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Karl Friedrich Otto Wolff (13 May 1900 – 16 July 1984) was a senior German Schutzstaffel (SS) officer who served as Chief of Personal Staff Reichsführer-SS (Heinrich Himmler) and an SS liaison to Adolf Hitler during World War II. He ended the war as the Supreme SS and Police Leader in occupied Italy and helped arrange for the early surrender of Axis forces in that theatre, effectively ending the war there several days sooner than in the rest of Europe. He escaped prosecution at the Nuremberg Trials as a result of his participation in Operation Sunrise. In 1962, Wolff was arrested in West Germany and prosecuted for the deportation of Polish Jews. In 1964, he was sentenced to 15 years in prison for being an accessory to murder. He was released in 1971 and died 13 years later.
After the war, Wolff was forced to leave the army because of the reduction of the German armed forces following the terms imposed by the Treaty of Versailles. Wolff was in the paramilitary Freikorps from December 1918 to May 1920. He started a two-year apprenticeship at the Bethmann bank in Frankfurt and married Frieda von Römheld in 1923. The couple moved to Munich, where Wolff worked for Deutsche Bank. In June 1924, he was laid off and joined a public relations firm. Wolff may also have studied law, but never took any state exams. In 1925, he started his own public relations company which he operated in Munich until 1933.
From March 1933, after the Nazi Party had obtained national power, Wolff served as an adjutant to Franz Ritter von Epp, then-governor of Bavaria. Here he came to the attention of the head of the SS Heinrich Himmler who appointed Wolff his personal adjutant in June 1933. In March 1936, Wolff was elected as a deputy to the Reichstag from electoral constituency 33 (Hesse-Darmstadt). Reelected in April 1938, he retained this seat until the fall of the Nazi regime in May 1945. Karl Wolff entry in the Reichstag Members Database
In 1936, Himmler named Wolff chief of Personal Staff Reichsführer-SS to coordinate all contact and correspondence within the SS at both party and state levels. By managing Himmler's affairs with the SS, the Nazi Party, state agencies and personnel, the eloquent and well mannered Wolff rose to become one of the key figures in Himmler's power regime. In addition, Wolff oversaw the economic investments made by the SS, was responsible for saving funds among Himmler's circle of friends and for connections to the SS organizations Ahnenerbe and Lebensborn. In 1939 he retroactively became head of the Main Office and SS liaison officer to Hitler. In 1936, Wolff left the Protestant Church. On 30 January 1937, he was promoted to the rank of SS- Gruppenführer (major general).
Incriminating letters show that Wolff was involved in the Holocaust. On 8 September 1939, shortly after the invasion of Poland, Wolff wrote to the Gestapo office in Frankfurt (Oder) and ordered the immediate "arrest of all male Jews of Polish nationality and their family members" and the confiscation of any wealth. In 1942 Wolff oversaw the deportation transports during "Grossaktion Warschau", the mass extermination of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto. When rail-transport bottlenecks occurred, Wolff communicated repeatedly with Reich Railway Director Albert Ganzenmüller. In a letter sent from the Führer Headquarters, dated 13 August 1942 and referring to transports of Jews to Treblinka extermination camp, Wolff thanked Ganzenmüller for his assistance:
According to Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, in August 1941, Himmler and Wolff attended the shooting of Jews at Minsk which had been organized by Arthur Nebe, who was in command of Einsatzgruppe B, a mobile killing unit.
Nauseated and shaken by the experience, Himmler decided that alternative methods of killing should be found. On Himmler's orders, by the spring of 1942, the camp at Auschwitz had been greatly expanded, including by the addition of [[gas chamber]]s, where victims were killed using the pesticide [[Zyklon B]].
After the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in June 1942, Wolff developed a strong rivalry with other SS leaders, particularly with Heydrich's successor at the Reich Security Main Office ( Reichssicherheitshauptamt or RSHA), Ernst Kaltenbrunner, and with Walter Schellenberg of the Ausland-SD in the RSHA. His position was weakened by his frequent absences from Berlin, in part due to his suffering from pyelitis and renal calculus (kidney stones), which required surgery. Wolff fell out of favour with Himmler and was dismissed as his chief of staff. In April 1943, he was relieved of his duties as liaison officer to Hitler. Himmler announced he would temporarily take over Wolff's duties. A new replacement as liaison officer to Hitler's HQ did not occur until the appointment of Hermann Fegelein, who assumed the duty in January 1944. Wolff had particularly angered Himmler by his divorce and remarriage in March 1943. Himmler, who believed the family to be the nucleus of the SS, had denied Wolff permission to divorce, but Wolff had turned directly to Hitler. Himmler still appears to have considered Wolff a loyal member of the SS, for in September 1943 Wolff was transferred to Italy as Supreme SS and Police Leader.
