Top Nazi (7 page)
One year later, on November 1, 1939, with the Polish campaign already victoriously concluded, Wolff got the opportunity on the other side to repair some of the damage to the chief of staff. A report from an SS Führer landed on his desk stating that there was “a complaint in the strongest language that even now Chief of Staff Lutze rides every morning through the forest with his entire family while horses have actually been removed from the officers of the High Command of the Wehrmacht.” Himmler decided and wrote in his own hand, “Report to Bormann!” Reichsleiter Martin Bormann already had his office directly next to Hitler at that time. He was the official head of staff for Rudolf Hess, the deputy to the Führer, but his influence on Hitler was far stronger than that of his superior. Wolff reported Lutze’s problem with the horses with the comment: “Personal! Confidential! Secret!” and left it to Bormann’s discretion “to decide what further measures should be taken.”
The fact that Lutze had to justify himself to Bormann (“The horses must be exercised!”) did not improve the climate between the former fighting comrades. The snide remarks continued. Wolff had risen so high at this point that he could ignore the running battle with a comrade of lesser rank. In March 1940 SS Hauptsturmführer Dr. Rudolf Brandt, a colleague on the Reichsführer’s personal staff, was working on a report from Brigadeführer Gottlob Berger, Chief of the Reserves Office of the Waffen SS, that Lutze is “slowly becoming a danger to the SS, if not to the entire Party,” because he used the comrades’ evenings that he holds for the SA
officers serving in the Wehrmacht to “criticize other parts of the movement, but directed especially against the SS.” Lutze also “created an awful morale atmosphere against the Reichsführer in a most outrageous manner” among sergeants at Officers’ Training in Döberitz, although he was “in a drunken state” at the time. Berger was advised, “to watch Lutze and at the next opportunity, nail him down.” This would not be difficult, since Lutze “is too stupid and conceited to notice a trap.”
The SS hit back whenever the opportunity arose. It was reported to Himmlerin February 1943 that Lutze arrived at the Polish spa at Krynica for a several weeks’ holiday with an adjutant, although that particular area was closed to Reich Germans and reserved only for wounded soldiers from Stalingrad and children from areas threatened with bombing. Another letter was sent to Reichsleiter Bormann, who in the meantime had been promoted to “Secretary to the Führer” and to “Chief of the Party Chancellery,” becoming one of the most powerful men in Hitler’s Reich. Himmler suggested that “it be arranged that Lutze rest his doubtlessly weakened state of health at one of the Reich’s German seaside resorts.”
Three months later, Viktor Lutze ended all arguments. Officially it was announced that the chief of staff of the SA, while on a business trip, was killed in a crash with the party car. Bormann ordered all Reich leaders, Gau leaders, and unit leaders by telex, with the obligation to attend the state occasion, in this case a Party funeral, at the new Reich Chancellery. “In the name of the Führer,” he clearly reminded everyone, “all conversations are forbidden at the funeral service and at the funeral procession to follow.” The notice was especially fitting this time because there would certainly have been gossip circulating that a) Viktor Lutze had this accident not only with very strictly rationed gasoline but also under the influence of too much alcohol, b) his trip could not have been on official business, since his sons and daughter were in the car with him, and c) the chief of staff died of a crime against food management because a huge number of broken eggs garnished the car wreck, the street, and the corpses.
The Party funeral took place on May 7, 1943. Four days later, SA Gruppenführer Hacker, who was responsible for the SA in the newly created Gau Wartheland, had just returned to Posen from the funeral in Berlin. During a discussion with SS bosses there he said that Himmler should additionally take on the leadership of the SA; the reasoning being that “under the circumstances, a suitable successor for Lutze would not be found among the ranks of the SA… All SA Gruppenführer and Obergruppenführer share the same opinion.”
There is no indication that this suggestion ever made it to Hitler. Wolff asserted, however, that the Party chief made the suggestion to the Reichsführer SS directly after Röhm’s murder that he take over the command of the SA. Himmler refused, however, because he did not want to create the impression that he had killed to inherit. But contradicting that version, Röhm’s successor had been manipulated before June 30; Viktor Lutze was one of Hitler’s regular companions during those critical days.
