In every war, as the saying goes, if you went along with it, you can be hanged for it. Major General Kendall, in command of the 88th U.S. Army Division was not at all impressed that Wolff had been responsible for the surrender in Italy. He did nothing to prevent his soldiers from stealing from the SS general and his family. Wolff’s cash—several thousand reich marks, a thick bundle of Italian lire and several hundred Swiss francs—disappeared into their pockets. Wolff’s wife Inge, her mother and their children, the youngest being eight, were placed in a miserable displaced persons camp in Verona, home to a motley assortment of the flotsam of the war. Wolff was taken to Modena and handed over to British Intelligence. From May 16 on, he was kept at a large interrogation camp set up in the Cinecittà film studios in Rome.
On the third day after his arrival, things seemed to be changing. In the evening, one of Marshal Alexander’s adjutants called him to the office of the camp commander and told him that in a few days he and his family would be moved to a house with a garden. That property, however, and his family still had to be located. In order not to upset the Italians, Wolff had to temporarily use a different name. He decided to become Count Bernstorff—he always had a weakness for the aristocracy, and besides his wife was still using her old passport.
But this never did get too far and just five days later a fiesty first lieutenant of His Britannic Majesty curtly told Wolff that he was to remain as a POW at the camp, no reasons given. Three weeks later, the general almost got the opportunity to complain at the highest level The Commander in Chief, Field Marshal Harold Alexander, visited the camp, but avoided speaking to an SS general. From a distance, Wolff had to watch as the British field marshal, General von Vietinghoff, and General Lemelsen shook hands together.
On August 21, the Americans took the prisoners back to Germany. The plane landed in Nuremberg, the city of the Nazi party rallies. In a wing of the prison for prominent figures, in the same hallway as Göring, Wolff was assigned a cell as a war criminal. It was a narrow room with a barred window high up in the wall, a small table, a stool, a fold-up bed, and a gray woolen blanket. Everyone in that wing was living just as comfortably. The electric lamp on the ceiling had been removed. When it was dark, light would seep through the observation flap, which was always to remain open so that at all times the guards in the hall could watch what every prisoner was doing. The noise made by the guards and the employees, along with a cold draft, filtered through that hole.
At the beginning the Allies were planning to place Karl Wolff as Himmler’s former chief of personal staff on the dock during the first trial, along with Göring, Hitler’s former ministers, military officers and SS Obergruppenführer Kaltenbrunner. (Himmler had poisoned himself when he was arrested.) However, even though Allen Dulles had issued a veto from the OSS, he remained unreachable to his former negotiating partner in the surrender. When Wolff wrote a number of outraged appeals for help, Dulles pretended not to hear but still wanted to spare him a seat at the dock knowing how that would end. When Husmann again returned from Bern to speak on Wolff’s behalf, Dulles said: “Let time pass by this man. Perhaps we can help him later.”
Patience and reserve had never been among Wolff’s strengths, and in this situation he was certainly not able to take things in stride. His natural ambition and strong self-confidence were unbroken. During the negotiations in Switzerland, his partners commented that a man like him appeared destined to take over a leading role in a democratic Germany. It was even mentioned that Field Marshal Kesselring could become president of Germany and Wolff could become the first chancellor of the new German State. Blushing with joy, he had refused such an honor, but declared himself prepared to take part in the re-education of the German people to become democratic.
In the Nuremberg prison, there was no such talk. Wolff, therefore, saw himself forced to bring it to his jailers’ attention that they were constantly violating the rules of human fairness. One week after his arrival, he wrote a long letter of protest “to the Colonel and the Prison Commandant.” He began by complaining about a young U.S. lieutenant who repeatedly searched his cell and took Wolff’s personal army boots, a pair of gold cufflinks with green gems, and the stars from his general’s epaulettes.
His insignia of rank, the lieutenant had announced, would be taken from him very soon anyway.
