Walter Rauff

Walter (Walther) Rauff (19 June 1906 – 14 May 1984) was a mid-ranking SS commander in Nazi Germany.

"Rauff joined the Kriegsmarine (the German Navy) in 1924 as a young cadet. After a period of training as a midshipman he was promoted to Lieutenant in 1936 and given command of a minesweeper. He was a friend of Reinhard Heydrich, who also served in the Navy in the 1920s. Heydrich was hired by SS chief Heinrich Himmler in 1931 to serve as the head of the SS counter-intelligence system, and when Rauff resigned from the Navy in 1937, Heydrich took him under his wing. Rauff was given the job of putting the SS and its security service, the Sicherheitsdienst, onto a war footing."

During his thirteen years in the Navy, Rauff became acquainted with Reinhard Heydrich and saw service in South America and Spain as a young officer in 1924.

In 1937, Rauff left the Navy following an adultery scandal, but he was discharged "with all honours", as he said in a 1972 deposition before a German prosecutor in Santiago de Chile.

From January 1938, he was an aide of Reinhard Heydrich firstly in the Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst or SD), later in the Reich Security Main Office.

Between 1940 and 1941, Rauff returned to the Navy as a volunteer, commanding a mine sweeper flotilla in the English Channel.

During early 1940, he headed the SD in German-occupied Norway for few months.

He was promoted to Lieutenant Commander (Korvettenkapitän) in April 1941, shortly before he was discharged from active service, he then returned to the Reich Security Main Office.

In 1941 and 1942, Rauff was involved in the development of gas vans, mobile gas chambers used to kill, by poisoning or suffocation, those people deemed enemies of the German state: Jews, disabled people, communists and others.

According to declassified CIA documents:

"As an official of the Criminal Technical Institute of the Reich Security Main Office, Rauff designed gas vans used to murder Jews and persons with disabilities."

The MI5 file is more explicit concerning Rauff's "technical" skills:

"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. The trucks could carry between 25 and 60 people at a time."

Rauff was later involved in the persecution of Jews in Vichy France-controlled Tunisia during 1942 and 1943, by implementing the antisemitic Statute of the Jews enacted by pro-Nazi metropolitan Vichy state.

A month after German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's defeat of the British at Tobruk in June 1942, the SS set up a special extermination unit to follow in the wake of Rommel's Afrika Korps.

The unit, commanded by Rauff, was empowered to carry out "executive measures on the civilian population", the Nazi euphemism for mass murder and enslavement.

However, his mission to exterminate the Middle East's Jewish population was brought to an abrupt halt when the British 8th Army defeated Rommel at El Alamein in October 1942.

The MI5 file records that Rauff was posted to Vichy-Tunisia in 1942 as head of the Security Service (SD), where he led a mobile killing squad (Einsatzkommando) which conducted a "well-organised persecution campaign against the Jews and partisans".

During this time, the Jewish community was particularly hard hit.

More than 2,500 Jews in Nazi-occupied Tunisia died in a network of SS slave labour camps before the Germans withdrew.

Rauff's men also stole jewels, silver, gold and religious Jewish artifacts.

Forty-three kilogrammes of gold were taken from the Jewish community on the island of Djerba alone.

Rommel was forced to withdraw the remnants of his army to Tunisia, where it sustained a bridgehead until May 1943, enabling Rauff's SS to start lower scale persecutions of local Jews.

In 1943, Rauff was sent to Milan where he took charge of all Gestapo and SD operations throughout northwest Italy.

The MI5 file states:

"In both these postings [Tunisia and northern Italy] Rauff rapidly gained a reputation for utter ruthlessness. In Tunis and Italy he was responsible for the indiscriminate execution of both Jews and local partisans. His work in Italy involved imposing total German control on Milan, Turin, and Genoa. His success in this task earned him the congratulations of his SS superior, who described it as 'a superb achievement'."

Rauff remained in Italy until the end of the war.

He was arrested in 1945, but subsequently escaped and was never brought to trial.

He worked for the Federal Intelligence Service of West Germany (Bundesnachrichtendienst) between 1958 and 1962, and was subsequently employed by the Mossad, the Israeli secret service.

Recruited by Augusto Pinochet, Rauff played a role in the creation of the Chilean internal security apparatus during the military dictatorship.

His funeral in Santiago, Chile, was attended by several former Nazis.

Rauff is accused of being responsible for nearly 100,000 deaths during World War II.

Among other actions, he was instrumental in the use of mobile gas chambers for the execution of prisoners.

In 1972, in Santiago de Chile, Rauff made a deposition as a witness before a German prosecutor.

On the subject of the extermination of Jews in Poland and Russia, asked whether at that time he had any doubts concerning the use of gas vans, Rauff answered:

"Ob ich damals Bedenken gegen den Einsat [sic] der Gaswagen hatte, kann ich nicht sagen. Für mich stand damals im Vordergrund, dass die Erschiessungen für die Männer, die damit befasst wurden, eine erhebliche Belastung darstellten und dass diese Belastung durch den Einsatz der Gaswagen entfiel.

[...I cannot say.

The main issue for me at the time was that the shootings were a considerable burden for the men who were in charge thereof and that this burden was taken off them through the use of the gas vans.]"

Rauff delegated the task of keeping the gas vans operating in the Soviet Union and other Nazi-occupied areas to an SS chemist, August Becker, who kept Rauff fully informed on the gas van killing operations.

According to the MI5 file on Walter Rauff released in 2005: