Top Nazi (21 page)

With the “is to have been” and “something like” this was anything but precise information, but the Reich Chamber for Literature accepted it. Hans Hinkel, a professional Nazi and someone always on the lookout for a new opportunity to seek power, did not. He was Wolff’s age and a jack-of-all-trades. He was an old Party fighter from the time of the Munich putsch, and because no one would trust him with an important position, he was rewarded with the title of State Council, a seat in the Reichstag and a position as aide at the propaganda ministry. There, or so it was said, he could not inflict much damage because he was only handling cultural matters. It was precisely in this area, however, that he was a particularly zealous Jew hunter. For that reason, at the end of 1938 he wanted to know from Wolff “if he wished that Frau Stuck not be hindered in her further duties.” For she was “as far as we know, of half-Jewish heritage.”

Since Hinkel received no answer, he sent a reminder in mid-February 1939. When he repeated the reminder in May, a Wolff adjutant informed him that someone in the meantime had sent him an evaluation report regarding the matter. Supposedly no such thing happened because in June Hinkel requested an address, since that letter could not be found. He never got it, although Wolff was again reminded in August and September. On September 21, 1939, Wolff finally addressed the matter himself, using as a return address “temporary Führer Headquarters,” his permanent residence since the outbreak of the war. What must have made Hinkel more reticent was that Wolff now had passed the report along to Hitler via Himmler, and that anyone could say that “the comments made by the Führer covered the description I gave of the situation.” He was “not personally aware… of Frau Stuck’s percentage of Jewish blood…I only know of the Führer’s general decision.” With smug irony, Wolff commented that he would not be able “to decide whether this statement by the Führer was sufficient to reach a decision in the matter of Frau Stuck….”

The stubborn Hinkel then did what he could to obtain information from Hitler’s adjutant Brückner. He let Wolff know, however, and advised that he may want to “get in touch with him.” So in the middle of May 1940, Wolff received a further reminder it was certainly time to finally clear up an issue that “has been going on for two years.” For this reason, on September 6, 1940, Chief of the Personal Staff Wolff requested that the “ancestry expert” of the SS and chief of the Reich Office for Ancestral Research clear up the ancestry of Paula Stuck in “an appropriately careful manner.” Three days later, Wolff had the written results in front of him: her father was the Breslau Commerce Counsel Dr. of Jurisprudence Georg Julius Heimann, of Jewish heritage, and her mother was the daughter of the Christian wholesale business family Molinari, whose Breslau trading house served as the model for Gustav Freytag’s novel
Debits and Credits
, set around the mid-nineteenth century.

Pretending he had not yet received those results, Wolff informed the Staatsrat Hinkel in the middle of September that “no other facts were known at the local office… A decision by the Führer must be requested in any case.” The most expedient would be “if the Reich Office for Ancestral Research were to step in.” Hinkel remained patient until April 1941, before sending his last reminder. On this letter, Wolff wrote by hand: “Delay until after the war.” He managed to silence the State Council in the propaganda ministry with the information that Reichsleiter
Martin Bormann advised against informing the Führer just then, since the campaign against the Soviet Union had been going on for a month.

We cannot tell why Wolff used so much energy in allowing Paula Stuck to slip through the threads of the race laws. After all, she and her husband had many connections to the former movers and shakers in Munich, to Hitler’s private photographer Heinrich Hoffmann, as well as Hoffman’s former store apprentice, Eva Braun. It would certainly have been a mistake to upset those circles. Hans Stuck, who had become unemployed as a racecar driver on account of the war, was also given the secret task from Himmler and Wolff to use his foreign connections acquired through sports for the Reich. He was to sell the bucket version of the Volkswagen to the armies of Switzerland and several Balkan states. He did not succeed because he could never obtain demonstration cars that the German army needed. Paula Stuck slowed down her literary ambition for a while. But two years after the end of the war Luis Trenker, who was famous for his films, wrote to her from the South Tyrol saying that the memoirs by and about the Nazis could be sold for a lot of money. There was great interest in Eva Braun, whose existence was revealed to the public only because of her suicide in the Führer’s bunker. Therefore Trenker wrote to “dear Paula,” who was of course so well acquainted with prominent Nazis in the past. Could she please assemble even gossip and rumors from those circles about the young woman who had suddenly become a public figure? He would reward her efforts with “a lot of Olio Sasso,” or Italian olive oil, which was worth more than money in a postwar Germany plagued by hunger. Trenker received several dozen sheets of typewritten anecdotes, more or less credible, which were only passed along with the author’s reservation, since some were most likely only rumors.

No payment was made. But Paula Stuck was able to read in a newly published weekly paper, the first example of the new German tabloid press, the “diary” of Eva Braun in installments based on her manuscript. Trenker maintained that these notations by Hitler’s lover were discovered in his South Tyrolean home in Grödnertal in cartons stored among old NSDAP files. Naturally they were not authentic.

Chief of the Personal Staff Wolff once again had to get involved with the consequences of official party anti-Semitism. Oberführer Wilhelm Bittrich was a member of the SS Volunteer Troops, and later of the Waffen SS. As a Standartenführer, in April 1938 he had been transferred to Vienna, where a new unit was being created. An apartment was assigned to him and his wife through the Gestapo. Up until the Anschluss, it had belonged
to general director Dr. Benno Schwoner, a Jew who had fled; the only property he took with him was what he was able to carry physically. The SS officer, however, generously refrained from using most of the possessions left behind. He had been married since 1922 and wanted only to borrow the things he had not yet purchased himself: a grand piano, a gramophone cabinet with record player, a vacuum cleaner, a refrigerator (all appliances that at that time were only affordable to the wealthy), lamps, many oil paintings, ten Persian rugs and a silver set of cutlery made up of almost 200 pieces. Measured according to the standards of 1938, this was considerable luxury, but when the Gestapo sent over their certified appraiser, he calculated the total value to be 1, 327.98 marks. (Bittrich later: “As far as I can remember, 1, 000 marks.”)

When Wolff received the list of objects and their related values he became suspicious. The Gestapo used different appraisers, and they reached a value of 4, 779 marks. This correction, which was still largely below the true value, did not help the refugee who had been robbed of everything once his entire fortune had fallen into Nazi hands. Bittrich was allowed to use all of this only for a short time. He was not being treated better or worse than many other Nazis who improved their living conditions in the same manner. If they were part of the SS leadership, an order from Himmler forbid them to purchase any of their conquests; no one was to get rich due to the sacred goals of the Party. The property of Jews who had fled went to the Reich finance administration and the Gestapo had to answer to the authorities if anything was sold.

The Viennese state police precinct asked Bittrich shortly before the end of 1940 what would happen to the borrowed property. Having been promoted to Oberführer in the meantime he was understandably in no hurry to answer. Three months later he wrote to Wolff asking that he use his clout with Himmler to allow him to either buy everything at the appraisal value or at least be allowed to continue to keep it as borrowed for purposes of entertainment. The nitpicking Reichsführer SS said no as a matter of principle. On the other hand the Gestapo, under pressure from the Reich Ministry of Finance, demanded a decision from Wolff. Even then Wolff remained true to his time-honored habit despite numerous warnings—namely, that voluminous stacks of files would just take care of themselves if they were kept around long enough. But at the beginning of July 1942 Himmler decided that all the borrowed items were to be removed from Bittrich’s apartment and auctioned off.

Bittrich complained to Wolff: “Because the furniture and other objects of the apartment were collected… at this moment, not only my wife, but I too am being exposed to public ridicule, especially in our circle of comrades.” And Wolff, who had in the meantime moved up to Obergruppenführer and General of the Waffen SS, actually did manage to soften up Heinrich Himmler’s heart. “This entire issue” should be—as Wolff wrote to the Viennese Gestapo—put on ice until the end of the war…” Bittrich, who was now a Brigadeführer, was allowed to keep what he had. So that the Gestapo could close its books, Wolff transferred about 7, 000 marks from the treasury of the “Circle of Friends” donations. After the end of the war, Frau Bittrich would be able to buy the things that were, in the meantime, worn down further because she would—her husband assured her—no longer be married to an SS Führer, but rather divorced. He was six years younger than she was and after more than twenty years of marriage, he had had enough of her. The last page in that stack of files read: “The entire procedure is, at the end of the war, to be once again taken to SS Obergruppenführer Wolff…” It was dated March 20, 1943. By then Wolff was only the titular, no longer the functioning, chief of the personal staff of the Reichsführer SS. He was sick, had been removed from his post, and had fallen from grace.

