Top Nazi (29 page)
Wearing the broad epaulettes like generals of the Wehrmacht, Wolff no longer felt inferior in the company of titles and ranks. Hermann Göring, who had jumped just as quickly from captain in the First World War to field marshal, asked apparently unsuspectingly about the reason and purpose for the new uniform and decorations. Wolff pointed out that his assignments as liaison to the Waffen SS had “become purely military.” For that he needed a “rank insignia that every soldier would recognize.” The term “Waffen SS” was then used for the first time. After the war, as we discuss later on, the organization of Waffen SS veterans did not want to recognize its first general as one of their own. Wolff frequently complained at the time (as was normal in his circles) that he was not allowed to take active part in battle, but could only fulfill his duty to the Fatherland from a desk. He also consoled himself in the thought that the Führer knew why it had to be so. He therefore just took care of the mail that was sent to him from his SS Main Office in Berlin, made contacts and regularly attended—or so he claimed—the daily situation reports of the progress of the fighting. On the other hand, however, his name seldom appeared on the attendance lists. He would never have been granted the right to speak by the generals of the army. In the war diary of the senior general, Franz Halder, who was at the time chief of the General Staff, his name appears only once and only casually, on the occasion of his previously mentioned conversation with Major Radke. That Himmler and Wolff were not necessary to Hitler at that time is clear from a report written by Himmler in the manner of a school essay about a car ride through conquered land that they took together. The Reichsführer had stationed his special train “Heinrich” near Altenkirchen in the Westerwald. He, another four SS officers, and the drivers of two cars drove to Aachen on May 17. In the evening, they crossed the border into Holland. They invited a Sturmbannführer of the locally stationed SS Standarte, “Der Führer,” to a meal at a town inn. He was from Munich and had been part
one of the guards at the Brown House on October 7, 1931, who had recruited Wolff into the SS when he joined the Party.
On May 18 they drove around Holland, ate “unbelievably well and copiously,” and decided that it was “a real joy to see men, women, and children.” Himmler noted, “These are a benefit for Germany,” which implied that he at least was determined never to withdraw from the Netherlands. That night they found only poor accommodations; Wolff and Himmler had to share a hotel room.
After all this stress due to the war, they attempted to reach Brussels, but could approach the city only slowly as the destroyed bridges were continuously forcing them to take detours. In his report Himmler recounts how he and his companions conquered the Flemish city. Apparently no German soldiers had made it that far yet, and the mayor, with the district council and the militia, was waiting at the town hall for someone to whom they could hand over their city. They requested water, electricity, and gas be restored; the Germans found this rather funny. Himmler was even more pleased with Wolff: “He told those good men at the end that I was the head of the Gestapo.” The travelers all agreed that Germans behaved in a much more dignified manner in such a situation.
They spent the night in Brussels. On the return trip, they met the “Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler Their commander, Obergruppenführer Sepp Dietrich, had picked a castle as his headquarters. The travelers feasted thoroughly with him before returning to the lean stews of Hitler’s “Wolf’s Lair.” That same evening, they reported to the Führer. Apparently on this trip they really became aware of the imminent victory. After they had seen everything, they could confidently cry out that not only Germany and Europe, but also “tomorrow the whole world” would belong to them. They saw many destroyed houses on the trip, drove past queues of frightened refugees, met exhausted and wounded soldiers, and they could not avoid viewing the dead on the side of the road. But the misery of war is not mentioned in the report.
During the journey, they often took pictures. As they got gasoline in a small Belgian town, several soldiers of an army convoy, who were SS members in Germany, recognized Himmler, who posed for a souvenir photo with them. Wolff posed with his head high, almost at attention, his legs slightly spread but his knees together looking like the most important man in the group. Himmler came across looking as common as any of the other soldiers next to him. The picture shows why Wagner-fan Hitler viewed Wolff as the glowing “Siegfried,” rather than Himmler with his pince-nez.
From the new headquarters near the Belgian town of Bruly-le-Peche, Wolff had nothing remarkable to report, except for being badly bitten by mosquitoes between June 3 and June 25.
