Top Nazi (23 page)

For the SS it was a day of triumph over the army, which had always looked down at the Waffen SS. The Supreme Warlord did not spare his praise, although he kept to his opinion that the soldier is best equipped with the conventional rifle because automatic weapons used too much ammunition unnecessarily. The Wehrmacht generals congratulated him and asked whether anyone had been injured. Wolff replied that only a few had been slightly wounded by shrapnel. The machine gun shelling went just above the men’s heads, and missed, while hand grenades detonated only where no one could be hurt. Standartenführer Steiner was very much in favor with Himmler and Hitler. Six years later, in April 1945, Hitler was ranting about both men in the underground bunker of the Berlin chancellery. The traitor Himmler negotiated with the enemy and General of the Waffen SS Steiner did not obey the Führer’s orders. Steiner was supposed
to break open the ring of the Red Army tightened around the German capital with his army group and free Hitler, but he did not wish to lose his weary division for such a futile undertaking at the last moment. The rivalry between the army and the Waffen SS had long been brewing. The officers raised in the idea of remaining politically neutral as stipulated by the Weimar Constitution saw themselves as having a choice: either to take on the swastika themselves or to give up their monopoly as “the defenders of the nation” (according to Hitler). Their distrust was justified. Himmler’s troops said that their competition still included reactionary monarchists. There were taunts and arguments that made the climate even worse. In the higher ranks, both camps were intriguing against each other, and sometimes it came down to blows. This was nothing new; similar fistfights took place under the emperor between units or between different classes. Behavioral scientists are not surprised by such herd mentality.

The conciliatory Wolff was often called upon to quiet things down. The former lieutenant of the bodyguard regiment found that officers of the army listened to him because he would tell them that he missed out on his military career due to timing; the Reichswehr had discharged him in 1920 because it had too many men. For that reason in January 1938, when incidents of violence were on the rise, he was brought in to secure an agreement between the SS and the Wehrmacht. He managed to stop the fistfights that simply turned into office feuds. In the summer, the Supreme Command of the Army asked for a new structure that would include all the military units of the Party as well.

Reichsleiter Martin Bormann, who at that time was still the chief of staff to Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy for Party matters, was inclined to accept a suggestion by the military where, at first, the highest local Party official and the troop commander would settle any dispute. But Himmler and Wolff demanded an exception for the SS Reserves and the SS Death’s Head divisions, which included the concentration camp guards, because otherwise maybe “some dignified member, not quite mature enough to fully comprehend the Wehrmacht’s position,” (meaning a Party functionary) “could take this onto himself.” Finally, it was agreed upon to put the military SS and the Wehrmacht on equal footing if there was any trouble; the respective commanders had to work it out among themselves. In practical terms this meant recognizing the SS as military units, which was precisely what Himmler wanted to accomplish. In December 1938 Wolff imparted instructions to the “SS Court” still reporting to him to pass the
agreement down, “so that unit leaders would know that they must get involved in settling these matters.”

Wolff knew full well why the SS was reluctant to let the Party settle its clashes with the army—because the comrades in the black uniforms were no angels. They often behaved like nervous young animals compelled to go on a rampage because of the restrained arrogance of the Wehrmacht officers. Oswald Pohl, who was at the time SS Gruppenführer and chief of the SS Economics and Administrative Main Office, complained in July 1938, in a letter to Wolff, about the conceit and arrogance that was being taught in the schools especially set up to improve the bearing of the SS officers and the SS Junkers. As a former navy paymaster, Pohl was setting particularly high standards but, amazingly enough, the young men did not behave that way. They were taught that they were racially, physically, and by their character the best selection the nation could offer. It stood to reason that they, as the crème de la crème among Germans, had special rights. Comrade Pohl received no answer from Wolff, who preferred to handle anything critical in private. He reacted differently when Himmler assigned him to discipline an SS officer. In July 1938 he issued a warning to an Obersturmbannführer and fulltime SS functionary to register his engagement; the girl’s parents, whom the defaulting lover had promised marry, had appealed to the Reichsführer. Himmler strongly encouraged marriage because it increased the birthrate.

