Top Nazi (6 page)

In his Justification Speech on July 13, 1934, Hitler maintained that he made the decision regarding the murders spontaneously, late at night, when it was reported to him that a general mobilization of the SA storm troopers was imminent and that the now legendary “Night of the Long Knives” was an impending threat. In truth, his actions were prepared well ahead of time. Wolff did not discuss this, although he accepted Hitler’s version uncritically. He, at least, had nothing to do with those preparations, or so he claimed. On the other hand, he did admit that he had played what may be called a key role in the bloody purge.

He remembered that during the second half of June Himmler drove to Karinhall, Göring’s hunting lodge at Schorfheide, north of Berlin, to make decisions about the Röhm case. Wolff only learned of this meeting because an assassin shot at the Reichsführer SS’s car but only managed to shatter the windshield of the Maybach. When some days later Himmler related to Wolff that a unit of “SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler,” stationed in the former cadet institution at Berlin-Lichterfelde, was moving by train
to the Bavarian troop training grounds at Fort Lechfeld, south of Augsburg, and was being provided with trucks from the Reichswehr, Wolff did not consider this at all strange.

A few days before June 30, Generals Keitel and von Reichenau also came to the Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. Before they were allowed in to see Himmler, they waited a few moments in Wolff’s office, but he learned nothing as to the reason for their visit, and Himmler did not have him join in the conversation. Not until later, as Wolff testified, did he hear that it dealt with weapons and equipment that were to be made available to the Leibstandarte.

On the evening of June 29, Hitler was listening to parade music by the Reich labor service outside his quarters at the Rhein Hotel Dreesen in Bad Godesberg. At the same time Ernst Röhm was at the Hotel Hanselbauer in Bad Wiessee with a few SA leaders. Hitler’s orders, given to Röhm’s adjutant per telephone the day before, were for the entire top echelon SA leadership to be at the Bavarian spa, and the first ones had already arrived. Göring was still in Essen with Hitler on June 28, but he then traveled back to Berlin. Himmler remained in Berlin; he sent alarming reports about an SA conspiracy to Bad Godesberg. Wolff received the order from Himmler on the evening of June 29 to move immediately to Göring’s official residence on the Leipziger Platz for a few days, equipped with toothbrush, toiletries, razor, and an additional shirt.

Supposedly he still did not know what services he was expected to perform there. He met up with two other adjutants: a police officer and Göring’s adjutant, Colonel Karl Bodenschatz, who later became a general of the Luftwaffe. The three men stayed there together for three days. Until the end, Wolff gave only very sketchy information as to what they were to do. He said they were on the phone constantly with everyone and anyone, but mostly with Heydrich at the Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, using a direct line they had laid themselves. There were many questions coming in from the outside: What should be done with this or that person arrested? Heydrich had drawn up lists of names, as had Göring. Gestapo agents armed with pistols rounded up prominent individuals, and the SS of the Leibstandarte at the barracks made up the firing squads. Wolff knew about this as well.

For almost every name mentioned by the three adjutants during those seventy-two hours, it was a matter of life and death. Naturally, none of them shot anyone. They were also not authorized to strike a name from, or add a name to, the list. But they could, as Wolff admitted, dispatch
commandos and give instructions as to where someone arrested was to be taken. They searched for one man for three days, to no avail. Hitler mentioned him later in his Justification Speech as “Mr. A., well known to you all … as a thoroughly corrupt swindler.” He meant Werner von Alvensleben, who according to Hitler’s version had set up the connection between Röhm, the General of the Reichswehr and former chancellor Kurt von Schleicher and the representative of a foreign power. Schleicher was not even arrested; he and his wife were shot on the spot in his apartment. A bullet was also reserved for Alvensleben, but he happened to be at a hunting cabin in Mecklenburg and reappeared only after Hitler had stopped the killings. “He would have been one of the first to be shot,” admitted Wolff. But he only remained in prison for a short time.

