And so, on May 1 at about 10 a.m., at the headquarters of the Army Group, the contortions regarding the “oath of allegiance” began. For those involved, it was an exciting and, at times even a tragic, spectacle; but for the others it included some grotesque and even comic scenes. First, the Supreme Commander of the German Navy (a very small force) and the Supreme Commander of the Luftwaffe in Italy (which due to a lack of fuel and airplanes existed only on the ground) were informed of the situation. They were careful in their reactions. Before commenting on the events taking place, they wanted to consult their chiefs of staff. Röttinger then informed the members of his staff. Many young officers were demanding that the war go on; they did not want to turn their backs on the Führer, especially at a time like this. General Joachim Lemelsen, Commander of the 14th Army (which was holding the western flank) refused over the telephone; even if his soldiers’ situation seemed hopeless, he would only agree to an order to surrender from the legitimate supreme commander of the Army Group. This was General Schulz, who was by then confined to his quarters. Even General Traugott Herr, the supreme commander the 10th Army, which occupied the western segment of the
front, voiced his concerns against the surrender, but seemed prepared to negotiate.
The officers’ code of conduct called for committing suicide by shooting oneself in the head as the only solution in such cases. General Röttinger felt that he had failed and decided to take his leave of the world by blowing his brains out. Wolff found out about this and decided to stand by his comrade in word and deed. Once again, he saw a possible compromise where others could find no way out. He recommended that the generals who had been locked up be returned to their offices and that they be persuaded to change their mind. He was convinced that in the end, under current conditions, the new broom would not sweep better than the old one—and he turned out to be right.
General Schulz, who was now in command, was unable to report to his immediate superior, Field Marshal Kesselring, anything different from his predecessor, namely, the situation was hopeless and further fighting was pointless. Kesselring, however, insisted on his order to keep fighting, come what may. When Schulz informed the generals assembled at the gauleiter bunker at 6:00 p.m., all of them agreed with his analysis of the situation, but no one was prepared to stop the fighting as long as he had not been ordered to do so by Schulz himself. Even though he wanted to he felt incapable of issuing those orders unless he received instructions from Kesselring. But even the Army Commander was still waiting patiently for a word from his commander in chief. Hitler, however, had been silent for over twenty-four hours now, and would never again issue orders of any kind. In Bozen, no one knew this yet, and possibly not even the Supreme Commander of the West, who was now compelled to withdraw his headquarters back into Austria.
The generals who were conferring in the gauleiter bunker had reached a dead end. However, Wolff, always eloquent, called Kesselring once more. Since he didn’t reach him, he suggested to his chief of staff that the field marshal name another general as supreme commander in Italy, to replace Schulz, someone prepared to surrender without Kesselring’s consent. This was a bizarre suggestion and he never did get an answer.
While those gentlemen were brooding silently over the apparently insoluble conflict, the Commanding General got up at around 10:00 p.m. He had reached a decision and ordered his staff officer that on the following day at 2:00 p.m., midday English time, the 10th Army would cease fire, as stipulated in the agreement. Also, General Lemelsen of the 14th Army and Luftwaffe General Pohl agreed to endorse the order. Wolff was therefore
able to report to allied Field Marshal Sir Harold Alexander, through the Czech wireless operator, that the agreement would be honored, even without the approval of the Supreme Commander of the Army Group.
At about 11:00 p.m. the head intelligence officer came into the conference room with momentous news. He simply said: “The Führer is dead!” With those four words, all oaths of allegiance became null and void. News of Hitler’s death lightened up the worried faces of the men around the table. It was clear that they had no longer had any reason to argue. The new supreme commander would not oppose the surrender. He was only waiting for Kesselring’s decision.
