Walter Rauff

Walter Rauff developed the gas vans, the mobile killing trucks that were the engineering precursors of the stationary gas chambers. He commanded the gas van programme of 1941 and 1942, supervised its deployment in the occupied Soviet territories and at Chełmno, and personally drove the operational tests. He served afterwards as the SS commander in northern Italy and Tunisia, where he organised the deportation of Tunisian Jews to forced labour. He escaped through the Catholic ratline to Chile in 1958 and lived openly in Santiago and Punta Arenas for the next twenty-six years. He died of heart failure on 14 May 1984, having never been tried.

The gas vans

Rauff was the head of the SS Group II-D Technical Affairs section in the Reich Security Main Office under Heydrich, with responsibility for SS vehicles. The gas van programme was his principal contribution. From late 1941 he commissioned the conversion of around twenty enclosed lorries into mobile killing units, with the exhaust gas of the lorry’s diesel engine diverted into a sealed compartment in the rear. The conversion was carried out by the Berlin firm Gaubschat Fahrzeugwerke. Around twenty to thirty people could be killed per van per cycle.

Rauff supervised the operational testing personally. The October 1941 test at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp killed thirty Soviet POWs. The tests confirmed that the method worked. Rauff then deployed the vans to the Einsatzgruppen units operating in the occupied Soviet territories and to the Chełmno extermination camp from December 1941 onwards. The Chełmno operation killed around 320,000 Jews using the gas vans over the course of the war.

Rauff’s correspondence with the Gaubschat company and with the Einsatzgruppen unit commanders survived the war and was used at the Nuremberg subsequent trials. The letters are in his standard bureaucratic style. They discuss design improvements, complaints from the field about the smell of bodies, requests for tighter seals and easier hosing-out of the compartments. The letters are one of the most disturbing pieces of perpetrator correspondence in the Holocaust archive because of their tone: a manager solving routine engineering problems, where the problem is how to kill people more efficiently.

Tunisia

Rauff was assigned to command the small Einsatzkommando attached to General Erwin Rommel’s Africa Korps in Tunisia from November 1942 to May 1943, when the German forces in North Africa were defeated. The unit had been preparing to extend the killing programme to the Jewish populations of British-controlled Egypt and Palestine if the German army had reached them. The British victory at El Alamein and the subsequent Allied advance prevented the operation. Rauff in the meantime ran the deportation of Tunisian Jews to forced labour camps and operated a small concentration camp regime. Around 5,000 Tunisian Jews were deported. Around 2,500 died in the labour camps. The full operation in Egypt and Palestine that Rauff had been commanding the preparations for is sometimes called the Holocaust that almost happened.

Northern Italy

From September 1943 Rauff was the SS commander in Milan and northwestern Italy. He directed the deportation of around 6,000 Italian Jews to Auschwitz from the area under his control. He coordinated with the Italian fascist authorities of the Salò Republic and oversaw the round-ups in Milan, Genoa and the smaller cities. He was captured by Allied forces in May 1945.

The escape

Rauff escaped from Allied custody in Italy in late 1946 with help from the same Catholic ratline that took Eichmann, Mengele, Stangl and others to South America. He moved to Damascus in 1947 and worked for Syrian intelligence. He moved to Ecuador in 1949 and Chile in 1958. He lived in Chile for the next twenty-six years, working at a king crab cannery in Punta Arenas and later in Santiago.

The West German government requested his extradition from Chile in 1962. The Chilean Supreme Court rejected the request on the grounds that the statute of limitations had expired under Chilean law. Simon Wiesenthal, who had located Rauff in 1962, raised the case repeatedly through the 1960s and 1970s without success. Rauff lived openly in Santiago, attended German émigré social events, and was occasionally photographed by visiting journalists. The Chilean military government under Pinochet declined to revisit the extradition refusal.

Rauff died on 14 May 1984 in Santiago of heart failure. He was 77. His funeral was attended by several dozen mourners, some of whom gave the Hitler salute at the graveside. He was never tried.

What he was

Rauff was the engineering specialist of the killing programme. He did not formulate policy. He did not command large operations. He did the technical work that made the early phase of the killing physically possible: the conversion of lorries into killing units, the design improvements, the hosing-out of the compartments. The gas vans bridged the gap between the open-air shootings of 1941 and the stationary gas chambers of 1942. They killed several hundred thousand people. Rauff designed them, deployed them, and supervised their use. He died of heart failure at 77, in his bed, in Chile, in 1984. The Chilean state had refused to extradite him for twenty-two years.

See also

Sources

  • Martin Cüppers, Walther Rauff: In deutschen Diensten, Wbg Theiss, 2013
  • Daniel Asher, Rommel’s Egypt: A History of the Holocaust That Almost Happened, Cambridge University Press, 2010
  • Rauff correspondence with Gaubschat Fahrzeugwerke, recovered 1945, used at Nuremberg subsequent trials
  • USHMM: Walther Rauff