Rauff was able to live in Quito, for almost ten years after World War II, departing in 1958 and travelling to Chile before returning to Germany in 1960 to collect his German Navy pension.

In 1937, Rauff left the Navy following an adultery scandal, but he was discharged "with all honours", as he said in a 1972 deposition before a German prosecutor in Santiago de Chile.

According to declassified CIA documents: As an official of the Criminal Technical Institute of the Reich Security Main Office, Rauff designed gas vans used to murder Jews and persons with disabilities.

A month after the Axis capture of Tobruk in June 1942, the SS set up a special extermination unit to follow in the wake of Rommel's Afrika Korps.

The unit, commanded by Rauff, was empowered to carry out "executive measures on the civilian population", the Nazi euphemism for mass murder and enslavement.

[9] However, his mission to exterminate the Middle East's Jewish population was brought to an abrupt halt when the British Eighth Army defeated Erwin Rommel at El Alamein in October 1942.

Rommel was forced to withdraw the remnants of his army to Tunisia, where it sustained a bridgehead until May 1943, enabling Rauff's SS to start lower scale persecutions of local Jews.

The MI5 file records that Rauff was posted to Vichy-Tunisia in 1942 as head of the Security Service (SD), where he led a mobile killing squad (Einsatzkommando) which conducted a "well-organised persecution campaign against the Jews and partisans".

In just six months, from November 1942 to May 1943, the Germans and their local collaborators implemented a forced-labor regime, confiscations of property, hostage-taking, mass extortion, deportations, and executions.

They required thousands of Jews in the countryside to wear the Star of David, and they created special Judenrat-like committees of Jewish leaders to implement Nazi policies under threat of imprisonment or death.

[5]His interrogator in the POW camp ended his report with these words: Rauff has brought his organisation of political gangsterism to stream-lined perfection and is proud of the fact.

After escaping from an American internment camp in Rimini, Rauff hid in a number of Italian convents, apparently under the protection of Bishop Alois Hudal.In 1948, he was recruited by Syrian intelligence and went to Damascus, where he served as military advisor to President Husni al-Za'im when they fought against the newly established State of Israel, only to fall out of favour after a coup a year later.

After barely escaping from Syria, Rauff fled to Lebanon and later back to Italy, and gained a transit pass for Ecuador, where he and his family settled, later moving to Chile.

The 2007 book On the Trail of Nazi War Criminals Who Weren’t Punished by Mossad operative Yossi Chen (Chinitz),[11] indicates that Rauff provided intelligence from Syria and was handled by Shalhevet Freier, of the Foreign Ministry.

An earlier CIA report, from February 1950, stated that Cross helped Rauff obtain the necessary papers for settling in South America (entering by Argentina) and added: "It is not improbable that Subject's presence in Syria was in connection with a mission for the Israel[i] service".

In 1958, Rauff took on two roles: one as the manager of a king crab cannery in Punta Arenas, which is one of the southernmost towns in the world, and another as a merchant in Quito, Ecuador.

[16] To conceal his activities as a spy in South America, he posed as an export manager and agent for Importadora Goldmann, a company in Santiago, Chile.

He was evaluated as "untrustworthy" (charakterlich äußerst unzuverlässig), "intriguer" (er konspirierte nach allen Seiten), and "drunkard" (eng mit dem Alkohol befreundet).

[15] In 1960, Rauff made an important trip to Germany, in order to claim his pension for the time which he had served in the Reichsmarine, and he had no trouble with the German authorities.

The plan was to assassinate him and then issue a press release stating: "Today in Chile, we executed one of the greatest Nazi war criminals – commander of the Gestapo’s technical department who developed and directed the mobile gas vans in which more than 100,000 Jews were exterminated.

He worked as direct assistant to Manuel Contreras and gave advice on the creation of the secret police Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA).

Rauff planned and supervised the building of concentration camps and was involved in finding means of disposing the dead bodies of tortured and murdered dissidents.

In the meantime, Rauff disappeared and was discovered by the documentary filmmaker William Bemister in Los Pozos, Santiago de Chile, in 1979, and interviewed.