Top Nazi (34 page)
Presumably Wolff’s contribution to the genocide never would have gone into the files had State Secretary Ganzenmüller not been such a thorough bureaucrat and completed the arrangement in writing. In this manner “Herr Obergruppenführer Wolff, Berlin, SW 11, Prinz Albrecht-Strasse” found out as of the date of 28 July 1942 that, “[w]ith reference to our telephone conversation on July 16, for your information, I am please to send you the following report from my head office at the Eastern Railroad [Gedob] in Krakow: Each day since July 22, a train leaves with 5,000 Jews from Warsaw via Malkinia to Treblinka. A train also leaves twice a week with 5,000 Jews from Przemysl to Belzec. Gedob is in constant contact with security units in Krakow. They agree that the transports from Warsaw via Lublin to Sobibor [near Lublin] must remain there as long as
the construction on this stretch of tracks make the transport impossible [approximately October 1942] … Heil Hitler! Respectfully yours, Ganzenmüller.”
On August 2, the letter reached the addressee at ‘Werewolf.” The recipient wrote on the envelope by hand: “Many thanks, also in the name of the RF
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” Furthermore, copies were sent to Dr. Brandt [Himmler’s secretary], Odilo Globocnik [in charge of murder operations in Lublin], and Obergruppenführer Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger [who, as Higher SS and Police Führer in the General Government, was responsible for the extermination of the Jews]. They were all well aware of the State Secret of the Great German Reich that had long since been public within the leadership. If anyone could later have told them that Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff was excluded from this knowledge, they would surely have died laughing. This was clearly impossible. Brandt was sentenced to death by the Allied Court in Nuremberg and hanged for crimes against humanity; Globocnik committed suicide during the final days of the war; Krüger disappeared without a trace in the confusion at the end of the war.
In Wolff’s Berlin office, one of his colleagues drafted the reply to “Dear Party Comrade Ganzenmüller.” At the date of August 13, 1942, it was written, among other things: “With particular pleasure I took note of your report that for fourteen days now a train has been leaving daily for Treblinka with 5,000 members of the chosen people, and that in this manner, we have been able to carry out this population movement at increasing speed. I have been in contact with the offices concerned so that a smooth implementation of all measures is guaranteed. I thank you again for you efforts in this matter and ask you at the same time to continue giving your attention to these things.”
Wolff signed that letter at the “Werewolf” barracks. In later years, as he was reproached that the wording of the letter quite obviously came from the Nazi monster vocabulary, and could also be understood that he was in no way as harmlessly, guilelessly, or unsuspectingly involved in the mass murders, he explained that he did not approve the drafting of the letter because he was not an anti-Semite. He only signed the letter because he felt it was a matter of urgency, and he did not want to have to request another draft from Berlin. It also follows that he meant no harm by that letter because he sent it without the secret code, required for all Jewish matters. He regarded the letter simply as a thank-you note and for that
reason forgot it so completely and only remembered it again when it was shown to him at the war crimes trials where he was questioned as a witness.
So, on July 22, 1942, die first train ordered by Wolff rolled into Warsaw on a track next to the Jewish hospital. The fifty cars were to be locked, covered, and secured with barbed wire. Early in the morning the Jewish Council, the nominally autonomous administration of the ghettos, was told: “All Jewish people, regardless of age and sex … were to be resettled in the east.” The Jewish Council made sure that 600 Jews were present at the daily collecting point by the hospital. The one thousand men of the Jewish Service for Order were outfitted with clubs and had to herd the “resettlers” together every day, one hundred into each car. The general administration of the Eastern Railroad in Krakow made sure that deliveries to the gas chambers arrived on time according to “Schedule number 548.” They even managed to free up further transport vehicles so that by August 6 another special train could be ready to go to Treblinka every day.
Was it pure coincidence that on July 22, while the first group rolled into the extermination camp, the creators and managers of the camp dictated a long and friendly letter to Karl Wolff from Lublin? Odilo Globocnik, the SS Brigadeführer, was quite pleased with the expected rush. “The Reichsführer was here and gave us enough new work so that all of our most secret dreams will come true. I am so grateful to him for that. He can be sure that these things he wishes will be taken care of very shortly. I also thank you, Obergruppenführer, for I am certain that you also helped with this visit.”
