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. 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).
According to one report, he tortured Jews in Syria. He and his family then settled in Ecuador, later
shifting to Chile, where he may have 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.”
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 southernmost
city in South America. After his release by the Chilean
Supreme Court, Rauff disappeared. He was discovered
by the documentary filmmaker William
Bemister in Los Pozos, Santiago, Chile in
1979, and interviewed on film. This interview was included
in the Emmy-winning
film “The Hunter and the Hunted” and shown
on the PBS Network
in the United States on October 21, 1981. Rauff died
in 1984.
Photo: Simon Wiesenthal holds photos of Walter Rauff
and a Gassing Van used by the Germans to kill thousands
of Jews, people with disabilities, and communists.
