It started with a hunch. When Philippe Sands was researching his 2020 bestseller The Ratline he came across a letter held in the dusty family archive of a crumbling schloss in Austria. It was addressed to Otto von Wächter, the SS officer who was the subject of his book, written to him by a former colleague who had escaped postwar Europe and justice to Syria.
“And I just wondered, who is this character writing from Damascus?” remembers Sands, speaking on a video call from his home in London. So he looked up this Walther Rauff to discover he was the inventor of the mobile gas van. Though wanted for his role in the murder of an estimated 97,000 Jews during the Holocaust, he had died peacefully in Chile in 1984 during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. “That immediately triggered a thought: is there, could there be a connection between the two men?” he recalls.
As readers of The Ratline and its award-winning 2016 predecessor East West Street will know, making connections, teasing them out over decades and imbuing them with powerful meaning for our world today is what Sands does. But it is easy to see why he was so eager, despite no obvious leads, to investigate whether an SS colleague of Wächter, the man responsible for the wiping out of his grandfather’s entire extended family, had a link to Pinochet. Sands (64) a barrister and teaching law professor, had nearly represented the old dictator when he was arrested in London on foot of an arrest warrant from Spain in 1998. He passed on the work after his wife Natalia said she would divorce him if he accepted the brief, acting instead for Human Rights Watch when the extradition case reached the Law Lords.
The hunch led to years of relentless research. Sands threw up plenty of new revelations but ran down enough dead ends to have put off most other investigators. But he persevered. Eventually he convincingly proves that not only did Rauff and Pinochet know each other, but the old Nazi played a significant role in the dictator’s dirty war in which thousands of his regime’s opponents were tortured, disappeared and murdered. The old rumour in Chile that Pinochet, the most fascistic of South America’s military dictators, staffed his death squads with former Nazis is now shown to have been rooted in fact as Sands sets out in his gripping new book 38 Londres Street.
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This ends with Pinochet having lost his immunity from prosecution but dying without ever being convicted of his crimes. Sands shows us in fascinating detail how the principles of international justice collided with the realities of global power politics. The leaders of Britain’s New Labour will probably not welcome the episode being revised so thoroughly here. “If you were to go now to a book shop and buy a copy of Tony Blair’s memoir of his entire period in office, you would find that he passes over in total silence on the most significant case on international criminal responsibility since Nuremberg. How amazing is that?” asks Sands.
He is more sympathetic to the left-wing government in Santiago at the time of Pinochet’s arrest, which feared his trial and imprisonment abroad could topple the country’s recently restored democracy. He is particularly admiring of the statecraft practised by Cristián Toloza. An adviser to then president Eduardo Frei, he negotiated Pinochet’s eventual return to Chile after 17 months’ detention on medical grounds.
“He was brilliant. He designed the strategy [to get Pinochet home] in which he really played the British. He played a scorcher,” says Sands.
As part of the negotiations, Toloza showed Blair’s chief of staff Jonathan Powell a Chilean military document that directly implicated Pinochet in the actions of the notorious Caravan of Death army death squad. Sands shows that the Blair government let Pinochet go home on health grounds with the explicit understanding his immunity would be removed on his return to Chile, leading to his trial and likely conviction.
I want the books to create an audience that really understands the importance of safeguarding what we have. That it’s fragile, that it’s vital, that it’s useful
This understanding means in his book an ambivalent Sands leaves it for readers to form their own view on the British decision not to extradite Pinochet to Spain. He points out the hypocrisy inherent in a Spanish court going after Pinochet for crimes committed in Chile given Spain’s total failure to address the crimes of its own military caudillo, Francisco Franco.
But a recent viewing of the Brazilian film I’m Still Here, which tells the true story of one family whose father is disappeared by that country’s military dictatorship, has changed his mind. “It left me feeling so outraged I wept. It is exactly the same story as the ones I tell in my book.” Now he believes that given in the end Pinochet was never tried, his victims should have had their day in court, even a Spanish one.
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With the publication of 38 Londres Street, Sands says what he now thinks of as his East West Street trilogy is complete. The new book is a fitting conclusion to a series marked by great narrative verve, consisting of three thrillers about our troubled efforts to bring an end to impunity for the very worst of crimes.