The Obersturmbannführer at first ignored Wolff’s letter. He had to be reminded five times to answer. After seventeen months it finally arrived in December 1939; the author apologized for neglecting his loved one, using the excuse that he had been so taken with political events that it “had not been possible to handle personal matters in what little free time he had with the required energy” he dedicated to the SS service. He did not even set a date for the engagement. Shortly before Easter in 1940, Wolff sent the next reminder, possibly thinking that springtime could encourage love. But this didn’t work either. After more letters, all of them unsuccessful, Wolff wrote on the file: “postpone until after the war.”

In yet another love story settled within higher SS ranks, the chief of the personal staff could only act as an advisor. An outraged father and retired lieutenant of the Austrian imperial and royal army wrote to Rudolf Hess, who was frequently appealed to when a matter concerned a prominent Party member, that his daughter had been terribly deceived by the “unbelievable conduct of a Party comrade” and horribly offended in her feminine honor. When the Party was outlawed she had “hidden this man
and other National Socialists in our house when they were being hunted down.” However, when her lover became Gauleiter after Hitler’s invasion of Vienna, he had visited less and less frequently. Now he sent a “Dear John” letter offering the bride 10,000 marks as compensation. Could Hess please—so the father asked—see to it that the man honor his promise to marry?

The accusation concerned Party comrade Odilo Globocnik, one of the most brutal Nazis in Austria. Hess passed this on to Bormann and Himmler, since the accused no longer served as gauleiter, but rather as SS Brigadeführer, who was getting ready for his future assignment as mass murderer in the newly conquered Polish district of Lublin. The Reichsführer SS had great plans for him. Therefore, in his talks with the heads of the Party, the soothing Wolff had, at least for a time, to make sure that the affair had no further repercussions. He decided that Gauleiter Friedrich Rainer, who was in Salzburg at the time, be called in as an arbitrator. He did not want to play an active role in this case for several reasons; during his visit to Krumpendorf, he was able to get father and daughter to remain quiet. They were promised that when the time was right, they could present their complaint directly to Himmler. Someone in Wolff’s office in April 1940 wrote in the file: “postpone until after the war.”

The reason that Wolff’s part in this love story was behind the scenes was not simply because, as one of the Führer’s many aides at headquarters, he was busy with other assignments. He was also friendly with Odilo Globocnik and therefore wanted to avoid the accusation of not being objective should there be an argument. On top of that, he was himself getting deeply involved in an affair that began as a casual flirt but now threatened to become a serious problem.

It is rather difficult to deal with the love life of the subject of a biography who is meant to be emblematic of an era. How does someone behave under Nazism even in this area? In Wolff’s case it is necessary to also deal with family matters, because the general in drafting his self-laudatory autobiography took pains to write a chapter about his women.

A psychoanalyst could better explain how an escapade turned into such a passion (for which Wolff put his rank and position on the line) that ended his marriage with Frieda von Römheld, in order to marry his mistress Inge. In his forties he was one of the most attractive men in Berlin—tall, strong, and athletic. Himmler had in him an SS officer who was thin, blond and blue-eyed, with the confidence of an officer and the cultured manners of a gentleman, a brilliant conversationalist, an excellent
dancer, all dressed in a decorative uniform, with a South German accent, easily making friends in the dour Prussian capital of Germany. If he courted a woman, it would be difficult for her to discourage him, especially when so many women clearly signaled that they were attracted to him. Countess Ingeborg Maria von Bernstorff did not conceal her feelings in the summer of 1934, shortly after Wolff moved to the Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse following the Röhm murders. She came to ask for Himmler’s support in a charity affair. In retrospect, Wolff called this first meeting “for both of us a feast for the eyes.” She saw him as a “charming blond in an adorable light blue suit.” She naturally got to see the Reichsführer SS and on that occasion they saw each other again, flirting this time.

