Top Nazi (38 page)
They became acquainted in 1938. The lawyer represented a former colleague at the time, Dr. Maximilian von Rogister, who was the estate administrator of wealthy families and had emigrated to Holland because he was accused of tax evasion and breach of exchange control regulations. It is very possible, however, that those accusations were just meant to blackmail him. With Rogister’s help, Himmler wanted to retrieve pieces of old gothic gold jewelry from the Diergardt Collection, discovered in the Crimea long before and now in German possession, to be placed at the disposal of the SS. It was to be taken out of safekeeping in Cologne and brought to Wewelsburg, the future headquarters of the SS. The pieces were examples of the higher German culture during the period of the great migrations and would go to complete the collection already gathered at the castle. As a relative and financial consultant of the family that owned the jewels, Rogister refused not only because he viewed Himmler’s role as protector of Germanic cultural possessions ridiculous, but also because as member of a conservative Berlin gentlemen’s club, he deeply despised the crass upstarts of the SS.
Himmler summoned Dr. von Rogister to his office at the Prinz-Albrecht Strasse many times in 1936. After having snubbed Himmler every time, Rogister had to listen to the request once more in 1937, only in much stronger terms this time, with the hint that one of his brothers was already locked up in a concentration camp for speaking out against Hitler. Wolff was a witness to the conversation. He knew the Rogister brothers from school at the Ludwig-Georg-Gymnasium in Darmstadt. Wolff was not a man to forget his aristocratic schoolmates that easily. After the fall of the Third Reich, Wolff swore under oath that he had warned the friends of his youth of Himmler’s revenge. Some well-intentioned Party comrades told Rogister that the Gestapo had started to collect his malicious comments. When he fled to Holland in 1937, he gave attorney Dr. Carl Langbehn in Berlin the task of looking after his affairs, saying that Wolff may possibly be expected to help.
By then Himmler knew about Langbehn. His daughter Gudrun was with Wolff’s oldest daughter Irene and Langbehn’s daughter at a boarding
school near Bad Tölz in 1936. The three girls were each about sixteen years old; they became friends and visited each other at home as well. One day the fathers also met, and Langbehn managed to place a good word for his former teacher from the University of Göttingen, Professor of Law Fritz Pringsheim, who was now despised as a Jew and deprived of a teaching position. Wolff and Langbehn were pleased that the professor emigrated and began a new life in London shortly thereafter. All this happened before the war began, at a time when the SD was encouraging the emigration of Jews.
Langbehn could occasionally afford to make such recommendations. He had been a Party member since the spring of 1933 (a “fallen soldier of March,” as the old NSDAP fighters condescendingly called them) but he could prove of having sympathized with the Party earlier and was a reserve officer. Once the war began, he was drafted into counter-intelligence, the secret service of the Wehrmacht, because of his knowledge of languages, but he was soon turned over to the civilian service in the armaments industry. This allowed him occasionally to travel to neutral countries during the war. He was not afraid to collect information for the SD at that time, and used that cover to contact Allied intelligence services.
Dr. Johannes Popitz was one of the men who harbored plans for a putsch. In 1933 he was appointed state minister of finance by Hermann Göring, the newly appointed head of the Prussian state, and had also received the golden Party decoration for his service. But he also came to the conclusion that Hitler and his cohorts were leading the people to ruin. He and Langbehn belonged to an opposition group around Dr. Carl Friedrich Goerdeler who, as mayor of Leipzig, had been called by the National Socialists to the office of Reich Commissioner in 1933. He resigned his post in 1937. His resistance group considered him as the future chancellor.
All the resistance groups against the Nazi regime agreed that even at war, despite the mounting casualties, the losses in property because of air raids and the total absence of freedom, a revolt by the people against the current men in power could neither be expected nor even encouraged. The people were also living in great fear of the implacable and ruthless consequences that were reserved to the “enemies of the state,” and the still widely held belief that the demi-god Hitlerwould, in the end, save the German people from destruction in a world of enemies. The conspirators had hoped at first that the army would free them from the dictator
and his clique, but the operation either did not begin or failed because of unpredictable difficulties. So Goerdeler’s group resorted to the idea of enlisting the SS in fomenting a putsch. They had weapons, a tight and rooted organization, and their own information apparatus; they also controlled the police. With Himmler’s help—as the plan stipulated—it would be possible to overthrow Hitler. A revolution that started like this would continue and eventually eliminate the SS without difficulty.
