THE MAN WHO INVENTED NAZI MOBILE GAS CHAMBER AND WANTED TO SPY ON FIDEL

HIS INVENTION

After the defeat of the Nazis in WWII, the western allies set up the Federal Republic of Germany and handed it over to many of those "defeated" Nazis to run.  In turn, those Nazis provided jobs for their friends...who were also Nazis. I am, of course, excluding those Nazis who moved to the USA and in particular helped launch its ballistic missile program in Huntsville, Alabama.  Even knowing all this it is hard to figure out how the guy who invented the mobile gas chamber which murdered scores and scores of Jews (and I would suppose scores of Roma, some Ruskies, commies, maybe a few gay folks found wandering the countryside who they didn't feel like shipping to the big extermination factories) got involved in a spy plot directed at Fidel Castro.


This little blurb I picked up at nzherald.co.nz...

Post-war spy agency hired Nazi criminal

By Tony Paterson

Standartenfuhrer Walter Rauff (left) in 1945. Photo / AP

The Nazi war criminal who invented the mobile gas chamber and used it to murder thousands of Jews was recruited by West German intelligence after World War II and tried unsuccessfully to spy on Cuba's revolutionary leader, Fidel Castro, new documents have revealed.

The disclosures concern Walter Rauff, a senior SS official who headed a Nazi research group which developed mobile gas chambers run on car exhaust fumes that were used at concentration camps throughout Germany and Nazi-occupied Poland and Ukraine during the Holocaust.

Rauff, who was wanted for more than 90,000 murders, was hired by West Germany's newly created BND intelligence service in 1958, even though its officials were apparently aware of his war crimes.

"His recruitment was in no way politically or morally defensible," Bodo Hechelhammer, the head of the BND's history research group, told Der Spiegel magazine.

The revelations about Rauff are contained in hitherto unpublished BND archive documents, which the agency is researching with the help of historians in an attempt to provide an accurate assessment of its murky past.

After fleeing an Allied prisoner of war camp in Germany after the war, Rauff escaped to Chile, where he was recruited for the BND by Rudolf Oessger-Roeder, another ex-SS man. The BND's records show that Rauff was paid 70,000 marks (about $60,500).

One of Rauff's tasks was to infiltrate Castro's Cuba to supply German intelligence with information about the revolutionary leader.

However, the documents show that Rauff's pay was halved in 1962 because his mission had failed.

Despite the BND's readiness to recruit Nazi war criminals, Germany's justice authorities caught up with Rauff in the 1960s. By the end of 1962, Chile had arrested him and had initiated steps to extradite him to West Germany to stand trial.

However, as the crime of murder was subject to a 15-year statute of limitation in Chile at that time, he was freed after spending only a few months in custody. Rauff never answered for his crimes, dying in Chile in 1984 at the age of 77.

The revelations follow recent disclosures that the BND mysteriously "lost" a 500-page file on the 99-year-old Nazi war criminal Alois Brunner.