Wolff remained convinced until his death that Hitler did not know what happened in the extermination camps. He admitted under questioning by the American interrogator Dobbs on April 24, 1947, that he was being dishonest with himself at that time. He gave assurances that he had never heard about the Einsatzgruppen before the end of the war. Could he truly not remember that he, together with Himmler in Minsk, had watched as Einsatzgruppen 8 pushed over one hundred people into a ditch and murdered them there?
Journalist Gitta Sereny tried to explain how someone can shut himself off from such atrocities after a nine-day visit with Hitler’s armaments minister, Albert Speer (published in the ZEIT magazine in 1978). After serving his sentence at Spandau prison, following his conviction by the Nuremberg tribunal, Speer was living in Heidelberg writing his memoirs. He also stated that he knew nothing of the mass murders, which may appear believable since he had relatively little to do with Himmler and the SS. The Nuremberg Tribunal accepted that he was not informed of the mass murders. However, with Gitta Sereny, Speer did admit, “I can say that I had an idea… that something horrible was happening to the Jews.” Anyone able to observe the happenings in Hitler’s Reich from the lofty standpoint of a minister or as an SS Obergruppenführer, had to at least have an
idea
of something dreadful was taking place. Wolff, however, would never admit that.
After April 1947 Wolff was no longer considered a prisoner under investigation in Nuremberg. Perhaps his numerous protests had some effect, or perhaps the decision not to prosecute him made the difference since he had been transferred to POW status. In addition, he was a “senior” prisoner of war, and therefore the POW representative with the U.S. authorities and had to guarantee everyone’s good behavior and well-being. If the food was bad, he had to file a complaint. When the Americans dismissed the German cleaning women who up to that point had been cleaning the hallways, stairs and toilets, he wrote to the “prison director,” a U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, that he please “have the regular cleaning of the common rooms continued.”
However, Wolff could not handle his concerns about his family. Frau Frieda (neé von Römheld) pulled through bravely with her four children in difficult times with help from her relatives and wrote comforting letters
to her ex-husband. Frau Inge (the divorced Countess Bernstorff), with her three children from three different husbands, had to face mounting difficulties. In the summer, Wolff asked for help in a letter to his interrogator Rapp, with whom he obviously got along well. The cash that had been taken from him during his captivity in Bozen—Swiss francs, lire, reich marks—had still not been sent to his wife. Some soldier had simply let it disappear into his own pocket. His wife was without income now for two and a half years and had been forced to sell her last valuables at giveaway prices. Recently, they had even impounded the furniture, which was a normal reprisal against high-ranking leaders of the Nazi party.
Many months later, Wolff sent Husmann a request. He said that his wife Inge, who was ill, complained to him: “Both doctors prescribe rest, inner peace” and medication that “can only be found abroad.” “More recent emotional burdens could lead to the slow end of a human life.” Wolff “begged” Husmann to “obtain a corresponding dose of the medication as quickly as possible. I will repay your expenses, of course, as soon as I can. Should anything serious happen to my wife as a result of the continued inconsideration” (the still unfulfilled promises to protect him and his family from persecution) “it would mean the public bankruptcy of your guarantees and obligations.”
Husmann did not take this stern reminder of his role as negotiator during the surrender too badly. He continued to help Wolff whenever he could. He understood that Wolff turned to him and Waibel as “guarantors” of the rather vague promises made by the Allied negotiators. The two Swiss private citizens, the director of a boarding school and an officer without official support, could at best obtain something through their persistent appeals. Allen Dulles would have responded to Wolff’s complaints. However, he did have reasons to play deaf; as a politician, he was on his way to becoming director of the CIA, and his brother John Foster Dulles was attempting to be appointed U.S. Secretary of State. During a speech in New York, Allen Dulles could indeed afford to recommend economic aid for the starving Germans so soon after the end of the war, but had he openly pleaded for an SS Obergruppenführer, it would not have helped his career.
