Sept. 30, 1964 - Karl Frederick Wolff (pictured during WWII and today), the highest-ranking Nazi officer yet to be tried by a West German court, was convicted today on a charge that he had had a role in the mass slaughter of Jews. He was sentenced to 15 years at hard labor.
Wolff, a former SS major general and the wartime liaison man between Heinrich Himmler and Hitler, was found by a Munich court to have contributed to the murder of 300,000 Jews during World War II.
Originally accused of complicity in the slayings, Wolff was found guilty on a lesser charge of having helped to provide railroad cars that carried the 300,000 Jews to Nazi death camps.
The Munich prosecutor had asked for life imprisonment, the severest penalty possible under West German law.
Throughout the trial, which began July 13, the 64-year-old defendant insisted he was ignorant of the Nazi program to exterminate the Jews.
However, the president of the Munich court said today that Wolff, who was on intimate terms with both Hitler and Himmler, “was well aware of their murder plans.”
Wolff had been kept under arrest by Allied authorities for about four years after World War II. However, because of his role in helping to arrange the surrender of German troops in northern Italy in 1945, he escaped prosecution at the Nuremberg war crimes trials of the top Nazi leaders.
While serving as chief SS officer in Italy, he participated in clandestine meetings with Allen W. Dulles and other Allied agents to help arrange an early surrender of German troops. He also was said to have entered negotiations with Pope Pius XII.
During his trial, Wolff insisted he had helped save the lives of thousands of Allied troops through these negotiations. He also tried to convince the court that his cooperation with the Allies showed his lack of deep commitment to the Nazi cause.
The court rejected this contention. The court president said that, in his judgment, Wolff was a deep believer in the Nazi ideology and that he had accepted plans for the obliteration of the Jews “under the idea that he had to fulfill a historic task, setting back all qualms of conscience.”
Wolff, who fought with a Hessian guards regiment in World War I and joined the SS in the early 1930s, was living as a businessman in West Germany before his latest arrest.
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