The number of murders committed using the excuse of the “Röhm Revolt” was never officially published. If one were to count those that Hitler named in his July speech, these would be about seventy. Actually, it ended up being many more. At another point in his speech, Hitler spoke of one hundred “mutineers, conspirators and plotters.” It would have been customary for the Gestapo to put together a final report for Himmler with exact numbers, but Wolff was unable to remember. When U.S. Army Colonel H. A. Brundage at the Nuremberg War Criminals Prison interrogated him on September 5, 1945, Wolff said that most of the victims were guilty, and the rest, maybe ten percent, could be dismissed off hand. It seemed normal that among those shot there were also four members of the SS; Himmler obtained their “execution with Hitler’s authorization” because they were suspicious elements. Wolff characterized his role so vaguely that absolutely no responsibility for the events could be pinned on him. “I was sort of an assistant. We three in Göring’s house had nothing to do with the executions. No SA leaders were brought to us. They went to Lichterfelde to the barracks of the Leibstandarte and were kept there until the orders to shoot them came in.” Individual names? With this question, Wolff could only think of those names that had become well known in the meantime, as well as von Alvensleben, one that even Hitler, although in slightly veiled terms, had also mentioned. Wolff: “When one makes over 7,000 telephone calls in 72 hours, one is so exhausted that one cannot remember anything so precisely!” (One hundred calls per hour, day and night, could be considered an exaggeration.) He was, he says, “very sad” to handle this task, which “made us take action against our own comrades with whom at one time we had marched shoulder to shoulder.” He wrote to his wife in Munich on July
2, “We still have an immense amount of work due to the Röhm mutiny, until 3 or 4 in the morning, and after that phone calls every ten minutes. We are exhausted, but, despite that, relieved from enormous pressure.”

Wolff’s statements, on different occasions, provide further evidence that the murders had been planned for a long time. The Führer, according to Wolff, made it clear to Göring and Himmler in the middle of April that the entire police force must be under one command if “we want to get rid of Röhm.” This was the only reason Göring was willing to give up an authority that he had strongly and sometimes even brutally defended until then. His position was slightly weakened, however, insofar as he had chosen a number of police chiefs from the leadership corps of the SA to annoy Himmler, and now the way these men would behave in an action against Röhm was an open question.

In his Justification Speech Hitler heaped the greatest praise on himself; the German people had him to thank in the first place that in the future they would no longer be terrorized by drunken, violent homosexuals living the high life. Some praise was also directed at Göring, who from Berlin destroyed the band of conspirators in the north of Germany, while Hitler himself ordered the murders in the south. Himmler was mentioned only in passing, namely that he and Röhm’s successor, former SA Obergruppenführer Viktor Lutze, were rejected by the would-be revolutionaries “because of their fundamental respectability.” Of the SS, Hitler (speaking Wolff’s opinion as well) said that “they fulfilled their highest obligation during the last few days with an inner sorrow” and his trust in the SS “never swayed.” Hitler’s thanks to Himmler were hardly noticed by the public. On July 20, 1934, the status of the SS was raised to that of an independent subdivision of the NSDAP; Himmler was no longer under the chief of staff of the SA. Wolff was already promoted from Standartenführer to Oberführer by July 4, two days after Hitler ordered an end to the murders. He had held his previous rank for two and a half months. He must have indeed proven himself worthy on his Berlin telephone line.

But he was not completely satisfied. He had, he later admitted, earned the Reichsführer’s special confidence in those days, but the camaraderie of “Du”
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that Leibstandarten commander Sepp Dietrich, the Berlin SS Führer Kurt Daluege, the Reich Minister of Nutrition and SS Obergruppenführer Richard Walther Darré, and many others shared with Himmler was
not offered to him. He was addressed as “Wölffchen” when spoken to and in writing, which also sounds very informal.

Hitler’s warm praise for Himmler and the new chief of staff Lutze did not necessarily mean there was friendship between the two. The new equal status of the SA and the SS was only one more reason to strengthen the already existing rivalry. When arguments developed now and again, Wolff was often given the task of keeping the peace. With his polished officers’ club manners, his jovial and calming remarks in the Hessian dialect, his studied charm and eloquence of the professional salesman, he apparently had the ability to dilute all conflicts. Those talents filled him with self-admiration.

Himmler’s problems with the humiliated SA began shortly after the bloody purge. The highest SA leadership, in this case Lutze, had comrades and other participants questioned about how much those murdered could have been guilty of treason and conspiracy. SS Gruppenführer Böckenhauer, a declared opponent of the SA, led the investigation and SA Oberführer Reimann from Hamburg threatened an SS Führer who was present: “one day… the SA will surely be vindicated and others will regret what they had done to the SA.”

