38 LONDRES STREET

An international law scholar and practitioner points to the loopholes that allowed a tyrant to evade prosecution.

Sands’ title comes from the former Chilean Socialist Party headquarters that, in a cruelly ironic turn, became a center for the interrogation and torture of leftists after the military coup that overthrew the government of Salvador Allende in 1973. A second irony is that Augusto Pinochet’s coup was coordinated with the Nixon administration courtesy of Henry Kissinger, who at the end of World War II had been on the trail of the de facto head of Chile’s secret police. That man was a Nazi named Walther Rauff, inventor and administrator of the mobile gas truck of Holocaust infamy, who had escaped from Europe after the war and later managed a crabmeat cannery in Patagonia. When Pinochet was arrested in London for crimes committed during his reign, the linkages between his government and Nazis residing in South America became clearer. In a complicated series of trials to determine whether Britain could extradite Pinochet to Spain to be tried on charges of genocide—under, ironically again, a law promulgated during the Franco dictatorship—Pinochet’s attorneys claimed that the Chilean leader enjoyed immunity from prosecution as a head of state. Spanish attorneys conversely argued, as Sands writes, that “Pinochet was directly involved in the physical elimination, disappearance, kidnapping and torture of thousands of individuals.” Sands establishes a trail of evidence that links Pinochet to Rauff through a long acquaintance that began when both men were living in Ecuador. A final irony, perhaps, apart from the fact that after 17 months Pinochet was allowed to return to Chile, was that a journalist who helped find Rauff for execution by Israeli intelligence agents—which never took place—was none other than Gerd Heidemann, the con artist behind the Hitler Diaries scam.

An extraordinary exposé of the collusion of Nazis with the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile.