Wolff’s special status and position had to at least be credible; therefore, the titles were changed. The usual “Higher SS and Police Führer” became the “Highest,” using the highly appreciated superlative favored by the bombastic Nazis. At the same time, Wolff’s self-confidence was enhanced. As former head of an SS Main Office, he would stand a head above all of his colleagues in Germany in his new position as well. In the first days of September 1943, it was still not clear when his new position would become official. Before the Italians were to fall under the control of the SS police, the alliance had to be dissolved. It had actually disintegrated some time before; and behind all the assurances of unbreakable friendship there was a growing mistrust. What Mussolini had begun, namely the secret construction of Italian fortifications along the ridge of the Alps, was vigorously pursued by his successors. While Rommel threateningly gathered his divisions on the border, Badoglio consistently and quietly brought troops from the south to the Italian Alps instead of placing them to face the armies of the western Allies.
Whenever Axis military leaders or diplomats met, recriminations, suspicion, and threats followed. After a conversation on August 6 in Tarvisio, Ribbentrop took the German ambassador to Rome, Hans Georg von Mackensen, back to Germany on the spot in his special train. Following this shameful recall, the ambassador was forced to act as an advisor at the “Wolfsschanze.” Prince Phillip of Hesse was also forced to stay there; he was married to Italian Princess Mafalda, and therefore always used as a negotiator when things were not going right within the alliance.
All those involved knew that the days of the Axis were numbered, but as much as Hitler mistrusted the new regime, his informers found very little that appeared suspicious to report about. Field Marshal Kesselring, the diplomat Dr. Rudolf Rahn, who was the acting ambassador, the versatile SS Standartenführer Eugen Dollmann, who was functioning as liaison officer, police attaché SS Standartenführer Herbert Kappler, the SD, and the Abwehr all reported that no switch of sides was contemplated. No one discovered the threads that were continuously being woven tighter between the Allies and the Italian leadership.
In the meantime, the situation became increasingly difficult for the German divisions fighting in Sicily and later in the southern end of the Italian boot. The Italian army surrendered one unit after the other, and their forces slowly but surely dissolved, as the soldiers returned home. Fighting a delaying battle, the Germans cleared the country in front of the enemy, who was pushing forward hesitatingly. What would happen—and
this was the great concern—once the king and Badoglio decided to change sides abruptly and form an alliance with the enemy?
Because of such fears an order was issued from Headquarters on September 7 to disarm all Italian units. Many of them were happy to end the war that way. They had no idea that the Germans were going to use them as forced labor. Others, however, mainly the elite units that had been sent north, simply disappeared into the mountains, hid their weapons and prepared for the future resistance to the German occupation. SS General Karl Wolff would have to handle that situation.
W
olff was not in Italy during the first few days of September 1943. Himmler and Hitler had ordered him to headquarters. His account of that meeting, partly in conversations with journalists and historians, and among the drafts of his sketchy autobiography, is sensational enough to wonder whether the General’s memory was affected by his self-confidence. His stories are all the more difficult to assess because no one else could confirm them, and Wolff could not provide any personal notes from those glorious moments of his career, and had problems identifying the dates of those events. Therefore, one must sometimes fit his version into the sequence of events.
Wolff was present at Hitler’s table for lunch at the “Wolfsschanze” on September 6, 1943, from 2:45 p.m. to 4:55 p.m.—according to Linge’s diary—together with Himmler, Ribbentrop, and Ambassador Walter Hewel, the foreign minister’s liaison at Führer headquarters. The usual frugal meal must not have taken more than ten minutes. Without a doubt, they spent the next two hours talking primarily about Italy and Wolff’s mission there. It contained, according to his report, an additional task that was not even discussed at that confidential lunch; Hitler apparently informed only Himmler and his Obergruppenführer.
Himmler had already told him at his field headquarters, says Wolff—he would be ordered to clear out the Vatican. The task was immediately confirmed the by the Reichsführer, who quickly added that this was an opportunity to remove all evidence of German culture. During the Early Middle Ages when missionaries and monks were to Christianize the Germanic peoples, these relics were apparently taken as trophies from the pagan north to the holy city of Rome. “The Führer,” Wolff quoted the Reichsführer SS, “is thinking primarily of political ammunition contained in the archives. We, however, as the protectors of the eternal treasures of our race must plan for the future.”
