Wolff’s role within this circle can only be understood in the context of its formation. Long before 1933, the industrialist Wilhelm Keppler joined the NSDAP, becoming Hitler’s business consultant. He collected donations to the party among the membership. When Hitler became Chancellor, these donors naturally did not wish to sever those ties, and the Nazi party did not want the clique to drift apart. Now that Keppler had an office in the Reichskanzlei and had to be present from time to time, he appointed his relative Fritz Kranefuss to take over his duties. Although both the Party and the SA had refused to let him join, the SS accepted him, and Himmler even took him on as his protégé. Because of his leading position in industry, Keppler was able to recruit new members into the circle.
The members of the group were invited by Himmler to attend the Nuremberg party rally in 1933, and the Reichsführer SS assigned his adjutants with the best manners to look after them. Wolff did his job so well that later it was claimed that Himmler’s guests enjoyed more privileges than those of the Führer. As a result, Wolff kept this position in the future. Together with Kranefuss, he organized meetings at least twice a year, sightseeing tours, trips, and lectures by the Party greats in which the guests had the feeling that they were being taken into preferential confidence regarding Party plans and initiatives. Whoever was not already a member of the Nazi party could, although the Party remained closed to new members for a long time, still join with Himmler acting as guarantor. In due course almost all these members received the rank of “Honorary Führer,” giving them the right to wear the black uniform, decorated with braid and trimmings, as members of the “personal staff of the Reichsführer SS.”
In the years after the war, when Wolff was questioned regarding the purpose of this circle of friends, he replied that Himmler wanted to do something about the dealings of certain hyenas of the business world by providing respectable entrepreneurs with rank and influence—“insofar as an economist having anything to do with money could ever be honest according to the SS.” This limitation is understandable when one remembers that during the streetfighting years the SS and the SA were singing anti-capitalist songs borrowed from the Communists, with the lyrics being only slightly modified. However, contradicting this explanation, the circle of friends also included directors with bad reputations, such as Dr. Friedrich Flick. On the other hand, Himmler and Wolff were barely fazed when an honorary Führer thinly veiled his aversion to the National Socialist system; as, for example, Hans Walz, General Director of the Stuttgart Bosch Group, with whom regime opponents like Carl Goerdeler
and Theodor Heuss later consorted. At one examination in Nuremberg on December 14, 1949, Wolff claimed, “A man like Otto Wolff, for example”—who was said to use cutthroat methods in business—“we would never have accepted because proper behavior was our priority.” The examiner asked, “Which particular advantages and which type of protection did the members of the circle enjoy?” At first, Wolff played innocent: “It seemed after a while that those gentlemen came occasionally with different requests,” and gave as an example that one gentleman, in the middle of the war, received permission as well as money for a stay at a health resort in Switzerland. When Wolff was reminded that Obergruppenführer Pohl was also a member of the circle of friends, and that he could decide how many concentration camp prisoners would be made available to industrial companies, and that possibly Himmler’s friends took rather significant advantages from this membership, he evaded the issue. “At the outbreak of the war, I went to the Führer headquarters as a liaison officer… I found out… about matters only coincidentally from conversations.”
Most members considered it below their level to become openly involved in politics, but they appreciated having their backs covered, a service which they bought through their tax-free donations. They were Dr. Emil Helfferich, chairman of the board of HAPAG, as well as his Bremen competitor Karl Lindemann of the North German Lloyd. Heavy industry was represented among others by Dr. Albert Vögler from United Steelworks; the banks by Karl Blessing, later president of the Bundesbank; the insurance companies by Dr. Kurt Schmitt from Allianz; the chemical industry by the I. G. Farben member of the board Dr. Heinrich Bütefisch—all in all, some three dozen men, hardly any of whom fit into the Nazi party’s written program.
