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About three months before, SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the RSHA and therefore in charge of all persecutors of the Jews, was assassinated in Prague. Wolff’s ally, his support in critical situations, was gone. From now on, if he wanted to protect any Jews, he could only turn to the responsible Gestapo specialist, Adolf Eichmann. Someone like Wolff, it is not hard to imagine, could not deal with the likes of Eichmann. Or he had to seek the assistance of Eichmann’s direct superior, the chief of the Gestapo (Amt IV in the RSHA), SS Gruppenführer Heinrich Müller.
“Heini” Müller was a police officer in Bavaria until the Nazi seizure of power—that is until March 1933—as an inspector in the political department of the Munich police precinct and a strict member of the clerical Bavarian People’s party. Heydrich kept him in that position when he took office because Müller had advertised himself as a communist hater, immediately praising his new masters, and was ready to serve them with equal eagerness. His industriousness, his experience, his criminal tracking sense and his harsh bureaucratic savvy allowed him to rise quickly in official, and therefore also SS, rank. He had already become Gruppenführer when, on October 19, 1942, he wrote the following letter to Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff, who was one rank above him.
Under the seal “Geheim Reichssache” (“Secret Reich Matter”) Wolff read:
According to a report from the SD Main Branch in Chemnitz dated September 27, 1941, SS Scharführer Dr. of Philosophy Kurt Möckel, a chemist, born on July 19, 1901, in Zwickau, resident there, had told an SS Führer, among others, that he had heard from a Frau Bechstein, Berlin, that SS Gruppenführer Wolff in the Staff of the Reichsführer
SS was having a relationship with a Jewess and could not, despite warnings, break it off. Möckel, who was questioned about this, admitted to the facts. According to his description, Frau Bechstein, who was friends with his parents, had raised the above-mentioned reproach in the company of the family in 1937 or earlier. In response to Möckel’s reply that something had to be done about it, Frau Bechstein answered that everything had been done, but to no avail. But since the situation never led to any unpleasant consequences, and had taken place quite some time before, I saw to it that SS Scharführer Möckel was instructed not to repeat any such rumors in the future. In any such occurrences, he was only to report to the department. In the name of the deceased SS Obergruppenführer Heydrich, I admit to being aware of the facts of the case. Heil Hitler! Yours, Müller.
The letter is quite uncommon in more than one respect. After the address in the officially correct form, the letter is not directed to anyone, as was otherwise normal among SS Führers, even if they did not particularly like one another. The entire text had no personal nuances, aside from the “yours” at the end, the only evidence that the sender and the receiver had known each other almost a decade. In correspondence among the staff, there is hardly any similar trace whereby a high-ranking SS Führer wrote so officially and distantly to a higher-ranking officer.
It is also noticeable that the Gestapo head Müller picked up a case that had been reported to him a year before—eight months prior to Heydrich’s death. Perhaps he saw to it that the letter remained where it was, unattended. But why was it pulled from the files now? At any rate, Wolff was accused of “shaming his race” (the term for having sexual relations with a non-Aryan), and, according to the laws of the Third Reich, this was most definitely punishable with a prison sentence, and unavoidably carried the consequences of being kicked out of the Party and the SS. Frau Bechstein, the woman mentioned in the letter, was the wife of the piano manufacturer Carl Bechstein, who liked to call herself a “motherly friend” of Hitler. She also supported the Party with money at the beginning of the 1920s. The Führer and Reichskanzler no longer needed her support, and she was no longer allowed among his closest entourage, but among old Party comrades like Himmler, she was still regarded quite highly.
The final sentences of the letter are also peculiar. Müller says that the matter was already filed away, but he pointed out to Scharführer Möckel that if “the situation came up again, he was to report it.” Even more
improbable was that Heydrich, who had died five months earlier, had given him the task of writing this letter.
All this leads to one conclusion, that the paper was more than simply informing Wolff of a trifle. One can read between the lines Müller’s threat that this claim could always be checked, and even more effectively since the Jewess involved in the case had been in the hands of the Gestapo for a month. During the war years, Wolff was constantly at the Führer headquarters, and there he became one of the courtiers whom Hitler especially valued, possibly even more so than Himmler wanted. The Reichsführer SS watched suspiciously, anyway, that none of his underlings could become dangerous to him. After Heydrich’s death, he led the RSHA himself for a short time before he entrusted Obergruppenführer Kaltenbrunner with it. These two could have had an interest in dampening Wolff’s ambition. Wolff himself was known to say that during the fall of 1942, he felt Himmler’s growing irritation, supposedly only because he wanted to divorce and marry another woman. One would have liked to ask Heini Müller about the purpose of his letter. But he disappeared without a trace after the end of the war, in the ruins of Berlin.
