According to documents published for the first time in English in this edition, Wolff was sent in February 1942 to secretly negotiate with an NKVD representative of Stalin a potential cease fire on the eastern front. The original document, published in Moscow in 2003 comes from the Russian archives and describes the statements and offers Wolff made to his Soviet counterpart directly contradicting the image of a marginal figurehead that he so strenuously created of himself after the war. Wolff was clearly Hitler's ?point man' in carrying out what could have been a crucial negotiation that could have changed the course of history. "This is a revelatory document and I believe it is authentic...the idea of Stalin being willing to go to war with the US and England is not so strange as it may sound to some since in the winter of 1940-41 he was eager to join the Tripartite Pact which included a willingness to go to war with the United States." Gerhard L. Weinberg author of A World At Arms Both Hitler and Himmler affectionately called him ?Wölffchen,? or ?little wolf'. In September 1964 former General of the SS and General of the Waffen SS, Karl Wolff was sentenced to 15 years in prison by a Munich court. He was found guilty of having participated in the murder of 300,000 Jews by arranging for railway box cars to take the victims from the Warsaw ghetto to the gas chambers at the extermination camps. Five years after the sentence, Wolff was released when doctors declared him unfit to remain in prison due to his poor health. From then on he lived in Darmstadt, Munich or Prien-am-Chiemsee when he wasn't travelling. The highpoint of his career came during the war years when he acted as middleman between Hitler and Himmler at the Führer's Headquarters, never in the foreground but always present at all important meetings. He rose to general of the SS and of the Waffen-SS, becoming Heinrich Himmler's right-hand man and a close confidant of Adolf Hitler. From September 1943 to the surrender on May 2, 1945 Wolff was the top leader of the SS and Police in Italy, Hitler's proconsul and the same time the authorized representative of the German Armed Forces. Hitler personally gave Wolff a secret order to seize the Vatican and kidnap the Pope which he managed to not carry out. Wolff was Mussolini's shadow and his keeper he made sure the Duce did what Hitler wanted him to do at all times. Wolff also had major responsibility in all affairs in Italy and held a secret meeting with Pope Pius XII in the Vatican in May 1944 that probably saved Rome and much of Italy from additional destruction. SS General Karl Wolff, was the key player in organizing the famous ?secret surrender' with Allen Dulles of Army Group South of the German Armed Forces to the American and British forces in 1945 ending the war on the German southern front six days prior to the general ceasefire in Europe. At the time, according to Hitler's rule, capitulation was treason, and punishable only by death.