Popitz was still free, but it was a foregone conclusion that he would now be arrested. What would he testify? Perhaps that is the reason Himmler felt it was advisable to have his accomplice at his side and not near Hitler. Hadn’t they both pleaded for limits to Hitler’s omnipotent power? And hadn’t they negotiated with people who were now to be persecuted? It is a fact that Himmler proceeded cautiously in chasing the enemies of the state; after landing in Berlin, he and Wolff certainly did not run directly to the source of the fire, the building of the Reich Ministry of War on Bendlerstrasse. At first, they waited to see which way the wind was blowing. They made sure their offices and the government quarter were secured by the Waffen SS units stationed in the Reich capital, and made telephone calls around the world. Himmler did not go to the Bendlerstrasse until two days after the assassination attempt. SS Obergruppenführer Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Chief of the Security Police and of the SD, the successor to Reinhard Heydrich, was in charge until then. Wolff was no longer with Himmler, but rather with Obergruppenführer Hans Jüttner, who as Chief of the Command Main Office had to provide recruits for the Waffen SS. He now became Himmler’s representative in his function as Chief of the Replacement Army. Skorzeny asked himself: “Himmler was never in the military. How could he take on this task along with all his other duties?” At the same time, Wolff was given another appointment and became officially Plenipotentiary General of the German Wehrmacht in Italy.
He could now boast how his authority extended in every region between the Alps and the Apennines, between Carinthia and France. There were areas in which no German soldier and even less a Fascist militiaman could be in unless he wanted to desert to the partisans. Some of those units actually collected taxes that were made available to their leadership, and the orders of their leaders counted for more than those of police officers or officials who sympathized with the freedom fighters anyway. The partisan units were located mostly in difficult-to-reach mountain regions from where, during occasional advances, they supplied themselves with weapons, ammunition, and food. Many of the members of these units were highwaymen in the tradition of a land that one hundred years before still respected the brigand as an honest professional. However, most of them were patriots fighting for the freedom of their homeland. Almost all were revolutionaries who wanted to bring about a better order of society. However, they all wanted a different kind of order.
Their fighting power was different. It tended to diminish the more the number of brigands surpassed that of the patriots in the group. The strongest units operated on the French border in the west and on the Yugoslav border in the east. They received instructions and deliveries of material from the Allies. As Wolff planned a “week of fighting the partisans,” for which he employed his forces in massive numbers, over eighty of his soldiers died, up to a third of them Italian militiamen, and there were over three hundred wounded and thirty missing. If one believes the victory report issued by his office, his soldiers killed more than 1, 600 partisans, took almost as many prisoners, and rescued some 6, 000 forced laborers from the “liberated” area. They captured a lot of artillery, including two salvo guns, six flame throwers, middle and light grenade throwers, tank defense weapons, many small arms, a large quantity of ammunition, hundreds of vehicles of every kind. They also blew up more than three hundred combat positions and shelters. So it was a small campaign against a significantly armed power and the Senior General Heinrich von Vietinghoff acknowledged Wolff’s “very special contributions” to this success.
He had already been awarded two more decorations in May 1944, which he must have missed terribly until then: in addition to his Iron Cross First and Second Class from the First World War, he now received the bars that were added to them, for additional acts of war. Normally, every one of these decorations must be individually justified with the description of a war incident, but during the final year of the war, one was no longer that particular, especially for a general who was walking around without the
insignia of bravery. The fact that Wolff had the bars of both classes pinned to his chest on the same day, namely May 29, 1944, leads to the assumption that he was either being rewarded for an uncommon operation or that they were given to him late. After all, up to that point he had hardly had the opportunity to approach the enemy any closer than one thousand meters.