Hitler usually had several guests at dinner; mostly the secretaries and Bormann, but also Wolff, and alternately one officer or another. War and politics were not discussed if Hitler did not mention them; they wanted to spare his nerves.
On June 28, six days after the armistice with France, Hitler visited Paris with a small following. In the woods in Kniebis near Freudenstadt, on the steep slopes of the Black Forest on the Rhine Valley, Hitler met up with his entourage once again. They were staying in an inhospitable bunker system in the West Wall, and when the pounding rain stopped they had a wide view up to the crest of the Vosges Mountains. During two car excursions, Hitler and several of his confidants visited Strasbourg, the Maginot Line, and the city of Mulhouse. Wolff and most of the entourage were bored in the wet concrete caves and were pleased when the Führer’s special train pulled into the hall of the Anhalter train station in Berlin on June 6 around 3:00 p.m.
With that, the members of the headquarters were practically on vacation. Hitler went to Obersalzberg. He studied the plan of an invasion army landing in England; and drafted “Directive 16” to the armed forces and chose Ziegenberg near Bad Nauheim as his next headquarters. But he was undecided about the landing, hoping that the English would opt for peace and would allow him to have a free reign over the European continent. But since they refused, he did not go to Ziegenberg, or rather, not immediately. It wasn’t until December 1944 that he moved there, long after he had lost his war, and was seeking with a desperate strike to force his enemies in the west to negotiate.
Wolff, who had been placed on vacation from his duties, and Himmler now wanted to see what they (or actually the soldiers) had really conquered. They took a trip in mid-July and inspected Burgundy for three days.
They left Freiburg-im-Breisgau and traveled nearly one thousand kilometers. The summer beauty of this blessed land, hardly touched by the war, made them want more of it. Lothar, one of the heirs of Charlemagne, governed a kingdom from the Rhone to Antwerp. Weren’t these sloped vineyards meant for the South Tyroleans? Already the travelers dreamed of an SS city very closely bound to Germany, whose first lord and master would be Heinrich Himmler and whose first chancellor would be Karl Wolff. Filled with such ideas, they flew back to Berlin. Their presence was
required as actors in a triumphal production at the Kroll Opera House where Hitler assembled the Reichstag for—as the press wrote—“the most colossal honor in German history.”
Throughout his speech he distributed high praise to everyone. The military was showered with promotions. There were eleven new field marshals. Göring became Reich field marshal, a rank that even Prince Eugen never reached. Many top party officials were also praised. Himmler was not among them, but one sentence in Hitler’s speech gave Wolff reason for particular pride when he also mentioned “the brave divisions and Standarten of the Waffen SS.” It was the first official mention using that name as a unit, a new name that sounded better than the “Reserve troops.”
Since Hitler once again retreated to the Obersalzberg, the Himmler-Wolff team could resume its travels. They still needed to visit Alsace and Lorraine in the west at the beginning of September over four days. They began their tour by car near Belfort. In Natzweiler SS Gruppenführer Oswald Pohl, Chief of the Economic and Administrative Office of the SS, guided them through quarries that were superbly suited to become concentration camps. The highlight of their trip, however, was the final destination: the old fortress city of Metz, where the Leibstandarte had set up its quarters with four battalions of motorized infantry, one pioneer battalion, and two artillery divisions. Himmler gave them a new flag in a fort dating back to the Hohenzollern era. The “christening” took place amid a lot of music and national anthems as well as the standard song of the SS. The few Germans there were (hardly any Nazis in Metz) watched in quiet anger as the good-looking boys in their smart-looking uniforms strolled noisily up and down the narrow and winding main street, the Rue Serpenoise, which was already renamed Adolf-Hitler-Strasse.
At this event, the first, and for the time being only, Waffen SS general should have been put on a pedestal, but there is no evidence of this. Perhaps Himmler did not want to see either his Wölffchen or the commander of the Leibstandarte, Sepp Dietrich, stand in the limelight and reap the advantage. Between the troop commander, who had not stopped using rough language since leaving the Munich beer hall environment, and the former guard lieutenant brought up with the good manners of the officer’s club, there was not much common ground besides the uniform. Once Dietrich and his warriors earned their laurels in Poland and France, it made the distance seem even greater to both.
