19. Arthur Rudolph Was a Huge Hitler Fan
Arthur Rudolph’s past eventually caught up with him in 1979. That year, investigators for the Department of Justice’s Office of Special Investigations (OSI), tasked with investigating crimes against humanity, started looking at Rudolph’s Nazi past. His wartime activities began attracting attention, and he did not help himself when he told a reporter: “I read Mein Kampf and agreed with lots of things in it…Hitler’s first six years, until the war started, were really marvelous“.
He eventually cut a deal with the OSI that spared him prosecution in exchange for surrendering his American citizenship and leaving the US. In 1984, Rudolph departed for West Germany, which conducted a halfhearted investigation before declining to prosecute him on grounds that the statute of limitations had run out on most of his crimes. He died of a heart attack in Hamburg, on January 1st, 1996.