Top Nazi (58 page)
The story mainly dealt with what happened during Wolff’s glorious time in Italy, garnished with anecdotes of internal SS operations. The
crimes of the SS, however, were not mentioned. Since Wolff, in the glory of his office, had been photographed often and never missed an opportunity to make prints for himself, the
Revue
readers got to know his best side, at least visually as a smart-looking man and soldier with engaging features, who stood with Himmler and every now and then with Hitler or Mussolini. Without a doubt, he had been an important man.
Wolff was no longer the protagonist after the third issue; someone else was used in the series. The response to the publication was minimal. Even among the former SS officers few paid any attention, because from their viewpoint Wolff was trying to sit on too many SS stools at once. The former members of the Waffen SS wanted to be considered as the real soldiers and fighters for Germany or even for a Germanic Europe. The others, the so-called “Black SS,” included all those who wore the uniform, from functionary to secretary, from the lowly militant to the industrial giants and business leaders. The majority did not relish being reminded of their membership. Finally, there were the dubious characters from the Gestapo, the SD and the concentration camp guards that the other two groups and Wolff wanted nothing to do with. The soldiers rejected him because after his service as a lieutenant during the First World War, he had hardly heard the rifle bullet whiz past. He was not popular with the majority of the SS veterans because he apparently had been too much of an intriguer as Himmler’s right-hand man, and now through his public appearances, he was seen as drawing attention back to the SS. All were saying that he had learned nothing from his experiences during the years after the war.
In 1952, when he wanted to donate his papers to the Munich “Institute for Contemporary History,” he said—as he later mentioned to this author—that Hitler had not ordered the extermination of the Jews, and only found out about it at the end of 1944. Heinrich Heim, an official who at times took stenographic notes of Hitler’s table talk at Führer headquarters, reported a similar absence of orders in a letter. He and Wolff knew each other from the “Wolfsschanze.” Heim obviously included the former general among the community of true believers in sending him the letter. When a long text came from the still anti-Semitic Heim years later, where he was apparently attempting to prove that the gas chambers had not existed in the concentration camps, Wolff did not even attempt to correct that falsehood, but instead saved all of his correspondence as material for the Institute of Contemporary History. In 1950 he was informed that along with the legal end of his denazification in Hamburg, restrictions
to his professional activities were also removed—not only did he acquire the untainted quality that the courts certified, but he also had faultless personal papers once again. In 1953 he was allowed entry into Switzerland (with his wife Inge) without difficulty to visit his former negotiating partners.
Wolff and his wife were guests for two days in August at the home of Max Waibel, who in the meantime had risen to colonel. The residence was located in Dorenbach near Lucerne. There, eight years before, the decisive negotiations with Dulles had taken place. “Now a circle has closed happily once again,” Wolff wrote in the guest book. He had already won the sympathies of Frau Waibel during his first visit. She had found him to be a “well-groomed and cultured guest” and she was concerned that she should, “for God’s sake, find a bed for this giant.” At that time, she deeply regretted “that he was in the SS.” Now she read in her guest book, “Hopefully we will see you again soon in Germany.”
In 1956 Wolff’s oldest daughter married the son of a well-known and wealthy athlete whom Karl Wolff had grown to like during the preparations for the Olympic games in 1936 in Berlin. Now he produced the revelation that he had kept modestly hidden through the years, namely that, on April 20, 1945, ten days before his suicide in the bunker under the Reich Chancellery, Hitler had promoted him to the rank of senior general of the Waffen SS. The promotion was never recorded in the official archives. However, it was mentioned in the “German Book of Genealogy,” volume 175, the Gotha for commoners.
A “Central Office” was established in Stuttgart during the postwar years where all the material regarding Nazi crimes was collected and archived. This was necessary, because the events could often only be recorded in bits and pieces by the justice administration in the different states. The records of both victims and criminals were usually spread throughout Germany. This state of affairs, often doubling the work required during the investigations, was unavoidable and some connections only came to light when all the documents were brought together in one place. With some delay, increasing numbers of those guilty were being found and indicted.
