The Gas Vans: A Critical Investigation - Holocaust Handbooks

132 SANTIAGO ALVAREZ, THE GAS VANS
least twice, once by a journalist and once by a German public prosecutor.
The first interview was conducted by the U.S. journalist Georgie
Anne Geyer, who met Rauff in southern Chile in 1966. Here are the relevant
passages of what she claims Rauff had told her (Geyer 1966, pp.
109f.)
“Then, in a conversation that kept changing from moment to
moment, I decided to wade in – I asked him of what he was actually
accused. His face tightened:
‘They say I killed ninety-six thousand Jews,’ he said unemotionally.
‘They know I never killed one man, and we never killed one Jew
there.’ He paused. ‘That was [not] a gentleman’s war.’
‘There is no brief way to explain it all,’ he said as we drank a
white Chilean wine. ‘Nobody can explain simply what happened in
Germany. You have to understand what Germany went through in
the twenties and thirties. It was a proud country, humiliated. No
people can stand that. There were terrible things done, later on – I
don’t say there weren’t terrible things. I’m not one who says he
didn’t know…’ (He seemed, I thought here, almost strangely proud
of not taking the ‘easy’ way out on ‘knowing.’) ‘I knew. But I was a
soldier – right or wrong, my country. A soldier obeys. That’s what
he is.’
I pressed him, because I still did not, then, know all the details of
his case. ‘Of what exactly are you accused?’
‘They say that I was in charge of technical things,’ he said, his
voice sinking lower. ‘What did I know of technical things? I was the
organizer. Organization – that was my strength.’ [...].
As the corpulent hotelkeeper’s wife served us lamb from Tierra
del Fuego, I asked him, ‘If you could go back, would you do the
same thing over again?’
‘Yes,’ he said slowly, ‘I would have to say I would do the same
thing again. There was nothing else to do.’”
All we can deduce from these meager statements is that Rauff apparently
had no bad conscience, that he felt innocent of the accusation
of murdering 97,000 people, the figure given in the Just document (and
not 96,000, as Rauff erroneously stated). Claiming that the Second
World War was a “gentleman’s war” is surreal and contradicted by
himself shortly thereafter when admitting that there “were terrible
things done.” Hence I assume that this is a mistake in Geyer’s book.