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Wolff’s friend Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, who was sentenced to life imprisonment for his participation in mass murders, testified at Wolff’s Munich trial that he found it highly improbable that an SS officer of his
rank and position would know nothing about the crimes. When the two met in Minsk in the middle of August 1941, the former Reichswehr officer had already left his bloody tracks in eastern Upper Silesia. Both had the same rank and were so friendly that they used “Du” and Bach-Zelewski’s letters usually began with a “Dear Wölffchen.” Had he not told his friend about his terrible deeds? Von dem Bach-Zelewski became ill after the Minsk meeting. In the SS sanitarium at Hohenlychen, SS physician Dr. Ernst Grawitz diagnosed intestinal colic and a nervous breakdown. He also named the cause: “He is particularly suffering from memories of the shootings of Jews, as well as other difficult experiences in the east.” Psychological counseling, therefore, was a “significant factor in the whole healing process.”
The patient kept nothing that depressed him secret from the doctor. “I’m at the end,” he said to anyone. “Don’t you know what’s going on in Russia? The entire Jewish population is being exterminated over there.” Isn’t it likely then that he would tell his close friend Wolff the same thing when, as Himmler’s envoy, he visited his bedside? However, the condition of the patient improved only slightly. Besides, he was still somewhat groggy from ether anesthesia. In any case, Himmler was so upset by Wolff’s report that he ordered a high-ranking SS officer to stand guard at the bedside of anyone with knowledge of state secrets in the future. The sick man was at that time already an Obergruppenführer, like Wolff, who on January 30 had just had the lapels of Obergruppenführer sewn to his uniform collar.
Should Wolff, however, have returned from Hohenlychen still having no idea, he was now going to get an explanation from the other side. In occupied Serbia there was an SS Gruppenführer State Councilor Dr. Harald Turner working as chief of the military administration. In October 1941, in retaliation for partisan attacks on German soldiers, he had 4,000 Jews and 200 gypsies shot. “It’s not a nice job,” he wrote to Wolff’s friend Richard Hildebrand, an SS Gruppenführer and Higher SS and Police Führer in Danzig, “but this way, the Jewish question gets the fastest solution.”
The military did not agree with his crude practices. They tried to get rid of Turner using bureaucratic tricks. Following Hildebrand’s advice, he turned to Wolff with the request that he speak to Himmler for him. Once Turner was again secure in his post, he thanked Wolff in a letter on April 11, 1942, “because I am sure that this is all due to your influence.”
The letter further states: “After all, I know that you are interested in these things, and the reason why I am calling attention to it now is simply
because this issue will become more man acute. Already months ago I had all the Jews within reach in these parts shot, and every one of the Jewish women and children put into a concentration camp. At the same time, with the help of the SD, I got hold of a delousing truck,
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which will handle the final clearance of the camp in fourteen days to four weeks… the moment has come when, under the Geneva Conventions, the Jewish officers in the prisoners of war camp, like it or not, are to follow their dead relatives. If those concerned are let go now they will be given their final freedom once they arrive but as with other members of their race, it will not be very long, and the whole issue should be resolved once and for all…”
Once may assume that the addressee read this letter because it was not marked “mail to be read,” as Wolff classified all copies that Himmler and others often sent him “for his perusal,” where such murderous happenings were sometimes mentioned, but according to Wolff they went unread into the files because as a very busy man he just did not have the time to work through so much paper.
There is one further clue showing that he could not have been that innocent. On July 5, 1942, he informed his personal consultant, Obersturmführer Heinrich Heckenstaller, at the Berlin office by phone to tell Himmler’s secretary, Dr. Rudolf Brandt, to notify the Reichsführer SS of an important discussion to be held at the Wehrmacht leadership staff meeting the following day. The SS absolutely had to be represented at that meeting concerned with clearing the captured Crimean peninsula of all residents as ordered by Hitler. The reason was that all South Tyrolean Germans were going to be resettled there. In Heckenstaller’s “comment for SS Obersturmbannführer Dr. Rudolf Brandt,” written on Wolff’s instructions, it stated: “Point of discussion, aside from the installation of assembly camps, resettlement, racial inspection, and the required security forces involved in resettlement, the guarding of the camps, the liquidation by Einsatzgruppen, and the general problems of all issues involved.”