But the bars weren’t enough. On November 11, 1944, the Supreme Commander Southwest filed the suggestions on the regulation forms to decorate “Wolff, Karl, born on May 13, 1900, in Darmstadt, with the German Gold Cross.” The large, ostentatious medal was worn on the lower right breast and was named “German fried egg” by the soldiers. In the section “former employment in the war since 1939” that was typewritten, surely not without Wolff’s help, two bits of information are worth noting. It states: “August 26, 1939-September 8, 1943, officer of the Reichsführer SS to the Führer.” After the war, Wolff placed great value upon having been “Liaison officer of the Waffen SS to the Führer” because direct cooperation with Himmler could appear compromising. In the same column, it states after the list of Wolff’s Italian posts: “also Chief of the Personal Staff of the Reichsführer SS since August 26, 1939.” This may have still formally been the case at the time; he was not relieved from this post nor replaced by a successor. However, he was no longer involved in the activities from the time he was confined to the hospital at Hohenlychen. Himmler, his secretary, Dr. Rudolf Brandt, and the higher adjutants were all managing the “Main Office of the Personal Staff.” On the other hand, there was a new “Officer of the Reichsführer SS to the Führer,” SS Gruppenführer Hermann Fegelein, who married Gretl Braun, the sister of Hitler’s lover, Eva Braun. Fegelein had thus become “the left hand” at his brother-in-law’s side.
The OKH agreed to the suggestion for the decoration: on December 9, 1944, Wolff was decorated with the German Gold Cross. The award was justified, among other things, because “using predominantly Italian forces, with only weak secondary German units…was responsible for great undertakings in areas completely contaminated by partisans…leading to a sweeping success by completely destroying the partisans.” Wolff “earned outstanding achievements for the military direction of the war as well as the maintenance of war production in the Italian territory.” He was “worthy of the high decoration…with particularly high motivation.” Such massive praise must have whetted his appetite for further decorations. The next step would be from the Knight’s Cross to the Iron Cross. Wolff occasionally said that he had already been recommended for this medal,
but the war was over before the award reached him. The snail’s pace of the military bureaucracy cost him a necklace that, by the sixth year of the war, was almost a part of a general’s uniform. The situation reports from the local positions sounded less glorious than the recommendations for medals, though. In these, it was stated, among other things: “For sustained fighting of the partisans, the current forces are not enough.” And again, “Individual units are in control of their territories and have…taken over the administration. The organization can be counted on to continue to strengthen and separate groups are joining together so that in the future, planned operations with larger forces under united command can be expected.”
On the other hand, the merging of the Highest SS and Police Führer and the plenipotentiary General of the Wehrmacht simplified the united operations of all available units in the war against the partisans. Wolff was therefore in command of an army of far more than one hundred thousand men, who represented a conglomeration of units having different morale and motivation, different nationalities, weapons, training, and capabilities as soldiers. “Only very few Italian units,” it said in one situation report, “have proven to be reliable.” In these forces, included units that spoke neither German nor Italian; they had been recruited from war prison camps in the East, and the men had joined in mostly because they didn’t want to starve behind barbed wire. Next to Russian and Turkmen battalions, there was also one of Georgians; on one operation, it shrank by 120 men, who, together, deserted to the partisans. German soldiers stationed with the commanders of the Wehrmacht were certainly not top-quality fighters, otherwise they would have been sent to the front long before. The propaganda leaflets distributed by the Allied forces were successful even among them, not just with the Slav volunteers and the Italians; there were more and more deserters, and the population in the cities and towns willingly granted them help.
That pessimism and defeatism were to spread like an epidemic throughout Wolff’s army was only to be expected. After the occupation of Rome on June 4, the Allies landed in Normandy. In the middle of August, there was another such landing on the French Mediterranean coast. In September, Allied soldiers had reached the German border near Trier. One after the other, the Romanians and Bulgarians declared war on Germany. In mid-October 1944, Hitler, in what was obviously his final attempt, called up the Volkssturm (German territorial army). In Italy, he was continually able to temporarily stop the advance of the enemy further
north, but the population expected—as was written in the situation report—“the rapid extension of the fighting to northern Italy.”
