Himmler’s expanding treasury. In 1936, Wolff made a secret alliance
with Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Sicherheitsdienst and a key
subordinate of Himmler, to defeat their common enemies in the Nazi
hierarchy. Wolff’s own position as chief adjutant to Himmler solidi-
fied once Heydrich assumed his responsibilities as Reichsprotektor
of Bohemia and Moravia after the Nazi seizure of Czechoslovakia.
Promoted to the rank of SS-Obergruppenführer (lieutenant general)
on 3 May 1940, Wolff was additionally Himmler’s main liaison of-
ficer to Hitler during the first years of World War II.
A long illness lessened Wolff’s importance to Himmler, and he
was named highest SS and police Führer in Italy and plenipoten-
tiary to Benito Mussolini in September 1943. Wolff’s role was to
strengthen the German position in Italy amid deteriorating political
and military conditions. According to his later recollection, Hitler
even gave him private instructions to depose the pope and other
clerics and assume control of the Vatican (Wolff’s stalling presum-
ably prevented this operation from taking place). Once Mussolini
was reinstated in the puppet Salo regime, Wolff had the task of
forcibly recruiting Italian workers for the German armaments in-
dustry and combating increasing partisan activity. But with the Al-
lied military advance and the evacuation of Mussolini to Germany,
he decided, in concert with Himmler, to make secret contact with
the enemy. In February 1945, a Swiss intelligence intermediary,
Max Waibel, delivered a plan to Allen Dulles, the U.S. Office of
Strategic Services station chief in Bern, calling for an armistice on
the entire Italian front. Through Operation sunrise, the surrender
of German troops occurred on 2 May 1945, six days before the ac-
tual end of the European war.
Although Wolff was taken captive by the Americans and im-
prisoned in Nuremberg, no charges were filed in order to obtain
his testimony against other Nazi figures (he attempted in vain to
keep the SS from being classified as a criminal organization). After
his transfer to a British prison in Minden (Lower Saxony) in early
1948, a denazification court in Hamburg-Bergedorf found him
guilty and sentenced him to a five-year term. When a successful
appeal reduced his sentence, Wolff was released in June 1949 and
began working as an advertising executive in Cologne. During the
trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961, published comments by Wolff502 • WOLFF, KARL