Top Nazi (57 page)

Husmann attended the hearing as a witness. He was allowed to testify thoroughly about Wolff’s part in the surrender in Italy. The chairman of the court, a district court director, and two Hamburg citizens as assessors were impressed by the respectful recognition that a Swiss neutral participant of that operation was giving to a German. Husmann emphatically refuted the suspicion that Wolff “only acted out of selfish motives.’ He referred in this case to his knowledge of human nature that he had acquired in the teaching profession. He pointed out to the court that the Allies had decided not to “press charges against Wolff because they were so convinced by him. I ask the Germans,” he continued, “to show the same understanding to Wolff that we Swiss, the Americans and the English have shown the defendant.”

As much as he impressed the court with this, it must be remembered that the enthusiastic witness had only known the accused during his last eight weeks as an SS officer. The court could not forget that this man had worn the SS uniform for years and the awful deeds carried out in the name of the SS ideology.

As Wolff recounted his achievements to the court, he occasionally contradicted himself; on one hand he wanted to show how effective he was during his rise in Hitler’s set up, but on the other hand he avoided responsibility whenever possible. Chief of the Personal Staff, according to his description, was a misleading title; in truth, he was only Himmler’s chief of protocol. When he was told that based on the Nazi organization chart, his role must have been much more important, he replied that the chart had been written by Dr. Robert Ley, the Reich Leader of Party Organizations, and that one could “not take that man very seriously.” He most certainly “did not find the concentration camps pleasant,” but because “of social situations before the war” he was often told “jokes and tales of atrocities,” while he had “asked individual prisoners about their treatment during every visit, with the promise of my protection. None of them had ever complained.” He openly admitted having witnessed the medical altitude experiments when Luftwaffe Dr. Rascher used concentration camp
prisoners as guinea pigs since there was already a lot of this information in the Nuremberg court files. However, Wolff stated once again that he would volunteer anytime for those experiments because of their important purpose.

At the Bergedorf hearing he described his relationship to the Vatican in guarded terms, compared to his later declarations on the subject. He never discussed Hitler’s orders to kidnap the Pope and remove him from Rome; only an evacuation of the Head of the Catholic Church from the approaching Allies had been considered, and he had also opposed it. At that time he received “an invitation to the Vatican from a person of high standing,” and only vaguely mentioned his audience with Pius XII. In that conversation on May 10, 1944, he was risking both “his neck and position” because he wanted to enlist the Pope as a peace negotiator. Unfortunately nothing came of this, because the next planned meeting never took place. He had fallen ill and the Allies had occupied Rome in the meantime.

He had never taken anti-Semitism seriously at first as an element of the Party program. He found it “unfortunate and unpleasant” that all Jews be forced to wear a yellow star. Himmler explained to him why the mark of identification was necessary; it was because the world leader of the Jews, Chaim Weizmann, had called all the Jews on earth to wage an active fight against National Socialism—that they had to mark them all as enemies of the regime. The Germans ran the danger, otherwise, of unknowingly passing on information to them during simple conversations. “I had the impression,” Wolff said about the yellow star, “that for the racially conscious Jews, it was an honor.” The absurdity of such a remark makes one wonder.

When he telephoned State Secretary Ganzenmüller at the Ministry of Transportation to order the railroad cars for the trains from Warsaw to Treblinka, he believed he was only fixing a temporary delay in transportation. “It is possible,” he said, “that I knew this was a transport of Jews.” Not until Ganzenmüller’s “letter did I find out about the large transports…I was not aware of anything criminal happening.” The hearing lasted from Wednesday to Saturday, more than four days. That was rather long for a hearing before the court. Attempts to prove the personal guilt of the defendant were somewhat weak and always wound up in general discussions about Nazi crimes. The Ganzenmüller incident, which led to Wolff’s sentencing sixteen years later as an accomplice to mass murder, was used only to prove that he
knew
that Jews were being persecuted. He was sentenced
at Bergedorf, according to the indictment, as “a member of a criminal organization after September 1, 1939,” and “with the knowledge that it was related to acts that, according to Article 6 of the statute of the International Military Tribunal, were declared criminal.” He was sentenced to five years in prison; the two years he spent in prison while awaiting trial were counted as served.

