By Richard Sandomir
22 Mar 2024
At the age of 15, he fled to England. At 20, he joined the British Army and, while on the run, recognized a German minister who, among other things, was deporting Dutch Jews to labor camps.
Norman Miller was visiting the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum with his sons Steven and Michael in 1999 when they paused at an exhibit describing the top Nazi leaders who carried out the extermination of six million Jews. Pointing to a picture of Arthur Seyss-Inquart, a high-ranking but not well-known Nazi, he made a startling confession.
“I told you I arrested him, didn’t I?” Norman Miller said.
“We were incredulous,” Steven Miller recalled in an interview. “We turned to him and said, ‘What?'”
Until then, the elderly Mr. Miller hadn’t said a word to them about Mr. Seyss-Inquart, who, as Reich Commissioner of the German-occupied Netherlands, was responsible for the deportation of thousands of Dutch Jews to concentration camps. He held a similar position in Poland, where he was known for policies that favored the persecution of Jews.
The chance encounter 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 and the war in Europe ended. Mr. Miller belonged to the Royal Welch Fusiliers, which guarded a checkpoint between the American and British sectors in Hamburg.
When a brown Opel, which had been driving erratically, had to be stopped at the checkpoint, one of the four men in the vehicle said he had papers that Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery needed to sign. One of the soldiers asked a German policeman whether the papers were in order, according to a newspaper published by the regiment after the incident. The officer said the papers, which were written in German, looked fine. But the fusilier was not satisfied with this answer.
So he asked Mr. Miller, who could read German, for help.
“He came to me and showed me the paper,” Mr. Miller said in a 2013 interview with the Holocaust Museum. (The regiment’s newspaper stated that 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 recognized Mr. Seyss-Inquart’s name and face from the newspaper, recalled having him arrested and sent to the battalion commander. Mr. Seyss-Inquart was convicted of war crimes by the Allied Military Tribunal at Nuremberg and hanged on October 16, 1946.
Mr. Miller, however, was not very happy with the arrest.
“I mean, I wasn’t overjoyed,” he said last year in an interview with WNBC-TV in New York. “It didn’t help bring my parents and my family back.”
Mr. Miller died at the age of 99 on February 24 in a Manhattan hospital, said his son Steven.
Mr. Müller was born Norbert Müller on June 2, 1924, in Tann in the Rhön region and moved to Nuremberg with his family in 1930. His father, Sebald, was a teacher, and his mother, Laura (Youngest) Müller, ran the household.
The Müllers’ desire to leave Germany became even more urgent during the Kristallnacht pogroms in November 1938. The Nazis broke into the family’s apartment and used axes to smash furniture, duvets, a cupboard containing jars of jam and pickle, and musical instruments, including a piano and a cello.
The following year, Norbert, his parents, and his sister Susanne moved into another building in Nuremberg designated for Jewish use. They shared an apartment with an elderly couple.
Despite their desire to keep the family intact, Norbert’s parents were only able to secure safe passage for Norbert through the Kindertransport, the British rescue operation that brought some 10,000 children from German-occupied countries to safety.
During a stopover in Cologne, Mr. Miller’s father discovered that his son did not have the proper papers to enter the Netherlands. His father then sneaked into the closed British consulate and soon emerged with the signed document his son needed to board the Kindertransport train and later take a ship to Great Britain from the Dutch port of Vlissingen. (Mr. Miller believed his father had most likely bribed someone to obtain the document.)
It was the end of August 1939. There were only days left until Germany would invade Poland on September 1, starting World War II. Fifteen-year-old Norbert’s family would never receive 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. For the next two years, he and his family exchanged letters.
One day, his parents sent him a haunting photograph, which seemed like a vision of the wish that they had never been separated. A picture of Norbert was inserted into a studio photograph, between his mother, who leaned to the left, and his sister. His father sat to the right. (The photograph was among the letters, notebooks, and other documents that Mr. Miller donated to the Holocaust Museum in 2016.)
“It’s devastating,” said Fred Wasserman, who curated the donation, by phone. “This is an example of a picture being worth a thousand words.”
In 1944, when he was 20, Norbert joined the British Army—believing it was the best way to learn what had happened to his family after the correspondence ended—and anglicized his name to Norman Albert Miller. As a corporal, he was assigned to the Intelligence Service because of his fluent German, which led to his presence at the checkpoint in Hamburg.
After being released in 1947, he left England the following year for New York, taking a train to Toronto within a few days. In September 1949, he returned to New York and worked for many years as a tool and die maker, primarily 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 after his sister Suzanna.
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 elderly and sick Jewish prisoners taken by bus and truck to a forest on the outskirts of Riga, where they were 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 into the woods, where Mr. Miller filled three vials with soil from the killing fields: one for him and the others for his sons.
At Mr. Miller’s funeral in Paramus, N.J., his sons and other family members poured the soil from the vial onto the coffin after it was lowered into the grave.
“It was unbearable,” said Mr. Wasserman, who attended the funeral and burial. “The rabbi said he had never seen anything like it in 40 or 50 years.”
In his eulogy, Steven Miller said that sprinkling the coffin with Riga soil was “so that those who were taken from him and never had a proper burial could finally be prayed for and reunited with their son and be laid to rest.”
Source: New York Times