Top Nazi (37 page)
Such dire prospects moved Wolff to put his private matters in order before the operation. He asked Himmler one more time to approve the divorce and the second marriage. And once again he received a stalling answer—with an ulterior motive; as he later discovered, this could be decided when the patient was healthy again. Wolff felt justified in calling on the highest authority. To write to Hitler in the proper way, he stood himself up from his painful position and wore his general’s uniform. Luckily he was able to give his petition to a first-class messenger; the Party and SS veteran Julius Schaub, Hitler’s most trusted adjutant on the team at Führer headquarters. Schaub was just about to leave Berlin during the first few days of March for “Werewolf” in the Ukraine, the current location of the commander in chief. Besides Wolff’s letter, Schaub also took a second divorce petition along with him; by a Party Reichsleiter. Wolff reported with proud vanity that only his petition had been approved. His often vaunted personal credit undoubtedly played a role, but a letter from his wife Frieda that Hitler also had in front of him at the same time was important as well. In this letter, written in very moving words, she agreed to give up the husband she still loved after more than two decades of life together, and supported his petition because she did not want to stand in the way of his happiness.
The divorce became final on March 6. And so finally on March 9, 1943, Wolff’s second marriage could be officially registered in Hohenlychen. For Ingeborg, born Christensen, the widowed Countess Bernstorff, this was the third procedure of this kind. Before her marriage to the Count, she had already been married to a middle-class businessman and was divorced from him after a short time.
On March 12, the best team of doctors that Hohenlychen could offer operated on the patient. Two ribs had to be shortened in order to reach
the kidney stone. Himmler announced in a circular that the Chief of the Personal Staff was very ill—so ill that no one should visit him, write to him, or even send him gifts. He, Himmler, would temporarily take over the duties of the Main Office. A replacement for him as the representative of the Waffen SS at Führer Headquarters was not even mentioned; not until late autumn did a new man there take over that position, which leads to the assumption that the position did not necessarily have to be filled. The Reichsführer SS never came to visit the patient, who took it rather badly. Once, Himmler dispatched his secretary who was also his lover. She did not reveal that Wolff’s return to his former position was not planned and that his future usefulness was left open. As she reproached him that his switch of wives was not morally justifiable, and that he had behaved unfairly to Himmler by writing to Hitler, the Obergruppenführer realized he had fallen out of grace with his superior.
Was he to take this to heart? How many times—as far as one can believe his confessions—in the last few years had he already stated that the Reichsführer had deeply disappointed him? And how often had he asked himself whether he could actually realize his ideals in the SS at all. Despite his objections the corrupt Gauleiter Erich Koch was still in East Prussia, and in the meantime had also become the absolute master of the Ukraine. Himmler’s rules for the treatment of the populations in the defeated East had not been revoked and were still in force. The Einsatzgruppen were still operating, just as he had seen in Minsk. And the Gauleiters placed themselves against the SS and Himmler. The mighty Reichsführer SS and Chief of the German Police could not find the guts to take a Party comrade like Danzig Gauleiter Forster to the supreme party court.
Did he already sense the failings of his idol (see the letter from Taormina) as strongly in 1943 as he described them after Germany’s defeat? The heavy burdens of the times, the constant balancing act between victory and defeat had turned the totally predictable environment of the past into an objective and sober experience. Their joint shady activities had made them cronies, when there was no further unconditional trust because each one already knew too much about the other. When Wolff saw himself as Himmler’s presumed successor after Heydrich’s death, then one couldn’t blame him for using the opportunity to weaken his rival by removing him from responsibility. It is also understandable that he blamed him for the Horia Sima affair. What superior will accept someone under him making him the target of the dictator’s displeasure? That Hitler then approved Wolff’s divorce and new marriage on top of that could only lead
Himmler to believe that the Obergruppenführer could expect more favor from the supreme leader than he could himself.
