Karl Friedrich Otto Wolff
Karl Friedrich Otto Wolff
1900–1984
○ Convicted war criminal · natural death
A senior Nazi SS coordinator who became a late-war negotiating envoy
On 8 March 1945, Wolff met Allen Dulles in Switzerland to discuss terms for the surrender of German forces in northern Italy.
Karl Wolff was a senior Nazi SS officer who served as Heinrich Himmler’s chief of staff and stood close to the regime’s central decisions and crimes. As the highest SS and police leader in occupied Italy, he oversaw a system marked by the deportation of Jews, forced labor, and repression of the resistance, responsibilities not erased by his later negotiations. In 1945 he conducted the secret Operation Sunrise talks with OSS chief Allen Dulles in Switzerland, helping secure the early surrender of German forces in northern Italy, though his influence and motives were limited. After the war he was convicted for facilitating mass murder.
Career Timeline
- 1917–1920Officer candidate in the Imperial German Army’s 115th Infantry Regiment, serving on the Western Front
- 1931Joined the Nazi Party and the SS
- 1935–1943Chief of the Reichsführer-SS Personal Staff
- 1943–1944Highest SS and Police Leader in Italy
- 1944–1945Plenipotentiary General of the German Wehrmacht in Italy
- 1945German negotiating representative in Operation Sunrise, involved in the surrender in northern Italy
- 1964–1969Convicted by a Munich court for facilitating the murder of 300,000 Jews and sentenced to 15 years, released in 1969