Wolff saw this as “human and military degradation,” which he did not deserve in the least due to the list of his achievements in the surrender and the risks he took to secure an early peace. In Rome a commission had flown in from London just to interrogate him thoroughly; a radio signal to General Lemnitzer in Casarta would confirm that Wolff was not a war criminal. Also General Airy and Allen Dulles would not approve of the treatment that he was receiving. Against this assault on his “human and soldierly honor” he protested with a hunger strike. “Come what may,” he proclaimed, “MY HONOR has always stood much higher than my life and will continue that way in the future.” He wrote this word in capital letters, as the word GOD was sometimes written in Christian writings.
The letter was typed in English; someone must have translated it for Wolff. It was directed to U.S. Commander Burton C. Andrus, a tough jailer with a clear aversion to the Germans. Already at Mondorf in the Eifel, he had jailed and harassed the Nazi leadership imprisoned there. Once he had handed them over in Nuremberg, the prison that was filling up allowed him to fully vent his feelings. The prisoners defended themselves by disregarding his orders and cursing him. When he took the press to visit the rooms where the main defendants were having lunch during the trials, former economic minister and Reich Bank president Schacht defended himself against a photographer who held the camera right in his face by pouring a cup of coffee over his head. Andrus took this as an excuse and ordered that Schacht be denied his walk in the prison courtyard and no breakfast coffee for four weeks.
Wolff could do without the prison food without difficulty. It was bad and there was not enough of it. Andrus wanted his prisoners to be no less hungry than ordinary Germans who were still using grocery and ration cards. Wolff would not starve for very long. Already after a few days he was assured that he would keep his epaulettes and be allowed to continue wearing them. His stars were also returned to him. As he repeated with pride, he was the only German general in Nuremberg to wear his shoulder decoration; all the others had been removed. He viewed this as proof that because of his achievements, he could request special privileges. Since Andrus always found reasons to punish him, he got back at him by whistling the melody of the SS loyalty song whenever the commandant appeared. If the commander objected, Wolff could always say
that he was only whistling the national hymn of the Netherlands, one of the allies of the United States.
Twenty-five years later, in November 1961, he had one of his fellow prisoners swear how valiantly he had behaved at the Nuremberg prison. Since a preliminary examination was already taking place for the Munich trials, this declaration was to be used as evidence for the defense against a future accusation. It said: “Despite the fact that it was strictly forbidden to speak with one another” during the walks in the courtyard, “Wolff did not obey that rule. He used every opportunity … to encourage … his fellow prisoners. In that situation, Wolff was similar to Göring and a few others who, by their dignified behavior, gave their comrades strength and courage to get through this difficult time in a respectable manner.”
Before the main trial began in November, where, aside from the surviving leadership of the Third Reich, the Party and its ancillary organizations were being charged, Wolff felt compelled to save the honor of the SS. In letters to each of the supreme allied judges, he offered to stand accused in replacement of the dead Reichsführer SS and assume responsibility for the Black Guard of the Nazi party, “as a soldier who must jump in to fill the breach when a superior falls.” He believed he could thus prevent the SS from being branded as a criminal organization and that he could avoid each member being incriminated until there was proof of his innocence. His reasoning was presented in such mystical terms that it only made the lawyers shake their heads in complete disbelief. Although he repeated his request many times, they never gave him an answer because they neither had the time nor the desire to deal with his arguments.
Two years later, when Wolff was asked during a Nuremberg interrogation whether he had seriously intended to take responsibility for Himmler’s crimes, it became obvious how absurd those statements were. He would have clearly been sent to the gallows in that case. That was not at all what he had wanted, he said. They had misunderstood him; he was guilt-free and could prove that most of the SS did not take part in the crimes and only very few had even known of them. Two decades later when he was accused of having been involved in the mass murders, when the state attorney demanded that the jury of the Munich court condemn Wolff with a life sentence, the accused announced once again in his reply that he had only heard of “the mass killings in gas chambers for the first time from an American interrogation officer at Nuremberg.”
