That was the reason why Wolff had arranged for protecting his office in the palace of the Counts of Pistoia in Bozen against attacks with an SS unit. Czech radio operator Hradecky had a transmission room where he slept on the third floor. On his door, there was a sign that read: “Entry only with the Obergruppenführer’s permission.” Now Wolff could send messages to Switzerland through that radio antenna: the negotiators Schweinitz and Wenner had to avoid Tyrol on their return to headquarters if possible, but most importantly they should stay away from Innsbruck. Kaltenbrunner and Hofer were there, waiting to have them arrested.
The two negotiators had already signed the armistice at 2:00 p.m. on April 29. According to Article I the capitulation would take place unconditionally. The ceasefire was to begin on May 2 at 12:00 p.m. English time. Now the two negotiators had to return to their headquarters to report and deliver the document. Waibel brought them through Switzerland, and told them about the dangers of their trip home; but first there was a problem at the border crossing at Bludenz, because one of Waibel’s rivals in the Swiss Intelligence Service wanted to disrupt the operation. Schweinitz and Wenner were stopped for six hours. Wolff sent a car to the border to pick them up. They reached the Reschen Pass by way of Landeck and arrived without a hitch in Bozen in the early hours of May 1.
Since their departure a week before, many momentous events had taken place. The dictatorial system run by Hitler and Mussolini now melted away as quickly as the snow in the Alps. As they arrived in Switzerland on April 23, Mussolini was just beginning his failed attempt to extract himself
from the whole mess through an understanding with the Milan partisans. After leaving Milan, he spent the night of April 26 in Como, only a few kilometers away from his former advisor and guard, Wolff, who was spending the night at the Villa Locatelli. However, neither of the two men knew how close they were. When they left in the early morning, Mussolini wanted to get rid of his SS escort as well, but SS Untersturmführer Fritz Birzer asserted himself, threatened to use his weapons, and insisted that his men and their vehicles be part of the convoy. The convoy took the western bank of the long lakeside drive north, always barely a few kilometers from the Swiss border. On the afternoon of April 26, the cars turned west on a road leading to Lake Lugano that also reached into Switzerland. They stopped in the town of Grandola. Two of Mussolini’s ministers attempted to slip into Switzerland on a scouting mission. When this failed, the convoy turned back toward the banks of the lake. Mussolini spent the night in Menaggio. He announced that he wanted to drive as far as Merano the next day—a road where the distance to the border was constantly changing, but at the same time could lead to his bastion in the Alps, the Valtellina, and to Wolff’s headquarters as well.
They started at 5:30 a.m., but did not get very far. Already after the next town, just before Dongo, a tree trunk and a few boulders blocked the road. Partisans had set a trap; the road had a very steep drop to the lake on the right-hand side and to the left a cliff climbing straight up from the edge of the road. In front of the obstacle, there was a line of vehicles continuing for a few kilometers because Mussolini’s column had been joined by a Luftwaffe intelligence unit that was not very experienced when it came to fighting. An armored scout car made up the lead of the convoy. Behind them, there were regular cars and trucks of all kinds, and among them some motorcycle riders.
When the head of the convoy was shot at, the armored scout car became immobilized because its tires got hit. Intimidated by this, no one thought of clearing away the obstacles. The built-in machine guns in the armored scout car provided some cover. However, the SS, the Luftwaffe company, and the Italians were so demoralized by the defeat that each of them was only thinking of saving his own skin.
From the front, two young Italians approached the head of the column with a white flag. They demanded that the weapons be handed over to them. No one from Mussolini’s people could be seen. The commander of the Luftwaffe company took charge of talking with the partisans because he spoke fluent Italian. He went to Dongo with them and returned
after six hours—after the partisans had called in reinforcements from the entire region. Proud of what they had achieved, he announced that the Germans were allowed to continue driving on to Switzerland without weapons, of course. Only the Italians would be held back. The fact that the resistance movement had used the radio to call for the immediate execution of all Fascist leaders was known to most of the Germans in the convoy. But in a situation like this, every man looked after himself.
