Top Nazi (11 page)

The fact that the chief adjutant of the Reichsführer SS (since November 9, 1935) and especially as the chief of the personal staff of the Reichsführer SS (since November 9, 1936) was overworked may seem accurate from the eyes of his direct superior. Subordinates, however, have always been known to create the impression of feverish activity for their superiors. It was also part of Wolff’s careerist ambition to constantly be on the lookout for new responsibilities. In that respect, he greatly increased his own workload. Even before becoming chief of staff, he already supervised the departments of Chief Adjutant, Personnel Chancellery, SS Court, and Auditing and Staff Treasury. Under Wolff’s leadership, this apparatus was further expanded. There are many surviving files from his conglomerate of offices. The person who knows this information the best is Elisabeth Kinder at the Federal Archives in Koblenz: “Wolff quickly became Himmler’s closest confidante, accompanied him on trips, and participated in leadership responsibilities.”

Himmler showed his gratitude in an order dated November 9, 1936. He decided that the chief adjutant, “given the expansion, and over the
years, the strongly expanding areas of service,” would receive the title of “The Personal Staff of the Reichsführer SS.” It was not clearly stated that Wolff’s position in the service had the rank of an SS full time officer, equally important to that of full time SD officer Gruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich. However, Wolff’s skillful tactics and his ambition to get ahead in the service quickly created the de facto situation of his being actually a full time chief officer, and therefore equal in status to Heydrich, although, as Brigadeführer, he was still a rank lower than Heydrich.

When the two met for the first time in February 1932 at the training course on Theresienwiese, he was still an independent businessman, and being a troop leader recently part of the noncommissioned ranks of the SS, whereas Heydrich already wore the four stars of a Sturmbannführer on the collar of his brown shirt. According to the comparative standards of the SS, Heydrich had reached the rank of major. The troop leader sat, practically unnoticed by ranking superiors and lecturers, among the hundreds of listeners. He had to make due with the role of student, although the teacher had been neither a soldier on the front, nor did he have any decorations. Even worse, it was whispered that he had been promoted to the rank of officer as a professional soldier in the Marines, but had been released with a simple discharge, which was the equivalent of being dishonorably discharged. Heydrich only joined the SS three months before Wolff in July 1931, but started off from the first day in the service as a paid functionary, whereas Wolff joined the black guards “on an honorary basis” until June 15, 1933, a point he never failed to emphasize.

Once the National Socialists entered the government in Bavaria, the two encountered one another more often, one as the chief of the political police in Munich under Chief of Police Himmler, the other as adjutant of the Reichsführer SS. Their responsibilities hardly ever crossed, but the militant, affected behavior of their relationship required the lower ranking officer, even if he was four years older, to give a loud boot-clicking greeting, standing at attention with his arm outstretched in the Nazi salute. At that time, Wolff’s collar glittered with three stars (Sturmführer) and Heydrich’s sparkled with the Oak Leaf (Standartenführer). In recalling that situation, Wolff often complained in retrospect that he, the fighter from the front and decorated guards officer, had to work his way up from the ranks and as an honorary Führer was promoted more slowly than his full-time comrades.

From the day Himmler took over the office of the secret state police from Göring in Berlin (April 19, 1934), the two deputies were forced to
cross paths constantly. Both had their offices next to Himmler’s suite; Himmler was their direct superior and both of them were avidly seeking promotion. This alone, even without a clash because of their duties, made them rivals. Wolff occasionally indignantly relates how Heydrich and his Munich team searched the offices of their Berlin colleagues at the time they took office, and also had broken open the locked desks of those who were momentarily absent. Wolff could not, however, afford to engage in any public reprimand; in the meantime he had been promoted to Standartenführer, but his competition was a second silver Oak Leaf richer. Besides that, Heydrich, because of his position as chief officer of the SD, managed matters within his area of responsibility independently, while Wolff, as first adjutant, could only derive his authority from Himmlerorders.

At that time, Heydrich tried to show his higher rank and difference in length of service (although slight) over Wolff by treating him as one who took orders. But he had not counted on the adjutant’s best weapon: Wolff controlled Himmler’s date book as well as his telephone conversations. Whoever wanted to speak to Himmler had to go through Wolff first—and Heydrich often had to wait. It finally came down to a loud argument between the two of them.

