Walter Rauff
Walter Rauff spent most of his career, from 1924 to 1941, as a naval officer. While in the navy, though, he developed a friendship with Reinhard Heydrich, who turned out to be a rising star in the SS. By 1941, when Rauff left the navy, Heydrich was second in command to Heinrich Himmler and was overseeing the operations of the Gestapo and the development of the Holocaust. In this capacity Heydrich would offer Rauff a position working on a new method for mass-execution.
When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941 special killing squads, called the Einsatzgruppen, followed behind the military, rounding up and shooting the Jews and communist functionaries that they encountered. These mass-shootings soon took a severe toll on the psyche of the executioners, so the SS began looking for a more impersonal means of murder. Rauff oversaw the development of a fleet of killing machines that were to fulfill this purpose: the gas vans.
Victims would be loaded into an airtight cabin in the back of the van, and exhaust from the vehicle was redirected into the cabin while it drove to a burial site, creating a mobile gas chamber. This technology would later be repurposed in the static gas chambers of the extermination camps. With these new industrial killing facilities established, Rauff was redeployed to North Africa, where he led an Einsatzgruppe which would surely have gone on to murder the Jews of the Middle East had the British not stopped the German advance at El Alamein.
Owing to his experience in the Middle East, Rauff was recruited by Syrian intelligence after the end of the war. After a coup in Syria drove Rauff out he was courted by an intelligence agent from Israel, of all places, but elected instead to flee to Ecuador and subsequently settled in Chile. The West German intelligence service would track down Rauff in Chile in 1958, but instead of calling for his arrest they too sought to mold him into an intelligence asset. He soon proved to be of little value to West German intelligence, and in 1962 they would request his extradition to Germany to stand trial for war crimes.
The German extradition request went all the way to the Chilean Supreme Court, but the court decided to release Rauff because the statute of limitations on murder had elapsed according to Chilean law. For the next twenty years the Chilean government rebuffed one extradition request after another from both Germany, Israel, and several prominent Nazi hunters. As a consequence Rauff lived the rest of his life as a free man, dying in 1984 at the age of seventy-seven.