Walther Rauff
Walther Rauff was responsible for outfitting and supplying the gas vans that preceded the extermination camps of the Holocaust. These gas vans were mobile gas chambers, relying upon carbon monoxide to produce death. They were widely used in Eastern Europe to kill large numbers of Jews and Roma, and were also used to kill the disabled in the T4 program . Rauff, like many other Nazis, lived out his life in South America after the end of World War II.
Born in 1906, Rauff spent a number of years in the navy; he was, by 1939, part of the Reich Security Main Office, under the command of Heinrich Himmler. The vans were developed, with Rauff’s assistance, in 1939. Rauff went on to persecute Jews in North Africa and Egypt later in the war. By the end of the war, he was stationed in Italy, working as an SS officer and in a police role. Rauff surrendered in Northern Italy at the end of World War II and was placed into a U.S. internment camp.
In 1946, Rauff escaped the internment camp in which he was being held. He was sheltered by a Catholic bishop for some time following his escape. In 1948, he travelled to Syria to serve in the Syrian intelligence service. While he only remained in Syria for a year, he is said to have continued his persecution of Jews there. Sometime thereafter, he moved, with his family, first to Ecuador and later to Chile.
West German authorities located Rauff, and attempted to have him extradited to Germany to stand trial, with the support of noted Nazi hunter, Simon Wiesenthal. While he was briefly arrested in 1962, extradition efforts failed. Rauff was interviewed in a U.S. documentary in 1979, but went on to live out his life, dying in 1984 in Chile.