Robert Wolfe: History’s gain and loss

My most distinct memory of Robert Wolfe was that day in October of 1999 when he stood in the dreary, grey rain outside a heretofore unknown archive in Sindelfingen, Germany, a suburb of Stuttgart, attempting to gain entry when the archive unexpectedly shuttered its doors and refused him. With the chilled drizzle running down his cheeks, Wolfe summoned an intense inner anger, born of decades of devotion to documenting Nazi history. He shook with disbelief and demanded they open the door. They would not. No matter. Wolfe persevered, and the information was revealed.

Robert Wolfe was the irreplaceable chief archivist for captured Nazi documents at their main repository, the National Archives and Record Administration in Washington He died just before dawn this Dec. 10, at the age of 93. He left behind his gentle German-born wife, Ingeborg, previously an office manager in Occupied Germany. She traveled with him extensively. Two sons also survive him.

With his death, a legacy also dies. 

Wolfe set the standard, hammered together the ethical structures, and single-handedly galvanized a generation of Holocaust and Nazi-era historians and authors, including me. So this is actually my back story, which in large measure is part of Wolfe’s front story. 

First and foremost, Wolfe was a fighting man. He fought in both the Pacific and European theatres and used to brag he survived separate head injuries in both campaigns. Those injuries just hardened him. 

Fresh from his second head wound, while in France, he was assigned to the Nuremberg War Crimes prosecutor’s office, where he became familiar not only with the infamous testimony there, but also the many thousands of linear feet of evidentiary documents that, to this day, remain largely unexploited. These are the millions of pages of letters, memos, telegrams, reports, notes and other documents that constructed the enormous case of genocide brought against the Hitler regime and provide proof eternal of the crimes.