Top Nazi (32 page)
By the end of July 1941, so many protests and accusations against the murder practices of the Einsatzgruppen had reached the Führer headquarters that Himmler decided to take inspection tours. One of his adjutants received the order to prepare those trips. This was how High SS and Police Chief Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, SS Gruppenführer and lieutenant general of the police, found out by radio: “RFSS [Himmler] plans a two day trip through your territory.” Visits to Baranowicze, Minsk, and Orscha were scheduled. Von dem Bach-Zelewski had to take care of accommodations and meals. Wolff was first on the list of participants accompanying Himmler. Also listed was a prominent civilian, whom Hitler greatly admired, “Reich Set Designer” Benno von Arent, who not only decorated the most famous theaters, but was also called when important Party and State functions required a particularly impressive set design.
What the theater expert saw on this trip on August 15–16, 1941, must have disturbed him more than any drama he had ever staged. In Minsk, the head of Einsatzgruppen center, SS Brigadeführer Arthur Nebe, reported on the security situation in his region and von dem Bach-Zelewski described how the killing units captured their victims—during raids in the city and in the country, by combing through prisoner of war camps, with raiding party operations across the land and bigger operations concentrated on towns having a large Jewish population. Where there was simply suspicion of sabotage or of support given to the partisans, they didn’t waste time searching for the guilty parties; they immediately shot hostages.
The headquarters of the Einsatzgruppen was a concrete building with many floors in the city center of Minsk. Until recently, it was the office of the NKVD, Stalin’s political police operating from the same location. Because the new owners hardly differed from the previous ones, the complex was perfectly suited for the German security police. Here Nebe quietly described to Himmler, the great criminologist, how tough, resilient, and fanatical his opponents were. Among the partisans and saboteurs, there were hardly any Jews, but they were nevertheless dangerous because they had created a closely-knit intelligence network across the country, setting the stage for attacks and sabotage. Himmler’s reaction was that Nebe should proceed even more harshly.
On that point Wolff told a journalist in 1961: “Today I consider it possible that [Himmler], during those moments in Minsk, came up with the horrible idea of exterminating the millions of Jews in the east, only a small part of whom were spies.” The question remains as to whether or not he meant this seriously. Or did Wolff use this idea to cover up the fact that he had known about the orders for mass murder from the very beginning? If not, then he experienced them very harshly that same day. One of the participants at the meeting, Dr. Otto Bradfisch, SS Obersturmführer and head of Einsatzgruppen 8, admitted after the war that it soon became clear to him that the Jews presented no danger to the fighting troops and that someone simply wanted to get rid of them. Therefore he asked Himmler in Minsk who would take responsibility for those actions. Himmler told Bradfisch that the Führer and he, the Reichsführer SS, would be answerable for all of them.
Years later Wolff provided quite a different picture of what happened in Minsk at the Munich Court as it made great efforts to establish the facts. On the basis of statements from eyewitnesses and documents it was determined that at that time, just four weeks after the start of the eastern campaign, the partisans in the Minsk area were not very active. They began increasing in numbers and therefore became dangerous once the results of the Einsatzgruppen proved that they were doomed if the Germans were to win the war. It was therefore fairly unlikely that Hitler sent the Reichsführer SS on a tour just because of the partisans, saying, “Wolff can accompany you and report back to me later.” Wolff replied: “It left me cold!” He wanted to advise against this but never got a chance. “And you go with him,” Hitler ordered.
An area of fields and forests outside the city had been prepared for the murders. All participants drove there in cars, the death candidates were in smaller groups. They were not to hear the shots when their fellow victims died. The prisoners had dug two holes, each about eight meters long, two meters deep and two meters wide. That was the normal procedure for a mass grave in the east. Wolff did not have to describe to either the journalist or the court the details of what followed, since the killing methods were always the same. The first prisoners were driven to the hole, pushed off the platform of the truck and into the pit and as soon as they landed on their stomachs on the ground, those standing above them began shooting. The targets were at a distance of about four meters.
Wolff described one particular experience. “After many volleys, I could see that Himmler was trembling. He ran his hand across his face and
swayed. ‘You could have spared yourself and me this,’ I said to him. His face was almost green. And then he said, ‘A piece of brain just splattered in my face.’ He immediately threw up.”
