Top Nazi (36 page)
Himmler admitted shamefacedly: “I respectfully beg the Führer’s forgiveness, but Horia Sima actually escaped a week ago.” He wanted to report it immediately, but Gestapo chief, Gruppenführer Heinrich Müller, had advised against it. Hitler’s nerves were already at a breaking point because of the difficult situation at Stalingrad and Rommel’s retreat in North Africa. He could have done without the latest excitement because the escapee would be caught in a matter of days, he commented to Wolff: “I must say that I expected a more resolute statement coming from the Reichsführer.”
Hitler was even less pleased with the information. Wolff reported that the Führer paced the small room, shouting for fifteen minutes. His excellent memory did not recall the threat of the “Black Plague,” but did remember the praise: the SS was “a wonderful thing,” and “I am glad I have them, but even the guard must obey.” Wolff had to use the phone again
and immediately pass along the following to Himmler: “The Führer expresses his personal displeasure; he does not want to see him at headquarters and will not shake his hand until Horia Sima has been arrested once again. The Führer demands to hear a report twice daily as to what the police are doing.”
Wolff took the liberty of suggesting another procedure. He pointed out that a Wehrmacht unit was servicing the telephone exchange. Out of boredom, the soldiers listened in on all the conversations at three o’clock in the morning, although this was forbidden. They would enjoy hearing that the SS were ticked off, and would naturally pass the information along. It was therefore not desirable that Field Marshal Keitel or General Jödl found out about this matter. This was not a matter of malicious intent, but rather of “some lack of attention.” He supposedly told Hitler: “I have to say this because I must set things straight.” To be more effective Wolff should drive over to see Himmler and give him Hitler’s message in person.
The meeting took place in the morning. Himmler became “quite pale” as Wolff was reciting his piece. In his opinion, the Reichsführer had to “reach the obvious conclusions” of Hitler’s lack of trust and disfavor. Which ones? Was the Obergruppenführer counting on his superior’s resignation? Did he already see himself as his successor? If he did, he was making a mistake. “He answered quite weakly,” Wolff recalled. “I quietly set things straight for him, but he never forgave me for that. He thought that the order of things was no longer the same, namely, the Führer at the top as Commander in Chief, then the Reichsführer SS, and only then the liaison General of the Waffen SS at the Führer headquarters. He felt that I was now above him.” In the closing days of 1942, Wolff was convinced that nothing could stand in the way of his future career. He believed that he had secured Hitler’s favor for good. “The Führer spoke the same language of the front soldiers of the First World War with me while Himmler chattered like a civilian.” He wrote this retrospectively and critically as an old man, more than thirty years after the fall of the Third Reich; still seeing himself as the masterful Nordic man in his own mind.
The danger to his career came unexpectedly in an area our hero easily kept very tidy—from his private relationships. According to the strict standards of bourgeois morality, things had become rather messy because for some time he reveled in the joys of a double family life, mindless of any criminal consequences. The situation was well known within the upper levels of the SS, but no one faulted him because of it. Concubines (if this biblical naming of them is even appropriate here) were the norm
among top Nazi officers. The wives of those leaders and officers of all types who had risen from humble beginnings did not follow their husbands’ flights of fancy, and in time were no longer presentable at State receptions. Since such men were desirable to other women only due to their position, some of the Party men did take on younger and more beautiful women as their mistresses.
The legitimate Wolff family, therefore, lived in Rottach-Egern on the banks of Tegern Lake in a ten-room house, with boats and a bathhouse. His wife, Frieda, born von Römheld, raised their four children there, two girls and two boys. When Hitler resided at Obersalzberg, above Berchtesgaden, Karl Wolff could live with his family. If he was absent, as he was most of the time, his loved ones had to comfort themselves with a life-sized and lifelike oil portrait of their father and husband.
