On January 1, 1945, Adolf Hitler awarded a decoration created for a single person to a pilot who flew 2,530 missions and claimed 519 tanks destroyed. This episode examines the life of Hans-Ulrich Rudel, from a Lutheran minister’s son in Silesia who joined the Hitler Youth in 1933 to the most decorated German airman of the war. It covers his part in the September 1941 attack on the Soviet battleship Marat, the propaganda that credited him alone for a two-bomb strike, and the cannon-armed Ju 87G Stuka he flew at terrifyingly low altitude to hit tanks where their armor was thinnest.

The episode then follows Rudel beyond the war: surrender to American forces in May 1945, escape via a rat line with a fake Red Cross passport, and life in Argentina as a friend of Juan Peron, founder of a relief network for war criminals, and associate of Josef Mengele. It traces his reinvention as an arms broker for West German firms across Latin American dictatorships, his ties to Klaus Barbie and intelligence-linked companies, his return to German politics with a neo-Nazi party in 1953, and the 1976 scandal that forced two NATO generals into retirement and eventually cost the defense minister his job.

• Why General Ferdinand Schorner said Rudel alone replaces a whole division, and what it took to survive being shot down or forced to land 30 times
• The fate of gunner Erwin Hentschel, who flew 1,400 sorties with Rudel before drowning in the Dniester in March 1944
• How Rudel returned to combat within weeks of losing his right leg below the knee in February 1945
• How Cold War anti-communism led the CIA and West German BND to tolerate networks of former SS men selling surplus arms in South America
• Why the US military consulted Rudel during the development of the A-10 Thunderbolt II, and the unresolved question of whether tactical skill can be separated from the ideology it served