If one believes Wolff, then there was no rivalry between him and Heydrich. That may be true insofar as neither was envious of the other’s position. The bloody handiwork of his friend would most certainly have gotten to Wolff’s conscience; more importantly, it would have been too vulgar for him to consider. Conversely, Heydrich would not have been able to stand the pressures Wolff was exposed to from different sides. Thus, they competed for influence over Himmler. In this regard, Wolff’s judgment of Heydrich was not without animosity. He complained about his looks, which somewhat deviated from the Nordic race, which Wolff believed to embody perfectly himself. He found Heydrich acceptable above the navel, but called the wide hips womanly and un-Germanic. This also encompassed the gray eyes, which coldly peered out of thin slits. Because of this, when Himmler was annoyed with Heydrich’s personal ambition, he always laid the blame on several ancestors from the hordes of the Mongolian ruler Genghis Khan.
On his part, Heydrich apparently complained occasionally to his wife about Wolff’s intrigues. In her memoirs,
Life with a War Criminal
, Lina Heydrich mentions that Wolff achieved something like a “key position in Himmler’s entourage” but not just through his soldierly sincerity. She states rather acerbically that Wolff lacked “every prerequisite for a political career,” and was predominantly busy “in the area of human relations”—
sending congratulations, handing out flowers, and receiving petitioners. “In that respect, he became indispensable.” One does not exactly hear any particular respect for his intelligence in any of this, but the question is how could Lina Heydrich be responsible for such a judgment?
Karl Wolff, on the other hand, felt very capable of managing tasks of a highly political nature with style. Thus, Himmler opened up to him one day, that in the case of his sudden death, he had suggested to the Führer two men—namely Heydrich and Wolff—from whom he could choose to be his successor. “One of the two,” Hitler supposedly replied to Himmler, “will have to do it. Please put both of them in the picture.” With this statement he could only have meant that Wolff, as well as Heydrich, was to be instructed by the Reichsführer SS about the issues and orders within his jurisdiction. Himmler thought that the choice would depend on the situation: for difficult times, Heydrich would be better than the contemplative Wolff. Lina Heydrich sees this differently. As she realized, so she tells, that her husband practiced “the most dreadful of all professions” (she does not say whether she means the supreme police officer or the mass murderer), he said, “I have to do it. Any other could misuse the system.” To that, his wife answered, “Mr. Wolff would certainly have abused it.”
Wolff, who was enraged by this, maintained the opposite. Germany’s most supreme police officer was a henpecked husband, and had a difficult time finding much to say to his wife Lina, who was a stubborn Fresian born in the east. Reinhard, a friend who was four years older, complained from time to time to Wolff of his family problems. Since Heydrich had his little affairs here and there, he had to accept that when his wife flirted so conspicuously with one of his commanding officers, Walter Schellenberg, inevitably there was talk among the Nazi circles. According to Wolff, Lina did this only to force her husband to pay more attention to her.
According to Wolff, the upper echelon of the SS leadership complained about their high-ranking comrade. If he could not even make his own wife march in step, it raised doubts as to whether he could master greater leadership tasks. That was an unfortunate error, because Heydrich organized the murder of the Jews with diabolical perfection. However, caught in his officer’s club standards, Wolff sent his wife Frieda to warn Lina Heydrich. Was this out of friendship? Or was it rather more like a reconnaissance patrol? Lina Heydrich claims in her recollections of Wolff that intrigue was “not foreign” to him. She was not the only one to make such a statement.
Once Lina Heydrich became a widow, Heinrich Himmler showed more concern for her than she wanted. He did not like the fact that she
wanted to continue to play a prominent role, and that she increased her claims regarding benefits because her husband died in the fight for the Führer, the people, and the Fatherland. Hitler saw this differently. At the table in his headquarters, he said to his listeners that a man in the position of Protector of the Reich has to reckon with an assassination attempt, and if he rides through Prague in an unarmored car, one can only describe it as “stupidity or mindlessness.”