This was the reason why Heydrich never trusted the circle of friends. In February 1937, however, at the request of his friend Wolff, he was willing to show the gentlemen around the offices of the Gestapo in Berlin and explain their various functions. They were even taken on visits of the concentration camps; in 1937 to Dachau and in 1939 to Sachsenhausen, each time led by Himmler and Wolff. They were, however, also compelled to take part in a midnight celebration on July 2, 1936, at the tomb of the Quedlinburg Cathedral in memory of King Heinrich, called “the Vogler,” who had supposedly been buried there one thousand years before. That king, the first from Lower Saxony to sit on the German throne, victoriously fended off storming cavalries from the east; Himmler, the pantheistic sectarian who also wanted to Germanize the east,
believed that a part of Heinrich’s soul had been reincarnated into his body. And so on that night a crowd of dignified men stood rapt and bareheaded in front of a sarcophagus with Himmler in the lead, his right arm stretched out for the Heil greeting, and Karl Wolff behind him, obviously overcome by emotion. It was later made clear that there were no royal remains in the sarcophagus.
Wolff’s task was to gather the donations of the wealthy gentlemen and manage those funds. At one examination at Nuremberg regarding the indictment of Flick, Wolff said on December 16, 1946, “Himmler was no businessman and I took care of banking matters for him. I learned the banking business in Frankfurt at the Bethmann Bank.” At another point he added, “We always checked from whom the money came. It took a long time for money to be accepted from I. G. Farben, and the yearly donation of 100,000 marks was earmarked personally for Bütefisch. We only took the money because of the character and importance of Bütefisch. We did not regard the entire I. G. Farben group very highly… For example, we never took money from Otto Wolff in Cologne. We only took money from honorable people.” Following this method Himmler’s treasury grew from 600,000 marks in 1936 to over 8 million marks in 1944. This went into the “R” account at the Dresdner Bank in Berlin, an account to which only Himmler and Wolff had access. Some money came from the Party directly into the SS treasury, but it was never very much because the stingy NSDAP Reich treasurer, Xaver Schwarz, counted every penny. It then became very important for the concentration camps run by the SS to earn forever-higher profits. Some of the prisoners worked in the SS’s own businesses, but in increasing numbers they were being lent out as slaves to industrial enterprises for cash payments.
At Nuremberg Wolff testified, “I initiated this, the financing of these things. I took over the management of the money. I always made sure that the Reichsführer did not spend too much and that he always had money available.” And regarding the beginning of this operation, he said, “I suggested to Himmler that he to allow me go to Funk, who if I remember correctly was already Reich minister. I said, ‘Mr. Minister, these are our concerns, our wishes and ideas. We don’t want to glue paper bags in the concentration camps, but rather perform productively. We need money. For you as minister of trade and commerce, it is surely not difficult to find a way for us to receive a personal loan.’ I believe that Funk [Dr. Walter Funk, who had originally been a journalist, then Chief of the Press for the Reich government from 1933, after 1938 Reich minister of trade and
commerce, later also Reichsbank president; in Nuremberg he was sentenced to life in prison] got this done with Kranefuss. They were, however, my ideas and the result of my initiative.”
With the money from the special “R” account, Himmler—according to Wolff—“helped many people,” such as old familiar members of the SS and the Party, those who had gotten themselves into difficult business situations because of their involvement with National Socialism. He also helped the widow of Gregor Strasser, who was shot on June 20, 1934, and had been the former Reich Organizational Director of the Nazi party and was for a time the second man in the Party, after Hitler. The organization “Lebensborn,” which shall be discussed further ahead, was also financed. The “Ahnenerbe” (ancestral heritage research unit) received funds. An expedition to Tibet received money. Great sums of money were poured into the Wewelsburg castle. A good number of SS Gruppenführers who were all paid according to the Party wage scale set by Xaver Schwarz—which was fairly meager—were given the opportunity to dress with a bit more style because Himmler approved an expense allowance for them. Wolff, also received several hundred marks every month.
He was given a much larger portion as he got himself into dangerous and potentially damaging financial difficulties with the construction of his home in Rottach-Egern on the Tegernsee. In April 1936 he bought the property on the south end of the lake, 5,500 square meters with its own beach for 17,000 marks. This was already remarkably cheap at about 3 marks per square meter, considering the great demand by prominent Nazis who just came into money. Himmler was also in the process of settling down at the north end of the lake in Gmund.