At the marketplace in Dongo, the vehicles were searched and personal effects were inspected. Hidden on a truck between two gasoline containers, the partisans discovered the former Duce and current Head of State of the Italian Social Republic. He was disguised in a German military coat and a Wehrmacht steel helmet and pretended to be a sleeping drunk. He was led away, followed by the screams of hatred from the crowd that had gathered. His ministers and Party functionaries were arrested along with Clara Petacci, who insisted on sharing his fate.
On the afternoon of April 27, the Germans in the convoys were allowed to drive on north, across Chiavenna to the Maloja Pass. At the Swiss border they had to wait for a long time before they were allowed through, but they were not stopped or opposed at any time. They were taken to the road leading to the Reschen Pass into Austrian territory via St. Moritz and through the Engadin. They were the only German soldiers allowed into Swiss territory as a unit. The question will remain unanswered whether or not it was their duty to protect the Italians, Mussolini included, from the blind rage of popular justice. It would have allowed for proper court proceedings to deal with their actions and the atrocities they had committed.
When journalist Erich Kuby was assigned to write a story on Claretta Petacci for a German magazine, he traveled with the then almost eighty-year-old former General Karl Wolff around Italy and Germany in search of facts and witnesses. Fritz Birzer, who headed the SS escort commandos, said that handing over Mussolini was the only way to control the situation. Otherwise more than two hundred people would have died because of one man. Wolff then completed that statement: “If he had kept his word of honor”—and he was referring to the instance when Mussolini had acted against the instructions of the SS Obergruppenführer—“he would have been well cared for.” No one was to blame for what had happened.
During the night of September 27 following a short stay at a customs house, Mussolini, together with Claretta Petacci, was taken to a farmhouse by the partisans. She insisted on accompanying him. The farmer’s wife prepared her children’s bedroom for the couple, not knowing who they
were because the partisans had wrapped the man’s head in bandages to keep him from being recognized. A guard stood in front of the door. At approximately 11:00 a.m. the next morning the couple was served breakfast in their room. A Communist partisan leader picked up the prisoners and drove aimlessly around with them in a car in search of a suitable place for the “execution.” Finally he stopped in front of the driveway of a country home. The property was separated from the street by a high wall. Mussolini and Clara Petacci were told to get out, go through the gate and stand on the inner side of the wall. The partisan then announced that a liberation committee had sentenced them both to death and shot them with his submachine gun.
In the meantime, sixteen Fascist party and government leaders were executed in Dongo, along with Clara Petacci’s brother, Marcello. The corpses were loaded onto a truck. The two dead bodies from behind the garden wall were also added to the load. The dead were displayed in Milan on the pavement of the Piazzale Loreto. And once the people had vented their rage on Mussolini’s corpse, his body and that of his lover were hanged by the feet at a gas station.
When Hitler heard of this, in the bunker of the Reich Chancellery, he ordered that his body be burned immediately after his suicide—which actually took place two days later. He no longer intended to engage in the fighting in the south, although Kaltenbrunner in the Tyrol challenged him to do so by reporting that “after the breakthrough by the Americans, a disorderly flight to the north had begun.” After the “outbreak of planned rebellions in all the large cities” he had “reason to fear that the demands of the regional liberation committees would be accepted by the top leaders…and according to Hofer, these included Wolff and Vietinghof.” Kaltenbrunner suggested blocking all the roads in the South Tyrol leading north by “immediately setting up strong demolition squads,” and therefore preventing a breakthrough of enemy tanks to the Brenner Pass.
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*
Walther Rauff, SD Chief in Milan, died in 1984 in Chile. After the end of the war, he found support through the Catholic church, apparently lived illegally for two years in a convent, and then was smuggled out to South America. Rauff’s “claim to fame” was being the inventor of the gas vans, used first to kill the mentally ill and later the Jews.