This is a gory tale but what actually happened must have been carried out differently. Even assuming that Himmler was standing on the edge of a pit, the victim’s head had to have been more than three meters away from him and five meters from his face. They were shooting with regular 98k carbines and the normal rifle ammunition, at such a short distance, cuts smoothly through the skull. It rips a larger hole at the point of exit and digs a fairly deep hole in the ground. So, if inner pressure builds up caused by hitting the brain, and as a result of the impact parts of the brain are scattered, they most certainly do not fly up almost four meters in the air and across a distance of five meters.
Wolff, by the way, did not dare repeat this nonsense in court. The story he told a journalist differed from the forensic statement, where a “2 to 3 cm piece of brain covered in blood” flew only to hit Himmler’s coat.
One possible reason for Himmler’s apparent shock, said Wolff, was that his superior (who had not been a frontline soldier like retired Lieutenant Wolff) had never seen a person who had been shot, much less ever seen anyone in the process of being shot. He then mentioned the “trips to the front” that they took together during the Polish campaign, in the West and in the Balkans. They did not advance quite as far as the fighting troops, but drove through battlefields that had not yet been cleared. Besides that, he forgot that he and Himmler had seen how SS Oberführer Ludolf von Alvensleben in Bromberg had a number of Poles shot because they had supposedly killed German nationals.
The Munich court where Wolff went on trial in 1964 ignored those melodramatic descriptions for good reason. Wolff was apparently only carrying out court-martial sentences for espionage and other offenses. From eyewitness statements about the incident, it was ascertained that after the last of the 120 murders, Himmler still found enough vigor to give a grandiloquent speech. He assured the members of the Einsatzgruppen that the highest leaders of state and the Party would recognize their hard work. It was necessary for the nation, the Reich and the Führer so that the German people could live in freedom, security, and peace in the future. This speech and Wolff’s presence—it was stated in the courtroom—convinced the officers and their Einsatzgruppen teams that their actions were not only lawful, but even highly commendable.
At the Munich trial, Wolff recalled that following the Minsk murders he had warned the Reichsführer “not to do something like this with me again.” Under questioning he was once again able to quote verbatim what he had told Himmler over two decades before: “Reichsführer, since I am not a police official, to follow against my express request the unnecessary order you gave me today undermines our longstanding friendship to the point of tearing it to shreds.” This was not just an empty phrase because, in truth, the already strained relationship with Himmler had suffered an “inner break” since the Minsk events. If one were to follow Wolff’s autobiographical narrations, this would in no way have been the first time.
Yet the inspection of Einsatzgruppen B was not the first and certainly not the last that the Himmler-Wolff duo undertook in the East in 1941. At the end of July they were in Kovno, Riga, and Dünaburg, in the area of Einsatzgruppen A. The murderers stationed in that area were doing “cleansing work for political security following orders” meaning “the most extensive elimination of Jews,” according to Einsatzgruppen commander, SS Brigadeführer Dr. Walter Stahlecker. He kept an exact record of the number of victims. Three months after Himmler’s first inspection he could offer a total of 135,000 dead, of which over 120,000 were Jews. Did he speak to the Reichsführer SS and to the chief of his personal staff about this? A further inspection tour by Himmler and Wolff took them to the Baltic during the latter part of September, to Riga, Reval and Dorpat. At the beginning of October they traveled south, and visited Brigadeführer Dr. Otto Rasch in Kiev with his Einsatzgruppen C, responsible for the Ukraine.
They also inspected Einsatzgruppen D deeper in the south under SS Standartenführer Otto Ohlendorf. The purpose of the trip was to bolster wavering morale. Himmler repeated the speech that he had given to encourage the murderers in Minsk. Besides that, the Higher SS and Police Leaders were instructed that they were to continue the work of the Einsatzgruppen as they followed the armies advancing in the east and were to take their operations forward. When the units available to the Higher SS and Police Leaders were no longer sufficient, they were allowed to recruit volunteers from the resident population, give them uniforms and handguns. In the Baltic countries and in the Ukraine, they temporarily found enough murderers, as long as the action was only targeting the Jews.
