The human rights lawyer Philippe Sands has long drawn on political and personal history in his books, which include East West Street and The Ratline, piecing together the consequences of the Holocaust with all the acumen of a forensic detective.
In his latest, he draws in particular on the tortured politics of Latin America. It is a two-track investigation, into the entwined fate of the notorious military dictator of Chile, Augusto Pinochet, and that of the one-time SS commander, Walther Rauff, whose post-war years were spent in Patagonia, in southern Chile, under the seemingly innocuous guise of a manager of a company producing tinned seafood.
Witnesses who survived Pinochet’s torture system told Sands that they recognised images of Rauff from his presence in the building
In fact, as Sands shows, in this at times dense account, Rauff had a horrific back story. He was the architect and designer of the infamous mobile “gas vans” which the Nazis originally used to murder Jews in Europe, before deciding that the method did not kill in sufficient numbers. One of his many thousands of victims was a cousin of Sands. And, despite repeated denials, Sands argues that Rauff and Pinochet definitely knew each other, with Rauff’s “expertise” brought into play by the murderous regime over which General Pinochet presided between 1973 and 1990.
The eponymous address, 38 Londres Street in Santiago, was the headquarters of a torture system run by the Pinochet regime. Witnesses who by some miracle survived told Sands that they recognised images of Rauff from his presence in the building, and recalled his strong German accent when speaking Spanish.
For those who did not survive there was a different system of vans, this time refrigeration vehicles. Sands tells us that thousands of people alleged to have been “disappeared” during Pinochet’s virulent anti-Communist rule, were in fact loaded into the vans and once murdered, horrifyingly turned into fish food. While Sands does not quite succeed in providing a definitive, provable link between Rauff and Pinochet in the carrying out of the executions and torture, he is informed by a judge that he almost certainly has enough to show “that Rauff assisted Pinochet in facilitating the disappearances”.
Sands’ book is particularly fascinating when re-tracing the Pinochet story, the first former head of state to be arrested in another country accused of crimes committed elsewhere, under the principle of universal jurisdiction.
Having been advised not to travel outside Chile, Pinochet did just that, arriving in London in 1998 with his wife on a spurious excuse of discussing arms sales with the British government. Soon after his arrival, he was arrested at the direction of the then Home Secretary Jack Straw following pressure from the Spanish National Court and Amnesty International.
A protracted legal battle ensued, involving Sands himself. He had been approached to advise Pinochet, but instead went in the opposite direction and worked with Human Rights Watch. Pinochet himself, repeatedly protesting his innocence, was kept under armed house arrest in Surrey.
Eventually, in 2000, Straw controversially informed Parliament that he was letting the former Chilean leader return home on the grounds of ill-health. Sands makes contact with two vital figures in the story — Straw, and Jean Pateras, a Met Police interpreter who was convinced that Pinochet was faking his mental and physical decline in order to return to Chile.
Pateras was arguably vindicated, as Pinochet arrived back in Chile in a wheelchair and then promptly got up and walked to a cheering reception in the airport terminal. Jack Straw, for his part, now says he “regretted his decision to allow Pinochet to return, and the fact that he was never tried and convicted in Chile” — and admits that some sort of deal was done between Britain and Chile to allow the dictator to leave.
Both of these contemptible men are, thankfully, long dead, with neither ever facing any court. For the sake of clarity it ought perhaps to be recorded that Sands, who is Jewish, spent February 2024 arguing in favour of the “state of Palestine” at the International Court of Justice’s case on Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories. I imagine that Sands hopes 38 Londres Street might serve as an awful warning to political leaders in places other than Latin America.
‘38 Londres Street: On Impunity, Pinochet in England and a Nazi in Patagonia’ by Philippe Sands
Weidenfeld & Nicolson