The interrogating officer Rapp told Wolff that Allen Dulles’ station had been closed “at the end of the war”; the attorney had “due to his contacts, at most an indirect influence…but no power to issue orders.” Robert Murphy, the political advisor to General Lucius Clay, the U.S. High Commissioner for the American Sector, was a more likely official to be
able to help. Murphy would be in a favorable mood if Wolff could clear up several facts that remained unclear during the last weeks of the war. This was how Rapp established a statement made by Wolff that there had been a “traitor” during the negotiations for capitulation, someone who had continually informed Kaltenbrunner and Himmler of the treachery of the Highest SS and Police Führer in Italy.
“It was,” said Wolff, “the Chief of the Swiss Defense, Colonel Masson.” SS Gruppenführer Walter Schellenberg, chief of German espionage in the last phase of the war, told him this during a chance meeting in the Nuremberg prison. Indeed the role of Roger Masson was discussed among Swiss citizens; he handled the exchange of information with Schellenberg, when the latter was still Chief of the Foreign Department of the SD. Masson played both ends in establishing a central exchange of secrets between the Axis powers and the Western Allies. From his subordinate, Major Waibel, he found out the general outline of what was happening between Wolff and Dulles. Schellenberg did not like the situation, as he wanted to control contacts to the OSS in order to save himself at the right time, and also because Himmler and Kaltenbrunner were both demanding that he be in contact with the Western Allies. Both were hoping to somehow manage to cheat their way out of the Nazi
Götterdämmerung
.
The question as to why the Americans never tried Wolff in Nuremberg was asked many times. Wolff answered it himself the same way on every occasion; despite thorough and lengthy examinations, nothing criminal could be discovered. Telford Taylor was chief prosecutor during the second phase of the Nuremberg trials, a New York lawyer by profession. During the investigations of the Munich court against Wolff, Taylor testified before a Bavarian examining judge and said, among other things, “Mr. Wolff was at first in the group of people who could have been prosecuted… After he became a British prisoner, he was no longer under American jurisdiction.” As Taylor was asked if the accusations against Wolff that were presented in Munich would also have been sufficient for a condemnation in Nuremberg, he said, “It would have been the proper place.” In the indictment of the Munich prosecution, Taylor’s sworn testimony, “with several perjured statements,” according to Wolff, led to the conclusion that “the American criminal prosecutors” who did not have to proceed according to German legal procedures, “made a free choice among the many possible defendants at that time.” Wolff “belonged to the suspects in Nuremberg who were spared final examination and prosecution.”
Why did this happen? Allen Dulles, whom Wolff called disloyal, could probably have cleared this up.
In January 1948 Wolff was finally handed over to the British, and was received very badly. They stuck him in a detention institution called “Tomato” in Minden in a cell that was constantly locked, without a window-pane, heating, a table or a chair. They took almost everything he had brought, including his files, and, what hurt him the most, all of his medals. In a letter “To the Prison Commandant Tomato” under the heading “urgent” and the short formulation “Sir,” he protested; he was “neither a war criminal nor released from the Wehrmacht,” and therefore was entitled to the “status of a prisoner of war with the rank of a full general.” He threatened to complain through Ambassador Murphy (whose name he knew only through the interrogator Rapp), and Field Marshal Alexander, and he would take this “scandalous case to the English and the American public.” This did not impress the commandant, who let the SS general freeze in the cold cell for twelve days. Wolff became ill and was transferred to the former concentration camp at Neuengamme near Hamburg. There he was informed he could no longer claim rights as a prisoner of war, however few those may have been; he was now a civilian prisoner awaiting trial because he had belonged to an organization that was declared to be criminal in Nuremberg.
In a list of his “imprisonment data” Wolff names the camp at Neuengamme an “Eng. internment concentration camp.” He obviously did not want to remember that it had been a place of SS terror for many years, and that the British, as liberators of the prisoners, stood in disgust in front of piles of corpses—those who had died of starvation, epidemics, and being worked to death.
