One of these projects began as early as April 1939 when a concert singer from Munich, Karoline Diehl, used her former affair with Heinrich Himmler to recommend her current lover to him. He was an intern, Dr. Sigmund Rascher, who, in addition to his work in a Munich hospital, ran a private cancer research clinic and needed financial aid. One week later, he was already set up in the “Ahnenerbe” and after six more months he was allowed to wear the SS uniform of an Untersturmführer of the Allgemeine SS.
However, at that time he was already wearing the uniform of a Luftwaffe doctor. He had been called up at the beginning of the war. He managed to get himself placed at the Institute for Aeromedicine in Munich. There they tested how pilots remained in control of their senses in the oxygen-poor air at high altitudes, a problem that affected mainly fighter pilots. A pressure chamber was available to the doctors for testing the conditions of the air at different heights through simulations. They only lacked missing people who accepted the health risks involved and would be locked voluntarily in the cabin for tests,. Rascher knew how to solve the problem and in the middle of May 1941 he asked Himmler if he “couldn’t hand over two or three professional criminals for this purpose.”
The Reichsführer SS was not squeamish when dealing with human lives, and gave his approval. The experiments took place at Dachau concentration camp. Many SS bigwigs watched, Wolff among them, and saw how a healthy person gasped for air, screamed, collapsed and then, depending on Rascher’s capriciousness, was either provided with air in time and returned to life, or in an “experiment that was to go through to the end,” how this person died a wretched death from an embolism in the brain. By mid-May 1942, approximately 150 of these experiments were carried out; half of them ended in death.
After the war, when Wolff was questioned about these crimes, he maintained that the test subjects had volunteered for the experiments because they could be released from the camp. The thought never crossed his mind that a prisoner working forced labor, vegetating behind barbed wire for an indefinite period of time, was not capable of expressing free will when making such a decision. Two or three of the test subjects died, Wolff said—they had been sentenced to death anyway. He knew that this was not true because in the National Socialist state death sentences were carried out in jails, whereas concentration camp prisoners were locked up without being sentenced. That many more deaths actually took place, he could have read from the reports Rascher sent to Himmler, if he had wanted to. Quite relaxed, he assured, when questioned, that he would have volunteered for these experiments as well, had it been necessary. He claims to have seen prisoners perfectly fit just moments after their rescue from the cabin, and happy to have been able to contribute to victory. A few of the survivors were actually rewarded—if one can call it that, because instead of being released, they were sent to serve in the Wehrmacht, in the Dirlewanger Penal Battalion, a probation unit used for suicide missions.
Had Wolff been gullible or even trusting about Rascher’s altitude experiments, that excuse could no longer be applied after August 15, 1942. In a new series of experiments, the doctor was exposed as a sadist who delighted in the suffering and death of human beings. The reason for the new tests was for the pilots who could be downed in cold seawater. Despite life jackets, most of them died of hypothermia. At the Dachau experiments, the test subjects were brutally plunged into a pool of ice-cold water. Not until their body temperature had fallen to under 30 degrees Celsius did they become unconscious and were fished out of the pool. The research centered on how they could be most efficiently warmed up, and brought back to life. One possibility, “the revival by animal warmth” was tried and tested at Himmler’s suggestion. For this purpose, former prostitutes were brought from Ravensbrück concentration camp to Dachau, to lay naked under a blanket and warm up the cold men at their sides, and bring them about to have intercourse. With his hypothermia experiments, Rascher abused more than 280 people; one third of them dying.