In that position, Wolff shared responsibility for standard police functions such as security, maintenance of prisons, supervision of concentration camps and forced-labor camps, as well as the deportation of forced laborers with Wilhelm Harster, who was the Commander in Chief of the Security Police. When Wolff became Plenipotentiary General of the German Wehrmacht in July 1944, he also became responsible for anti-partisan warfare in occupied Italy. By now Wolff commanded the police and the entire rear army in Italy. So far Wolff's involvement in war crimes in Italy remains largely unclear, partially because source material on the degree to which SS units participated in Nazi security warfare is lacking. Although it seems as if US investigators were in possession of incriminating material in 1945 that indicated Wolff's approval of the executions that became known as the Ardeatine massacre, this evidence was deemed not sufficient for criminal charges. On 9 December 1944, Wolff was awarded the German Cross in Gold for using Italian units, with secondary German units, to destroy partisans and for the "maintenance of war production in the Italian territory". During this period he approved the project of the Marnate's Bunker, close to the German command of Olgiate Olona. By 1945 Wolff was acting military commander of Italy.
In 1945, Wolff, under Operation Sunrise, took over command and management of intermediaries (including the Swiss Intelligence officer, Captain Max Waibel) in order to make contact in Switzerland with the regional headquarters of the US Office of Strategic Services, under Allen W. Dulles, with a view to the surrender of German forces in and around Italy. After meetings in Zurich on 8 March 1945 and in Ascona on 19 March 1945 and a diplomatic standoff in Lucerne (23 to 25 April 1945) Wolff negotiated the surrender of all German forces in Italy (signed 29 April 1945, effective 2 May 1945), before the war in Europe officially ended with the surrender of Germany signed on 8 May 1945. Wolff's capitulation of Italy to the Allies upset the plans of Admiral Karl Dönitz (German President from 30 April 1945) who envisaged a staged series of surrenders designed to give German troops and refugees more time to make their way west.
He took up residence with his family in Starnberg. In 1962, during the trial in Israel of Adolf Eichmann, evidence showed that Wolff had organized the deportation of Italian Jews in 1944. Wolff was arrested and put on trial in West Germany. In 1964, he was convicted of deporting 300,000 Jews to the Treblinka extermination camp, which led to their murders. Sentenced to 15 years in prison in Straubing, Wolff served only part of his sentence and was released in 1971 following a heart attack.
Wolff's reliability has been questioned by Holocaust historians,Holocaust Denial on Trial. 2009. " Use of an unreliable source: the testimony of Karl Wolff ". Emory University. such as István Deák, a professor of history at Columbia University. New York Review of Books. 20 November 2008. " Can We Believe General Karl Wolff?". Vol. 55. No. 18. Reviewing A Special Mission by Dan Kurzman, a promoter of the theory, Deák noted Kurzman's "credulity" and that the latter "uncritically accepts the validity of controversial documents and unquestioningly believes in the statements made to him by his principal German interlocutor, the former SS General Karl Wolff". He further criticized the book's "modest documentation" containing "a great number of vague or inaccurate references".
In the late 1970s Wolff also became involved with Stern journalist Gerd Heidemann. Together with Heidemann, he travelled through South America, where he helped to locate, among others, Klaus Barbie and Walter Rauff, with whom Heidemann conducted interviews for a series of articles. Wolff served as a consultant for the alleged Hitler Diaries and was upset when they turned out to be forgeries by Konrad Kujau. Asked to attend the trial of Heidemann and Kujau, Wolff declined.
A few weeks before his death, Wolff had declared the Islamic profession of faith, becoming a Muslim. At his grave, his daughter Fatima Grimm gave the funeral prayer in the presence of representatives of the Islamic Center of Munich (ICM). She was also a Muslim convert, doing so in 1960 while in Munich, later becoming a translator, author and speaker on Islam in Germany.
Later life
After his release, Wolff retired to Austria. During the 1970s and early 1980s, Wolff returned to public life, frequently lecturing on the internal workings of the SS and his relationship with Himmler. After his release from prison in 1971 he appeared in television documentaries including The World At War saying that he witnessed an execution of twenty or thirty partisan prisoners in Minsk in 1941 with Himmler.
In the early 1970s, Wolff promoted the theory of an alleged plot to kidnap Pope Pius XII. Most other allegations of such a plot are based on a 1972 document written by Wolff that Avvenire d'Italia published in 1991, and on personal interviews with Wolff before his death in 1984. Wolff maintained that on 13 September 1943, Hitler gave the directive to "occupy Vatican City, secure its files and art treasures, and take the Pope and Curia to the north". Hitler allegedly did not want the Pope to "fall into the hands of the Allies".
Personal life and death
On 17 July 1984, Wolff died in a hospital in Rosenheim. He was buried in the cemetery at Prien am Chiemsee on 21 July.
Citations
Bibliography
(2025). 9783770052547, Droste. ISBN 9783770052547
(1997). 9780306807930, Da Capo Press. ISBN 9780306807930
External links
Categories: 1900 Births, 1984 Deaths, 20th-century Freikorps Personnel, Converts To Islam From Protestantism, German Muslims, Holocaust Perpetrators In Italy, Holocaust Perpetrators In Poland, Members Of The Reichstag 1936–1938, Members Of The Reichstag 1938–1945, Military Personnel From Darmstadt, Nazis Convicted Of War Crimes, Operation Reinhard, People From The Grand Duchy Of Hesse, Personal Staff Of Heinrich Himmler, Pope Pius Xii And World War Ii, Prisoners And Detainees Of Germany, Recipients Of The Gold German Cross, Ss And Police Leaders, Ss-obergruppenführer, Waffen-ss Personnel
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