Walter Rauff

Walter Rauff
Walter Rauff during his arrest in Italy in 1945
Born	(1906-06-19)19 June 1906 Köthen, Germany
Died	14 May 1984(1984-05-14) (aged 77) Santiago, Chile
Service/branch	Reichsmarine Waffen SS Bundesnachrichtendienst
Rank	Standartenführer

Walter Rauff (19 June 1906 – 14 May 1984) was a mid-ranking SS commander in Nazi Germany. 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 or RSHA. Between 1958 and 1962 he worked for the Federal Intelligence Service of West Germany (Bundesnachrichtendienst). His funeral in Santiago, Chile was attended by a crowd of old Nazis.

Rauff is thought to have been responsible for nearly 100,000 deaths during World War II. He was instrumental in the implementation of the Nazis’ genocide by mobile gas chamber. His victims included Communists, Jews, Roma and the disabled. In the late 1970s and the 1980s, he was arguably the most wanted Nazi fugitive still alive.

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

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.

On 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.

Between 1940 and 1941 Rauff went back to the Navy as a volunteer, commanding a mine sweeper flotilla in the English Channel. 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 (RSHA). During early 1940 he headed the SD in German occupied Norway for few months.