The state attorney’s office in Munich was investigating former SS Hauptsturmführer Dr. Otto Bradfisch because as commander of Einsatzgruppen 8 during the invasion of the Soviet Union behind the front lines, he had ordered the mass murder of Jews and Communists. On June 9, 1958, as he was questioned about shootings in Minsk that had taken place in the middle of August 1941, he stated that those executions were legal
and that he had been ordered to them carry out. This could easily be verified simply because of the presence of the Reichsführer SS and Karl Wolff. Everything took place following instructions from higher up, and if he had refused, he would have placed himself in a dangerous position.
Still no one in the department of justice even thought of accusing Wolff, simply because he was present when those murders took place. Exactly one month later, the state attorney questioned him whether Bradfisch was correct in referring to an emergency situation where he was following orders. Wolff confirmed that statement. Bradfisch’s civilian position as a minor senior civil servant in the Gestapo hardly allowed him to not follow orders or even to counter Himmler. As an Obergruppenführer, Wolff was allowed a bit more leeway—“for example, in starting the negotiations for surrender in Italy… because I had rank and position so that they could not just make me disappear without a trace.”
At that point the whole matter appeared to be settled. Bradfisch was sentenced by the District Court in Munich in 1961 to ten years in prison. At the hearing, he said that he asked Himmler in Minsk whether the executions were covered by law. Himmler dismissed those scruples offhand; an order from the Führer was the law and Hitler had given them the order to wipe out the entire Jewish population in the East.
A
n alarming signal from a very different source affected Wolff with the publication in 1960 of a book entitled
Eichmann and His Accomplices
. The author, Dr. Robert Kempner, was a top senior civil servant in the Prussian government service until 1933, when he emigrated as a hated political opponent persecuted by the Nazis. After the war, he was part of the American prosecution team at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. He was the most knowledgeable member of the prosecution and very familiar with the procedures and connections in Germany during the Third Reich, and was determined to hunt down all the Nazi criminals. As a lawyer, the American legal system became as familiar to him as the German, and he mastered both languages which turned out to be extremely useful.
Karl Wolff was held responsible during the Nuremberg trial against the chief of the administrative and economic main office of the SS for his exchange of letters with State Secretary Ganzenmüller (the purpose being to obtain railroad cars to transport the Warsaw Jews to the extermination camp at Treblinka). Kempner was determined to put Wolff on trial at Nuremberg. Chief Prosecutor Telford Taylor, who was his boss at the time, would not have stopped Kempner had he not been clearly instructed
by Robert Murphy, political advisor to General Lucius Clay, American High Commissioner for the U.S. Zone, to spare Wolff. But Kempner refused either to forgive or forget. After the founding of the Federal Republic, he remained in Germany, working as a lawyer in Frankfurt. In his book, the exchange of letters with Ganzenmüller was introduced as evidence concerning a man living in West Germany and who had taken part in the extermination of the Jews. When Taylor was later questioned as a witness at the Wolff trial and asked why the SS Obergruppenführer had not been indicted back then for his involvement in the transport of the Jews, he said that “other ways…seemed to be more favorable” to “take care of” this case, either through the denazification process or within the German system of justice. Kempner wanted to remind the Germans of this unfinished business; the time seemed to be ripe because of the kidnapping of the former SS Obersturmbannführer and Jewish expert for the Gestapo, Adolf Eichmann, from Argentina and his trial in Jerusalem. Eichmann had also mentioned Wolff as the type of SS officer who usually took care of his business with “white gloves” to avoid getting his hands dirty.
According to the Cologne newspaper
Neue Illustrierte
, the Eichmann trial was a good occasion to inform the German people about “what a true believer among Hitler’s followers had said about the dreadful deeds of the Third Reich.” Under banner
HEADLINES
E
ICHMANN’S
B
OSS:
H
EINRICH
H
IMMLER
in the spring of 1961, it published “a portrait” of the Reichsführer SS, written “by Karl Wolff, General of the Waffen SS.” The introductory paragraph said: “For the first time since the collapse of the thousand year Reich, a man who belonged to the innermost vicious circle around Himmler for ten years speaks…Wolff reports the facts, and gives his personal opinion, which is not that of the editors…” He saw himself as the leading witness and the readers were to be the judges and issue a verdict.