Mussolini’s entourage had double the reasons to fear such a development. Not only was the enemy threatening them; the retaliation of their own countrymen would be even worse. The Italian people blamed the Fascists for the misfortune that had befallen Italy because of the war. The Fascist functionaries had experienced very little of this until then. In their idyllic location on Lake Garda, they saw streams of enemy bombers daily drawing lines of condensation in the sky, but they fell almost exclusively upon the German cities on the other side of the Alps. Occasionally a low-flying aircraft chased through the valley, and they had to seek cover because the enemy in the sky shot everything that moved, be it cars, boats, or persons. It was uncomfortable, but it was war. What could the people do about bombs falling on train stations, factories, and bridges in the cities and when their apartments were bombed out and people were killed? The bad news was easier to accept if one could always sleep peacefully, eat well and drink plenty on the banks of Lake Garda. In the restaurants, waiters quietly served their menus without requiring ration coupons—only it was more expensive than before. Everything came from the black market. But what was the big deal? Why should anyone save, in the face of an insecure future?
It was precisely this kind of uncertainty that caused such worries for Mussolini’s entourage. “Victory or death” was still the official battle cry. Now, however, victory seemed more unlikely, and death a very real possibility—unless there was a way to avoid the noose; but there was very little time left. By mid-October, the enemy was already able to temporarily block important roads at the level of the Po River with its artillery fire. The Germans had successfully forced the Allies back a few kilometers, but it was easy to see that with one surprise advance, they could quickly reach the southern edge of the Alps. Rahn and Wolff addressed the issue at their residence on Lake Garda in passing at first but then officially that it could be advisable to begin sending away the women and children to safety; every man would fight with more energy and unconditionally knowing that nothing could happen to his family.
Up to a point Wolff was sensitive to these concerns. He knew that his two families were protected from the war in every way that was humanly possible. His wife Frieda lived with their four children in rural peace on the Tegernsee in Rottach-Egern. His wife Ingeborg, because of his transfer to Italy, had secured luxurious quarters in the Austrian
Salzkammergut with the three children in a castle on the Wolfgangsee near the famous guesthouse “Zum Weissen Rösl.” The decision regarding quarters for the prominent Fascists, however, did not belong to either Wolff or Rahn. They had to ask Hitler. Some Italians, wishing to be deported to Switzerland, were easily rejected because the Swiss were expected to block such an influx. Also that kind of exodus would be viewed throughout the world as fleeing a sinking ship.
The Italians also argued as to who would probably be allowed in the last bastion, the Alpine fortress. Only prominent figures? Or also the armed forces? If at the beginning the talk was of tens of thousands, the Fascist party leadership reduced the number down to a few hundred chosen ones. Their shelter should be hard to reach, easy to guard and defend, but on the other hand not too far removed from civilized areas. If such a place existed on the southern edge of the Alps inside the Italian border, the partisans were already operating there.
Out of necessity, the top Fascists finally accepted the offer of a place to stay on the Arlberg. If they were in danger there, they could always retreat to southern Germany or over the mountain paths into Liechtenstein, and from there, trickle into Switzerland. The wives of the ministers, state secretaries and such moved with their children and servants to the plush winter sports hotel in Zürs, as guests of the Reich. To the majority of the Fascists in danger—meaning several tens of thousands—the mountain seclusion did not provide enough space. In the following weeks and months, they continued their escape north to the Frankenland between Würzburg and Nuremberg. But the beds there were to a great degree already filled by those fleeing the bombing of the large German cities, so the refugees looked for lodging in southern Bavaria and Austria.
Wolff wanted at least to keep the men in the south. Made up of Italians, South Tyroleans and other ethnic Germans he put together a unit that grew to no more than a battalion, but as the “24th Infantry Division of the SS, Kärst riflemen,” it received a name and an emblem. From the same group, Wolff recruited volunteers for a “29th Infantry Division of the SS,” which was given the ancient Roman symbol of the axe, showing their Italian-Fascist origin. That unit is also mentioned in the war diary of the OKW, where one can read, “A volunteer unit of the Waffen SS in the 14th army was given the name as Waffen SS Infantry Brigade (Ital) Nr. 1. It did not prove itself and therefore disappeared again.” How could it be otherwise? since the Italians were justified in their opinion that they only fought for the Germans and, in doing so, they were shooting at their
brothers and relatives. In the meantime, Italian divisions loyal to the monarchy were also fighting on the side of the Allies.