Background
Karl Wolff was born in Darmstadt on 13 May 1900, the son of a wealthy district court magistrate.
Karl Wolff was born in Darmstadt on 13 May 1900, the son of a wealthy district court magistrate.
He was on active service during World War I, rising to the rank of Lieutenant in the Guards, and receiving the Iron Cross (First and Second Classes). From December 1918 to May 1920 he was a Lieutenant in the Hessian Freikorps. For the next five years he worked as a commercial clerk in various firms and from 1925 to 1933 was the proprietor of an advertising enterprise in Munich.
He entered the NSDAP in 1931 and by March 1933 was already an SS leader. From March to June 1933 Wolff served as Adjutant to the right-wing nationalist Governor of Bavaria, General Ritter von Epp, and in July of the same year became Himmler's personal Adjutant. A member of the Reichstag for the district of Hessen from 1936, Wolff rose rapidly in the ranks of the SS. Made an SS Lieutenant-Colonel on 30 January 1934, he was promoted to SS Brigadier on 4 July 1934, to SS Major General on 9 November 1935 and to SS Lieutenant-General on 30 January 1937.
He received the Golden Party Badge of the NSDAP on 30 January 1939 and was made Lieutenant-General of the Waffen-SS on 3 May 1940. Virtually Himmler’s deputy from the nomination of Heydrich as Protector of Bohemia’, he was also his chief liaison officer with the Führer. In 1941 he accompanied Himmler to Finland and received the Grand Cross of the Finnish White Rose with Swords in 1942. In the same year Wolff was promoted to SS-Ober- gruppenführer and Colonel General of the Waffen-SS. In September 1943 Wolff became German Military Governor of northern Italy and Plenipotentiary to Mussolini during the last two years of the war.
Convinced by the end of February 1945 that the war was lost, he established contact through Italian and Swiss intermediaries with Allen Dulles, the representative of the US Office of Strategic Services. His negotiations behind Hitler’s back in Zürich led to the early surrender of German forces in Italy. For this service the elegant, smooth SS General was not tried at Nuremberg, appearing instead as a willing prosecution witness in full military uniform before the court. Sentenced to four years' hard labour by a German court in 1946, he spent only one week in prison. He subsequently became a highly successful advertising agent in Cologne, later building an elegant lakeside villa on the Starnberger See from his earnings. The exhibitionism of ‘the SS General with the clean waistcoat' proved, however, to be his undoing. His memoirs published during the Eichmann trial in 1961 drew' the public’s attention and that of the Bavarian Justice Ministry to his wartime activities as a key figure in Himmler's immediate entourage and in the building up of the SS State.
The amiable, aristocratic-looking Wolff was arrested on 18 January 1962 and charged with complicity in the mass murder of Jews. He was accused of sending at least 300,000 Jews to Treblinka death camp. In a letter of 13 August 1941 Wolff had professed to be ‘particularly gratified with the news that each day for the last fortnight a trainload of 5,000 members of the “Chosen People” has been sent to Treblinka’ and he was charged w ith arranging for additional railroad cars to facilitate the deportation of Jews from ghettoes and other areas where they were concentrated. Wolff was also accused of complicity in the shooting of partisans and Jews behind the front near Minsk, where he had been present as Himmler’s Chief of Staff, and it was claimed that he was a willing participant in the ‘Final Solution' in an advisory and consultative capacity. The assizes of the Munich County Court did not accept Wolffs denials of any knowledge of the death camps and sentenced him on 30 September 1964 to fifteen years’ penal servitude and loss of civil rights for ten years.
The sentence was softened in view of his ‘otherwise blameless life' and contribution to shortening the war, and in 1971 he was released.