The second family lived in a six-room apartment in Berlin-Charlottenburg. The widowed Countess Ingeborg Bernstorff, born Christensen and originally from Hamburg, lived there with her three children. The youngest, Wolff’s son, was now five years old. For the time being, she was Wolff’s only companion north of the Main. She received an officer’s pension because her dead husband had been a Prussian head of an administrative district. She already had two children when in 1937 she bore Karl Wolff’s son. This happened, as already noted, in Budapest, so that very few people rejoiced at the happy occasion and the reason why the infant child with the Germanic first name of Widukind Thorsun and his mother were not allowed to travel back to Berlin immediately. For discrete cases of this kind, there was an office in the main office of the Chief of the Personal Staff of the Reichsführer SS, called “Lebensborn.” It had been founded so that the girlfriends of the SS officers and men could bring their children into the world in peace unencumbered by the verdict of their surroundings, and those infants, who were racially perfect, could be given up for adoption to well-deserving SS couples. This was such a case. Wolff’s son was put in the “Lebensborn” home in Steinhöring, and cared for there during the first months of his life, and then given back to his biological mother as a foster child.
The fact that Widukind was very blond and blue-eyed pleased his father immensely. However, Wolff also made great efforts to care for the Bernstorff son, who would later become his stepson after his second marriage. That child’s uncle, the brother of his late father, was Count Albrecht von Bernstorff, who had become a diplomat, as had many of his ancestors. As councilor to the German ambassador in London, he
resigned from state service in 1933; he was opposed to Hitler. Now he was in the banking business. Because he had no direct heirs, and had a fortune, Ingeborg von Bernstorff demanded that her son, the young Count, become his heir through a formal will. When the Count refused—as a witness at the Munich criminal proceedings against Karl Wolff was to testify—he was picked up by the Gestapo and taken to the concentration camp in Dachau. Wolff declared he would only be freed once he signed the last will and testament. After long negotiations, they finally reached that conclusion. But in 1943 the Count was arrested for the second time, and in April 1945 the SS finally shot him to death.
The Munich court was also shown a letter provided by the prosecution that Wolff had written to his wife from Taormina in Sicily in February 1939.
This could be viewed as a symptom of his SS obsession. In the letter, he writes: “…fate made me one of the closest colleagues of a unique man, the Reichsführer SS, whom I not only immensely admire for his quite extraordinary qualities, but in whose historical mission I deeply believe. Our common and my endlessly satisfying work… [is] rooted in thoughts of race. My entire being and effort is for the SS and its future goals. It is, therefore, no surprise that the thought that my sons will not fulfill the SS selection conditions that, according to human expectations, will be valid for the next 15 to 20 years, pains me greatly, especially because I could theoretically give my people children who are racially better qualified. I do not need to discuss with you the absence of children having absolutely complete SS qualities…” Until now Widukind Thorsun was an only child.
It had been his private worry for years: the woman in Rottach-Egern and the four children were healthy, but fate had endowed them with brown hair and brown eyes. If the schoolboy Karl had been more attentive to his biology classes in high school, he could have avoided such bad luck; he would have learned the law of genetics that dark dominates over blond. In the meantime, SS officer Karl Wolff felt guilty of having wasted his Nordic attributes. It was clear to him that he could expect no perfect offspring from his marriage. With Countess Ingeborg this was not the case: her children and especially Wolff’s son had turned out perfectly.
How Wolff imagined he would straighten things out in the long run is unimportant. He excelled at sweeping things under the rug quietly, through a barrage of words. He was confident that time, would make certain things become unimportant. As more and more men were dying in the war, the National Socialist bureaucrats calculated how to make up
for those losses and deal with the surplus of women. The word “domina” circulated among prominent Party figures. It meant that in the future, every man who had served the Fatherland would receive permission to marry a second wife. The first one was not allowed to be disadvantaged in her rights; for her understanding she would be rewarded with the honorary title of “domina,” meaning mistress, but the second wife was not to be any less legitimate and worthy of respect. It was said that following the Thirty Years’ War this had become normal practice in Germany. The Führer and the leader of German women, Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, had already been informed of the necessary laws for the period following the war.
Like many other prominent Nazis, in his thoughts Wolff also toyed with this possibility. He felt even more encouraged when even Reichsleiter Martin Bormann, who had now become the Führer’s secretary and who knew his plans better than anyone else, supported the project. Peace was of course still far removed, but the interim state of affairs would probably have been just as satisfying for the love commuter from the Spree to Tegern Lake for a long time. But Countess Inge wanted a man for herself, and she was not remotely interested in the role of second wife. She demanded what her lover had promised long ago and many times after that: a divorce, and with that, Wolff’s choice between his two women.