Langbehn found out in 1942 in conversation with Wolff, that the leading men in the Party were jealously observing one another and were also concerned about the policies and the leadership of the war. He attempted to find out with Wolff how far the Reichsführer SS could be willing to cooperate and participate in a change in the current power base. In the fall of 1942, the lawyer and the Obergruppenführer met many times. The content of their conversations was, of course, not recorded. It may only be reconstructed from what happened afterwards. Wolff informed the Reichsführer after every meeting; they agreed that the contact should continue. The goal they were both trying to reach remained unclear. One year later, once Langbehn was tightly in the clutches of the Gestapo, Himmler and Wolff maintained that they were only trying to find out how far the conspiracy had spread. There is, however, evidence that the two top SS leaders were prepared to play on both sides and wanted to keep their options open in case Hitler’s operations turned into a failure.
It is not possible and not even necessary to describe the wide complexities of the resistance movement where the SS played a secondary role, in fighting the rebels as protectors of the state loyal to Hitler or as allies with the conspirators. What subsequently happened to Langbehn can be tied to the suspicion that the SS played both roles at the same time. At the end of 1942, Langbehn arranged with Wolff to have Himmler speak with Popitz, who was still Prussian prime minister, about the German situation. But they never got to the point of setting the date because Wolff became ill and could not take action from Hohenlychen sanatorium. He did not pick up the thread again until he went to Bad Gastein and had enough energy to engage in this hazardous business.
In agreement with Himmler, Wolff and the lawyer met on August 21, 1943. They agreed that Popitz and Himmler would talk on August 26 at the Reich Ministry of the Interior—one day after the head of the German police was to have relieved his former nominal superior, Dr. Wilhelm Frick, of his duties. When Wolff later gave the Gestapo information about
his conversation with Langbehn, he testified that the lawyer argued that the war could no longer be won, and if Germany wanted to avoid a catastrophe, the leadership of the state and the Wehrmacht had to change. The Führer had to accept limitations to his power. The enemy would never negotiate a peace with Hitler, but would agree to do so with the men of the resistance. Popitz had already made contacts in preparation.
The meeting with Himmler took place at the Reich Ministry of the Interior and Wolff had the conversation recorded with a microphone built into his boss’s desk. Decades later, he proudly commented, “It worked perfectly well!” While Popitz was trying to convince the new Reich Minister of the Interior that only a thorough change in Germany could prevent the devastating consequences of a catastrophic defeat, Wolff and Langbehn were arguing in the waiting room. It was up to Himmler, said Popitz, to bring the people, the State and the National Socialists to achieve a better future. It was still possible because Great Britain and the United States feared the Bolshevik menace. But the political leadership and that of the Wehrmacht must be handed over to new men and Popitz even named names.
While he laid out the conspirators’ plans still relatively carefully, Langbehn told Wolff “very openly and without holding back,” per a formulation contained in the indictment by the prosecution against the two conspirators. “Only an open statement would make sense,” said Langbehn. “In Germany” there must be “a state under the rule of law set up again by clever, clean, and farsighted men” and “the arbitrariness that has slowly become unbearable” must disappear. Wolff’s answer is not in the indictment, and there was no reply from Himmler. The prosecutor as the highest German prosecuting authority merely realized that Wolff only (and with that Himmler as well) “allowed himself to get involved in the conversation for the purpose of finding out in which direction those ambitions were heading.” He replied that “the Reichsführer was loyal to the Führer and could not ignore these commitments.”
Although the top SS leadership already had its hands on the essential threads of the conspiracy with the statements of August 26, 1943, they did not end the contacts. On the following day, Wolff again met with Langbehn. They agreed to another Himmler-Popitz conversation. They did not set the date yet because Langbehn obviously wanted to let the other conspirators know and on a trip to Switzerland, wanted to find out how the allies would react to Himmler’s participation.