Himmler had already been damned for eternity by the whole world. What about Wolff? He had never felt guilty; even his punishment under denazification had been erased from his character reference. He expected that the readers would be more vocal in their approval of the basic attitude and actions of a general who, unfortunately, was still not well known. The opening issue therefore began with a sympathetic account about the near fistfight in August 1943 when Wolff supposedly chased Himmler from behind his desk. After that scene, he reported on the mass murder in Minsk, or rather (as it is called in the report) the “execution of one
hundred Jewish spies and saboteurs.” Then, Himmler’s curriculum vitae followed, beginning with his early years in the Nazi party, which Wolff had no first-hand knowledge of.
Even though he did not write a single line of that article, the text begins this way: “I, Karl Wolff, SS Obergruppenführer and General of the Waffen SS, request to speak. My conscience forces me to do so.” A journalist from the
Neue lllustrierte
did the ghostwriting. Once again Wolff thought he had found an eloquent spokesman for his deeds. The writer had been in the Waffen SS. But by the second issue it became obvious that one could not rely even on such comrades any more. The former SS soldier made an editorial decision, and after the third issue Wolff was no longer the main topic. He announced in the introduction: “Since the end of the war, I have kept silent, full of shame for having served Heinrich Himmler for so long.” Now, once again he returned to silence: the magazine told him that his story wouldn’t sell.
But it did sell in a way he had not anticipated. The readers protested. Wolff had once again stated that neither Hitler nor he knew anything of the mass murders in the extermination camps. Someone attacked him for spreading “monstrous assertions,” as he had already done as a witness at a criminal hearing in 1952. And a doctor from Innsbruck said that either Wolff was lying, or that he had been such an incompetent adjutant to Himmler that one had to wonder how he could have kept his position for ten years. Even the author Axel Eggebrecht spoke up; in his letter, he simply called Wolff an “accomplice.”
Robert Kempner shared the same opinion. In his letter, he placed under his name the title “private deputy to the U.S. main prosecutor at Nuremberg.” He was often asked, he wrote, “in connection with people like Wolff,” why this high-ranking SS officer had not been charged at Nuremberg, where only a total of 199 of the main war criminals were brought to justice. The German, French, Dutch, and other courts sentenced many more guilty parties. Numerous pieces of evidence relating to the crimes committed were “not found until years after the end of the Nuremberg trials.” “For this reason no one can refer back and say that the Allies had not found anything against him at Nuremberg. The comment often used—’even Dr. Kempner had tested my case and let me go’—legally meant nothing. In that sense, whoever was only a witness in Nuremberg was in no way protected from German courts.” For the German prosecuting attorneys, this was an obvious hint.
Even from his SS comrades, Wolff received no applause. There was a club of former soldiers of the Waffen SS, the HIAG. Their legal status was often in doubt, but as a club they were never banned. This club sent a newsletter, called
The Volunteer
, to its members seeking to make it clear to the public that the SS had not always been the same everywhere. The “field troops named the Waffen SS” had “constantly distanced itself from the main SS in its mission and had nothing more to do with it in that sense.” Himmler had indeed made the Higher SS and Police leaders Generals of the Waffen SS, but they only had the rank and never a military command. This explained by a committee of “the federal association of soldiers of the former Waffen SS.”
In one of the following newsletters under the title “The Devil’s Adjutant,” an interview appeared with “Comrade Wolff…in order to find through questions and answers an explanation for the articles” in the Cologne paper. The Baden Württemberg State association of the club had already sent a letter to its members and informed them of “Wolff’s shame for hire.” In the interview, Wolff admitted that he had not written the report himself and had only provided the journalist with “hints, documents and pictures.” What was his motive? It certainly could not have been large royalties. “In the course of the Eichmann Trial” he said, “I feared a new wave of collective blame against the Waffen SS,” and he wanted to ensure a truthful account. Did he cooperate one more time to cover up even worse things, or did he want to call attention to his own laurels?