In the autumn of 1998 Philippe Sands embraced his wife, Natalia Schiffrin, at the gates of a Paris cemetery where his grandfather was buried. Sands told her he had been approached by the lawyers of Augusto Pinochet to help the former Chilean dictator’s defence. “Will you do it?” she asked. Sands explained that barristers were required to act like cab drivers, to take every fare.
Fine, she replied, but if you do it, I will divorce you. Defending Pinochet, who was accused of genocide and crimes against humanity, would have been a personal affront for her: she held the ruthless general responsible for the killing of a friend of her father. And, a clinching argument, her mother was a refugee from the Spanish civil war. Defending Pinochet would be tantamount to acting for Spain’s former caudillo Francisco Franco.
Sands, an Anglo-French human rights lawyer and writer, got the message loud and clear. He remains happily married. But his fascination with Pinochet has lingered on. And shapes the narrative of this intriguing, beautifully observed and thoughtful book about immunity and impunity. It is the last of a trilogy that began with East West Street, which won the Baillie Gifford prize in 2016, and continued with The Ratline, about the escape route for Nazi criminals from postwar Europe to South America.
Sands’s books are peopled with fugitives and their internal lives. East West Street is about two Jewish lawyers who escaped from Lviv — and their almost certain extermination — and their subsequent attempts to codify the idea of crimes against humanity. The Ratline focuses on Otto von Wächter, the former Nazi governor of Krakow. Sands’s new book, 38 Londres Street, is named after the address of an interrogation centre in the Chilean capital of Santiago for Pinochet’s secret police, the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA). It has two strands. One focuses on Pinochet and the legal case against him; the other on Walther Rauff, a German SS officer and war criminal who made his home in Chile.
Sands makes his legal arguments come alive, partly with tricks (the book is dotted with often off-beat snapshots), partly by dramatising his interviews with bit players in the plot, and partly by larding snippets of information about the dictator. Pinochet, the leader of Chile from 1973 to 1990, was a Star Wars fan, apparently, and an obsessive collector of books about Napoleon. Less charmingly, he befriended old Nazis like the Luftwaffe ace fighter pilot Hans-Ulrich Rudel. “Hitler’s only mistake was to lose the war,” Rudel told him. Did Pinochet approve of the sentiment? We do know that he once challenged a visiting West German government minister on whether he was sure that six million Jews had really died. Couldn’t it have been four million?
It was not, of course, his Holocaust denial that endeared him to Margaret Thatcher. Rather she admired his anticommunism and his commitment to free market economics; they shared an enthusiasm for Milton Friedman. Pinochet had backed Britain when Argentina invaded the Falklands in 1982. All in all, he must have assumed he was safe when he came to London for some back treatment.
He was no longer president when he flew from Santiago to London in 1998, but Amnesty International had tried to engineer an arrest on a previous trip to London. So his team sought legal advice — there was, after all, a new Labour government and a foreign secretary, Robin Cook, who believed in an ethical foreign policy. To an old man marinated in anti-communism the Blair government must have looked like a bunch of lefty agitators.
Some of Pinochet’s advisers assured him that he would have immunity. He was not only a former president but a senator-for-life. To be on the safe side his team invented a business mission to buy military hardware to make it politically inconvenient for him to be arrested.
When a Spanish judge issued an arrest warrant in October 1998, Pinochet was put under house arrest. First at the London Clinic in Marylebone, where he was recovering from back surgery, and later in a rented house in Surrey. Thatcher said the arrest was “outrageous, unlawful and inhumane, carried out at dead of night on a sedated Pinochet”.
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Pinochet seems to have taken the arrest with some stoicism. He was after all a soldier who had lived before in cramped quarters — two of the four bedrooms of the house he lived in on the Wentworth estate, near Virginia Water, were allocated to British cops and surveillance cameras crowded the kitchen. But the 83-year-old wasn’t being given the Londres Street treatment and the house was round the corner from a golf course. He behaved like an officer on sick leave, maintaining his self-belief as a military hero, not a torturer. He was in his own eyes the commander in chief who had led the 1973 coup against the leftist president Salvador Allende for the sake of the nation.
The army code was, in a twisted way, what linked him to Rauff, a former SS commander and the other strand of the Sands narrative.
During the Second World War Rauff found a method for funnelling gas into sealed lorries, effectively inventing mobile gas chambers. About 97,000 Jews were murdered in this way. Rauff, according to a letter unearthed by Sands, had advised Wächter to head for South America on the clandestine “ratline”. It was 1949 and Rauff was writing from Damascus, where he was helping to set up the Syrian secret police. Wächter died mysteriously in Rome, but Rauff, worried about Mossad and Nazi hunters, followed his own advice and set out for Ecuador.
There he struck up an acquaintance with a group of Chilean army officers teaching at the local officers’ academy. One of them was a certain Major Pinochet. The Chilean army had been heavily influenced by the Prussian army tradition; the uniforms were similar and Pinochet revealed himself to be a Germanophile. Rauff — who was recruited by the West German secret service, the BND — moved to Chile. He became BND agent 7410 and his job, under the guise of being a businessman, was to spy on communists in Chile, Ecuador and Peru.
Pinochet rose; Rauff did not (he wasn’t much of a spy). When stories of his Nazi crimes leaked out, Rauff agreed to testify in writing on the construction of the gas vans, provided that the court accepted that he was only obeying orders and did not know how his invention would be used. Rauff was calculating, just as Pinochet later calculated, that he would enjoy immunity from prosecution — in his case as a BND agent. His testimony was used to convict two Germans on charges of killing almost 4,000 people. But the rest of the trial collapsed and Rauff moved further south to Patagonia, where he ran a cannery for giant crabs.
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The flaw in an otherwise fascinating narrative is that the lives of Rauff and Pinochet are not quite as intertwined as Sands would like us to believe. Yes, both claimed immunity for their crimes, both were anti-communists and considered themselves to be working for a common cause. Some of those taken to Londres Street reported hearing the voice of a German while they were being tortured. There were rumours that Rauff’s refrigerated vans were being used to transport dead bodies.
There are some logical connections: Rauff, with a record of mass murder and spy credentials, could have been entrusted by DINA to dispose of evidence of torture. And the connection between Pinochet and DINA was always a line of inquiry for those trying to find a way to try the general. But Pinochet always denied knowing Rauff, and even though he was lying there seems to be only the thinnest of evidence that Thatcher’s trusted friend used the German war criminal to carry out his dirty work.
Both men had this in common: they were expert in cleaning up evidence that could be used against them; they ducked out of legal responsibility and they died peacefully — Pinochet at the age of 91 in 2006 (300 criminal cases still open against him) and Rauff at the age of 77 in 1984. Neither should be resting in peace.
38 Londres Street: On Impunity, Pinochet in England and a Nazi in Patagonia by Philippe Sands (W&N £25 pp480). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