Most of the accused at the main War Crimes Tribunal in Nuremberg, even Hermann Göring, whom Hitler had employed as the highest official
responsible “for the solution to the Jewish question,” provided similar declarations of innocence. The judges would therefore have reacted to such assertions by Wolff with derision and scorn. It was his luck that he had no opportunity to issue such a statement early on. In the middle of May 1946 Wolff disappeared. The regular companion on his daily walks asked the guard where he had gone, and found out that he had been taken to an insane asylum. His mental condition was under observation and improved at the St. Getreu clinic in Bamberg. He had a bed in a room of the closed ward where sixteen other men were also living day and night. Several were constantly bedridden and incapable of controlling their bladders or bowels; others were argumentative to the point of being violent, and from morning til night the room was filled with an infernal noise of screaming, unpleasant singing and other wild rumblings. Wolff had to live in that environment. He spent another month in the lunatic ward in a sick bay in Augsburg. There are no files of medical examinations from that time. There is only the final report issued when he was released to the generals’ camp at Neu-Ulm on August 7; it stated that the patient was of sound mind.
The Nuremberg military court explained Wolff’s stay at the asylum stating that he suffered from a “delusion of self-sacrifice” with occasional fits of rage. The diagnosis, however, was only supported by isolated moments of excitement and by the written statements where he demanded to be allowed to represent the SS in Himmler’s place before the court. He was certainly not keen on being hanged or gaining fame as a martyr. He only wanted to give an example of courage and heroism. Up to that point, his name was known only in higher Party circles, but after such a trial and his acquittal, he would be known throughout the world. He considered a verdict of guilty as impossible, even though he repeated his assurances that he was prepared to give his life for his Fatherland and his comrades.
Wolff also repeatedly asserted later that they made him disappear so that he would stop fighting for the truth. His suspicions became even more believable because the psychiatrist who sent him to the lunatic ward was U.S. Major Leon Goldensohn, who as a Jew must have naturally hated everyone in the SS. He could even prove his theory with dates: he was of sound mind in August, once the evidence for the main Nuremberg war crimes trials was completed, and the opportunity for statements from witnesses had passed for the Malmedy trial, held against soldiers of the Waffen SS for crimes during Hitler’s final offensive at the Battle of the Bulge.
During his first months of incarceration at Nuremberg, Wolff was occasionally interrogated, but without any specific direction and in a fairly lax manner. He was not yet being confronted with documents. The Allies had not yet examined the mountains of papers that the Nazis had left behind. While Wolff was at the psychiatric hospital, a U.S. prosecution officer determined in a file memo that from his point of view there was no further interest in him. In another entry written very shortly after that he commented that Wolff should be released.
In the meantime, the British had developed an interest in him. In August 1946, he was flown to London where he was held for two months and interrogated often, primarily about events in Italy, the hostage murders in Rome, Kesselring’s role and that of other Wehrmacht generals who were later placed on trial. Wolff expected to be tortured during those interrogations, because among the prisoners, in what was known as the “London District POW Cage” the rumor was that statements were obtained by torture. He was certainly spared such experiences; otherwise he would have mentioned them. He quickly became of little interest to the British. They returned him to the Americans, who at first placed him, due to his rank, under automatic arrest in a huge internment camp in Ludwigsburg, and then kept him in a camp for generals in Garmisch.
But already at the beginning of 1947, the Nuremberg courts were calling for him again. He was required as a witness many times. One of his comrades from the “Fighter Days,” meaning before 1933, had to answer to the First American Military Court for crimes against humanity. He was Viktor Brack, who came from a good Munich family, who happened to be the last senior administrator at the “Chancellery of the Führer” and an SS Oberführer. Fifteen years before, they had both marched together as Hitler’s propagandists through Bavaria’s cities and towns carrying the swastika flag. Now Brack was on trial because, on orders from Hitler, not only was he responsible for murdering the mentally ill in a clinic in a “euthanasia” operation, but his experienced team and their equipment participated in the Holocaust.