On March 8, 1945, just two months before the end of the war, Allen Dulles, then head of the OSS office in Bern, Switzerland, met in Zurich with Obergruppenfuehrer Karl Wolff, higher SS and police leader (effectively the head of the SS) in Italy. Previously Wolff had been chief of Himmler's personal staff and thereafter his liaison officer at Hitler's headquarters. He was not a passive figure in the machine; in 1942, he had written a senior colleague in Berlin to express "his special joy that now five thousand of the Chosen People are going to Treblinka every day." Wolff's purpose in seeking the meeting, for which there had been preliminary soundings, was to propose a separate peace for the German forces and those of the Salo (Mussolini) Republic fighting in Italy.