Wolff’s sentence was meaningless since it was never enacted because the court had bungled the appointment of the assessors, apparently out of laziness, making an appeal inevitable whether the sentence was faulty or perfect. The appeal, of course, changed nothing for Wolff, who remained in custody. Immediately after the hearing, he was taken to the Esterwegen “Internment concentration camp” (as he called it) in Emsland, where “the mud soldiers” hostile to the state were shoveling snow. Wolff had been there once, as Himmler’s escort.

On March 8, 1949, the sentence of the court was reversed and Wolff returned to the district court prison at Bergedorf. This was, he hoped, the final battle with the justice system, so he collected more material with a zeal that he never showed before. In court he immediately requested a typewriter in his cell, as his defense attorney said, “to refute the mistakes of the first judgment.” In the weeks that followed, Wolff collected more “Persil certificates.” Among others, former minister Dr. Hans-Heinrich Lammers confirmed from prison in Nuremberg what little influence Wolff had with Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, Field Marshal Milch, former secretary of state and ambassador Ernst von Weiszäcker, from Baron Parilli in Italy, Allen Dulles in the USA and SS Obergruppenführer August Heissmayer. The Stinnes son-in-law, Gero von Gaevernitz, promised to travel from the United States to the hearing in order to testify on Wolff’s behalf.

The second hearing also took four days, from May 31 to June 3, 1949. A different district court was chairman, whom Wolff quickly charmed, according to the press report, by answering “the questions of the court in the most obliging manner.” Among others, retired envoy Rudolf Rahn and former secretary of state in the ministry of propaganda Gutterer, both prominent figures from the upper crust of the Third Reich who had survived and had been released, now spoke well of the defendant under oath.

The highpoint of the hearing was the arrival of Gaevernitz, whom a Hamburg daily newspaper falsely called a U.S. diplomat. It was not easy for him, he said, “to testify on behalf of an SS general,” because he had “fought against him and the ideas he represented since the beginning of
National Socialism.” However, justice demanded “that I testify about what I know in connection with the surrender in Italy.” It was thanks to Wolff that it happened at all, and that during the German retreat, the large Italian hydroelectric power station at the foot of the Alps and the docks in Genoa and Trieste were not blown up, as Hitler and Himmler had ordered. In addition, Wolff had the most valuable pieces of art saved from destruction during the fighting, and prevented the killing of a large number of political prisoners by the Gestapo during the Allied advance. Although Wolff had ended up in life-threatening situations many times during the surrender negotiations, he never “demanded any special treatment after the war.”

At the hearing, he asked that Husmann certify in writing that Allied representatives had promised him that he would be given an important position for the establishment of democracy in Germany. But he then decided that it would be better not to taint his nobly described portrait with such untimely requests. The court was clearly becoming increasingly sympathetic toward him. The district court counsel regretted that “the defendant had been treated harshly and detained for a long time.”

At the time of the hearing, Wolff was already released on a 4, 000 new Deutsche marks bail bond, a small fortune at the time; friends had lent the money. They were convinced that things would start to improve for him, so his “personal credit” was not cancelled. He could be satisfied with the second sentence: four years in prison, but because the four years of detention while awaiting trial were counted, from this moment on, he was no longer threatened with imprisonment. The court could hardly have let him off with less if they wanted to see an SS Obergruppenführer have rights to the democratic state’s benefits, because they had held him in prison too long. “In the court’s opinion, the only fault was the restrictive language and many qualifying clauses, by which the defendant admitted his knowledge of Nazi atrocities.” On the other hand, the court regretted “imposing a prison sentence that was fairly proportionate to the sentences of lower SS ranks.” Wolff was indeed “an outcast in the SS” and could leave “the courtroom with a clean slate.”