Why would she get her way in the end? She was the more energetic of the two women; but it could also be that the picture book German who was so firmly convinced of his own racial qualities also believed he must sacrifice his family that had such a poor appearance on the altar of the Fatherland. Making the people more Nordic was part of the SS program, and it now seemed more necessary than ever before that, given his position, he must lead by giving the good example. If his conscience suffered because of this, the pleasure of the now legal relationship with the younger woman and her attractive appearance would make up for it.
According to SS regulations the divorce and the remarriage had to be approved by Himmler. But he refused both; marriage scandals in the leading circles spoiled the morale of the people, he argued. “Maybe later!” and “Just wait! It is possible for family affairs to disappear in the wake of a great victory!” This went on for months, until it became too much for the Countess, who finally did not want to wait anymore. She barged into Himmler’s offices on Prinz-Albrecht Strasse, slammed her fist on his desk and protested so loudly that the Reichsführer promised her that he would no longer stand in the way of her wish. Despite this promise, he continued to hesitate in giving his approval.
Wolff said there were two reasons for the hesitation. First: the Reichsführer was afraid that the resolute woman from Hamburg could cause him trouble within leading SS cliques, while the moderate and properly raised Frieda from the Darmstadt official aristocracy would not do anything like that. Wolff further suspected: “When there were State receptions, the Reichsführer would lead with his wife—white blond hair and blue eyes, but her cheek bones and her hips were anything but Germanic. And then I would come, and if then the perfect specimen had a beautiful Frisian at his side, there would be even more obvious a difference.”
After that latest hesitation, Wolff took no further steps to clear up the situation. He waited once again, perhaps for Domina Day. But in February 1943, his growing stomach pains were bothering him. When he told Himmler about it, the Reichsführer recommended the man who had helped him with apparently similar maladies, the masseur Felix Kersten. This practitioner of alternative medicine from Finland, with his kneading hands, had eliminated Himmler’s stomach pains, digestive disturbances, intestinal colic and difficulty in breathing. In short, he was a miracle doctor. When Wolff once again took leave from Hitler for a few days in his Berlin office, checking on things and to accept an invitation from SS Gruppenführer Gottlieb Berger to hunt a wild boar in Warthegau, Himmler, in his role as patriarch, scheduled a massage at Kersten’s estate called “Harzwalde,” located one hundred kilometers north of Berlin, that would replace the hunt.
Wolff’s various accounts of his beginning illness differ from one another on several points. In the most aggressive version, Himmler knew that Wolff suffered from pyelitis. The Reichsführer was supposedly even attempting to have Wolff’s kidneys seriously damaged by the massage. Whether true or not, Wolff did have blood in his urine after that, and because the famous SS sanatorium at Hohenlychen was near the Kersten estate, Wolff described the symptoms of his suffering over the phone to Dr. Karl Gebhardt, the senior consulting physician there, on February 18, 1943. He told Wolff to come in immediately! A kidney stone, larger than a bean, was discovered as the culprit on the X-ray, and could only be surgically removed. Gebhardt said that the operation would not be simple, and Wolff’s general condition was no longer the best. In short, it could lead to a serious situation.
It is understandable that this came as a considerable shock to the patient. Like any unlucky person, he looked for someone to blame. Until recently, he maintained that Himmler ordered him to have the massage
to get rid of a dangerous competitor. Gebhardt, who was to be sentenced to death at a war crimes trial, had practically confirmed Wolff’s suspicion to the Americans shortly before his execution. However, the SS doctor had been a friend of Himmler’s since childhood. The urologist who was called to assist the operation immediately looked puzzled and later told Himmler on the telephone that according to his experience, only one in three patients survived such a difficult operation. According to medical doctors, Wolff’s suspicion that the murderous massage ordered by Himmler had ground parts of his kidneys on the sharp-edged stone, causing sepsis, was erroneous because no one could have endured such a painful procedure.