I
n the chaos of Berlin during the last days of April no one followed Kaltenbrunner’s suggestion. At the same time in South Tyrol, his plan to either hold a number of the most prominent concentration camp prisoners of the Third Reich as hostages or execute them as witnesses for the prosecution if negotiations broke down also failed. Since the beginning of April those prisoners had been gathered from various concentration camps and were then transported south of Dachau by bus. They were closely guarded by the SS, but were always treated reasonably well. Among them was former French prime minister Léon Blum and his wife, a nephew of Soviet foreign minister Molotov and two English secret service officers whom Hitler suspected of having organized the assassination attempt on his life with a bomb in the Munich Bürgerbräukeller during the evening of November 8, 1939. These also included Pastor Martin Niemöller and several other protestant clergymen who had taken a stand against National Socialism in the German Confessional Church, the former minister and Reichsbank president Hjalmar Schacht, who had helped finance Hitler’s armaments, but had refused to cooperate in the war plans, generals and other officers of the Wehrmacht—some two hundred people in all.
The transport finally stopped on April 29 at Niederndorf in Pustertal, not far from Toblach, because the SS guards did not know what else to do. While they tried to get further instructions, Captain Bogislaw von Bonin called the headquarters of the army group in Bozen from a Wehrmacht office. He asked General Röttinger for help, since they had occasionally worked together in the past. Röttinger immediately sent the officer in charge of his headquarters, Captain Wichard von Alvensleben, with a commando of eight well-armed NCOs with experience at the front. When Alvensleben asked the commanding officer of the SS guards about the destination and purpose of the transport, the man replied that his mission would not be completed “until the prisoners are dead.” Because the SS men were in the process of enjoying a few hours of relaxation in town, they had only left a few men behind to guard the prisoners. Alvensleben had them individually arrested and locked up in the Town Hall, some eighty-six men in all. Once they figured out that they were stronger than their guards, they threatened to turn things around but relented when Alvensleben called in a motorized Wehrmacht company from Toblach.
Wolff was involved in the operation since he had spoken to Bonin on the telephone and had agreed to help. He also instructed the guards to withdraw from Niederndorf, and ordered that the prisoners be set up with accommodations in a luxurious hotel on the Pragueser Wild Lake, an idyllic valley parallel to the Pustertal. There, they could wait in freedom for the arrival of the allied troops. However, they were not sent back home that quickly, and were first taken to the island of Capri where they were questioned by the OSS. In later years when Wolff was repeatedly on trial, he made it a habit of using the liberation of those prisoners to his advantage as one of his “good deeds.” However, Captain Bonin, when questioned as a witness, stated that he did not know former Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff, and was not aware of owing this man anything. Another witness, however, did confirm Wolff’s statement to a degree, but here (as it so often happened) Wolff presumably told the truth in a way that enhanced his image much better than the facts themselves.
It was also news to the negotiators who had returned from Caserta that their most important client, General Heinrich von Vietinghoff, who provided their legal cover, had been removed. As ordered, he waited for his sentencing by a court-martial in a hotel on Lake Darer, high up in the Dolomites. Only his Chief of Staff, General Röttinger would still be active, until May 1. When he heard from the new arrivals that none of the
requested concessions would be honored by the victors, that the surrender would literally be unconditional, Wolff had to give him moral support. The two generals, one from the SS and the other from the Wehrmacht, came to the conclusion that now they absolutely must cross the Rubicon of legality. They ordered that all information channels going north to Kesselring and to Berlin be blocked. Röttinger had the newly named commander of the Army Group General Schulz, and his Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Wentzell, informed that a fundamental change in the situation made it impossible for him to relinquish his position. Röttinger had the two locked up in their rooms in the gauleiter bunker and the doors guarded by officers with submachine guns. It was actually a small mutiny. It was obvious which side Wolff was on. He had been busy for weeks trying to end the war, and was prepared to pay almost any price. His conscience did not bother him too much; the oaths he had sworn to Hitler and Himmler were
one
thing, the war and defeat were
another
. He convinced himself that he had always told his Führer the truth (even though some things were kept silent) and that he had even been authorized by Hitler to negotiate the way he did. He secretly saw himself as the executor of the Führer’s will. He was part of the group that was to implement the surrender signed by Schweinitz and Wenner—this had to take place immediately because the ceasefire was to begin on the following day.