Wolff’s defense attorney was not satisfied with that. As he left the courtroom, he protested within earshot, “Acquittal! Acquittal!” Then the state treasury would be required to pay his fees, and not his near-broke client. Wolff, however, from then on wore his belated freedom as if it were another medal. He was once again someone, and on top of that he had received the democratic seal of approval. Since his release from prison,
he was living in Hamburg once again, in a respectable neighborhood near the oceanfront. Now he was getting into new territory. The chief of police in Lüneburg still had a personal file on Wolff following his stay at the Fallingbostel camp, and because of the sentence he was required to approve any change of residence. Wolff requested that he be allowed to move to Lake Tegern, to the house of Professor Padua. His life-sized oil painting of Wolff dressed in white still existed, and soon decorated one of the walls of his house.

At the start of his new life he possessed, besides a certificate from the men’s’ prison at Hamburg-Bergedorf that entitled him to grocery coupons until June 18, 1949, a notice from the court that he had been classified as a minor criminal (category III). According to his rank, he should have been classified as a serious criminal (category I) or at least as a criminal (category II). While many SS members of lower ranks were only allowed to work as unskilled workers with an hourly wage of approximately one DM, the only job closed to him was anything in the public service.

He was not interested in that kind of career anyway; the public sector was quite stingy during the lean years of reconstruction. In November 1949, he was informed that he had been switched to category IV as a casual participant; it was addressed to the “former General of the Waffen SS,” but he already had a different title and now called himself a “generl representative.” He was working in the advertising department of a weekly magazine, the kind of publication seeking to conquer a broad readership among the West German public. Wolff had his office in Cologne, in the economically strong region of the Federal Republic. He made good wages, and after a short time brought his second family to Starnberg to an apartment with a wonderful view of the lake and the mountains. He was living in a four-room apartment in Cologne. His self-confidence was unscathed and he told his acquaintances that he was living once again in a little castle, as once before on Lake Wolfgang. The Starnberg home however had only three rooms on the first floor. Wolff’s rise proved to be unstoppable. With the acquaintances he still had among industrial giants and bankers from Himmler’s circle of friends, he had no problem contacting the advertising departments of large companies. His knowledge of the material since his days in the Munich advertising company and his talent for making rather common issues seem more important through long presentations made him a representative equal in rank to a general. It was his luck that in those days many companies did so well that they placed their additional profits into advertising rather than pay extra taxes. In view of the increased
business of the Cologne office, the publisher in Munich—who was actually an active anti-Fascist—had no reservations about making a former SS Obergruppenführer a rich man. His income was dependent on the business; it rose every year until his retirement and reached, according to Wolff’s own statement, more than 120,000 D-Marks a month (over US$40, 000 in the 1950s). He didn’t find it difficult to buy the small manor by in 1953. It had 7,000 square meters on the waterfront, a dock, a bathhouse, and landing pier. Frau Inge and her three children were once again living in the lifestyle they were used to. Since Frau Frieda, who now had two grown daughters and two younger sons, also lived in Bavaria, family connections were not difficult to maintain. The father of both families now had the opportunity, as a private citizen, to lead a secure and affluent life; his dark past only to be discussed among a circle of trusted individuals.

However, he did not want to let that heroic past sink silently into oblivion. In so far as he had any free time, aside from earning money and taking care of relationships and friendships, he began to write his memoirs. He never got past some loose fragments, and even though he said that he wanted to tell what really happened during the Third Reich, those snippets of memoirs contain only very little that is unknown and a lot of unimportant information. Since he quickly understood that he would not succeed in carving out his place in history he looked for connections to professional writers and discovered that his publishing company wanted to turn the past into an economically fruitful enterprise.

In those days Germans were hungry for information about the reasons behind the National Socialist regime. They were working industriously at blotting out the consequences of the catastrophe, but also wanted to know how and why it all happened. As long as Allied occupation rules were in force, any publication dealing with the Nazi past ran the risk of official censorship for suspected support of the outlawed Nazi regime. Then when the young democracy announced freedom of the press, the emerging yellow journalism offered German readers fantastic discoveries, such as the cleverly forged diary of Hitler’s girlfriend, Eva Braun. Wolff’s employer, the illustrated magazine
Revue
, located in Munich, wanted to offer their readers something better. Their author Heinrich Benedikt wrote a series of reports under the title “The Unsolved Cases,” and as early as May 1950 Wolff himself was presented to the readers in words and pictures in three issues as a general of the Waffen SS.