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Norman Miller was visiting america Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1999 together with his sons, Steven and Michael, after they stopped at an exhibit describing the highest Nazi leaders who led the extermination of six million Jews. When he pointed to {a photograph} of Arthur Seyss-Inquart, a high-ranking however extensively recognized Nazi, he made a stunning admission.
“I instructed you I arrested him, didn't I?” Norman Miller mentioned.
“We had been incredulous,” Steven Miller recalled in an interview. “We turned to him and mentioned, 'What,
Till then, the elder Mr. Miller had not mentioned a phrase to him about Mr. Seyss-Inquart, who, as Reich Commissioner of the German-occupied Netherlands, was liable for deporting 1000’s of Dutch Jews to focus camps. He held an identical job in Poland, the place he was recognized for insurance policies supporting Jewish persecution.
The possibility encounter between Mr. Miller, a German refugee serving within the British Military, and Mr. Seyss-Inquart occurred on Could 7, 1945, the day Germany surrendered to the Allies, ending the battle in Europe. Mr Miller was a part of the Royal Welch Fusiliers regiment, guarding a publish between the American and British sectors in Hamburg.
When a brown Opel, which was driving the incorrect approach, was pressured to cease at a checkpoint, one of many 4 individuals within the car mentioned he had papers for Subject Marshal Bernard Montgomery to signal. Are. In line with a newspaper revealed by the regiment after the incident, one of many troopers requested a German policeman if the papers had been so as. The officer mentioned the paperwork, which had been in German, appeared completely nice. However the Fusilier was not glad with the reply.
So he requested for assist from Mr. Miller, who studied German.
“He got here as much as me, confirmed me the paper,” Mr. Miller mentioned in an oral historical past interview with the Holocaust Museum in 2013. (The regiment's newspaper mentioned the fusiliers introduced all 4 males to Mr. Miller.) After which, he mentioned, he realized “we had a giant Nazi fish right here.”
Mr. Miller, who knew Mr. Seyss-Inquart's identify and face from the newspapers, recalled that he had him arrested and despatched to the battalion commander. He was convicted of battle crimes by the Allied navy tribunal at Nuremberg and hanged on October 16, 1946.
However Mr. Miller didn’t get a lot satisfaction from the arrest.
“I imply, I wasn't very pleased,” he mentioned in an interview with WNBC-TV in New York final yr. “It didn't assist carry again my dad and mom, my household.”
Mr. Miller died in a Manhattan hospital on February 24. He was 99 years previous.
His son Steven confirmed the demise.
Mr. Miller was born Norbert Muller in Tann in der Rhone, Germany, on June 2, 1924, and moved together with his household to Nuremberg in 1930. His father, Sebald, was a instructor, and his mom, Laura (Jungster) Müller, ran the family.
Müller's need to depart Germany turned much more intense through the Kristallnacht bloodbath in November 1938. The Nazis entered the household house and used axes to interrupt furnishings, musical devices together with pianos and cellos, feather beds and cabinets containing jars stuffed with jam. And pickles.
The next yr, Norbert, his dad and mom, and his sister, Susanne, moved into one other constructing in Nuremberg designated just for Jews. He shared an house with an older couple.
Regardless of their need to maintain their household intact, Norbert's dad and mom might solely safe secure passage for Norbert via the Kindertransport, the British rescue effort that introduced roughly 10,000 kids to security from German-occupied international locations.
At one cease on the journey, in Cologne, Germany, Mr. Miller's father realized that his son didn’t have the proper paperwork to achieve the Netherlands. Mr Miller mentioned his father broke into the closed British Consulate and got here out with signed documentation that he wanted to board a Kindertransport practice and later enter Britain on a ship from the Dutch port of Vlissingen. (Mr. Miller believed that his father might have bribed somebody to acquire the paperwork.)
This was the top of August 1939. Just a few days remained till Germany invaded Poland on September 1, beginning World Warfare II. Fifteen-year-old Norbert's household would by no means get the visa they wanted.
In London, Mr. Miller lived in an orphanage and later in rented rooms. He additionally realized to weld.
However he was alone, an adolescent with out his mom, father and sister. He and his household exchanged letters over the subsequent two years.
Sooner or later, his dad and mom ship him a haunting photograph that looks as if a mirrored image of the want that they’d by no means been separated. {A photograph} of Norbert was inserted between his mom, who was leaning to his left, and his sister in a studio photograph. His father was on the suitable.
“It’s devastating,” Fred Wasserman, who donated Mr. Miller’s paperwork, together with letters and notebooks, to the Holocaust Museum in 2016, mentioned by telephone. “That is an instance the place an image is value a thousand phrases.”
In 1944, when he was 20, Norbert joined the British Military – he believed this was the easiest way to seek out out what occurred to his household after their correspondence ended – and adjusted his identify to English. Norman Albert Miller in. A sergeant, he was assigned to the intelligence part as a result of he was fluent in German, which explains why he was on guard in Hamburg.
After his discharge in 1947, Mr. Miller left England for New York the next yr, and inside a number of days caught a practice to Toronto. He returned to New York in September 1949. He labored as a software and die maker for a few years, largely within the Bronx. In 1951, he married Ingeborg Sommer, who had left Germany along with her household in 1938. He died in 1996.
Along with his son Steven, Mr. Miller is survived by his son Michael and two grandchildren, certainly one of whom is his sister Susanna.
Shortly after the battle, Mr. Miller realized from a letter from a buddy who had survived the Jungfernhof focus camp in Riga, Latvia, that his dad and mom, sister, and maternal grandmother had arrived there in late 1941. In March 1942, they had been among the many previous and sick Jewish prisoners taken by bus and truck to a close-by forest on the outskirts of Riga, shot lifeless and buried in a mass grave.
Mr Miller and his son Steven traveled to Riga in 2013. They noticed the stays of the camp and went into the forest. Whereas he was there, Mr. Miller crammed three vials with soil from the homicide fields: one for himself and the opposite two for his sons.
At Mr. Miller's funeral in Paramus, N.J., his sons and different relations poured soil from his vial onto the coffin after it was positioned within the grave.
“It was insufferable,” mentioned Mr. Wasserman, who attended the funeral and burial. “The rabbi mentioned he had by no means seen something prefer it in 40 or 50 years.”
In his eulogy, Steven Miller mentioned that the aim of sprinkling the coffin with Riga soil was “in order that these, who had been separated from him and who had been by no means given a correct burial, might lastly be prayed for and “In order that they are often united once more and buried.” With my son.”