Karl Wolff - Later Life

Later Life

Arrested on 13 May 1945 by U.S. Army troops (on the promise he would be reunited with his family) he was imprisoned in Schöneberg. During the Nuremberg Trials, Wolff was allowed to escape prosecution by providing evidence against his fellow Nazis, and was then transferred in January 1947 to the British Army prison facility in Minden.

Although released in 1947, he had been indicted by the post-war German government as part of the denazification process. Detained under house arrest, after a German trial Wolff was sentenced in November 1948 to five years' imprisonment due to his membership in the SS. Seven months later his sentence was reduced to four years and he was released. Wolff worked after his discharge as a representative for the ad department of a magazine and took his family to his new residence in Starnberg. Until his rearrest in 1962, it is alleged that Wolff worked for the CIA, while continuing to successfully build his reformed public relations firm.

In 1962 during the trial in Israel of Adolf Eichmann, evidence showed that Wolff had organised the deportation of Italian Jews in 1944. Wolff was again tried in West Germany and in 1964 was convicted of deporting 300,000 Jews to the Treblinka extermination camp, the deportation of Italian Jews to Auschwitz, and the massacre of Italian Partisans in Belarus. Sentenced to 15 years' imprisonment in Straubing, Wolff served only part of his sentence and was released in 1969 due to ill health, with his full civil rights restored in 1971.

Wolff has been a controversial figure because many believe he was far more privy to the internal workings of the SS and its extermination activities than he acknowledged. In fact, he claimed to have known nothing about the Nazi extermination camps, even though he was a senior general in the SS.

After his release, Wolff was quiet for a while and retired in Austria. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Wolff returned to public life, frequently lecturing on the internal workings of the SS and his relationship with Himmler. This resulted in him appearing in television documentaries including The World At War, saying that he witnessed an execution of Jewish prisoners in Minsk in 1941 with Himmler, going so far as to describe the splatter of brains on Himmler's coat.

During this period, Wolff also became involved with former Stern journalist Gerd Heidemann and Stuttgart military dealer Konrad Kujau, for whom he in part authenticated the later discredited Hitler Diaries.

Asked to attend the trial of Messrs Heidemann and Kujau, Wolff had declined: he was still in bad health and on 17 July 1984, he died in a hospital in Rosenheim. His death brought his name up again in all major German newspapers, where he was described as "one of the most enigmatic figures of the Nazi regime". He was buried in the cemetery at Prien am Chiemsee on the 21 July 1984.

In the preface to the biography of Wolff Claus Sybill writes that he could be described as a classic case study for the Nazi representative of the upper bourgeoisie: "Wolff himself is and remains (...) the idealist, always wanted the good. And because he himself had never conceived or planned something evil, though there were still so many crimes happening around him - he almost never noticed anything like this."

Wolff was portrayed by Vasily Lanovoy in the Soviet TV series Seventeen Moments of Spring in a major plot line concerning Sunrise Crossword and meeting with Dulles. In the 1991 mini-series Selling Hitler, based on the Hitler Diaries case, he was played by John Paul. He was also portrayed in the 1983 Gregory Peck film The Scarlet and the Black, as "General Max Helm".