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

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.)