Wolff later professed having no knowledge of these experiments. But when he was shown a letter that he had written on November 27, 1942, to General Erhard Milch, the Luftwaffe doctor and Rascher’s highest
superior, the retired Obergruppenführer had to give in. In the letter, he pleaded for the continuation of the hypothermia experiments, even if the Luftwaffe were to cut off its contributions. No one needed to be concerned about the test subjects, as they were only criminals and anti-social people. Rascher was to be removed from the Luftwaffe and placed in the Waffen SS, which was what actually took place. Wolff argued that he neither dictated nor read this letter. He had only signed it because a note from Himmler had ordered it. Only because the dreadful Rascher’s case had a grotesquely macabre ending characteristic of the SS does it deserve some further comments. The ambitious couple who craved admiration, Diehl and Rascher, also wanted to profit from Himmler’s manic promotion with births. At the end of 1939 Diehl, a widow who was already 46 years old, gave birth to a son in Prague; in truth, she arranged to obtain the child through a midwife. In February 1941, she had another child in a similar manner, a third in November 1942, but with the fourth she had bad luck. She was arrested, and on Himmler’s orders taken to Ravensbrück concentration camp without a trial. Shortly before the end of the war she attacked a guard there and was hanged.
Her husband—she married after the second false childbearing—was first kept in an SS barracks in Munich, then taken to Buchenwald concentration camp. It meant a lot to Himmler to keep the case secret, because otherwise he would have been covered with ridicule. When Buchenwald concentration camp was cleaned out at the beginning of April 1945, as the Americans were getting closer, Rascher and a group of prominent prisoners were taken to Dachau. With Wolff’s help, the group was eventually freed in South Tyrol, but Rascher was no longer there. On April 26, 1945, on orders from Himmler, he was killed with a bullet in the head at Dachau.
Another doctor received support for his criminal activity by the “Ahnenerbe” as a member of the personal staff. In December 1941 an SS officer and a dangerous race fanatic suggested beginning a collection of Jewish skulls for the purpose of comparative anthropology. Three months later anatomy professor Dr. August Hirt, at the University of Strassburg [Strasbourg], was given the task. At first it was planned to chop off the heads of Jewish soldiers in the Red Army captured during the Eastern Campaign. For various reasons, the plan was not carried out. The professor then occupied himself with the poison “Lost”—already used during the First World War as yellow gas. Prisoners at the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp in Alsace were the test subjects. Many died;
the survivors were transported to a camp in the east where they were killed because they had been witnesses.
It is more than likely that Wolff also found out about these crimes, but he was no longer directly involved. The over-zealous business leader of the “Ahnenerbe,” Wolfram Sievers, wanted to arrange practically everything by himself. When he couldn’t manage on his own, he got help from Himmler’s secretary, Dr. Rudolf Brandt, who was more and more intent on eliminating Wolff. In this case, Wolff may not have officially found out about another plan to collect entire skeletons instead of just skulls. When Himmler agreed to this, Wolff was very sick and confined to a hospital. For this “research,” on orders from Hirt, “115 people, of which 79 Jews, 2 Poles, 4 Asians and 30 Jewish women” from the masses of prisoners were taken from Auschwitz to Natzweiler. There they were murdered in a gas chamber that had been especiallyset up for them. Their bodies were sent to Hirt at the Strassburg anatomy institute. In order to turn them into skeletons, the “Ahnenerbe” had purchased new machinery.
________________
*
A truck (with a boxlike structure on top) into which the victims were pressed closely together and killed by carbon monoxide exhaust fumes.
*
See
Hitler’s Table Talk 1941–1944
, H. R. Trevor-Roper, ed. (New York: Enigma Books, 2000).
*
This particular idea—that Hitler did not know what was going on—is used by many Holocaust deniers, and by David Irving in particular. See, among others, two books by Irving:
Hitler’s War
(New York: Viking, 1977) and
Goebbels
(London: Focal Point, 1996).
*
Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler.
W
hile he was still in good health Wolff made sure he was not completely excluded from the various medical experiments. Rascher and Hirt had been assigned to the “Institute for Specific Military-Economic Research,” a secret department of the “Ahnenerbe,” and continued to be part of Wolff’s payroll, even though the big money now came from the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office. When he had to make transfers from his “Special Account R,” then he may have occasionally asked for what purpose the money was needed.