Translated into intelligible language, this means: the residents of Crimea will be gathered in concentration camps. The racially useful will be selected and all of the others will be left to the Einsatzgruppen. Wolff would probably have composed the text differently, in better language and more obscure at the same time, but the meaning would have invariably been the same. What could Wolff know or had to have known about the
mass murders? It must have occurred to him that Hitler threatened the Jews with violence or death more during the first half of 1942—in no less than six public speeches and announcements and at least eight times during the “Table Talk” discussions at Führer headquarters.
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This accumulation becomes retrospectively clear, because the mass extermination at the death camps was being carried out in full force at this time.
Wolff must have noticed this; he was the ambitious observer and this was precisely his task. So it could not have slipped by him that in closed circles after hours, the Führer was increasingly speaking of the “dirty Jews,” “Jewish pigs,” “Jewish vermin” and that he only viewed his archenemies as “pests”—perhaps because in this way he could “justify” to himself subconsciously that he was not having humans murdered at all.
Anyone like Wolff, who believed in authority and lived in such a poisoned atmosphere, among generals who made decisions daily about life and death regarding thousands of soldiers, in the end was no longer so disgusted that at any one time a few thousand more Jews or other “inferior” races were processed through Hitler’s killing machine. Of course, the man who got the “final solution” going died on June 4, 1942, from an assassination that was not even meant for the murderer of the Jews, but rather for the Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia. SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich retained his position as chief of the security police when he was sent to Prague to put the fear of God into the Czechs. Hitler ordered a state funeral in Berlin for the victim of the assassination. For this, the highest SS officers formed the honor guard at the coffin in the Mosaic Room at the Reich Chancellery. Wolff was one of those men. Now, the friend, the comrade, and also the rival—as he had thought—for Himmler’s succession lay in a casket next to him. The Reichsführer himself even said one day: “If something should ever happen to me, there is only Heydrich or you as my successor; who that will be can only be decided by Hitler.”
Wolff saw a different side to Heydrich’s death. The Reichsführer too had now been rid of another rival. Himmler supposedly feared Heydrich, whom Hitler characterized as “the man with the iron heart,” because the chief of the RSHA had not only created a terrifying apparatus of total surveillance, but also had surpassed his superior in mental keenness, in the ability to make decisions, and in unscrupulousness as well. As Himmler
and Wolff collected the body in Prague, Heydrich’s adjutant handed them sealed envelopes: the farewell words of the dying man. The legacy to Wolff included the request that he always courageously and ruthlessly tell the Reichsführer SS the truth. Heydrich didn’t even mention murdering the Jews. In the plane back to Berlin, Wolff let Himmler read his letter, but the expected discussion did not take place. Wolff assumed this because Heydrich discussed his “dirty work” in the letter to Himmler, which the Adjutant was not allowed to read.
Wolff lived up to his description as the SS Parsifal, the pure Thor, one night in a scene said to have taken place at the beginning of July 1942 at Gestapo headquarters at number 8 Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. He left his offices at about 1:30 a.m., and without announcing himself (something he was allowed to do) went over to Himmler’s offices nearby. He found the leader “both psychologically and physically collapsed over his desk.” Himmler answered the compassionate question as to whether his faithful paladin could offer him any comfort with woeful smiles, shaking his head. Wolff suspected at that point that the difficulties of love and marriage must have been the cause. He was well aware of the problems Himmler was having. His wife, Marga, was seven years older than her husband; she was a professional nurse when he fell for her motherly care, and since then her large body was all that was still remarkable about her. He was increasingly hesitant about showing her in public. She reacted to this estrangement by quarreling. So, Himmler looked for feminine comfort and found it in his personal secretary Hedwig Potthast. Recently, in February, she bore him a son. Since Wolff in many ways served as the father confessor in this matter, he was now helpful as godfather—a condition that did not particularly point to estrangement or a row between the two men.
