Rauff, Hermann Julius Walther, also Walther Rauff.

Rauff, Hermann Julius Walther, also Walther Rauff born 19-06-1906 in Köthen, Germany, joined the Kriegsmarine (the German Navy) in 1924 as a young cadet. After a period of training as a midshipman he was promoted to Leutnant in 1936 and given command of a minesweeper. Rauff was a friend of Heydrich, Reinhard Tristan Eugen, “The Blonde Beast”, who also served in the Navy in the 1920s. He was a professional naval officer until a sordid divorce ended his career prospects which led to his resignation in December 1937. He then became a Standartenführer SS commander in Nazi Germany. From January 1938, he was an aide of Reinhard Heydrich firstly in the Security Service , later in the Reich Security Main Office or RSHA. Rauff supervised the modification of scores of trucks, with the assistance of a Berlin chassis builder, to divert their exhaust fumes into airtight chambers in the back of the vehicles. The victims were then poisoned and/or asphyxiated from the carbon monoxide accumulating within the truck compartment as the vehicle travelled to a burial site. It was developed and tested in the Chełmno extermination camp. The trucks could carry between 25 and 60 people at a time Newly-released files have uncovered evidence that the BND, (Bundesnachrichtendienst) West Germany’s international intelligence service, sheltered former SS officer Walter Rauff and made him an agent after the war.

Between 1958 and 1962,, even though he was a key perpetrator of Nazi crimes.Rauff is known to have been responsible for nearly 100,000 deaths during World War II. He was instrumental in the implementation of the Nazis’ genocide by mobile gas chamber withn the use  of Zyklon B . His victims included Communists, Jews, Roma and the disabled. In the late 1970s and the 1980s, he was arguably the most wanted Nazi fugitive still alive.

Walter Rauff was a member of the Reich Security Main Office, the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, a department of the SS created by Heinrich Himmler in 1939. Rauff was involved in the development of “Gassing Vans”: mobile gas chambers used to fatally poison Jews, persons with disabilities, and communists, who were considered by the SS as enemies of the German State. According to declassified C.I.A.documents: “as an official of the Criminal Technical Institute of the Reich Security Main Office, Rauff designed gas vans used to poison Jews and persons with disabilities.” He later was involved in persecution of Jews in North Africa, and there is a postwar report in the file that he tried to arrange the extermination of Jews in Egypt during late 1942.

Near the end of the war Rauff, then an SS and police official in northern Italy, tried to gain credit for the surrender of German forces in Italy but ended up only surrendering himself. After escaping from an American internment camp in Italy, Rauff hid in a number of Italian convents, apparently under the protection of Bishop Alois Hudal.

Alois Hudal (Graz, 31-05-1885 – Rome, 13-05-1963) was an Austrian bishop who served in Rome for a long time. After the end of the Second World War he operated a network of agents to help prominent Nazi leaders avoid prosecution. In 1947, Hudal was suspended by order of Pope Pius XII and stripped of his Vatican diplomatic passport. To his dying day, he defended his assistance to Nazi and other German leaders after the end of the war.

In 1948 he was recruited by Syrian intelligence and went to Damascus (only to fall out of favor after a coup there a year later).He and his family then settled in Ecuador, later shifting to Chile, where he served in Chilean intelligence. officials could not determine Rauff’s exact position. The C.I.A. report adds: “In any case, the government of General Augusto Pinochet resisted all calls for his extradition to stand trial in West Germany.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, he was perhaps one of the most wanted living fugitive Nazis, but during those years he enjoyed the protection of Augusto Pinochet.

”Rauff was arrested in 1962 after Germany requested his extradition, but was freed by Chile’s Supreme Court five months later. In 1972, Chilean President Salvador Allende, at the request of the Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, asked the Chilean Supreme Court to extradite Rauff to Germany. This application was again denied. After settling in Chile, Rauff worked as a manager of a king crab cannery in Punta Arenas, the southern most city in South America. After his release by the Chilean Supreme Court, Rauff disappeared. One of the last Nazi fugitives never brought to justice for major war crimes, the 77-year-old German had long been ill with lung cancer, but he died of a heart attack at his home in Santiago’s affluent Las Condes section. Walter Rauff, kept a detailed diary which sheds light into the meticulous planning against Jews. Rauff’s diary is a collection of reports and daily entries that he sent from Tunisia to the Gestapo headquarters in Germany, and in them he described what was happening around him.Over the years, the diary was kept in London archives.His funeral in Santiago, Chile, was attended by a crowd of old Nazis who made it a Nazi celebration.

Rauff, Hermann Julius Walther, also Walther Rauff was buried, in a family grave, at the Cementerio General de Santiago, Santiago, Provincia de Santiago, Santiago Metropolitan, Chile.

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