Book review: Horrific figures of history who refused to accept their crimes

Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet in September 1997; he was arrested in London in 1998 for suspected genocide. File picture: Santiago Llanquin/ AP

• 38 Londres Street: On Impunity, Pinochet in England and a Nazi in Patagonia
• Philippe Sands
• Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £25

One of the great puzzles that faced the prosecutors and jailors at the Nuremberg trials was the fact that none of the 24 defendants charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity could genuinely understand why they were in the dock.

After the war, most Nazis refused to accept that they had done anything wrong. 

They really believed that they were fighting for the future of the human race and wanted to protect it from Jews and communists. 

Those on trial at Nuremberg were dismayed to find out that their attitude was not shared by their captors.

The failure to accept guilt for war crimes and crimes against humanity has been a recurring theme in the work of the human rights lawyer Philippe Sands. 

His books East West Street about the lives of two Jewish lawyers who created the legal concepts of crimes against humanity and genocide, and The Ratline about a senior Nazi trying to evade capture in the aftermath of the holocaust and emigrate to South America, are masterly accounts of personal histories intertwined with deep treatises on both human existence and the human condition.

His latest work, 38 Londres Street, brings his remarkable trilogy on this theme to an end.

Author and human rights lawyer Philippe Sands details Pinochet’s evasion from justice in '38 Londres Street: On Impunity, Pinochet in England and a Nazi in Patagonia'.

It is the haunting parallel story of the Chilean dictator, Augusto Pinochet — whom many will have heard of — and Nazi war criminal Walther Rauff, whom few will know. 

Readers will have a gnawing feeling from the off that neither of these two reprehensible characters will face justice but the tale Sands weaves in this mammoth sweep of post-Second World War history, the geopolitics of the cold war, musings on impunity, and the intertwining fates of the infamous and the unknown, will have them turning the pages.

Pinochet, who took power in Chile after the American-backed coup against Salvador Allende in 1973, always felt himself to be above the law. 

He had no regrets about any of his actions. He considered himself to be a soldier whose good deeds had saved Chile from communism, leftist agitators, and a Cuban future. 

“I am an angel”, was one of his favourite sayings and he truly believed it. 

He ruled Chile from 1973 to 1990 through a barbaric clampdown on anyone vaguely thought to be a leftist. 

Eighty thousand people were interned in Chile’s prisons, countless thousands of people tortured, and more than 3,000 people executed — although many consider the figure to be far higher.

In 1998, at the age of 82, he took a trip to London on a strangely vague mission to purchase weapons for his country, in which he still had a type of ambassadorial role, and to have a minor back operation. 

Some in his still vast entourage of hangers on advised him not to go given that a new Labour government was in power, and various human rights groups had tried to have him arrested in the past. 

He shrugged them off, had tea with Margaret Thatcher where he told her he loved London, and had his operation.

But on the night of Friday, October 16, officers from Scotland Yard, accompanied by a translator, entered the London Clinic in Marylebone, woke the recuperating Pinochet, and arrested him on suspicion of murder, genocide, and terrorism on foot of an extradition request from Spain. 

Justice had come calling. Thatcher was outraged, proclaiming the arrest to be unlawful and inhumane, while the former Tory chancellor of the exchequer Norman Lamont wailed that Pinochet was a “good, brave, and honourable soldier”.

Another man who considered himself a good, brave, and honourable soldier was Walther Rauff. 

In reality, he was a vile Nazi war criminal who led a team that invented mobile gas chambers in which at least 97,000 Jews were murdered. 

A former SS commander who worked under the equally repulsive Reinhard Heydrich — one of the architects of the holocaust — Rauff used the ratline escape route for Nazi criminals from postwar Europe to South America and ended up firstly in Ecuador and then Chile.

The link between Pinochet and Rauff is the 38 Londres Street of the title. 

It is an ordinary street in Santiago from which prisoners of the Pinochet regime were ferried into and out of number 38 to face illegal detention, torture, and death. 

The vans which deliver them are not the execution chambers of Rauff’s SS career but rather those of the Pesquera Arauco fishing company, which remained under public control despite Pinochet’s mania for privatising everything else in Chile. 

It was that privatisation zeal which won him Thatcher’s approval. But in their own ways these are vans of death as well, delivering Pinochet’s hated leftists to a grim fate. 

No one has ever been convicted for their part in the Pesquera Arauco death and torture drives.

Justice never does come calling for Rauff. In a dispiriting twist, which won’t ruin the book for readers, we learn that Rauff was recruited by the West German secret service, the BND — with the remit to spy on communists in Chile, Ecuador, and Peru. 

It turns out he wasn’t much good at it, and when stories of his Nazi past ultimately leaked out, the West German state had no option but to pursue him.

In February 1963, a court in Chile examined a seriously large amount of evidence against him in an extradition hearing. 

Rauff agreed to testify in writing on the construction of the gas vans, provided the court accepted that old Nazi canard that he was only obeying orders and could not possibly know what the vans would be used for.

The court ultimately ruled that, notwithstanding his protestations, he had a major role in the construction, enhancement, and use of the gas vans.

Luckily for Rauff, it also ruled he could not be extradited to West Germany on genocide charges because the crime was not part of Chile’s criminal code at the time, but that he could for the murder of 97,000 Jews.

A long legal battle only ended when the Supreme Court ruled these crimes were also outside Chile’s statute of limitations.

Rauff was free to stay. Given his status as a BND agent, the suspicion was the West Germans were not too upset at the verdict.

Rauff lived out his days as the manager of a giant crab cannery in Patagonia, joining other Nazis with mundane jobs in South America — such as Josef Mengele who was first a carpenter and then a pharmaceutical salesman in Paraguay, and Adolf Eichmann who worked in administration for Mercedes Benz in Argentina.

The dots between Pinochet and Rauff join up in places but do not reach the same end point. 

Rauff had links with Pinochet’s secret police, the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional, but Sands — as one of the most eminent human rights lawyers of the age — can never fully connect these two conduits of evil. 

What he has done is produce a gripping history of a time, place, characters, and ideas intermixed with the universal maxim of bad people getting away with mass murder.

The only consolation is that Sands and history has damned them.