It reached them by telegram two hours later—but it was different than expected. Kesselring was ordering the arrest of Generals Vietinghoff, Röttinger, and three other officers; a court-martial would be convened to sentence them. Young officers, upon reading that telegram, got together and suddenly took positions at the conference room door with submachine guns ready to carry out the order. Wolff led the threatened group to safety through another exit out of the bunker system he knew so well. Those still loyal to Hitler wanted to force Wolff out of his headquarters by using tanks, but they decided against it when the SS general had seven Waffen SS tanks drive out around the Pistoia Palace for his own protection. Through the Czech radio operator, he signaled Marshal Alexander to request help from Allied paratroopers who would probably land in Bozen immediately. He was not only worried about himself and the capitulation in general; his wife Ingeborg was now living with the children inside SS headquarters.
At 2:00 a.m. on May 2, ten hours before the start of the ceasefire, Kesselring called Wolff one more time. He accused him of driving those soldiers facing the Red Army into Soviet captivity in Siberia because of the surrender. They would not have enough time to make their way to the British or American lines. Besides, he was endangering the retreat of German troops from Greece and Yugoslavia. As a countermove, Wolff could prove to the Army Commander that only an immediate surrender would guarantee that western troops rather than the Communists would occupy the key position at Trieste. And indeed, British motorized units immediately reached the city on a fast march and occupied it before Tito’s partisans could take over.
The conversation between Kesselring and Wolff, including technical interruptions, continued for two full hours, and it seemed as if the field marshal was refusing to yield. However, a half-hour later over the phone,
he gave General Schulz his approval to surrender, and rescinded his orders to arrest the officers. At dawn, the headquarters of the Army group clearly broadcast the order to all Wehrmacht units that all firing was to cease at 2:00 p.m. local time and that weapons were to be handed over to the enemy.
The war continued for several more days in the west and the east. However, on May 3, even Kesselring was ready to bring an end to the fighting and the dying. He called Wolff in the morning and asked him to also arrange for an armistice for the armies of the Supreme Command in the West. The Czech radioman, who was still in Bozen in Wolff’s headquarters that were still operational, sent Marshal Alexander the following text: “Wolff, under instructions from Kesselring, to Alexander: request information, which Allied headquarters is responsible for negotiations for the surrender of Commander in Chief in the West.” Wolff’s radioman received the answer that Eisenhower was the man responsible, and that the inquiry had been immediately sent on to him. Through the same channel on the following day, instructions were received as to where Kesselring’s negotiators were to appear at the American lines.
General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander, later wrote in his memoirs that the surrender in Italy sped up the unavoidable complete capitulation, thereby shortening the war by many days. Retrospectively in the 1960s, Allen Dulles wrote about Wolff’s role: “He made his great contribution to the success of the Sunrise operation.”
*
That sentence could obscure the achievements of several other men in the Wehrmacht and on Wolff’s staff. What they had done was less striking whereas he happened to possess the voice, the bearing, and the stature that easily eclipsed others around him. He did take great risks but only Himmler and Hitler could call him to account for anything—and everything had always gone smoothly with both, perhaps because in their relationship to Wolff they were victims of their own insanely grotesque views on race whereby such a specimen of the aristocratic German and the knight in shining armor could only be completely loyal. Besides, they were always far removed from action during all these operations. The generals of the Wehrmacht in northern Italy were in a much worse position. They were under scrutiny from every direction, even by their commander in chief Adolf Hitler himself, who during the final phase of the war wanted to be informed of the movements of every single company. They could
therefore only attempt to end the war underhandedly. For all these reasons, many South Tyroleans consider Wolff as the one man responsible for saving their homeland from the fury of war. When he visited the wine country at Eppan near Bozen many years later, he was celebrated as an honored guest and showered with applause at a local festival. All of this moved him to tears.
His final days in the South Tyrol in May 1945 were full of short-lived joy and sunshine. Wolff had somehow managed to avoid problems once again; everything that appeared so threatening before—the war and court-martial, Hitler and Himmler, the Gestapo and the enemy—all had vanished like ghosts. The victors were not being harsh; they had moved past Bozen toward the Brenner Pass, leaving behind a relatively weak unit to occupy the city. The local commander left it up to the Germans to worry about peace, order and discipline among themselves. As long as they were acting as deputy policemen, they were even allowed to carry weapons. Almost everyone in the region had reason to celebrate, the South Tyroleans, the Allies and the defeated German troops. Even the Germans were not lacking in food and drink. The warehouses of the Wehrmacht quartermaster were still full, and whoever wanted more could obtain it by exchanging army goods on the black market.