There is another reason why the offer to Himmler sounds improbable. Everyone knew that Hitler avoided such accumulation of power within the leadership of the Third Reich. Lutze’s successor would be the colorless Obergruppenführer Wilhelm Schepmann from Saxony. He and his SA were only entrusted with target practice for the Volkssturm during the last phase of the war in the fall of 1944, far under Himmler, as the last contingent, along with many other competent commanders of the reserve army.
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Informal manner of addressing someone as “you” as opposed to the formal “Sie.”
O
n July 2, 1934, at four o’clock in the morning, an order from the Führer put a stop to the hunt for “the Röhm loyalists.” Wolff could now catch up on missed sleep. As he arrived at the office the next day, he found an invitation for lunch. Göring called those entrusted with the action and other confidantes to a meal at the Prussian prime minister’s residence. The approximately thirty guests were offered a glass of champagne in the foyer. Wolff saw the commander in chief of the army, Generaloberst Werner Freiherr von Fritsch, but his attempt at saying something obliging to the high-ranking new ally remained unsuccessful; Fritsch was not approachable. His face twitched nervously and his glass of champagne at the reception was shaking in his trembling hand.
Wolff was surprised at the absence of a victorious mood. But the general knew more about the mass murder than the SS wanted him to. He knew in what an underhanded manner General Kurt von Schleicher and Major General Ferdinand von Bredow were killed. He was also convinced that the supposedly planned “Röhm putsch” was just made up. Several days before June 30, Army District Commander of Silesia General Ewald von Kleist came to him and reported that he had spoken to the Silesian SA Obergruppenführer Edmund Heines (considered to be one
of the most radical mutineers and also shot) because of the rumors about an imminent SA putsch. Heines answered honestly and ensured him quite credibly that not one word of these rumors was true. After this discussion with Kleist, Frisch called Major General Walter von Reichenau, director of the ministerial office at the Reichswehr ministry and well known for his direct line to the Nazi party, requesting that he make a statement. As Fritsch voiced his suspicion that the Reichswehr and SA were only to be turned against one another in some sort of intrigue, Reichenau commented, “That could be true, but it’s too late now.”
This would explain why Fritsch became so upset at the sight of the black uniforms. Wolff found it amusing, however, that just three days after the bloodbath the disturbed general was just looking very much beside himself. For Wolff, going to receptions, celebrations, and reviews increasingly became a part of his duties, either as his master’s constant and decorative companion or as his no less impressive personal representative. With his new office he rented a conveniently located apartment, a seven-room house, in the fashionable neighborhood of Dahlem, despite his low monthly salary, which was the norm for the Party. If his family was to come to the capital of the Reich, he did not want them to feel hemmed in. The house in Bogenhausen was sold and with that money Wolff bought a piece of property in Rottach-Egern on Lake Tegern, now called, for some reason, the “Lago di Bonzo” because more and more prominent Nazis were settling there. Even Heinrich Himmler had given up his modest estate in Waldtrudering for a more suitable home. Wolff proclaimed that he would build the family’s ancestral seat on the lake property. Moreover, the house was also necessary since Hitler resided on the Obersalzberg during most of the vacation months.
Himmler now had the rank of Reichsleiter within the Party. Regarding his police duties, the Reich minister of the interior, Dr. Wilhelm Frick, was still above him, but he hardly had to worry about his opinions. During an interrogation in Nuremberg after the war, Wolff said, “As a jurist the minister did not incur the Führer’s favor; to him he was just a bureaucrat. Frick never got into any arguments with Himmler because he knew that Hitler would always say that the Reichsführer was right.”
In the leadership of the SS, Himmler could just about do as he pleased. Hitler usually only clipped the wings of his birds of paradise if they got in his way. It didn’t bother him that everyone had different views of what National Socialist Germany was supposed to be and that the Party and
its satellite organizations were anything but a monolithic block. Himmler had even thrown together a rather abstruse program from various kinds of sources: racial delusions, arbitrary interpretations of history, theories by would-be scientists, rules of secret societies and monastic religious orders, heroic cults, the occult, natural medicine, and anti-Christian religious musings.