The revelation that Rauff was an operative in Pinochet’s dirty war also brings Sands full circle, back to where his journey started with East West Street which focused on the extermination of his grandfather’s extended family near Lviv by the Nazis. Alongside this, Sands also explored the struggle to bring into existence an international legal architecture to punish such crimes that first emerged at the Nuremberg trials.
“East West Street was about the origins of genocide and crimes against humanity. And of course that was well before I was born in 1960. But in 1998 I was involved in the Pinochet case which concerned crimes against humanity and genocide,” says Sands, who now knows that the brief that landed on his desk in 1998 contained a tortuous but unbroken link through Pinochet to Rauff and Wächter and back to the murder of his grandfather’s family in Galicia. Sands also learned that his mother’s 12-year-old cousin Herta was likely among the 97,000 victims gassed in Rauff’s vans. As one Chilean poet tells him in 38 Londres Street and which he repeats like a mantra: “Everything is connected.”
If Sands is a natural born storyteller who appears unable to pass by an anecdote without first expertly stitching it into his narrative, he also has another agenda. “The legal order that was created in 1945 is now being challenged by various developments around the world,” he warns. “And I want the books to create an audience that really understands the importance of safeguarding what we have. That it’s fragile, that it’s vital, that it’s useful.”
Of all the places I go to talk in the world, Ireland is my favourite. Irish readers are second to none. You know, the Irish facility with words and stories and a good argument
He is clear about the challenges now being faced. He criticises former US president Joe Biden for welcoming charges by the International Criminal Court (ICC) against Vladimir Putin over Ukraine but then denouncing as “outrageous” similar charges against Binyamin Netanyahu over Gaza. “It’s a complete double standard in that instance and we have to call it out for what it is.” He also condemns South Africa for on the one hand bringing a case before the ICC in relation to Gaza and Israel but inviting Putin to a summit in Johannesburg “while his government is bombing the s**t out of Ukraine including targeting civilians”.
“You can’t pick and choose. It’s not a la carte justice where your mates are off the hook and your enemies get ensnared, and this is a very real issue,” he insists.
But Sands would rather focus on the positive, pointing to milestones like the Pinochet case. Though it never resulted in a trial, it was the first time a former head of state of one country had been arrested in another for committing an international crime.
“I think the door has now been opened to some degree of accountability. It’s patchy, it’s uneven, but I don’t think we’re going back to a
situation where it’s going to be possible to simply close the door and say ‘no, justice is out’. I’m not starry-eyed. It’s a long game and, you know, one step forward, one step sideways, one step backwards, two steps forward. It’s unpredictable, but the door is open.”
After his London launch Sands was off to Chile, where his book is already making political waves. Before he travelled he had assumed any waves would be caused by his revelation that Chilean authorities had a document that directly implicated Pinochet in death squad activity, which once shown to the British seems to have disappeared again from history. Instead it is the – to outsiders – lesser revelation that as part of their efforts to get him home, Chilean authorities drew up a document advising Pinochet on how to feign dementia in order to secure a medical release that has been causing controversy.
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When back in Europe there will be trips to Ireland, including to the Borris House Festival of Writing and Ideas in June. “Of all the places I go to talk in the world, Ireland is my favourite,” he says. Perhaps spotting a raised eyebrow over the video call, he quickly adds: “I have said this quite publicly before. Irish readers are second to none. You know, the Irish facility with words and stories and a good argument.” This Brexit-disdaining, Irish-reunification supporting Anglo-French litigator, whose last three books must be the envy of many novelists, should feel right at home.
And when the promotion work is done? “I think I have to do less law because I love writing.” He is currently writing a book on ecocide, the destruction of the environment by humans, and also “a sort of memoir” about his life in sport. “I wear this whole other hat where I’m on the international court of arbitration for sport. And the disputes that I deal with are beyond unbelievable.” He also says he is going to turn his hand to fiction. “I’m going to write a short novel about a place called Vittel.”
As readers of the East West Street will know, the French town is connected to the woman who saved his mother’s life during the Holocaust. And so while the trilogy might have reached its powerful conclusion with 38 Londres Street, a story that for Sands started back in 2010 with an invitation to give a lecture in Lviv looks set to continue.