All of this took place either just before or after the purported fistfight that had been barely avoided between the Reichsführer SS and his Obergruppenführer. Contradictory to later assertions by Himmler, Hitler at first had no idea of the SS conversations with his archenemies. He found out only when the Gestapo told him—this happened in the first half of September—that they had arrested Dr. Langbehn upon his return from Bern due to contacts with representatives of an enemy intelligence service. With that, he became the first and, temporarily, the only victim of the affair.
In Bern Langbehn spoken with an OSS representative, the German-American Gero von Gaevernitz, and told him that the conspirators were dependent on the participation of the SS; they would initiate the rebellion with the takeover of the Führer headquarters, and the Wehrmacht would then go along. Hitler’s fate was still left open in this plan. The Gestapo had found all of this out in a secret radio signal from an allied agent that they had decoded. The Chief of the Gestapo, SS Gruppenführer Heinrich Müller, strangely neglected to tell his boss Himmler about the catch. He reported his success directly to Führer headquarters and, therefore, to the sly Martin Bormann, who at the time was Himmler’s opponent and Hitler’s closest advisor.
That was clearly the skeleton that Himmler and Wolff had hidden in the SS closet together. It did clear up a few things and was the reason why, for example, Himmler prevented Wolff from presenting the plan for Italy to Hitler himself. Wolff had to be kept away from Hitler because, with his high personal rating, had he mentioned his version of the negotiations with the conspirators, Himmler, who had fallen out of Hitler’s graces, would have possibly faced dismissal, and Wolff would have immediately become his successor. The Reichsführer had enough reason to believe that Wolff, after what had taken place in recent months, was capable of such a surprise coup. This would also explain why the violent argument they had at field headquarters had no consequences.
Even after the war, Wolff denied that he had denounced the men of the resistance to the SS. In advance of his trial in Munich, before he had even been accused of any crimes, he told a journalist in 1961 that he had spoken to Popitz and Langbehn “about the Führer,” namely “that he was overburdened and perhaps should give up some of his tasks to others. Perhaps even to me.” Specifically which job he would have liked to take on he did not reveal. As he told the Gestapo years before, he had only tried to find out “who was actually behind Popitz and Langbehn.” In no
way did he order Langbehn to “travel to Bern…that would have been extremely dangerous!”
Himmler got himself out of a predicament by moving Langbehn from Gestapo custody to a concentration camp. There the lawyer temporarily enjoyed favorable treatment. At his questioning, he didn’t dare even give the impression that either Wolff or Himmler could be involved in the conspiracy plans, knowing that he would then be immediately liquidated as a witness for the prosecution. The prosecuting attorney’s indictment was not announced until one year later at the end of September 1944. Together with Popitz, he was sentenced to death by the National Socialist People’s Court, at the same time as the trial involving the attempt to kill Hitler on July 20, 1944, the case was buried among the many proceedings. But even then the SS made every effort to cover up any connections they may have had to the resistance. Before the trial began, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, head of the RSHA, wrote to the Reich Minister of Justice: “…regarding the facts in the case, that you are also aware of, namely the conversations between the Reichsführer SS and Popitz, I request that the main trial be carried out before a public committee. Assuming your agreement, I would like to delegate ten of my colleagues for this task. As for a wider audience, I request finally that you allow me the right to check on them.” Langbehn was executed shortly after sentencing, on October 12, 1944. Himmler was now in a hurry to close the case. On the other hand, he had plenty of time with Popitz because there were no further witnesses to attest that Himmler had almost agreed to an alliance with the conspirators. There are, however, several clues from the investigations of the would-be assassins from the July 20 conspiracy indicating that Himmler betrayed Hitler. Popitz survived until February 2, 1945, when he was finally hanged.
While Langbehn was organizing the underground movement against Hitler, Wolff was preparing his own invasion of Italy. His task seemed sufficiently clear: he would have executive power in an area from the Brenner Pass in the north to the areas immediately behind the fighting troops. There was one exception in a strip of land along the long coast where the German navy was in control. For civilian affairs, he was to consider himself the Führer’s governor, independent of any future Italian government. Of course, the former allies were expected to obey the Führer, not only with threats and terror, but also with promises and diplomacy. This was slightly different than in other occupied territories, but the end result had to be that those who were inferior must obey.