As first adjutant (April 4, 1934), and even more upon becoming the top adjutant (November 9, 1935), Wolff zealously served that program like a convinced disciple. Typical of this attitude was his relationship to Christianity. As a child he had been baptized in the Protestant church, where religious belief was an integral part of bourgeois respectability. As an officer in the Kaiser’s army, he was brought up in the traditional alliance of throne and altar. Like so many middle-class Germans during the Weimar Republic, he saw in the Christian churches a bulwark of defense against godless Marxism and a factor of order in society. He and his family went to church services regularly in their community of Munich-Bogenhausen; sometimes he even attended wearing his SS uniform. He had his daughters Irene (born in 1930) and Helga (born in 1934) baptized. “The fact that he made himself available to the parish council in the church community was further evidence of his upstanding and consciously devout attitude,” as retired pastor Ernst Veit was to state later on. This was certainly a de-nazification certificate used by the former SS Führer to whitewash his reputation in 1945 when he was accused of being a militant Nazi during Hitler’s reign.
The religious Christian Wolff became a new pagan “Saul” in September 1936. He left the Protestant church and took his children with him. The fact that Himmler viewed Christianity as foreign and that he encouraged a kind of religious belief that Protestants and Catholics alike described as regressing to Germanic paganism, makes it very probable that Wolff turned his back on his family’s religion to advance his career. But this change of mind should not be interpreted as simply as that. It must be taken into consideration that shortly after 1933 the “church fight” began among the Protestants. The faction known as the “German Christians” made Jesus of Nazareth into a hero of the Nordic race while the followers of the “German Confessional Church” were opposed to the Aryanization of their beliefs and did not reject the Old Testament in the Bible, for example, as being Jewish. At the same time the National Socialist government tried to undermine the reputation of the Catholic church by
uncovering sexual offences in the convents, which, at the behest of the ministry of propaganda, were to be fully exploited, as were the trials that followed. The foundation of Christian beliefs, as well as its organizations, became very suspicious in those days. Leaving the church out of conviction was increasingly taking place.
The National Socialists did not want to get rid of God altogether; they had inveighed against the philosophical materialism of Karl Marx too loud and for too long. So, the SS and its prophets wound up with GOT, apparently an Old German word. They imagined a heavenly, superhuman, superior authority, both monotheistic as a higher being settled somewhere and nowhere at the same time, an omniscient and pantheistic spirit. They went back to the mystics of the Middle Ages, to Goethe, Schopenhauer and any critic of the Jewish origins of Christian beliefs. If the conversation between Himmler and his adjutant turned to anything of a divine nature, they spoke of “Age Old One,” as the Teutons addressed their God.
When Wolff’s first son (after two daughters) was born in January 1936, the father was already an enthusiastic follower of Himmler’s homegrown religion. Because astrology also had a place in this religion, the birth announcement was decorated with a jumping ibex, the accepted sign of the zodiac for the time of birth. A family coat of arms, a “Wolfsangel,” that represented a rune from the time of the Teutons, appears for the first time on this card. Wolff’s son was named Thorisman, and therefore commended to the most argumentative and aggressive of the Teutonic deities. The additional names were given by the “name gods” or Goden, an Old German expression for godparents: Heinrich (for Himmler), Karl (for SS coat of arms creator Professor Diebitsch), and Reinhard (for Gruppenführer Heydrich, at the time chief of the SD security service and of the Gestapo). Another godfather was SS Brigadeführer Weisthor, a rather diminutive Teuton, but nevertheless knowledgeable about the religion, customs, and runes of the ancestors. He had developed the ritual for naming in the SS and thus assumed the role of high priest in the naming of Wolff’s son.
The naming ceremony took place on January 4, 1937, when Thorisman was almost one year old. The event was recorded on a typewritten certificate. The content, language, and form are so typical of all that was sectarian in the SS that it should be reproduced here:
Temporarily: Land at Tegernsee