During lunch, Hitler announced he would end the “unbearable situation in Italy one way or another” in the next few days. The location of Mussolini’s jail had been found and his liberation was being prepared, but had been put on ice because the king, his court, Badoglio, and his generals had to be seized first. The Duce would be returned to power and honor, but the Fascists would from now on be dependant upon German support so that the people did not once again destroy Fascist party offices and burn their flags. The task of Ribbentrop and Rahn was to link a future Fascist government to Axis policies. Himmler and Wolff were to guarantee peace and security. Mussolini must be better protected in the future. To Wolff he said, “You are responsible for the Duce. A specially selected unit of the SS must never let him out of their eyesight.” Hitler, Wolff recalled, gave him the secret order, when there were no other witnesses present. He was ordered to occupy the Vatican, clear it out, and take the leading clerics working there, including those close to the Pope, and especially the accredited diplomats and their asylum seekers. “The SD should put together for you a list of the most dangerous persons,” Hitler supposedly said. “There will be an uproar throughout the world, but that will soon die down.” The political documents of the last decades must be secured. “That will be a harvest, richer than the one from France in 1940!” (Hitler was referring to the files of the French foreign ministry captured from railroad cars.)
The transportation available for the higher clergy and the diplomats must, of course, be commensurate with their high rank. Accommodations for the clerics were to be cloister complexes or even castles. If the Pope so wished, he and his colleagues could later go to the Principality of Lichtenstein, “so that no one could say that we treated His Holiness badly.”
When Hitler asked when this operation could take place, Wolff supposedly looked for an excuse and pointed out the difficult and necessary
preparations. The Vatican must be taken apart, people must be found who knew every step and every garret, experts had to be recruited who knew how to handle the archives and mastered Latin and Greek. When Wolff set six weeks as the minimum amount of time for those preparations, Hitler was supposedly disappointed, but he then agreed and said: “If one wants a first-class job, it cannot happen overnight.” He did ask to receive regular updates regarding the progress of Wolff’s preparations.
As we know that operation never took place. Wolff credits himself for this: since he hesitated so long in carrying out those plans, Hitler ended up dropping the idea. In seeking to use this “good deed” to offset the accusations of being a leading Nazi raises the question whether the order was really taken seriously. It seems very plausible that it was serious. Even though Hitler regularly paid his church taxes as a Catholic up until he committed suicide, he always viewed the clergy as a bitter enemy. In 1933, the priests prevented him from obtaining the majority vote in the Catholic areas of Germany by warning voters that the “Catholic Center” would protect practicing Catholics from the actions of the new pagans. The Nazis considered Hitler’s concordat with the Catholic Church after his rise to power simply as a temporary cease-fire. He swore revenge when the Bishop of Münster, Monsignor Galen, forced him to stop the “euthanasia” program—the mass murder of the handicapped and mentally retarded in the nursing homes. In bitter fury, he announced many times that as soon as he victoriously ended the war, he would settle the score with the clergy of all denominations.
The conversation at the table on September 6 may very well have turned to the Vatican. The consequences must have also been discussed if Pius XII were to give pastoral instructions if he were under Allied control to Catholics living in Nazi-occupied Europe. Obviously influenced by his long stay in Germany as the nuncio, the Pope had until then avoided a head-on confrontation with the National Socialists, but that could also change.
Wolff, of course, knew these facts, that gave credence to a plan for action against the Vatican appear plausible. Besides that, there were already at least two statements from Hitler that apparently anticipated the order given to Wolff. One statement came at lunch on December 13, 1941, at the “Wolfsschanze” in the presence of three Reich ministers and presumably Wolff as well. In those days German divisions were at the outskirts of Moscow, frozen by winter, defending themselves only with the courage of desperation, against fresh units of Siberian Red Army troops that were just being thrown into the war. Hitler digressed from this, saying:
“The war will be over one day. I shall consider that my life’s final task will be to solve the religious problem. … I don’t interfere in matters of belief. Therefore I can’t allow churchmen to interfere with temporal affairs… The final state must be: in St. Peter’s Chair, a senile officiant; facing him, a few sinister old women, as gaga and as poor in spirit as anyone could wish. The young and healthy are on our side.” And referring to Mussolini’s situation: “I’d have entered the Vatican and thrown everybody out—reserving the right to apologize later: ‘Excuse me, it was a mistake!’ But the result would have been, they’d have been outside!”
