World: Bureaucrat of Death

To Hitler, Lieut. General Karl Wolff was the very model of the Aryan SS general. To Himmler, his immediate superior, he was affectionately known as “Wolfie.” But to American intelligence officers at the top-level P.W. camp at Gmunden in 1945, the tall, blond, aristocratic Wolff was a fascinating and highly valuable German patriot—”the white sheep” of the dreaded SS.

Behind his chiefs’ backs, Wolff had met U.S. Superspy Allen Dulles to negotiate the early surrender of German troops in Italy, then arrested the Italian-front commander when he refused to lay down his arms. At Gmunden, by alternately threatening and charming fellow P.W. generals, Wolff became one of the Allies’ most successful interrogators.

Said Brigadier General Edwin Howard, the admiring camp commander: “The Nazis couldn’t have been all that bad if they had generals like Wolff.”

Wolff’s cooperation was well rewarded. Though he was technically under arrest, his impressed captors gave him the run of Gmunden, allowed him to live with his beautiful blonde wife and daughters, kept him well supplied with liquor, cigarettes and food from the PX —and even brought in his private yacht for pleasure cruises on Lake Gmund. At Nürnberg, Wolff sat out the trials as a prosecution witness, and in 1949 he was released.

Then, ten years later, his name came up in testimony at the Ulm mass-murder trial, and West German investigators quietly began a closer look at his past. On a wintry day in January 1962, two plainclothesmen knocked on the door of Wolff’s lakeside Munich villa and hauled him, protesting, off to jail. The charge: “Aiding and abetting murder in at least 300,000 instances.”

Specifically, alleged the prosecution when his trial finally got under way this summer, Wolff had been Heinrich Himmler’s closest confidant and his chief liaison officer to Hitler, had “supported and guaranteed” their plans to exterminate the Jews, and, between July and September of 1942, supplied the boxcars that took 300,000 Jews from the Warsaw ghettos to the ovens of Auschwitz.

For eleven weeks the trial dragged on, with Wolff, now 64 and ailing, stubbornly denying everything. Last week, impassive, he sat in the prisoner’s box of Munich’s Palace of Justice while Chief Judge Emil Mannhart took three hours to read the verdict, which found him guilty. The sentence: 15 years. “He was continuously engaged and was deeply entangled in guilt,” said Judge Mannhart. “Himmler found in him his bureaucrat of death.”