Background
Hans-Ulrich Rudel was born in Kondratowice on 2 July 1916.
Hans-Ulrich Rudel was born in Kondratowice on 2 July 1916.
After attending military school at Wildpark, he was assigned as an engineering officer to a Luftwaffe Stuka formation. Promoted to Lieutenant in 1939.
Rudel sank a cruiser and the battleship Marat in 1941. In March 1944 he was captured by the Russians after being shot down, but succeeded in escaping. In January 1945 a special decoration - the Golden Oak Leaves of the Knight's Cross - was created for him in acknowledgement of his phenomenal achievements as a fighter pilot. Shot down again in February 1945, Rudel had his right leg amputated.
After the war Rudel fled to Argentina, where he was a prominent member of the German Nazi community. Aided by the Peron government he acted as a contact man between the Nazi exiles and those in Lower Saxony. On his return to Germany in 1951 he became patron of the ultranationalist Freikorps Deutschland, and published his memoirs in Buenos Aires, under the title Trotzdem.
The idol of the post-war German Right, Rudel became one of the most inflammatory spokesmen and propagandists for the neo-Nazi Socialist Reich Party.
In 1956 he returned to South America, living for a time in Brazil and Paraguay and continuing his activity on behalf of the extreme right-wing circles. Rudel remained a controversial personality in West Germany, where two air force generals were dismissed in November 1976 for defending his appearance at an official reunion of former members of the Luftwaffe.
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1950