It remains open as to whether the condition of the patient after the operation was as life threatening as he described. He remained at Hohenlychen for two months. On May 15, 1943, he traveled to Karlsbad in the Sudetengau for a spa cure to have his kidneys irrigated. At the end of June he switched to Bad Gastein on the northern face of the Tauern; he hoped to gain new strength at an altitude of one thousand meters. He may have assumed for a long time that he could return to his usual office in Berlin on the Prinz-Albrecht Strasse and to the Führer headquarters. But as several of his colleagues from the Main Office in Berlin were replaced by new employees, and as Dr. Rudolf Brandt took over more and more of the tasks of the former Chief of the Main Office, he began to have doubts.
Wolff did not keep his fears secret from his old comrade Maximilian von Herff, now head of the SS personnel office with an equal rank of Obergruppenführer, during his stay in Bad Gastein in the third week in July. He still did not know where he would be in the middle of August, when his vacation was over. Herff answered him in a letter: “I would consider it very desirable if you were to be used in your former position at least for a few months in order to blunt any such talk, but it must be taken care of appropriately.”
As Herff wrote this in August 1943, he still did not know that his comrade had been thrown into a new career by a major political event. On July 25, following a meeting with Italy’s King Victor Emmanuel III, Benito Mussolini, the Duce and promoter of the Axis policies in Italy, was arrested and secretly removed from the royal palace in an ambulance. At first no one knew where the prisoner was being held. Most of his political supporters in the Fascist government had melted away. They no longer believed in the victory of the Axis powers since Allied soldiers had landed in Sicily, and feared defeat more than anything. The king appointed Marshal Pietro Badoglio as prime minister to replace the Duce. Both announced that they would remain true to the alliance with Germany and Japan, but they were secretly holding talks towards an armistice and later an alliance with the English and Americans.
The Allied victories were impressive. They had chased Axis soldiers from the Italian colonies in Africa, landed in Sicily, and would predictably soon land in southern Italy. While German troops pulled back toward home, fighting a stalling battle of resistance, Italian units were surrendering
one after the other. The situation of German divisions in the south became very precarious. They knew that their strongest ally in Europe would sooner or later switch over to the enemy, but they could do nothing about it. As long as Italian troops were intact the Germans could not risk seeing them strengthening the enemy. So it became politically useful to maintain the disintegrating alliance until Italy’s new government decided to break it.
It was possible, however, to prepare for those events. The military requirements were rather clear. What must be avoided was that when the Italians switched fronts, German units in the south were not be cut off from their rear. A new army group was therefore concentrated in Austria, southern Germany and northern Italy under Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, who had been previously victorious in Africa. A German police organization was also to be prepared to secure supplies behind the fighting units and to oversee the economy and the workers as required by Germany, just as in other occupied countries where the task was supervised by the Higher SS and Police leaders. The right man had to be found now for such a task in Italy.
Such a man had to know the country and feel comfortable with the Italians. He must be able to skillfully negotiate because Germany could not treat its former ally the same way they treated Poland. Besides that, the man must also get along with two field marshals who could not stand one another, Rommel in the north and the Commander in Chief of the Southern Front, General Albert Kesselring. Both were rightly considered to have a mind of their own, which was why they could not get along.
Himmler called Wolff on July 27, 1943, in Bad Gastein. He was ordered to immediately, his health notwithstanding, to report to field headquarters near Lötzen not far from Rastenburg. There he found out that he was to get ready for service in Italy. He was appointed to this task because of his excellent knowledge of Italy, but this was really only an excuse. He had traveled to that country numerous times, mostly in the entourage of the Reichsführer SS, and had negotiated with Italians on many occasions in dealing with the resettlement of the South Tyroleans, but he could never manage without an interpreter. He had met a number of men, mostly from the Fascist party whom he called his friends, but he judged them according to German moral principles, always upheld by other Germans compatriots but not always practiced. There were surely many other men in the SS with equally favorable qualifications, but of much lower rank. What was in his favor was that he got along so well with Mussolini,
who thought so highly of him since the episode with the baton on the Munich Royal Plaza in 1937. Of course, the Duce must first be found and freed, but Hitler was quite determined to do everything possible to make this happen. He needed Mussolini as a puppet ruler in order to use the country better for his war effort.