She was not quite as blue-blooded as he thought, with his fixation about the aristocracy. She was the daughter of a Hamburg businessman, Ludolph Christensen, and married into the Bernstorff family as a step into the Gotha handbook. Her husband served as head of administration of a local district, which was still at the time the Prussian state of Harbourg, on the southern bank of the Elbe. The couple spent the summer of 1934 there, where even then the rich and the beautiful went on vacation, at Kampen on the North Sea island of Sylt. The star guest that year was Hermann Göring, Reich minister of aviation, Reichstag president and Prussian prime minister, just to mention the most important of his functions and titles of the moment.

As head of the Prussian government, he gave preferential treatment to his officer Bernstorff and his wife. She was young, full of energy and happy; her husband was more than ten years older and in poor health. The Reich minister of aviation had his airplane on the island, which, as a former fighter pilot and a captain in the war (he was decorated with the medal “pour le mérite”) he usually flew himself. On the day he left, Göring took the count and the countess to the airport. There, he invited the lady to inspect the cockpit, when suddenly the door closed. In this rather breezy manner, the countess was kidnapped to Berlin. She spent the night at the house of the Reichstag president as guest and was very honorably treated, as Wolff later found out.

This incident of course amused prominent figures of the political scene; they invited the count and countess to many of their private festivities. Wolff learned from Inge Bernstorff later that ministers at these events had surrounded her with the then widowed Army Minister Werner von Blomberg, Rudolf Hess, and a minister without anything specific to do except for ensuring cooperation between the Party and the State. Wolff could not be close to the woman in all her glory at that time because he only had the rank of SS Oberführer and was only allowed to attended society functions as Himmler’s shadow.

Both the lady and the gentleman were married at that time, but not with each other; however, she was less happy than he. The count suffered increasingly because of the consequences of his war injuries. Wolff was in the process of having his wife and two small daughters move to Berlin. He had rented a house with a beautiful garden and seven rooms in fashionable Dahlem. This complicated matters considerably. The countess’s circumstances, on the other hand, became clearer when her husband died in April 1935. No one expected his widow, a beautiful thirty-one year-old woman, to remain alone and in mourning for too long.

It so happened that Wolff was rewarded with an trip to east Asia aboard the passenger vessel
Potsdam
by a member of Himmler’s “circle of friends,” the chairman of the board at the North German Lloyd. The countess took the trip in his place. Reinhard Heydrich, whose office was next to Wolff’s at the Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, enjoyed himself by having her watched during the
trip and occasionally reporting back to his friend Karl. The Gestapo and SD had already placed their spies on almost every passenger ship. The countess, Wolff found out, let herself be courted by a Wittelsbach prince, who was commonly known in the Vatican to be a priest. She also made friends with an older couple among the passengers, with whom she amused herself now and again when they went ashore; their name was Hecht and they were Jewish. This did not put an end to their love and he was happy when she was pleased.

Wolff’s family did not stay in Berlin long. Were they in his way all of a sudden? Whatever the reason for their return to Bavaria may have been, Wolff argued that they had to save money. He had already bought the property at Rottach-Egern on Lake Tegern and had begun the construction of the “my family manor.” Much later he would add another reason: the Führer sometimes stayed at Berchtesgaden for months on end, and as the SS officer having special assignments it was more convenient to have a permanent residence nearby. As previously mentioned, the house had caused Wolff a bit of trouble. His sons, born in 1936 and 1938 in Munich, grew up in that house. Another son was born to Wolff three months before his youngest brother. This was no a miracle of nature, since they were half-brothers. The countess came to Bavaria at the end of 1937. Hoping to avoid gossip, he turned to his friend Heydrich, who, given his duties, was experienced in handling secrets and therefore took care of
things discretely. He was friendly with a Hungarian colleague and provided the expectant mother with a new name and passport, as well as a bed at the clinic of the most famous gynecologist in Budapest. It was rumored in political circles that one of Hitler’s lovers was in the Hungarian capital to have her baby. Because of his presence and rank, her escort, who had just become an SS Gruppenführer, contributed to that legend, did not deny it, and quite enjoyed it.