TOP NAZI: SS General Karl Wolff: The Man Between Hitler and Himmler

A German expert on the Third Reich gives us this dense but useful biography of one of Heinrich Himmler's right-hand men. A youthful veteran of WWI, Wolff was a bank officer and advertising agent during the '20s, but rose rapidly in the ranks of the SS after joining the Nazis in the early '30s. He spent much of his career as Himmler's chief of staff, and the author establishes his numerous connections to the Holocaust and dismisses his postwar claims of ignorance. Wolff was also something of a "fixer," arranging for a German racing driver to escape penalties for marrying a woman of Jewish ancestry and planning a gigantic castle to be the meeting place of the senior SS officers as a new order of Teutonic nights. In the second half of the war, Wolff participated in abortive negotiations with the Soviets for a separate peace, commanded the SS in Italy and was involved in plans to seize the pope. The author's extreme thoroughness makes the book primarily a scholarly resource, but it is also a worthwhile portrait of a criminal with complex motives. (May)