Accordingly, it can be assumed that everywhere they visited the two highest ranking inspectors had been seriously discussing the issue, which at that time and for them was of the utmost importance. It may be said
in Wolff’s favor that one may assume that he was not the driving force behind the whole initiative. After the war, he always maintained that he had nothing to do with the crimes against the Jews. That may be true insofar as he only went along with Nazi anti-Semitism to the extent of what seemed necessary to further his career. He mixed with the best society, the aristocracy, business leaders, and famous artists in his circle of acquaintances like other people collect stamps, and only rarely did he lose his composure as a parade ground officer. According to the National Socialist teachings on race, he could consider himself a model of Nordic German aristocracy. For a man like him, the pitiful, Yiddish-speaking, gesticulating, long-bearded and longhaired male Jews of Eastern Europe were something so untouchable and subhuman that he saw no reason to bother with their well being or suffering.
As 1941 drew to a close, the need for the SS leaders to continuously drive the number of those murdered higher by taking part themselves was no longer necessary. The
most clever one
who had in the meantime been promoted to Obergruppenführer, Reinhard Heydrich, had developed a system that bureaucratized and automated the mechanism to murder the Jews. A conference was to be held to present this system by the State and the Party to all the officials involved in the Jewish question, and at the same time introduce it as a general procedure coming down from the highest level. The date for this conference had to be postponed several times, but it took place on January 20, 1942.
The many leading functionaries and officials of institutions involved with the Jews met in Berlin in a luxurious house at 56 Grossen Wannsee. Heydrich was the host and was ordered by Hitler and Himmler orally to prepare the “final solution” of the Jewish question. He had also a written authorization from Hermann Göring, Hitler’s designated successor. He was ordered, as stated, “to arrange all the necessary organizational and material preparations regarding the Jewish question.” Heydrich was also chairing the meeting.
Since it was a delicate topic, the ministers and Party leaders were all represented without exception. Adolf Eichmann, head of the Jewish department in the Gestapo and the SD Amt-IV-B-IV, kept the minutes and was hardly noticed, sitting in the corner with a stenographer. As an SS Sturmbannführer, he seemed to be no more than an extra in this “Secretaries of State meeting”—as that gathering was referred to in official circles later on. When Israeli police captain Avner W. Less interrogated him in 1960, Eichmann denied that “killing had been discussed” at the conference.
They had only spoken of the “Einsatzgruppen in the East.” “The naked, brutal words” (Eichmann said) like
murder, kill, shoot, kill off
, and
gas
were avoided there. The entire murder machine developed its own secret codes as a result of this, which allowed all those who knew and the masterminds behind the scenes to suppress the disturbing images. One had to speak in terms of “evacuate, send, resettlement,” and “special treatment.” Responsibility was constantly being traded, back and forth. Who gave which order to whom? Hitler to Himmler? Himmler to Heydrich? Hitler to Heydrich? Göring to Heydrich? Heydrich to which persons? They were all in it together, so that every one could claim that he was not alone, nor did he have more responsibility. Their tactics made it easier for many Germans to convince themselves that they had never heard of, and certainly not seen any of, these atrocities. Even Wolff resorted to this; he belonged without a doubt to that kind of person who believes what he wants to believe and, instead of facing reality, sees only what he wants to see.
For Karl Wolff’s future,
when
he knew about the crimes of the Gestapo and the SD became a significant issue. As an old man he still maintained that he found out the “truth” just a few weeks before the end of the war through contacts with Swiss citizens. His opinion was that one should write that word “truth” in quotation marks because the atrocities had been exaggerated and generalized for many reasons. But this is an argument also frequently used by many Germans to hide their feelings of guilt about the past. Wolff always maintained that Himmler, as well as his friends Heydrich, Pohl, Eicke, and others, kept him from knowing about the atrocities because they did not want to burden his sensitive nature and drive him out of the SS. However, the SS society of men never had that much concern for sensitive souls before; quite the opposite, the men of higher rank were actually quite proud of the fact that they could withstand horrible and dreadful things without showing any noticeable strain. Even if Gruppenführer Karl Wolff, “the most trusted among all the Reichsführer’s SS officers” (as his colleague Berger wrote at the end of 1941 in a letter to Himmler), had truly been kept from knowing of the crimes, certain things must have made him suspicious during the course of his constant contacts with those involved, particularly since “General What’s New” was such a vigilant observer.