Wolff wanted to have an ancestral seat for his family. He imagined a ten-room house with a kitchen, bathrooms, and powder rooms, including (as Wolff explained) a toilet for the employees. Due to the high ground water level, the house had to be built into a tub of concrete. At the edge of the lake, there was also a boathouse and bathhouse.
The house had been built by a general construction company, the “Association of Social Building Works Ltd.,” with headquarters in Berlin. The DAF (German Workers’ Front) represented what passed for labor unions during the Third Reich. Their branch office was in Munich, “The Building Hut” (Bauhütte), was in charge of the building site. During the negotiations, Wolff left no doubt that he was not in a position to spend much more than 40,000 marks on the new construction. Wolff’s demands could never be met with that amount; he therefore rejected the
first draft by an architect. The drafts by a Munich architect met with his desires, but according to the calculations of the Bauhütte, the house would cost 80, 000 marks. Work started following these drafts without a contract for costs and services ever having been drawn up. Additional wishes were also included. When the house was finished, the bill came to over 154,000 marks. After tedious negotiations, Wolff finally claimed he was prepared to pay an additional 40,000 marks, and not a penny more. He wanted to borrow the money. At the end of 1936 the family moved into the house by the lake, without having reached an agreement on the price.
Shortly after, following considerable mismanagement the DAF dissolved its construction company. Court proceedings were instituted against the director, in the course of which the judges also stumbled upon files concerning the Wolff family residence. On May 22, 1939, the Supreme Party Court wrote to the Reichsführer SS in a tone of reprimand stating that even “the acceptance of the already extremely reasonable offer, and then tolerating the construction of a house whose value stood in no relation to the means Wolff had available to him, were not compatible with National Socialist views.” Wolff, “by refusing the remarkably reasonable offer and every other privilege, should have avoided even the appearance that he was using his position as a higher SS Führer for his own personal advantage.”
The judges also did not soften the fact that Wolff, in view of the uncomfortable complications, offered the liquidator of the bankrupt company the property plus the house as reimbursement for any of his own expenses. They were critical of the fact that “Wolff should have come up with these considerations at the very beginning, and not now, one and a half years after the inspection of the house… It is not even difficult for a layman to recognize whether a house costs 40,000 RM or double or even triple those construction costs… In this situation, Wolff demonstrated behavior that was not consistent with the duties of a Party comrade and high-ranking SS Führer… Only taking into consideration the issuance of an amnesty by the Führer on April 27, 1938, does the Party Court refrain from carrying out court proceedings.”
Himmler, however, did not abandon his “Wölffchen.” On June 15, 1939, he wrote a pompous letter labeled “Secret Reich Matter” (the formula for a state secret) to Supreme Party Judge, Walter Buch in which he protested this court decision. “If I can completely step in for someone and am totally convinced that he honestly… undertakes something, that is Party comrade Wolff. The only accusation that could be made would
be that he was not enough involved in the matter… because he had too much work.” Himmler announced that he would discuss the letter of the court “point for point” with Buch “on his next stay in Munich.” Because Wolff supposedly had even been cheated with the sale of his Munich house to the Building Society of the German Workers’ Front, the Reichsführer also wanted to have Reich Treasurer Xaver Schwarz present at this discussion, so that the “unintentional injustice could be repaired.”
The paperwork regarding the family residence dragged on into 1941. Wolff, of course, was allowed to keep the house. In a settlement it was determined that Wolff still had to pay 21,500 marks. Of that amount, Himmler gave him 20,000 marks from the donations treasury; the other 1,500 marks, he let Wolff have as a loan from the NSDAP treasury. To Schwarz, who had stepped in as negotiator, the Reichsführer SS wrote an intimate thank-you letter: “You actually helped me with a tremendous favor. I have gotten to know SS Gruppenführer Wolff’s honorable and irreproachable character on a daily and hourly basis in the last eight years, and consider him one of my most valuable colleagues and have personally grown very fond of him as a friend.” The heading of the letter was sealed with a stamp “Secret Reich Matter.” The matter was now one level less secret; the fate of the Reich no longer depended on its outcome, but anyone who talked in public would be sent to prison. Who, then, had a guilty conscience?