In the first few days following the surrender, Wolff had invited by radio his American partners from Bern to come to Bozen. The lawyer Dulles could not endanger his OSS career because of a friendship with one of the highest ranking officers in the SS, but Gaevernitz landed at the Bozen airport on May 9. He was surprised by the almost peaceful atmosphere in the streets, and most of all by the SS troops standing guard in front of Wolff’s palace presenting arms whenever an officer went through the gate. During the afternoon coffee, Wolff introduced his family to the guest. He showed him to Vaclav Hradecky in his radio cabin, and the basement where he kept the coin collection belonging to King Victor Emmanuel III that he had taken from the Quirinal Palace for safekeeping when the Germans retreated. Finally, he traveled with Gaevernitz to St. Leonhard in the Passeier Valley north of Meran. This was not because one and a half centuries before the Tyrolean national hero Andreas Hofer had served wine and bacon there as an innkeeper, but rather because in this town at the bottom of the valley Tuscan art treasures were stored and Wolff had supervised their transportation out of Tuscany. Gaevernitz found paintings and sculptures of incalculable value in the town hall and in a shed near a sawmill that were kept unwrapped and not
very well stored. He felt that it was urgent for American art experts to take care of the preservation of these works.
On May 12, Gaevernitz left Bozen. He knew for sure what would happen on the following day, and had no desire to watch. Wolff celebrated his 45th birthday that day with champagne and a cold buffet in the palace gardens, in the tradition befitting a general. However, that afternoon, soldiers from the 38th U.S. Army division burst into the festival loudly requesting that everyone quickly get into their trucks. Whoever wore a German uniform in Bozen was taken to a prisoners’ camp in the south. Rank and honor were barely respected, and upon entering the camps watches and rings, the little man’s spoils of war, were more important. In this respect, the GIs were no different than the soldiers of the Red Army. If anyone had told General Karl Wolff that he would spend the next four years behind barbed wire, bars, and locked doors, he would certainly not have believed it.
By the evening of May 13, 1945, as he sat in his cell at the prison in Bozen, did SS Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff, General of the Waffen SS and Plenipotentiary General of the German Wehrmacht realize that after his fat years, he was on the threshold of the long lean ones? The American GIs handled him somewhat roughly, disregarding his rank. They had also arranged for accommodations for his wife, his three children, and his mother-in-law at the camp. He kept his outrage to himself, however, when he remembered what his guest Gaevernitz, even though an OSS agent, had told him two days before—the victors must first lock up the Highest SS and Police Führer in Italy, whether he liked it or not, because the entire world expected it; then after a few days or weeks at the most, they would return him to freedom in Germany so he could start whatever job he wished as had already been discussed during the surrender negotiations.
The Allied generals had agreed with the German negotiators in Caserta that they would treat prisoners of war with honor, even chivalrously. The
Stars and Stripes
newspaper had gone so far as publish that stipulation. It could only be a verbal promise, since a written commitment would violate the agreements among the Allies because the surrender could only be unconditional. Based on that, Wolff and his friends were already planning on when they would be with their families, which could take two or three months, as the railroad tracks over the Brenner Pass had to be repaired and returned to working order. Transporting the prisoners could then take some two months; generals and staff officers would be the last to go and could be home in time for Christmas.
Several of Wolff’s acquaintances in Italy, however, did not share his optimism and were not counting on being back home that soon. One of these was the ambassador to the Vatican, Baron Ernst von Weiszäcker. Protected by his diplomatic status and the extraterritoriality of the Vatican State, he had been overrun by the Allied armed forces in Rome. He thought that, as the former State Secretary under Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop, he would have to stand trial. He was indeed sentenced to seven years in prison at the “Wilhelmstrasse Trial” at Nuremberg, although he made every effort in the foreign office to prevent Hitler’s war and had not participated in any atrocities.