What can this good-natured person have meant with “new work” and “our most secret wishes”? What was it that Himmler wished for that would be fulfilled very shortly? Throughout the year, Globocnik reported to the Reichsführer SS that “by October 19, 1943, 1 will have completed Operation ‘Reinhard’ [the name of his assignment] and shut down all camps.” What remains unclear and ambiguous is why he was thanking Wolff so specifically. Was the general director of the death mills afraid that he would have to close his operations early due to lack of business? And had the unsuspecting Obergruppenführer Wolff freed him from such worries by speaking favorably to Himmler? At this point, we are reminded of a hint that Heydrich gave to the head of the SD Foreign Intelligence Service, Brigadeführer Walter Schellenberg, as he was leaving: “Pay particular attention to Wölffchen. Without Wolff, Himmler seldom does anything; everything is discussed with him first.”
In principle, this may be correct, but during the war frequent travel no longer allowed such a close relationship. However, Himmler made great efforts to keep his chief of his personal staff up to date; he was sent copies of almost all the important documents to the Führer’s headquarters in Berlin—the previously mentioned “mail to read” that Wolff supposedly never read. He therefore found out (or perhaps did not) about Himmler’s order to the Higher SS and Police Officer in the Ukraine, Obergruppenführer Hans Prützmann, that he must “despite existing economic concerns, immediately” clear out and destroy “the Pinks Ghetto” (dated October 27, 1942). Or the “SS order,” in force and effect for the entire East, whereby in operations against the partisans, men, women, and children suspected of band activity were to be gathered and transported in groups to the Lublin and Auschwitz camps. What was supposed to happen to the adults once they arrived there was not stated in the order—they were forced to work and die of exhaustion. The children and youths were to be judged according to racial criteria. The worthless ones were to be trainees in the concentration camps and were raised in “unconditional subordination” to their German masters; the racially acceptable ones were to be Germanized in National Socialist reformatories. (Order dated January 6, 1943.)
Five days later, on January 13, Himmler ordered “that all proletarian elements currently suspected of band activity, either male or female, will be arrested and sent to the KL [concentration camps] in Lublin, Auschwitz, and in the Reich on a continuous basis… This operation is to be carried out with the greatest speed. I have asked SS Obergruppenführer Wolff to discuss the issue of ordering trains with State Secretary Ganzenmüller. Any requests or wishes regarding this matter are mainly to be directed to SS Obergruppenführer Wolff.” This was taking place during the weeks when all wheels on cars and locomotives were to roll—not, as a propaganda slogan suggested, for the victory, but to keep the disastrous battle of Stalingrad from turning into a catastrophe for the entire eastern front.
The successful arrangement regarding the trains was a possible reason why Himmler took his Wölffchen with him to Warsaw on January 9, 1943. It could also have been that Wolff was experienced in dealing with the Wehrmacht (especially if it concerned the Jews). It had been reported to the Reichsführer that there were still 35,000 Jews living in the Warsaw Ghetto. Actually, including illegal residents, there were many more. Of these, 20,000 were employed in businesses controlled by the Munitions Command of the Wehrmacht. In September 1942, the Armed Forces
Commander of the General Command demanded that the resettlement of these workers and their immediate families be stopped until the orders that were vital for the war effort were completed.