Wolff’s task was to prepare for the transfer of power in Italy of the civilian sector. He set up an office in Munich that was to be secret at first, knowing that it would not be necessary to always proceed so carefully. Upon hearing the news that the Duce had been arrested, Hitler, in his furious reaction, demanded that Kesselring take the Third Tank Grenadier Division located in reserve near Rome “and without further ado ride into the city…and immediately arrest the whole government, the king and the entire mess.” As Himmler instructed his Obergruppenführer of this, he added: “The Signori have a grace period, but to delay does not mean putting it off forever.”
It was also well known that Hitler did not trust Italians in general. They were for him, as an Austrian, “Katzlmacher.” They had hardly any discipline, only had courage when they could place themselves in a scene, and were all more or less anarchists. Wolff was to outline in a memo how he planned to proceed in that country and its people in the future. He had to present it to Hitler within fourteen days. It cannot be exactly determined on what day this happened. Somewhere between August 19 and the end of the month, Himmler was present at Führer headquarters more often than for six days. Hitler’s valet, SS Obersturmführer Heinz Linge, noted these visits in his diary. Wolff’s name did not appear in Linge’s diary during this time—which agreed with Wolff’s statements.
After that, Himmler had the memo delivered to him at field headquarters. He read it, said nothing, and requested that the author accompany him to Führer headquarters. During the trip in his Maybach car—quite an extraordinary automobile—that took about a half hour, he had several points explained further. He did not return the memo. Arriving at the barrier to the “Wolfsschanze,” Himmler said: “You can go for a swim, Wolff! I don’t need you anymore today!” This meant that he was to get out of the car; the Reichsführer wanted to present the memo himself and this was an intentional affront. Wolff had hoped to get back into Hitler’s awareness—Hitler usually eliminated people from his plans if he hadn’t seen them even for a short time. Himmler was obviously playing on that possibility. It was also a calculated humiliation to dismiss the Obergruppenführer in such a manner and even nastier in front of the
chauffeur. Besides the driver, the other witnesses were an adjutant and a police detective, who always accompanied the Reichsführer as his bodyguard. It had not even been six months since Wolff had privileged status to go through the gate almost daily. The guards knew him and now could see how he was obviously being shut out of the inner circle.
That was why Wolff barely controlled himself when he went to pick up Hitler’s decision at Himmler’s field headquarters the next day. Upon entering his office, it was already clear to him that he was not being received with favor. In front of the Reichsführer’s desk, there was no visitor’s chair. Wolff would be handled standing. Wolff justified the following scene by noting that the man who was humiliating an officer decorated for his courage during the war “had never even smelled a shot of powder.” Actually Himmler was called up as a volunteer in 1917, just as Wolff, who was the same age. He rose to sergeant, but never made it from the Bavarian garrisons to the front. According to the standards of the party that placed the soldiers at the front above all else, this was a minor mistake. The most recent harassment caused the normally conciliatory Wölfchen to forget all officers’ rules. As he tells it he threatened the Reichsführer with a beating and jumped at him with clenched fists. Himmler tried to hide behind his desk; pale and breathing heavily, appeasing Wolff: “For God’s sake, don’t ruin things for yourself! A physical attack on a superior could cost you your head!”
Did Wolff really reply as he claimed: “After beating you, I will go to the Führer and report to him what I’ve done. I think that he’ll reward me.”? There were no witnesses to corroborate this claim. The details of this chapter of Wolff’s narration are very subjective impressions; but if true, they could be the mark of glorious resistance to a higher SS officer. In any case, the two contestants decided to get along with each other once again. The formula they used to seal their agreement was “This is about Germany.”
The question remains as to why the commander of every conceivable police force, a secret service, and all concentration camps decided so quickly to not take any revenge. Perhaps one issue was stopping Himmler—something both he and Wolff were equally involved in, and therefore he had to fear that some embarrassing information might come to light. For example, Himmler might have been in jeopardy if Wolff had mentioned the names Popitz and Langbehn. Two men who were seeking to overthrow Hitler, deprive the party of power, and end the war. They belonged to a resistance group that included top military men, influential
statesmen, former trade unionists, representatives of the church, and a number of influential and prominent figures working together. The connections of Popitz and Langbehn to these groups went back a number of years, but those connections now took on the character of a widespread conspiracy. To them, Wolff was a connection in the SS, and Berlin lawyer Dr. Carl Langbehn was at the other side of that connection.