Wolff was informed that denazification proceedings against him would now be carried out. Every German was subjected to it during the first years following the end of the Nazi regime. The courts, specifically created for this purpose, were handling the procedure. Simple membership in the Nazi party or one of its organizations was reason enough for an investigation. This was even more of a certainty in cases of affiliation to something like the SS, which had been declared a criminal organization in Nuremberg. Anyone who had reached the rank of an Obergruppenführer was regarded automatically as “incriminated in principle.” According to rank, position, and personal incrimination, a defendant could be sentenced to prison for many years, or be condemned to pay fines, have his assets confiscated, be banned from any profession, and other lesser punishments.
Formal incrimination could be lightened by providing proof that, although one paid dues and had occasionally given the Hitler salute when singing the national anthem, he had done nothing to strengthen violent Nazi rule. Any deviations from the National Socialist laws were virtually worth gold, especially if confirmed by sworn oaths by persons racially or politically persecuted, such as Jews, Christians, Marxists, or even state enemies actively opposed to the former regime. Since the majority of Germans had belonged to one National Socialist organization or another in some capacity, most of them were more or less seriously affected by denazification. For that reason, in those days many people created files of documents where friendly persons confirmed that they only wore the swastika under duress, out of gullibility, to cover their secret opposition, or out of misled idealism (anything not applicable was to be deleted).
Wolff already had an impressive collection of such “Persil certificates” at Nuremberg. He now used the three months in Neuengamme to increase the stack. Gaevernitz sent in a reference. The pastor of his former Lutheran congregation in Munich confirmed that, even in his SS uniform, he had visited the church, before leaving the Church altogether. A millionaire German banker certified that Wolff had been involved in the liberation of Baron Rothschild, his Viennese colleague. However, this was interrupted, because the British believed they still had to take him to court for murders in Italy, similar to the case of Field Marshal Kesselring. Therefore Wolff had to sit in the war criminal camp in Braunschweig for three more months.
In the summer of 1948, the British stopped trying to issue any criminal indictment against Wolff. They sent him to the internment camp at Fallingbostel, north of Hannover. In the meantime he had hired a lawyer from Hamburg, but could not pay his fees. He could merely transfer the 40 Deutsche marks “head money” that every German received after the currency reform of the summer of 1948. However, he made the lawyer aware of other sources of funds. There was, for example, Max Waibel, who had in the meantime been promoted to lieutenant colonel in the Swiss Army and was now the military attaché in Washington. He was wealthy enough to help out, but, even more importantly, he could persuade Dulles and Gaevernitz (“both supposedly very wealthy”) to also make a contribution.
T
he Cold War had become a reality and was a confirmation for Wolff that in Italy he had already found the path to a new German future. “My surrender,” he wrote to a friend, “was the Tauroggen of the 20th century…and still contained all the related opportunities for Germany.” He saw himself in the historic hero’s role of General York von Wartenburg of Prussia, who retreated from Russia with his army in 1812, and then on his own, broke the alliance with Napoleon to sign a pact with the former enemy. “My case,” Wolff wrote, “is neither criminal nor a case for the courts, but rather a specifically political issue related to the honor and the broken assurances of President Truman, Churchill, and Field Marshal Alexander. That is my luck and my tragedy at the same time.”
The public prosecutor from the court at Hamburg-Bergedorf was ready with the indictment at the end of August 1948. These were ordinary criminal proceedings in the British zone of occupation, and preceded the actual judgment chamber’s sentence. Wolff’s case was heard from November 3 to 6, and the injustice done to him was announced to the entire world. During the summer he had written to Husmann that it would “lead to an outrageous scandal and loss of prestige for the Anglo-Americans if they” decided not to “keep their promises, that were already three
years overdue” by letting this come to a criminal prosecution. “If the vast crimes against humanity and justice which have been committed not only against us, but also against the thousands of innocent women and children, become public, then the world will hold its breath as horrified as when they learn of the Nazi atrocities.” His comparison proves once more that the perspective changes radically as soon as the oppressor becomes the oppressed.