Himmler refused and maintained that the evidence of “purported interest in armaments…in reality only supported the Jews and their businesses.” The atmosphere between the SS and the Wehrmacht was once again loaded with tension. Himmler’s visit was not announced to the leader of the Warsaw Armaments Command, a Wehrmacht captain; such impoliteness was purposeful. The Reichsführer SS provocatively asked why his order to move the Warsaw operations, along with their workers, to Lublin had not been followed. Everyone in his office knew what would happen to them there. “The Jews there, too,” Himmler had written in one of his orders, “would again disappear one day, according to the Führer’s wishes.” When defendant Wolff was asked about that meeting at his Munich trial, he at first could not “for the life of me” remember. He requested that they prove to him that he had been present. This was done successfully because the war diary of the Warsaw armaments inspection had been submitted to the court with remarks regarding Himmler’s entourage. In addition, any of the officers who had kept the diary could have been questioned as witnesses. Wolff then reacted with “a very vague recollection of the visit,” but he still had to explain why Himmler would bring the chief of his personal staff with him to Warsaw since he never had anything to do with the Jewish question. Wolff explained the lapses in his otherwise excellent memory by saying that his health had been “very poor” during those days in January 1943. Besides, he had also been psychologically burdened because he had completed the divorce from his wife and the marriage to his lover at that time. According to the statutes of the SS, he needed Himmler’s approval to do this. Because it had been denied to him, the estrangement between himself and the Reichsführer had turned into mutual aversion. This too further weighed upon him. So the court wanted to know, at least, how he explained Himmler’s comment where he addressed the disappearance of the Jews. He was thinking of Madagascar, Wolff replied. The SD and the Gestapo had both, at times, kept busy with the plan of deporting all Jews in German-controlled areas to that island in the Indian Ocean. But the conference at Wannsee had, in the meantime, proclaimed the much cheaper and efficient “final solution.”
After Himmler’s visit in January, the second wave of “resettlement” began on January 18, 1943, in Warsaw. For the time being, he ordered the “establishment of a concentration camp inside the Warsaw ghetto” that
“is to be moved to Lublin and its surrounding area as quickly as possible”—the three extermination camps under Odilo Globocnik were in the surrounding area. Himmler had copies of all orders regarding these matters also sent to Wolff. But this was none of his business and it can therefore be assumed that the chief of the personal staff simply sent all these copies immediately to the files because he had no time to read them.
When Himmler finally ordered his thugs to clear out the ghetto by force and destroy it, the Jews who were doomed to die decided to revolt. They had nothing more to lose than their lives, if they failed to defend themselves. In the middle of April 1943, the fight began. Only after 28 days could SS Brigadeführer Jürgen Stroop, report to the Reichsführer SS that the Warsaw ghetto no longer existed. Wolff found out about this while he was in the hospital. He was not only incapable of service but also demoted. Himmler had taken over the leadership of his SS Main Office himself.
Wolff repeated again and again: it was not the task of the chief of the personal staff to exterminate Jews. But whoever was in the SS above the common rank and file, at one point or another ended up having to deal with those Nazi crimes. That most certainly applied to Wolff because he had set up his office in such a manner that the range of his influence remained virtually unlimited. If he wanted, he could become involved in every area of National Socialist politics. Sometimes he made use of this to save one person or another, even though it is always difficult to decide in retrospect what would have happened had he not taken action.
On the other hand, there were areas where this intermittent show of humanity was painfully lacking. One of the seven offices within his main office—and not an insignificant one—was called the “Ahnenerbe.” Himmler used the renowned Munich university professor, Dr. Walther Wüst, as the leading thinker. His reputation served the purpose of drawing scholars from the most varied fields to the SS, putting them to work to fulfill their own goals. Once they received uniforms and honorary ranks, they were integrated to the personal staff. Wolff then became the director of a wealth of erudition, where quality and trash as well as art and kitsch from the most wide-ranging disciplines were available. And not least because of Himmler’s inclination towards the scurrilous and the occult—that field was so far-reaching that no one could coordinate those conflicting efforts. Certainly not Wolff, since his cultural interests did not reach beyond those of a conservative upper-middle-class citizen.
He therefore delegated the internal management to SS officer Wolfram Sievers, a wild careerist from German nationalist circles. Wolff cannot
be blamed for such ridiculous mistakes in the “Ahnenerbe,” such as the jubilation about the “Ura Linda-Chronicles,” that the obscure prehistoric researcher Herman Wirth discovered as proof of early Germanic advanced civilization, and which turned out to be wrong. There were also projects in the “Ahnenerbe” that were just as contemptuous of human life and inhumane as the persecution of the Jews, even if the scope of these actions didn’t even come close to the genocide perpetrated in the east. Wolff indisputably knew of these projects, which were part of his main office, and he even collected money for them from the rich men in the “Reichsführer SS circle of friends.”