38 Londres Street
On Impunity, Pinochet in England and a Nazi in Patagonia
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Beschreibung des Verlags
In 38 Londres Street, Philippe Sands blends personal memoir, historical detective work and gripping courtroom drama to probe a secret double story of mass murder, one that reveals a shocking thread that links the horrors of the 1940s with those of our own times.
The house at 38 Londres Street is home to the legacies of two men whose personal stories span continents, nationalities and decades of atrocity: Augusto Pinochet, President of Chile, and Walther Rauff, a Nazi SS officer responsible for the use of gas vans.
On the run from justice at the end of the Second World War, Rauff crosses the ocean to southern Chile. He settles in Punta Arenas, Patagonia, managing a king crab cannery at the end of the world. But there are whispers about this discreet and self-possessed German - rumours of a second career with Pinochet's secret intelligence service, the dreaded DINA.
In 1998, Pinochet is in a London medical clinic when the police enter his room and arrest him on charges of crimes against humanity and genocide. Philippe Sands is called to advise the former head of state on his claim to immunity, but will instead represent a human rights organisation against him. Years later, Sands makes a discovery while working on another book which reignites his interest in the case and leads to a decades-long investigation into Pinochet's crimes, his unexpected connection to Rauff and the former Nazi's possible connection to Chile's disappeared.
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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.
