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Hans-Ulrich Rudel (2 July 1916 – 18 December 1982) was a former Luftwaffe Oberst and Nazi flying ace, and a a key figure in the reformation of the former Nazi networks worldwide after the war.

1940s

Rudel lived in Argentina from 1946 to the fall of 1952 and afterwards was traveling in Europe with an Argentinian passport. While in Latin America, Rudel traveled frequently to other countries, such as Bolivia and Chile, where he met Nazi-friendly leaders and military dignitaries. Rudel was a key player in re-grouping the flood of Nazis that had arrived in Latin America to escape justice in Europe via the various ratlines. He was a leading figure in the Kameradenwerk ("Comrades' Work") and the Bruderschaft ("Brotherhood").1 According to a CIA dossier, " it was reported in 1950 that Hans-Ulrich RUDEL made a clandestine journey to Germany, conferred with Helmuth Beck-Broichsitter, and was authorized to organize the Bruderschaft in Argentina."2

According to a 1953 CIA report3 :

The real management of Kameradenwerk is purported to be in the hands of a former colleague of Dr. Goebbels, a Dr. CHRISTMANN, and Col. Hans-Ulrich RUDEL ... He [Rudel] was employed by the Argentine Air Force as a test pilot and technical adviser on jet plane production. Rudel reportedly has written or lent his name to inflammatory pamphlets with such titles as Dolchstoss! which were sent through the facilities of [the] Kameradenwerk to sympathizers in Germany. The Minister of Interior of North Rhine-Westphalia recently stated that his government has confiscated a quantity of subversive literature sent to Germany by former Nazis living in Argentina. Another of Rudel's alleged propaganda connections in Germany is with Die Deutsche Zukunft (German Future), organ of the rightist Free Democratic Party, through its editor-in-chief Siegfried ZOGLMANN and party leader Wolfgang DIEWERGE. ...

Rudel was reported present with Eberhard Fritsch and Arturo PONS Bedoya, press officer of the Argentine Foreign Ministry, at a secret conference on Bolivian affairs prior to the accession of power as Bolivian President by Victor Paz Estenssoro. ...

Col. Hans-Ulrich RUDEL, currently on a "study tour of Chile," also has visited President Ibañez. According to official Santiago broadcast he was received by the President and the Commander-in-Chief of the Air Force on 1 June, 1953.

In the aftermath of World War II, Rudel was a prominent supporter of the "Socialist Reich Party" (Sozialistische Reichspartei Deutschlands), a West German Strasserist political party founded in 1949 as an openly neo-Nazi oriented split-off from the national conservative German Right Party (DKP-DRP). The founding members included Otto Ernst Remer, a former major general of the Wehrmacht and Hitler's former bodyguard, and the nationalist writer and member of the Bundestag Fritz Dorls. The SRP was the first party to be banned by the Federal Constitutional Court in 1952.

According to aforementioned CIA report2 :

Since leaving Argentina, Rudel has been traveling between centers of neo-Fascist activity. Recently he was reported as principal agent of a Werewolf organization, identified as the Bund Deutscher Ex-Offiziere. The “Bund" is said to be directed from La Paz, Bolivia, by Martin BORMANN, whose aide is one Hans FRIEDRICH. Rudel's Argentine associates in the alleged Werewolf group, according to this report, include a person identified as “FRIEDE.” This may be Rodolfo FREUDE, who was reported as member of an Argentine Werewolf organization in 1951. General Adolf GALLAND also is mentioned. In the past, Rudel has claimed the General as an associate; Galland has denied this claim publicly.

1950s

Rudel was also in contact with the postwar Nazi coup plotter Werner Naumann. Following Germany's defeat, Naumann lived under an assumed name for five years and reemerged after a 1950 amnesty, when he resumed his contacts to former Nazi big wigs, including Rudel, Ernst Achenbach, Arthur Axmann, Otto Skorzeny and many others;4 and started major efforts to drum up those still loyal to the Nazi cause in order to plan a return to power. Beate Baldow described Naumann’s approach as follows:5

Based on the assumption that the ideas of the “Third Reich” would be still an ideological basis among a large part of the population and only would have to be activated at an appropriate time, Naumann began to prepare a seizure of power in 1957. The Naumann sympathizers, who were placed … everywhere in business, politics and culture, were linked together through a clever system of a so called “inner circle” and “outer circle.” Together they counteracted the fragmentation of the extreme right.

Members of this "Naumann Circle" infiltrated the Free Democratic Party (FDP) for a period of about two years. Naumann was arrested by the British Army on January 16, 1953, for being the leader of a Neo-Nazi group that attempted to infiltrate West German political parties.6

It is known that Rudel had stayed at the house of Gustav Scheel in 1952, the co-leader of the Naumann circle, who had ample contacts to the right-wing extremist scene, such as the Freikorps Deutschland, the shock troop of the conspiracy, which venerated Rudel as a hero.7

1960s

According to the historian Peter Hammerschmidt, Rudel assisted in establishing contact between the company Merex AG (of Otto Skorzeny and Gerhard Mertins) and Friedrich Schwend, a former member of the Reich Main Security Office and involved in Operation Bernhard who had settled in Peru. Schwend, according to Hammerschmidt, had close links with the military services of Peru and Bolivia. In the early sixties, Rudel, Schwend and Klaus Barbie, founded a company called “La Estrella,” the star, which employed a number of former SS officers who had fled to Latin America.8 Rudel, through La Estrella, was also in contact with Otto Skorzeny, who had his own network of former SS and Wehrmacht officers.9

1970s

In 1977, Samisdat Publishers published Rudel's "Allied war crimes and crimes against humanity: compiled and witnessed in 1946 by German internees of Allied camp 91" in German (Alliierte Kriegsverbrechen und Verbrechen gegen die Menschlichkeit: Zusammengestellt und bezeugt im Jahre 1946 von Internierten des Lagers 91 Darmstadt). The first edition of the book had been published by Editorial Dürer S.R.L., Buenos Aires, 1953).10

It was the same year that Michael Kühnen (1955-1991), arguably Germany's most prominent neo-Nazi at the time, said that he had provided security services for a rally of Gerhard Frey's far-right association Deutsche Volksunion ("German Peoples' Union," DVU, 1987-2011) in 1977 co-organized by Harald Neubauer, which featured Rudel.11

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