Himmler biographer Peter Padfield wrote : " he Müller was an archetypal middle rank official : of limited imagination , non-political , non-ideological , his only fanaticism lay in an inner drive to perfection in his profession and in his duty to the state — which in his mind were one ... A smallish man with piercing eyes and thin lips , he was an able organiser , utterly ruthless , a man who lived for his work . " Such was his dedication to the job that Auschwitz Commandant Rudolf Höss claimed that one could reach Müller " any time of the day or night , even Sundays and public holidays . " He was made Inspector of the Security Police for all of Austria following the 1938 Anschluss , while his close friend Franz Josef Huber took charge of the Gestapo office in Vienna . One of Müller 's first major acts occurred during the unprecedented Kristallnacht pogrom of 9 – 10 November 1938 , when he ordered the arrest of between 20,000 – 30,000 Jews . Heydrich also tasked Müller during the summer of 1939 to create a centrally organized agency to deal with the eventual emigration of the Jews . Müller became a member of the Nazi Party in 1939 for the purely opportunist reason of improving his chances of promotion and only after Himmler insisted he do it . Historian Robert Gellately does not give much credence to this apolitical image of Müller and cites the musings of Walter Schellenberg , who claimed that during a conversation with Müller sometime in 1943 , that Müller lauded the Stalinist system as superior to Nazism , which he believed compromised on too much . Schellenberg even alleged that when Müller compared Stalin against Hitler , his ( Müller 's ) opinion was that , Stalin did things better . As Gellately relates , such a politically-oriented asseveration certainly indicates Müller did indeed have preferences . He was notorious , for instance , for admiring the Soviet police
Kristallnacht
Kristallnacht
Heinrich Müller (Gestapo)