38 Londres Street On impunity, Pinochet in England, and a Nazi in Patagonia

Sands, a lawyer specializing in international law, didn't intend to write a trilogy when East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes against Humanity (2016) was published. What began as a journey to find his beloved grandfather's home in Lviv, now in Ukraine, became an odyssey of both international and personal significance. Sands followed the historical breadcrumbs of escaped Nazis in The Ratline: Love, Lies and Justice on the Trail of a Nazi Fugitive (2021). Here Sands continues that story of impunity, tracking individual Nazis directly responsible for mass murder who dispersed around the world, particularly Walter Rauff, who designed and supervised Hitler's mobile gas chambers, precursors to those at at Auschwitz. Rauff, the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, and Sands intersected in 1998 when Pinochet was arrested in London with an international warrant and indicted for war crimes. It turns out that Rauff played an indirect part in the murder of members of Sands' family during the Holocaust, and he was later involved with torture and disappearances in Chile during the Pinochet regime. Drawing on extensive research and interviews with key figures, Sands builds suspense like the best of mystery writers. 38 Londres Street is a masterful and timely mix of history, journalism, and memoir.

International lawyer Sands's gripping third installment in a series about Nazi war crimes (after The Ratline) juxtaposes the 1998 arrest of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in London with the life of SS commander Walter Rauff, who clandestinely settled in Chile under Pinochet. At first, Pinochet and Rauff's lives appear to intersect merely thematically, as both faced extradition for mass murder. Yet, as Sands meticulously documents, their connections ran deeper, with evidence surfacing over time that Rauff was an adviser at Pinochet's torture centers. A mix of courtroom drama and memoir (because of Sands's "minor role" in Pinochet's extradition case), one strand of the narrative follows the British legal system as it wrestles with Pinochet's arrest, while the Rauff-centered sections chronicle Sands's own dogged investigation of the former Nazi. Combing through archives, interviews, and fictionalized representations (including a Roberto Bolaño novel), Sands pieces together the haunting memories of torture survivors who recall a German-accented jailer--including one former captive who, with terror, recognizes Rauff's voice in a recording. Sands evocatively studies the two mass murderers, with their similarly arrogant and unrepentant personalities, as avatars of a fascism undefeated and still festering in the West. With the extradition efforts against both men ultimately failing, the result is a disturbing indictment of an international legal system hampered in its ability to punish crimes against humanity. (Oct.)

An international law scholar and practitioner points to the loopholes that allowed a tyrant to evade prosecution. Sands' title comes from the former Chilean Socialist Party headquarters that, in a cruelly ironic turn, became a center for the interrogation and torture of leftists after the military coup that overthrew the government of Salvador Allende in 1973. A second irony is that Augusto Pinochet's coup was coordinated with the Nixon administration courtesy of Henry Kissinger, who at the end of World War II had been on the trail of the de facto head of Chile's secret police. That man was a Nazi named Walther Rauff, inventor and administrator of the mobile gas truck of Holocaust infamy, who had escaped from Europe after the war and later managed a crabmeat cannery in Patagonia. When Pinochet was arrested in London for crimes committed during his reign, the linkages between his government and Nazis residing in South America became clearer. In a complicated series of trials to determine whether Britain could extradite Pinochet to Spain to be tried on charges of genocide--under, ironically again, a law promulgated during the Franco dictatorship--Pinochet's attorneys claimed that the Chilean leader enjoyed immunity from prosecution as a head of state. Spanish attorneys conversely argued, as Sands writes, that "Pinochet was directly involved in the physical elimination, disappearance, kidnapping and torture of thousands of individuals." Sands establishes a trail of evidence that links Pinochet to Rauff through a long acquaintance that began when both men were living in Ecuador. A final irony, perhaps, apart from the fact that after 17 months Pinochet was allowed to return to Chile, was that a journalist who helped find Rauff for execution by Israeli intelligence agents--which never took place--was none other than Gerd Heidemann, the con artist behind theHitler Diaries scam. An extraordinary exposé of the collusion of Nazis with the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.