Wolff was constantly trying to be a model soldier, but now he feared that role could only be partly believable. He wrote as much to his friend
SS Gruppenführer Richard Hildebrand in the middle of June 1940 as the full extent of victory in the west became apparent. As Higher SS and Police Führer in Danzig, Hildebrand was, like Wolff, a First World War volunteer officer. “As great as the honor is,” Wolff wrote to him, “to spend time in the immediate presence of the Führer at the Führer’s headquarters, I envy you, commanding a battery. You have a much better chance of breathing the air of the front lines, and you will certainly get a command at the front.” Wolff pathetically subdued the glory of war in his letter, playing up his trip through the conquered lands as “the long drive along the front accompanying the Reichsführer SS.”
The benefits the Waffen SS front line soldiers received from their representative with Hitler are hard to determine. Wolff was very vague on the subject. He played up the version (as a prosecutor was to say decades later) that he was first and foremost “Himmler’s eyes and ears”—certainly someone Hitler liked and who could, within an entertaining conversation, make wishes and suggestions, but Himmler was always the stronger advocate. Nothing for his black-uniformed men was too much for him. In addition, Wolff was not the only high SS officer having responsibility for the soldiers. There was their chief of staff, Gruppenführer Hans Jüttner, Chief of the SS Leadership Main Office, and also the shifty Gruppenführer Gottlob Berger, Chief of the SS Main Office, responsible for the replenishment of the troops at the front, and who, due to the high losses of units, had to constantly enlist new recruits. In many respects, the Economic and Administrative Main Office under Gruppenführer Oswald Pohl was also responsible. The same applied to the SS personnel office, whose head, Gruppenführer Maximilian von Herff, had been a regimental comrade from the Darmstadt regiment of guard lieutenants; Wolff had placed him into the SS. On the other hand, it was more difficult to get along with Gruppenführer August Heissmayer, who was in charge of creating new recruits for the Officer Corps of the Waffen SS from the youth indoctrinated in National Socialism.
There were many cooks in the Waffen SS kitchen, and each was out to protect his turf against his colleagues—at their expense whenever possible. With tactical skill and diplomatic phraseology, Wolff towered over all of them. The variety of offices within the personal staff—a conglomeration of Himmler’s crankiness and bureaucracy—allowed Wolff to meddle in almost every matter regarding the SS. This did not make him popular in among his comrades at the head of the SS. Some maintained
that he was a schemer, others accused him of fawning, but it was said among all top ranking officers in Hitler’s and Himmler’s entourage that Wolff was always the most clever and imaginative one in the struggle among Nazi factions.
Berger tried intermittently to place himself at the top of those most decorated through overeager devotion toward Himmler. When he realized, however, that he could not shake the chief of the personal staff from the good graces of the Reichsführer SS, he changed his tactics. Several problems hindered his career; the old Party comrade was one of the longest serving SA leaders in Württemberg, and since the murders of Röhm and his followers, this was viewed as a blemish the SS. Besides that the Party bigwigs in his hometown were his enemies. Lacking any other support he decided to seek Wolff’s good will. In a letter to him he swore his allegiance to Himmler’s life and health. At the same time, he assured him that if it became necessary, only Wolff was conceivable as the successor to the Reichsführer SS. The naturally cunning Berger probably knew that with this statement he was expressing one of Wolff’s secret thoughts.
Wolff began working at headquarters, supposedly as representative of the Waffen SS, consisting of three good but in no way first class divisions and one a regiment, the Leibstandarte, which had until then been mainly trained for parade appearances. Many things had changed in the meantime. The Leibstandarte was in the process of expanding into a brigade. The other regiments were being motorized and were better armed, but this was not because of Wolff’s initiative. The same had also taken place with many infantry divisions of the army. Understandably, Himmler and the SS leaders wanted to strengthen the fighting power of their troops and add new units. The army leadership obviously opposed any increase in the SS—viewed as competition. Even Hitler, whose decision it was ultimately, seemed to hesitate in wanting to keep the Waffen SS small, true to his principle of not letting anyone tip the balance and threaten his rule. He also did not want to anger the army generals, whose many divisions had produced victories.