As did most former Nazi party members, Wolff also stated at the end of the war that he was never closely involved with the awful consequences of anti-Semitism. Much remains to be said however about this point. He was right when he reiterated that he had helped many people who were having problems because of the race issue. (It could also be asked why this help was necessary if the Jews were not being threatened.) He helped them of his own accord, without any benefit to himself, and what he did was dangerous at times. One may also assume that the officer of the guards with upper-class ambitions was sincerely disgusted by the blatant inhumanity of the National Socialist system, and the only reason he did not revolt was that he was too deeply involved in the wrongdoing because of his rank and position. Wolff was therefore a white knight within the Black Corps. His acts of assistance prove that he recognized how wrong things were. Otherwise why would he have become involved?

He helped an architect from Göttingen, whom they wanted to forbid building houses because of a grandmother of the wrong ancestry. He managed to have an old woman, who had married into an old noble family, avoid punishment and a concentration camp despite the fact that she, as the descendant of a Jewish family, had defied the prohibition of
employing an Aryan girl as a servant. Regarding Jews who had served as officers, doctors, or treasurers in the Reichswehr, for the time being they were simply let go very quietly. But as soon as they were no longer protected by the uniform and fell into the vortex of racial persecution, their former comrades turned to Wolff in seeking help. It was well known in military circles that he was not a radical anti-Semite and that, due to his background, he felt himself bound to the soldiers. With his back covered by his comrade Heydrich, he let some of those being persecuted sneak out of the country ostensibly as SD agents. During one of these kinds of initiatives, Wolff ran into the number one executioner of the Jews, Adolf Eichmann, head of the Jewish unit at the RSHA or Amt IV-B-IV. Wolff had asked the world famous surgeon Ferdinand Sauerbruch, with his military rank of General Doctor of the Reserves, to help two Jewish doctors who had been coworkers of his in the past at the Charité hospital, and were now in danger of being sent to a concentration camp in the east. Wolff could no longer count on Heydrich’s help, since the chief of the RSHA had been dead for over a month, killed in a commando attack in Prague. A successor had not yet been named; Himmler had temporarily taken over the office. To ask him for protection for two Jews was completely pointless. The leader of Amt IV, Chief of the Gestapo Heinrich Müller, would have been the next highest authority, but Wolff did not trust him at all. So he turned to the man who was directly in the key position, namely Adolf Eichmann. In a telephone conversation, the Oberguppenführer and General of the Waffen SS Wolff tried to make his wish palatable to the Obersturmbannführer and Gestapo division head. He clearly let his partner at the other end of the line feel, in a very friendly way, that given the difference in rank he should be obedient. But the old bureaucrat, who by then had sent hundreds of thousands of Jews to the gas chambers, would make no exceptions, as long as he was not ordered to do so by a superior. Wolff put on more pressure and finally asked threateningly, “Do you realize with whom you are speaking, Obersturmbannführer?”

“I most assuredly do, Obergruppenführer!” answered Eichmann, still quite correct. “And you are speaking with the head of the Amt IV-B-IV of the Gestapo!” He made it very clear that even such a high SS leader had no say within the police area, if he had no official position there. Wolff then made “mincemeat” of his fractious partner in the conversation, as Eichmann related at his 1962 interrogation by Israeli police “… although I was right, because I … acted exactly … according to the orders of the Reichsführer…and the exception could in no way be granted…Naturally
I would have liked to grant it, on my part, because when you’re dealing with such masses, one individual makes no difference. But I wasn’t allowed to… at that time such a decision would have turned into an avalanche of consequences … it would have become a pigsty and not one single lousy person would have been able to see through it all.”

This Adolf Eichmann was not a wild Jew-hater, but simply a primitive bureaucrat who doggedly completed what the orders and regulations demanded. However, he could have provided the two doctors with an extension if their representative had not been the esteemed Karl Wolff, who was always intent on being honored as it was his due, officially. Eichmann was aware that he and his team were murderers under orders, but he got around his conscience with the argument that someone had to do the “dirty work.” So it made him all the more angry—as he told his Israeli interrogator—when “the so-called dandy officers of the SS, who wore white gloves and didn’t want to know anything about what’s going on,” but then talked down to him. “Wolff is a perfect example!”