It was Wolff who suggested making peace, as was customary for officers. They sat together one evening at a Berlin wine bar and, when their moods were relaxed enough, they moved to a nightclub. There, each of them invited a lady to their table. In this cheerful setting and according to time-honored custom, they agreed that from this point on, they would work separately and only join forces to defeat their enemies. As Himmler’s closest advisors, they could influence the goals and methods of the SS to a large degree. The Reichsführer, they decided, should know nothing of the alliance at all.

They occasionally repeated the excursion into the nightlife, as long as they were temporary bachelors in Berlin and their wives still lived in Munich. Separately they enjoyed themselves on business trips to Munich in an apartment that was used by the Gestapo as a conspiratorial hideout to which Wolff was allowed access. The mutual knowledge of those masculine sins strengthened the friendship. Covered by Heydrich’s apparatus of power, by the Gestapo and the SD, the security service of the SS, Wolff could venture into certain hazardous business, negotiating independently, for which he could have received Himmler’s consent only with difficulty. On the other hand, Heydrich could count on the fact that any mines that
were constantly being laid for Himmler by his numerous opponents would be reported to him far in advance for him to disarm them.

How skillfully Wolff used the situation was shown by his efforts to help two of his old schoolmates and friends from his youth in Darmstadt, Dr. Carlo Mierendorff and Dr. Theo Haubach, who had gotten into trouble as political opponents of the National Socialists,. Both were slightly older than Wolff, but they knew each other from the schoolyard of the Ludwig-Georg Gymnasium, which according to Wolff was the “oldest high school in Hesse, attended by the sons of the top families!” They not only knew each other from school, but they also often went swimming and occasionally to the “Dachstube,” a loose group of high school students with literary ambitions that grew out of the German Youth Movement. At the outbreak of the war in the summer of 1914, they were all under the spell of the same fervent enthusiasm for the Fatherland, and every one volunteered to join the Kaiser’s army as soon as possible. Mierendorff and Haubach both returned as officers decorated with medals of courage.

But then they had a parting of the ways. At the beginning, while Wolff tried to remain in the Reichswehr as a lieutenant, and then for lack of a better offer became a banker’s apprentice, the two friends went on to the university and joined up with socialist-leaning academic circles. Mierendorff became part of the leadership cadre of the Social Democratic Party based on a paper of his on the unions, and in 1930 he was the youngest representative to be elected into the Reichstag. Haubach graduated from the university and entered the Prussian ministry of the interior as a consultant, after an interim position as an editor of the Hamburg SPD daily newspaper. The two friends both became active in leadership positions in the “Black-red-gold Reichsbanner,” the militant formation of the leftist democrats.

The Nazi regime assumed that such “enemies of the state” had to be “re-educated” in concentration camps and, at the same time, prevented from engaging in any further political activity. As the great wave of arrests in the spring of 1933 seized the leading Social Democrats, Mierendorff was in Switzerland. He returned because, so he says, he would never again be taken seriously as a politician had he emigrated then. He and Haubach were arrested and sent to a concentration camp. At least during the first years of Nazi rule, Wolff viewed the concentration camps as necessary to keep the political opponents “from standing in the way of German happiness.” He could certainly not ignore that behind the barbed wire there
were often cases of abuse and sometimes even torture and murder. Because it had happened in the past, however, that political opponents had attacked, injured, and even killed National Socialists, he could understand up to a point that some of his comrades wanted revenge. Someone had to do the dirty work. A clean glove often hides a dirty hand.

Therefore, he had no reason to worry about his old schoolmates too soon. It took quite a while before he was told of their plight. But as he went to the Reichstag as the representative from Darmstadt for one of Hitler’s ninety-nine percent elections at the end of March 1936, he was asked to help. The cries for help from the dignitaries of his hometown were ringing in his ears, mainly from a woman who lived in Berlin, whom he had met at the Römheld house in 1919 and who was a friend of his wife-to-be.

