[1] Steiner rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel commanding the 4th Commando Brigade in the Biafran Army during the Nigerian Civil War, and later fought with the Anyanya rebels in southern Sudan.

[5] He stated that his father who had served in the Luftwaffe committed suicide in 1937 after failing a "racial hygiene test" as it was discovered that one of his ancestors was a Jewish woman who converted to Lutheranism in the 18th century to marry a Gentile.

"[1] The American journalist Ted Morgan ridiculed him for this claim, stating: "Choosing the Foreign Legion to carry out such noble goals was like becoming a loan shark in the interests of philanthropy.

"[6] Steiner was wounded in the leg, but described himself as enjoying the war in Vietnam, saying "the cruelties of the day, the warm evenings in the tropics, the camaraderie, the good wages of the Legion" were his "home".

[1] While fighting the FLN (Front de Libération Nationale) uprising in Algeria, Steiner became active in the anti-De Gaulle Organisation armée secrète (OAS) through his wife.

[16] Besides France, Biafra's main foreign supporter was South Africa as the apartheid government wanted to see the failure of oil-rich Nigeria, which was viewed as pro British and Pro-Soviet[17] Steiner flew to Port Harcourt via Lisbon, Portugal and Libreville and enlisted into the Biafran army.

[14] Faulques and most of the mercenaries he had recruited had expected a repeat of the Congo crisis when they had, with the exception of the Irish, encountered undisciplined and poorly trained Swedish and Indian United Nations peacekeepers.

[19] The Federal Nigerian Navy was very small, but the naval blockade imposed by one frigate and eight patrol boats had created major problems for Biafra, preventing arms and food from being imported and oil from being exported.

[14] David M. Bane, the American ambassador in Libreville reported to Washington on 12 November 1968: "Rolf Steiner, Taffy Williams and an unnamed Italian then became military advisors to Ojukwu.

[23] Steiner chose a skull and crossbones as his regimental symbol, which he thought would constantly remind his troops of the risks inherent to war rather than any reference to the pirates' Jolly Roger or the Nazi SS, and adopted the slogan "Long Live Death!

[27] Finally the heavily armed, belligerent Gay, a veteran of the Paratroop Regiment who spoke with a thick working-class Glasgow accent always carried around a shotgun, a Madsen sub-machine gun and a FN rifle "just in case I have to shoot my way out of this bloody place".

[36] Venter also wrote that Steiner was an "austere, engaging" man who quickly became a favorite of the journalists covering the war who found the flamboyant, eccentric mercenary a good news story.

[3] A 1968 article in Time quoted Steiner as saying about his opponents: "If any corporal serving under me in the Legion had taken more than a week to conquer West Africa with their kind of equipment, I’d have him shot for dereliction of duty.

[37] The fact that Steiner usually spoke either in his native German or French limited the impact of his rants, as his Ibgo-speaking soldiers did not understand what he was saying, causing him to finally switch over to English.

[25] Martell wrote about him: "Too wild to conform to the rigid authority of a formal army, he found comfort in violence, and meaning in the adrenaline of battle and the regularity of uniform".

Compulsively clean, he throws even slightly dusty plates at his mess waiters, then kicks them to drive the point home...The troops do not seem to mind the harshness of the command; they follow Steiner because they believe he is a winner and because he has juju (good luck).

[30] Baxter wrote that Steiner "ordered a surprisingly ill-conceived full frontal assault against Nigerian positions across an open area without artillery, air or fire support".

[41] By contrast, the British historian Peter Baxter called the 4th Commando Brigade the "best unit in the [Biafran] army" and under Steiner's leadership was "well commanded and tactically sound" on an operational level.

[46] Steiner offered his services to Idi Amin, then commander of the Ugandan Army, and arrived in the Sudan in July 1969 where he started by supervising the building of an airfield to fly in arms.

[53] The locals told Reed that the previous year Steiner had ordered them to build an airfield, saying that "plane loads of arms and relief aid" from the West would then be flown in.

[51] The period from late 1969 through early 1970 was characterized by heavy fighting as the new Sudanese president, General Gaafar Nimeiry, who just overthrown the previous government in May 1969, ordered an offensive to retake southern Sudan.

[54] By October Israel had singled out Lagu as the most able of the Anyanya leaders and conveyed that they felt Steiner was a "loose cannon" and objected to a man who spent his youth in the Deutsches Jungvolk.

[56] In November 1970, Steiner decided to return to Europe and departed for Kampala, Uganda where he was promptly arrested as part of a power struggle between Amin and President Milton Obote.

"[57][58] On 18 January 1971, Steiner appeared at a press conference in Khartoum, where he admitted that he worked as a mercenary, but denied having fought for Anyanya, saying he only served the Anyidi Revolutionary Government.

[59] The Muslim Arab government in Khartoum maintained that the Christian blacks of south Sudan had no grievances, and the rebellion was merely the work of outsiders stirring the southerners up, with the trial proving a great propaganda tool for the Nimeiry regime.

Steiner has denied that the East German filmmakers tortured him, saying that they got him to talk by supplying him with beer (a rarity in the Sudan, which enforces sharia law and bans alcohol).

[1] The British historian Edgar O'Ballance wrote: "Steiner had hardly made any impression in the south, which in general seemed embarrassed by his former presence there, but in view of his experience, some of his comments on this semi-secret war are of interest".

[62] Steiner retired to Germany where he remarried and dictated his memoirs to his ghost-writer Yves-Guy Berges, which were published in 1976 in French as La Carré rouge and as The Last Adventurer in English in 1978.

[52] In June 1982, Steiner was involved in a lawsuit in Munich as the government of the Federal Republic attempted to bill him for the cost of flying him out of Khartoum, leading him to claim that he had not wanted to leave the Sudan.

[65] In 2013, he was living in Munich and was described by the journalist Ulli Kulke as haunting the beerhalls, where he maintained a belligerent attitude, still insisting that he was idealist who fought only to protect the peoples of Africa.