It wasn’t family worries, said the Reichsführer. “That, dear Wölffchen, I could deal with. But you cannot even imagine all that I must silently take on for the Führer so that he, the Messiah for the next 2,000 years, can remain absolutely free from sin. You know very well, especially now; after Heydrich’s death, that if I should pass away or if I am unable to continue in my position, only you could be my successor. It is then better for you and for Germany if you neither have anything to do with nor know about these matters that weigh upon me.”
Such lines were not some novelist’s or screenwriter’s invention. Wolff recited them verbatim from his phenomenal memory, forty-five years after they had been spoken. When he was seventy-seven years old, and set
on proving to the world that he did not know about Himmler’s crimes and those of the entire SS crowd. One may accept the fact that he remembered these words so well because he could use them as an alibi. “I spent many nights,” he wrote further, “brooding about what he could have meant… It wasn’t until after the war that I found the answer in my search for the truth: that it concerned the Jewish issue.”
Wolff accepted the reasons for Himmler’s silence only temporarily. Sometimes he also argued that Himmler feared that the discovery of the abuse of his idealism could have driven the painfully precise guard officer to suicide. Also Himmler may have never said anything about the murders because he would then have placed himself in his rival’s hands. This thought immediately assumes that the crimes were being committed behind Hitler’s back by an overzealous Reichsführer—a suspicion offered here and there in Wolff’s recollections.
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On July 17, 1942, Hitler and his headquarters moved from the “Wolfsschanze” to “Werewolf,” a settlement of barracks in the Ukraine, 15 kilometers north of Vinnitza. It was in a small forest near the banks of the Bug River, somewhat far from the southern section of the front, which had advanced successfully in recent days. It was still close enough, however, to feel the proximity to the victories for the greatest military commander of all times (Grössten Feldherrn aller Zeiten—shortened to GRÖFAZ). Wolff also moved with the rest. Himmler was stationed farther north in his special train. He wanted to be closer to the Polish border because he had set himself the goal to “end the resettlement of the entire Jewish population of the general administration by December 31, 1942.” Now he had to admit that this would hardly be possible.
There were two reasons for this. Thousands upon thousands of Jews in the former Poland were working for the Wehrmacht. They produced ammunition, uniforms, and cooking utensils. They had been trained and could only be replaced with difficulty. On the other hand, there were not enough train cars to transport the “resettlers” to where they would be so thoroughly exterminated in the gas chambers, crematoria, and incinerators that no trace would be left of them. The death mills for this activity were now ready: Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Auschwitz-Birkenau. In the
Warsaw ghetto alone there were half a million Jews, but no trains to take them away. The Eastern Railroad, a branch of the Reichsbahn, which was responsible for them, regretted that they could offer no help. The German offensive toward Stalingrad in the Soviet south and the Caucasus was underway. The soldiers needed replacements, and the trains were being used for longer periods of time with the ever-growing distances. The Wehrmacht would not free up any trains for the transport of the Jews.
When Himmler appeared at the “Werewolf” headquarters on July 16, 1942, he probably also spoke with Hitler about his hesitations regarding the extermination of the Jews, but the Führer was too busy with global strategic plans that included a campaign to India. Hitler could by no means involve himself with organizing train transportation. So Himmler went to his local representative with his concerns. With his skillful negotiations Wolff had already achieved some impossible things. He remembered his good contacts with the deputy of the Reich Minister of Transport, Secretary of State, Dr. Albert Ganzenmüller. In a special priority telephone call from headquarters, Berlin assured him that cars and locomotives would be made available and that details would be sent in writing.
Wolff refused to take any blame when he was later accused of having helped transport 300,000 Jews to their death. First, he argued that he only made telephone calls on Himmler’s orders. Secondly, he assumed that the Jews were being taken to a sort of reservation, similar to the American Indians, because Himmler told him that they would be concentrated in a few large areas so that the number of guards could be reduced. And thirdly, Himmler had actually wanted to get on the phone himself, but was not authorized for special priority phone calls because he was not a member of headquarters, as far as the telephone exchange was concerned.