That Wolff’s underlings at the Main Office were always working to dethrone him from his boss’s chair should not have come as a surprise. This was part of the Nazi organization’s tradition; according to Hitler’s Darwinist basic principle that the stronger, and therefore the better, are always right, so it was not in the least frowned upon to use one’s elbows to move ahead. Wolff’s frequent absence from the Berlin office provided added encouragement to the careerists, as did his sporadic presence at Himmler’s field office. Dr. Rudolf Brandt managed that kind of advancement, and Wolff sensed that Obersturmführer Werner Grothmann, in charge of the Main Department “SS Adjutancy,” was pushing hard to become his successor. Besides, his many years close to Himmler taught
him that he could only conditionally rely on the Reichsführer SS’s loyalty (according to the basic principles of the SS “code of honor”).
In spite of all this, Chief of the Personal Staff Wolff did not worry too much. The best human specimen at headquarters was sure that the Reichsführer would do him no harm because in a serious situation Hitler would step in to protect him. For that reason, the former bank employee carefully nurtured his “personal credit” with the Führer by regularly participating in the evening chats as a dedicated listener. On the other hand, he did not make a big effort to maintain his credit with Himmler. At the beginning of his autobiography he told in epic terms and with some satisfaction how Hitler once gave him the opportunity to humiliate the Reichsführer SS.
It must have been in November 1942—Wolff does not provide the exact date—after the tiresome, incredibly boring afternoon teas and stressed by the Führer’s endless monologues, he got to bed long after midnight. He was awakened by a telephone call and ordered to come to the Führer’s bunker immediately. In highly dramatic and, as usual using verbatim quotations, Wolff described in his manuscript how Hitler practically begged him to answer all his questions truthfully and not to cover his boss in any way.
“Wolff,” asked the Führer, “do you know where Horia Sima is right now?” Since the Obergruppenführer “could courageously look him in the eye, as always,” and “immediately and spontaneously” bellow no, Hitler straightened up (considering the “bad situation … he had slumped somewhat”) “and said quietly, both aggravated and relieved at the same time, ‘Thank god!’”
Horia Sima was a Romanian. In his homeland he was the leader of the fascist organization called the “Iron Guard.” In 1940, together with the army, they had engineered a putsch against King Carol, that brought General Ion Antonescu to power. The SS was counting on the Iron Guard because they terrorized Jews and rejected the Francophile Romanian upper class. Hitler, however, felt that it was more effective to support the general. In January 1941 there was a quarrel between the two partners, Antonescu and Horia Sima. The legionnaires were defeated and persecuted, and many of them were killed. With the help of the SD, some 200 of them managed to flee to Germany. Ribbentrop placated Antonescu, his enemies having been locked up in concentration camps; Hitler guaranteed this with his word of honor. He was, however, completely in agreement that the SD hide them in one of its training schools to keep
them in reserve and ready should the Romanian head of state suddenly refuse to obey.
Now, however, this valuable political trump card had slipped away and was obviously traveling back to his homeland. Antonescu’s Secret Service had found Horia Sima. The general had the German ambassador in Bucharest ask von Ribbentrop to confirm that Hitler did not want to break his promise. Since Ribbentrop and Himmler had a permanent feud, the foreign minister used the opportunity to turn Hitler against the Reichsführer SS.
SS Brigadeführer and Chief of the SD Secret Service Walter Schellenberg reported after the war that Hitler, in his anger, threatened the “Black Plague”; he would eradicate them if they did not obey. It must have been quite turbulent in the Führer’s bunker that night because Wolff reported that it was “the only time” that “I had ever seen the Führer throw such a fit—and in this case, he was right.” Hitler explained to him why this was so serious just then; Romanian divisions were engaged just outside Stalingrad in heavy defensive fighting, and Germany was as dependent on the oil wells at Ploesti as on the food that this agricultural country was delivering in vast quantities.
Wolff was given the task to immediately call Himmler at his field headquarters just 30 kilometers from there, and ask him what the situation with Horia Sima looked like. He managed this, but only with a delay. At Himmler’s location, the SS officer on duty refused to wake up his boss, since this was strictly forbidden. Only when Wolff mentioned that the order came from the Führer, did Himmler’s telephone ring.