04.09.2023, Berlin.
German Nazis played a important role in the rise of dictator Augusto Pinochet, German journalist Wilfried Huismann wrote in his article published on September 3 on the website of the TV magazine Tagesschau.
According to the article, one of the German Nazis who influenced Pinochet’s formation was SS Standartenführer Walther Rauff. In 1976, Rauff sent a photograph to his nephew in Kiel, a city in northern Germany. He was identified from this photo by a former member of the Chilean DINA service [secret police of Chile during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet – translator’s note] with the call sign Simon.
According to Simon, he had seen Rauff at the Chacabuco nitrate mining town in the middle of the South American Atacama Desert. It was 1973. Simon was a recruit and had to mine the area. “We were building a concentration camp for 1,200 prisoners. It was a few weeks before the coup,” Simon recalls. One of the commanders was a German, his name was “General van Nordenflycht.” Simon recognized him confidently as the man in the photograph, Walther Rauff.
The German intelligence service BND, for which Rauff worked as an agent from 1958 to 1963, has so far remained silent about its agent’s role in the Chilean terror system. But in the face of the results of the investigation, the BND admitted that it was informed. There was allegedly a report in the archives, dated July 1974, which states that Rauff was, even if not the “chief consultant” of the DINA intelligence service, but “he could be called ‘Ejecutores’, that is, ‘executive body’ without any authority to give orders.”
Former DINA agents knew Rauff not as an “executive body” but as a commander. So says a man named Carlos, who was Brigadier General Christoph Willeke’s bodyguard during the dictatorship. He traveled with Rauff many times to Perrera. It was a large crematorium in the “park of kings” where stray dogs were burned. Willeke and Rauff wanted to see if Perrera’s ovens were suitable for incinerating human bodies. According to Carlos, the DINA torture centers in Santiago from 1974 to 1976 were full of corpses, and Rauff was burning with the idea of covering up traces of crimes right on the spot. “The way to Perrera was short,” Carlos adds.
Source: Rossa Primavera News Agency
