in Berlin in the last days of the war.

He said that “a body in a general’s uniform with Mueller’s identification documents” was then disinterred and reburied in the mass grave in the Jewish cemetery in 1945.