It remains one of the great riddles of the war. How could Hitler’s ruthless henchman, a forbidding figure described by another top Nazi as having hands like “strangler’s claws”, simply disappear and evade capture for decades?

Müller was a man of immense power. As boss of the Gestapo, he oversaw the implementation of Hitler’s murderous policies against the Jews. He was one of the planners at the Wansee conference where the Nazi leadership decided the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question”.

Adolf Eichmann, who was hanged by Israel in 1960 for implementing the Holocaust, was acting under Müller’s orders.

It was Müller, too, who at the end of March 1944 gave the order to shoot 50 British and allied prisoners of war after the mass