As in many other instances, he was ready to help. One cannot tell how far the feeling of justice, simple kind-heartedness or the satisfaction of showing his friends and acquaintances the kind of power he actually could wield, actually drove him. Wolff had the friends from his youth brought to his office in 1937, after almost a four-year term in the concentration camp. During a conversation lasting several hours, he convinced them to refrain from any future political activity, so he could vouch for them with the Gestapo. Both were then released to freedom. Wolff got Mierendorff a job that paid 800 marks monthly, not a bad salary according to the standards of the time. It entailed looking after the social and cultural affairs of the employees at the central German Brabag (Brown Coal and Gasoline Corporation), whose business director Fritz Kranefuss was a close acquaintance through connections at the “circle of friends.” Haubach was given a position in Leipzig with a friend who was a paper manufacturer.

Wolff undoubtedly found out from his friends what they had to endure during their time in the concentration camp. Mierendorff had been at the Hessian camp Osthofen, which the SA had kept during the first months after the takeover of power, without government authorization, and where the prisoners had been sadistically abused. After that, he worked in the quarries of the Papenburg-Bürgermott camp, then moved to the Torgau camp, and then was released from Buchenwald. Haubach told of the murderous work at the Esterwegen camp. The files of Himmler’s personal staff, however, do not have any documents showing that Wolff made any note of these reports of inhumanity, even just for the record. In this situation, he could have easily intervened, as he was a close friend of the supreme commander of the concentration camp guards, SS
Gruppenführer Theodor Eicke, as well as with the supreme chief of administration of all camps, Gruppenführer Oswald Pohl.

On the other hand, Wolff’s old friends never actually thought of keeping their promised abstinence from politics. Mierendorff used business trips that took him abroad to establish contacts with those having the same purpose and to exchange news. He was well aware of what he was risking. To one conspirator he said, “From now on it can only get better—to victory or to the gallows.” He was wrong. On December 4, 1943, he was killed during an air raid on Leipzig.

Haubach joined in with the “Kreisau Circle,” which had established itself around Count Moltke, and kept in contact with the resistance groups around Wilhelm Leuschner and Julius Leber. He was told of the plan to remove Hitler by assassination, and then with the help of the military to bring down the Nazi regime. But as Count Stauffenberg’s bombing attempt failed, and the revolt of the officers was nipped in the bud, Haubach was also arrested in the onslaught of mass arrests. In January 1945, he was sentenced to death by the People’s Court as one of the conspirators and executed.

The woman who initially sought Wolff’s aid was, however, increasingly in danger. According to the Nuremberg Race Laws, she was Jewish. Elisabeth Aron, who was the same age as Wolff, was the daughter of a professor of jurisprudence at the Strassburg Reichs University until 1918. When the French took back Alsace after the First World War, he was expelled to Germany. He went to Darmstadt. There, his daughter befriended Frieda von Römheld and her dancing partner and future husband. When Elisabeth Aron studied in Munich, her friendship to the now married Wolffs continued. She was living in Berlin when Wolff reached the Führer honors in the SS, but letters and visits kept the relationship from drifting apart.

“Despite the fact that the deputy to the Führer had forbidden it, he did not break his friendship with me after the seizure of power,” said Elisabeth Aron solemnly after the Second World War, as former SS General Wolff, like all prominent Nazis, was arrested and began searching for witnesses (for his “denazification” according to the regulations of the victorious allies) who would vouch for his good behavior during the Third Reich. That Rudolf Hess, of all people, who was allowed to carry this deputy title although he was never credited with having any particular competence, looked into the offensive behavior of a higher-ranking SS Führer may actually bolster Wolff’s claim to fame. Had this been the case, then the chief of the Hess administration, Martin Bormann, would have
made sure to see that Wolff was degraded because along with Himmler’s favorite, the Reichsführer SS would have been humiliated as well.

Karl Wolff’s Jewish friend still certified that he protected her “from serious problems through his personal intervention,” and took care that she be allowed to maintain her livelihood in Berlin, although her business competitors had enlisted “Der Stürmer,” the fanatical anti-Semitic and its rabble-rousing readership, against her. “In the spring of 1942,” it further states in the report, “the attacks against him because of me became so strong that he told me he could no longer help me.” Six months later, on September 6, 1942, the Gestapo picked her up when the remaining Jews in Berlin were transported to the east.