38 Londres Street
On Impunity, Pinochet in England, and a Nazi in Patagonia
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4.3 • 7 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE • A KIRKUS BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR • In this intimate legal and historical detective story, the world-renowned lawyer and acclaimed author of East West Street traces the footsteps of two of the twentieth century’s most merciless criminals—accused of genocide and crimes against humanity—testing the limits of immunity and impunity after Nuremberg.
“Though nearly a decade in the making, this book could not arrive at a better time, because its subject is one of the most pressing themes of our era: impunity. . . . Sands has created an indelible and enthralling work of moral witness.” —Patrick Radden Keefe, author of Say Nothing
On the evening of October 16, 1998, Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was arrested at a medical clinic in London. After a brutal, seventeen-year reign marked by assassinations, disappearances, and torture—frequently tied to the infamous detention center at the heart of Santiago, Londres 38—Pinochet was being indicted for international crimes and extradition to Spain, opening the door to criminal charges that would follow him to the grave, in 2006.
Three decades earlier, on the evening of December 3, 1962, SS-Commander Walter Rauff was arrested in his home in Punta Arenas, at the southern tip of Chile. As the overseer of the development and use of gas vans in World War II, he was indicted for the mass murder of tens of thousands of Jews and faced extradition to West Germany.
Would these uncommon criminals be held accountable? Were their stories connected? The Nuremberg Trials—where Rauff’s crimes had first been read into the record, in 1945—opened the door to universal jurisdiction, and Pinochet's case would be the first effort to ensnare a former head of state.
In this unique blend of memoir, courtroom drama, and travelogue, Philippe Sands gives us a front row seat to the Pinochet trial—where he acted as a barrister for Human Rights Watch—and teases out the dictator’s unexpected connection to a leading Nazi who ended up managing a king crab cannery in Patagonia. A decade-long journey exposes the chilling truth behind the lives of two men and their intertwined destinies on 38 Londres Street.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