In August 1935 it came down to a conflict, typical of the permanent tension that existed and was in no way isolated, between the Brown and Black uniformed comrades. After an inspection at a Pomeranian SA Brigade, Chief of Staff Lutze returned to the Stettiner Hotel and, as usual, filled up on hard liquor. A report about the evening, written by the Hamburg SS Standartenführer and Gestapo official Robert Schulz, landed on Wolff’s desk. The contents prompted him to stamp the seven pages “Secret” and send them immediately to Himmler, who for his part only wrote the word “Führer” on the first page. The opportunity to inform Hitler did not arise until two months later because the Chancellor and Führer of the German people was traveling once again, as was customary in more tranquil political times, throughout the Reich, being cheered by the masses at the Nuremberg Party rally and at the Thanksgiving festival in Bückeberg in Weserbergland.

SA Chief Lutze had always accompanied Hitler during the days of the Röhm affair, first from Godesberg to Munich and then to Wiessee, but he apparently never made an attempt to slow Hitler’s desire for murder. Now, during an evening of heavy drinking in Stettin with a small circle of high-ranking party members, one of whom was a Gauleiter, he named several men who were shot simply “to take it out on someone or to seek
personal revenge…” Those guilty would some day “come to a bitter end.” SS Standartenführer Schulz did not want to accept this without contradicting it. In his report, he wrote that in Lutze’s presence he regretted that “unfortunately everything hadn’t been eradicated root and branch and things had been handled far too delicately.”

Lutze said, “Orders from Röhm did not exist.” By making such a statement he was indirectly calling Hitler’s own statement, that the SA were getting ready for a putsch, a lie. He insinuated, without naming names, that no one had flattered Chief of Staff Röhm more than Himmler, that no one had thrown more wasteful parties than the SS. He maintained that even Himmler had kept a homosexual in a leadership position for years—Gruppenführer Kurt Wittje, sometimes head of the SS main office, who disappeared from his position only a few months before, although everyone knew that he had been discharged as an officer of the Reichswehr because of his male friendships. He would always keep on repeating all of this, boasted Viktor Lutze in Stettin, even if he were to be discharged and sent off to a concentration camp. And as always at a late hour and in a drunken stupor, he placed his glass eye on the table to punctuate his words.

Whether or not Hitler ever read that report is unknown; but no action was taken about it. Lutze’s attack was mainly aimed at Himmler and mirrored the tactics practiced by the Party chief for ages; he fanned feuds among his henchmen so that their ambition was never directed against him and, most importantly, so that he could show his power of mediation as often as possible. So, the grousing continued unabated. For example, SS Obergruppenführer Fritz Weitzel from Düsseldorf reported in April 1938 “an outrageously impudent statement made by Chief of Staff Lutze at the Leaders’ Conference of the Westphalian SA” in Dortmund. In front of 12,000 of his leadership in the Westphalian Hall, the chief of staff announced that the SA “was still as flawless and pure as it used to be.” And with the sentence, “We want to be carriers of ideas, not of rapiers,” he openly stated, and without hesitation kicked the Reichsführer in the shins, because Himmler not only gave the officers of the Leibstandarte a sable to wear with their parade uniforms, but he also presented the leaders of the General SS, who had earned it, including Wolff, a so-called “Rapier of Honor.”

Under such conditions, it is understandable that Wolff recorded with satisfaction an incident in which Lutze, obviously drunk once again, came to blows with a secretary of the Swiss embassy at the Königin-Bar on the Kurfürstendamm in Berlin at four o’clock in the morning. Supposedly the
Swiss citizen had eavesdropped on the chief of staff’s conversation, which was surely not difficult considering the loud voice in which the drunken Lutze usually spoke. The chief of staff then, with much yelling and screaming, confiscated the Swiss’s diplomat’s passport and called the police, who in turn reported the case to the personal staff adjutant of the Reichsführer SS, Wolff. In fact Wolff had no responsibility in the matter at all, but he made sure that the faux pas by the competition circulated within the better Nazi circles by sending the report on to Göring’s adjutant Bodenschatz, whom he addressed as “Du” since their joint work at the time of the Röhm murders. In his letter, he asked that the police report be personally brought to the Field Marshal (Göring’s former title). Wolff knew that “the fat man” (Reich minister, Commander of the Luftwaffe, Prussian prime minister, Reich Hunting Minister, Commissioner of the Four-Year plan, Reich Forest Minister, Reichstag President and much more, all in one person) collected the indiscretions of prominent party comrades like other people collected stamps.