Since Wolff had not been the chief of Himmler’s personal staff for some time and was serving in northern Italy as “Highest SS and Police Chief,” he received the order to ensure that Lina Heydrich understood that she was to move away from Nazi society, which was ruled solely by men, and back into private anonymity. This was the reason he invited her to Meran for a rehabilitative vacation in the spring of 1944—far enough away from his headquarters on Lake Garda but still close enough to keep her under control. He found her appropriate accommodations in the marble splendor of the Park Hotel, and, so she would not get bored, she was allowed to bring her son Heider and one of her friends. Heydrich’s mother was also in Wolff’s care. Himmler warningly pointed out to him that there was considerable tension between her and Lina Heydrich. “Mother Heydrich,” noted the Reichsführer SS, “is a good woman; however, she has never in her life been able to keep herself busy.” In addition, she is always unfavorably influenced by her son-in-law Heindorf, “a man of little value… The disadvantage is only that in taking care of the mother… Heindorf and his wife, Heydrich’s sister, must also be included.” A few weeks before the end of the war Wolff visited with Lina Heydrich for the last time. She was living on an estate in Bohemia that had belonged to a Jew who had fled. For a time, she had counted on it becoming her property, but Himmler hesitated in making the transfer, and since the Red Army was approaching, all these plans went up in smoke. One day in 1945, Wolff arrived unannounced at the estate. On a trip to Berlin with the plane made available to him because of his position in Italy, he had made a short stopover at a nearby airfield. He was now quite clear about the outcome of the war, unless it was still possible to split the western Allies from the Soviet Union in the final hours, and march with them to the east. He warned Lina Heydrich that within a short time all the Germans in the protectorate would be in great danger because of the Red Army and even more so with the Czechs clamoring for revenge.
In the Good Graces of the Führer
T
hat Wolff was allowed to spend the last and (he rightly believed) most significant phase of his career in Italy was not a coincidence. He counted a number of Italians among his many friends. These friendships were made as Himmler once again indulged in his foreign policy ambitions and spun some threads to Rome, only with Italian police officials, so that professional foreign policymakers could not claim that he was getting involved in extraneous responsibilities. At that time, the beginning of 1936, Hitler was well disposed towards such an outsider operation because his admiration for Mussolini and his regime was being less and less reciprocated, as Austrian Nazis were pushing harder to come “home to the Reich.” The danger for Italy was that instead of the weak Viennese State at the Brenner Pass—Italy’s northern border—the much stronger German Reich could encourage the South Tyrolians’ allegiance to the nationality of their forebears on the other side of the fence. This was the reason why in June 1935, General Pietro Badoglio and French General Gamelin signed a secret document in which the armed forces of their two countries agreed to proceed together against Germany were the Reich to force the annexation of Austria.
In the meantime, sympathies between the fascist State and the western democracies had soured once again once Mussolini expanded Italy’s African colonial territories by attacking the Kingdom of Abyssinia (today’s Ethiopia). It was still too early for a friendly meeting of the two dictators. They met for the first time in the middle of June 1934, and it was a disappointment for both. Hitler was looking for a partner who would support his planned foreign policy adventures, and Mussolini, overestimating his own strength, was too smart for that. Now that Himmler was extending his feelers to Rome, Mussolini needed a new friend. The rest of the world was against him because he had attacked a primitive people with bombs and poison gas while they defended themselves against the invasion with spears and arrows.
For all these reasons, when Himmler had the idea to hold an Italian-German police conference in Berlin, it happened to be just the right moment for both countries. On March 29, 1936, the Italian delegation arrived in the capital of the Reich. It was a Sunday. Three weeks before, Hitler had once again dissolved the Reichstag. Just as the Italians were getting out of their sleeping cars at the Anhalter train station shortly before 9:00 a.m., Germans all over the country were preparing to show their trust in their Führer and Reich Chancellor by putting an X on the election ballot. Candidate Karl Wolff could count on the fact that, as of the coming Monday, he would be a member of the Reichstag, because for the first time he had been found worthy to hold such an office. Flags with the swastika were flying in all the streets, and black and brown uniforms proved to the new arrivals that the German dictator sat no less secure in the saddle than the Duce in Rome.