Final Refuge in Chile
After settling in Chile in 1958, Rauff worked as the manager of a king crab cannery in Punta Arenas, one of the southernmost towns in the world.
From 1959 to 1963 Rauff earned 70.000 Deutsche Marks from the West-German Bundesnachrichtendienst and he was warned (and removed from the BND) before his detention in Chile. He subsequently partially recovered the lawyer's fees from the BND. He had to build a spy network in South America. He was evaluated as "untrustworthy" (charakterlich äußerst unzuverlässig), "intriguer" (er konspirierte nach allen Seiten) and drunkard (eng mit dem Alkohol befreundet).
In 1972 he confessed that in 1960 and/or 1962 he had been in Germany. He was arrested by the Chilean authorities in December 1962 after Germany requested his extradition, but was freed by Chile's Supreme Court five months later in 1963. Salvador Allende's election as Chilean president in 1970 did not change the situation. In a friendly letter to Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, Allende wrote that he could not reverse the Supreme Court's 1963 decision.
Under Augusto Pinochet's regime, Rauff may have served as an advisor in Chilean intelligence, DINA. Allegedly, C.I.A. officials could not determine Rauff's exact position. General Pinochet's government resisted all calls for his extradition to stand trial in West Germany or Israel. In the meantime Rauff disappeared and was discovered by the documentary filmmaker William Bemister in Los Pozos, Santiago de Chile, in 1979, and interviewed. This interview was included in the Emmy-winning film "The Hunter and the Hunted" and shown on Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) Public television in the United States on October 21, 1981.
The last request to extradite Rauff to West Germany was presented by renowned Nazi hunter Beate Klarsfeld in 1983, but was flatly rejected by the Pinochet government, which alleged that Rauff had been a peaceful Chilean citizen for over 20 years and that the case was closed since the Supreme Court's 1963 decision. Klarsfeld organised protests in Chile and was twice arrested for causing disturbances. Following her brief detention, the Israeli government's foreign affairs director, David Kimche, officially requested Rauff's outright expulsion in a meeting with Chilean Foreign Minister Jaime del Valle, but the request was turned down.
Read more about this topic: Walter Rauff
Famous quotes containing the words final and/or refuge:
“The place became full of a watchful intentness now; for when other things sank brooding to sleep the heath appeared slowly to awake and listen. Every night its Titanic form seemed to await something; but it had waited thus, unmoved, during so many centuries, through the crises of so many things, that it could only be imagined to await one last crisis—the final overthrow.”
—Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)
“When science drove the gods out of nature, they took refuge in poetry and the porticos of civic buildings.”
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