For the Jewish Chronicle March 2025
The human rights lawyer Philippe Sands KC has a storied reputation for forensic detective work in his books piecing together the consequences of the Holocaust — East West Street and The Ratline.
Now, in 38 Londres Street, Sands once again dips in to his personal history and his in-depth knowledge of the tortured politics of Latin America. It is a two-track investigation, this time: the 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, apparently as the innocuous manager of a company producing tinned seafood.
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, Rauff and Pinochet definitely knew each other.
Rauff’s “expertise” was, says Sands, brought into play by the murderous regime over which General Pinochet presided between 1973 and 1990. The address which gives its name to the title of the book, 38 Londres Street in Santiago, was the headquarters of a torture system run by the Pinochet regime. Numbers of 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, a judge tells him that he almost certainly has enough to show “that Rauff assisted Pinochet in facilitating the disappearances”.
The Rauff side of the story is bad enough. Sands is fascinating, however, 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.
In 1998 Pinochet, having been advised not to travel outside Chile, did just that, arriving in London with his wife on a spurious excuse of discussing arms sales with the British government. After Spain urged Britain to arrest him because some of its citizens had allegedly been murdered by the Chilean regime, and after a prolonged and at times farcical legal battle, Pinochet was indeed arrested at the direction of the then Home Secretary Jack Straw.
For 17 months legal arguments ensued back and forth among men and women who were to become some of the best-known lawyers in Britain, including Philippe Sands himself. He was approached to advise Pinochet, but instead went in the entirely opposite direction and worked with Human Rights Watch. Pinochet himself, repeatedly protesting his innocence, was kept under house arrest in Surrey.
One of the most fascinating elements of the legal rows was the position of the law lord, Lord Hoffmann. His was the casting vote in the first hearing against Pinochet, but then doubts were raised over his and his wife’s links with Amnesty International, a party to the case. Many critics said he should have recused himself, but he insisted that his wife’s activities were not germane and that his role was only that of a trustee of one of Amnesty’s satellite organisations. Nevertheless, the row led to an unprecedented setting aside of a House of Lords judgment.
A quarter of a century after Jack Straw told 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 — Jack Straw, and Jean Pateras, the woman who interpreted for the Metropolitan Police, and was convinced that Pinochet was faking his mental and physical decline in order to return to Chile.
Pateras may have been vindicated in her distrust, 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 — Rauff, who escaped extradition to West Germany and an assassination attempt by Mossad, in 1984 — and Pinochet, in 2006, without facing any court for his plethora of crimes.
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 is published by W&N on April 3 2025 at £25