the Prussian Province of Hanover on 1 April 1941 as SA Chief of Staff Viktor Lutze's successor. As Gauleiter and Oberpräsident, he thus united under his control the highest party and governmental offices in the province. At about the same time came his promotion to SS-Gruppenführer. Lauterbacher's last new assignment came on 16 November 1942, when he was appointed Reich Defense Commissioner for his Gau. On 30 January 1944, he was promoted to SS-Obergruppenführer. On 10 April 1945, shortly before the Allied forces marched into Germany, and only 20 days before Adolf Hitler killed himself, Lauterbacher took his family to safety in the Harz, but not without having announced over wired radio the requisite exhortations to hold out against the onslaught. Two days earlier, on 8 April, he had loaded his car up with cigarettes so that he could flee south from the Harz posing as a cigarette sales agent. Leaving his family in the Harz on 11 April, after making it as far as Carinthia, Lauterbacher was seized and taken prisoner by the British on 26 May. Post war Internment, acquittal, and escape Early in July 1946, the High British Military Court in Hanover acquitted Lauterbacher of the charge of having ordered early in April 1945 the murder of German and Allied detainees at the prison in Hamelin. In August 1947, new proceedings against Lauterbacher began at the Dachau International Military Tribunal. At issue this time was an order allegedly given by Lauterbacher in September 1944 for the shooting of twelve American airman who had been shot down over Goslar. In October 1947, this trial, too, ended in acquittal. Lauterbacher, who since the end of the war had been interned in the Sandbostel camp near Bremervörde, managed on 25 February 1948 to flee detention owing to circumstances that are still unclear. Ratlines He went underground, until he was arrested in Rome in April 1950. Here he was dealing with people smugglers who took people from former fascist states with warrants or charges outstanding against them to South America or the Middle East. Sent to the La Frachette camp near Rome by the Italians, who had declared him an "undesirable foreigner", Lauterbacher still managed to flee a few months later, in December 1950, to Argentina, following the same route Adolf Eichmann took the same year. In Buenos Aires he helped develop ratlines for other Nazis seeking to flee from Europe.