*
Hitler stated something similar eighteen months later at the situation report on July 26, 1943, when bad news kept coming in from Rome about the collapse of the Fascist system. Back then he threatened: “I’ll go into the Vatican immediately. Do you think the Vatican troubles me? It will be seized immediately. First of all, the entire diplomatic corps is in there. I don’t care. The rabble is in there. We’ll take the entire herd of swine … What is already… Then we apologize afterward; that doesn’t matter to us. We’re waging a war there… […] Yes we will get documents. We will bring out something about the betrayal!”
**
Was that just an outbreak of blind rage?
It is quite clear that Hitler had certainly considered such action. It remains open whether he actually planned the deed. That he never gave such an order in writing is not unusual; it was Hitler’s practice to order crimes orally, just as he avoided documenting the responsibility for the murder of the Jews. It is also conceivable that when the discussion took place, Wolff became convinced that his mission was to realize the Führer’s dream. Wolff often expressed the opinion that perhaps Hitler had mentioned murdering the Jews, but that he had never actually ordered it. Himmler and Heydrich may have relieved him of that responsibility of their own accord. There is also the possibility that Wolff fabricated the order hoping to mitigate his own responsibility by the idea that good is just evil that one doesn’t perpetrate. At any rate, Wolff only brought up the order about the Vatican long after the war, when he was in serious trouble.
Hitler’s plan to have King Victor Emmanuel III, Badoglio, and “the whole gang” in Rome picked up was not carried out either. Kesselring could
have used the armored infantry division stationed around the Italian capital, but that ring was encircled by yet another ring made up of six Italian divisions. Each quarreling ally waited for the next move of the other partner. On September 8 at midday, the king was still giving assurances to German envoy Rudolf Rahn that he would honor his obligations. But a few hours later, Rahn was called by Italian foreign minister Count Guariglia, who informed him what radio stations were broadcasting around the world: Marshal Badoglio, “in the face of the hopeless military situation, was forced … to ask for a cease-fire.” It was an unconditional surrender to the Allies following weeks of secret negotiations.
That evening the code word “Axis” was flashed from Führer headquarters. It triggered the measures that had been planned in the event of a “betrayal.” It also warned Wolff and his staff in Munich who left that night crossing the Brenner Pass at exactly 6:00 a.m. the following morning. There were no longer any Italian soldiers or customs officials in sight. The Italian government and high command had prepared orders for such a scenario, but they were abandoned or were simply ignored, because everyone had become weary of the war. A central leadership no longer existed. During the night of September 9, the royal family, Marshal Badoglio, his military staff and his ministers fled Rome in a convoy of luxury limousines, heading south, towards the little port of Pescara on the Adriatic. A small Italian navy vessel was waiting there to take them to the allied lines in southern Italy, at Brindisi.
Fate did not grant Wolff, who was eager for action, the pleasure of becoming involved in the exciting events during those early autumn days. His forces were still too weak; the SS and Police units would follow later on; he had to assemble emergency units on his own. His budget was 70, 000 Reichs marks in cash as “an advance towards the newly established position.” At that time, Rommel’s soldiers were basically driving their former Italian comrades-in-arms into concentration camps. Out of necessity, most of them were then deported to the north as foreign workers, the equivalent of slave labor. The residents of South Tyrol greeted the SS convoys enthusiastically. They took for granted that from now on the German language and their old traditions would be respected, and that they would no longer be forced by law to behave like tried and true Italians as it was under the Fascist regime. It must have been like the weight of the world being lifted from their shoulders that the resettlement, which had often been announced but was never actually enacted, would probably no longer be necessary.