Norman Miller, German refugee who helped capture a top Nazi, dies at age 99

Norman Miller was visiting the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum with his sons Steven and Michael in 1999 when they stopped by an exhibit detailing the key Nazi leaders who carried out the extermination of six million Jews. Pointing to a photo of Arthur Seyss-Inquart, a high-ranking but not widely known Nazi, he made a stunning admission.

“I told you I arrested him, didn’t I?” said Norman Miller.

“We were in disbelief,” Steven Miller recalled in an interview. “We turned to him and said, ‘What?’”

Until then the eldest Mr. Miller had not said a word about it Mr Seyss-Inquart, who as Reich Commissioner for the German-occupied Netherlands was responsible for the deportation of thousands of Dutch Jews to concentration camps. He had held a similar job in Poland, where he was known for policies that promoted Jewish persecution.

The chance meeting between Mr. Miller, a German refugee serving in the British Army, and Mr. Seyss-Inquart took place on May 7, 1945, the day Germany surrendered to the Allies to end the war in Europe. Mr. Miller was part of the Royal Welch Fusiliers regiment, which guarded a checkpoint between the American and British sectors in Hamburg.

When a brown Opel, which had been driving erratically, was forced to stop at the checkpoint, one of the four men in the vehicle said he had papers for Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery to sign. One of the soldiers asked a German police officer if the papers were in order, according to a newspaper published by the regiment after the incident. The officer said the papers, which were in German, looked good. But the fusilier was not satisfied with the answer.

So he asked Mr. Miller, who read German, for help.

“He came up to me and showed me the paper.” Mr. Miller said this in an oral history interview with the Holocaust Museum in 2013. (The regiment’s newspaper said the fusilier brought all four men to Mr. Miller.) And then, he said, he realized that “we have a big Nazi fish here.”

Mr. Miller, who knew Mr. Seyss-Inquart’s name and face from the newspapers, recalled having him arrested and sent to the battalion commander. He was convicted of war crimes by the Allied military tribunal in Nuremberg and hanged on October 16, 1946.

But Mr. Miller did not get much satisfaction from the arrest.

“I mean, I wasn’t overjoyed.” he said in an interview with WNBC-TV last year in New York City. “It didn’t help to bring my parents and my family back.”

Mr. Miller died on February 24 in a Manhattan hospital. He was 99.

His son Steven confirmed the death.

Mr. Miller was born Norbert Müller on June 2, 1924 in Tann in der Rhön, Germany, and moved with his family to Nuremberg in 1930. His father, Sebald, was a teacher, and his mother, Laura (Jüngster) Müller, managed the home.

The Müllers’ desire to leave Germany became even more urgent during the Kristallnacht pogroms, in November 1938. Nazis entered the family’s apartment and used axes to destroy furniture, musical instruments including a piano and cello, feather beds and a cupboard with pots filled with jam to smash. and pickles.

The following year, Norbert, his parents and his sister Susanne moved to another building in Nuremberg that was only for Jews. They shared an apartment with an older couple.

Despite their desire to keep their family intact, Norbert’s parents were only able to secure safe passage for Norbert through Kindertransport, the British rescue operation that brought some 10,000 children from German-occupied countries to safety.

During a stopover during the trip, in Cologne, Germany, Mr. Miller’s father realized that his son did not have the proper paperwork to reach the Netherlands. Mr Miller said his father sneaked into the closed British consulate and emerged with the signed document that he was to board the Kindertransport train and later enter Britain on a ship from the Dutch seaport of Vlissingen. (Mr. Miller believed that his father most likely bribed someone to get the document.)

It was late August 1939. Only a few days remained before Germany would invade Poland on September 1 and start World War II. Fifteen-year-old Norbert’s family would never get the visas they needed.

In London, Mr. Miller lived in an orphanage and later in rented rooms. He also learned to weld.

But he was alone, a teenager without his mother, father and sister. He and his family exchanged letters over the next two years.

One day his parents sent him a terrifying photo that resembled a vision of wishing they had never been separated. A photo of Norbert was inserted into a studio photo, between his mother, who was leaning to the left, and his sister. His father sat on the right.

“It’s devastating,” Fred Wasserman, curator Mr. Miller’s 2016 donation to the Holocaust museum of documents, including letters and notebooks, said by phone. “This is an example where a picture says more than a thousand words.”

In 1944, when he was twenty, Norbert joined the British Army – believing it was the best way to find out what happened to his family after their correspondence ended – and Anglicized his name to Norman Albert Miller . As a sergeant, he was assigned to the intelligence division because he spoke fluent German, which explains why he found himself at the checkpoint in Hamburg.

After his discharge in 1947, Mr. Miller left England for New York the following year, taking a train to Toronto within a few days. In September 1949 he returned to New York. He worked for many years as a tool and die maker, mainly in the Bronx. In 1951 he married Ingeborg Sommer, who had left Germany with her family in 1938. She died in 1996.

In addition to his son Steven, Mr. Miller is survived by his son Michael and two grandchildren, one of whom is named Suzanna, to his sister.

Not long after the war, Mr. Miller learned in a letter from a friend who had survived the Jungfernhof concentration camp in Riga, Latvia, that his parents, sister and maternal grandmother had arrived there in late 1941. In March 1942, they were among the old and sick Jewish prisoners who were taken by bus and truck to a nearby forest on the outskirts of Riga, shot and buried in a mass grave.

Mr Miller and his son Steven traveled to Riga in 2013. They saw the remains of the camp and went to the forest. While they were there, Mr. Miller filled three vials with soil from the killing fields: one for him and the other two for his sons.

At Mr. Miller’s funeral in Paramus, N.J., his sons and other relatives poured soil from his vial onto the casket after it was lowered into the grave.

“It was unbearable,” said Mr. Wasserman, who attended the funeral. “The rabbi said he had never seen anything like it in forty or fifty years.”

In his eulogy, Steven Miller said the purpose of sprinkling the coffin with Riga soil was “so that those who were torn from him and never had a proper burial of their own can finally be prayed for and reunited and laid to rest become. with their son.”