Inhaltsangabe
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.
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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor
PHILIPPE SANDS is professor of law at the University of London, the Samuel Pisar Visiting professor at Harvard Law School, and the author of East West Street. He is a frequent commentator on CNN and the BBC World Service, and a litigator before international courts. He is the former president of English PEN. In 2003 Sands was appointed a Queen’s Counsel. He lives in London, England.
Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.
Prologue
Santiago, August 1974
A Chevrolet refrigerated van trundled along La Alameda, which connected the Moneda Palace to the University. Near the ancient Church of San Francisco it turned right, to enter the Barrio París-Londres, constructed around the intersection of two streets, Calle Londres and Calle París. The neighbourhood, once the garden of an ancient hermitage, was home to poets, writers and artists.
The van moved over the cobblestones before coming to a stop before a low grey stone building, number 38. Referred to simply as Londres, elsewhere the street might have been Londonstrasse, or Rue de Londres, or Londres Street.
Men in civilian clothing opened the van’s rear doors and a group of men and women in blindfolds tumbled out and entered number 38. One was a twenty-year-old student of history, arrested for sub-version. He wasn’t sure where he was, but through a gap in the blindfold he glimpsed the black and white floor tiles that marked the entrance. A chessboard, the headquarters of the Socialist Party.
He was led up a few stone steps and into the building, separated from his companions and taken to a side room where he was instructed to sit. Another person, a woman, sat next to him.
‘My name is León.’
‘My name is Hedy,’ the woman replied.
They waited. After a while, he was escorted to a staircase that wound up the back of the building, to the first floor. In another room, a guard ordered him to remove his clothing. Naked, he was made to lie on his back on the frame of an old bed, metal and cold. His wrists and ankles were tied to the frame. He was splayed, like a pig on a spit.
He heard low voices, and wondered if one had a German accent. As he lay, he made out the shape of an old typewriter, tall, elegant. He heard other voices and noticed a scent, cheap and familiar. The sounds approached, the scent sharpened. Flaño, a perfume that would come to induce a sense of anxiety and fear.
Later, when he was back in the room on the ground floor, a young man was carried in and deposited on the floor, in a heap. Alfonso, someone whispered, a philosophy student, in a dreadful condition. Shortly, a young woman was brought to him, another detainee. The two spoke a few words before the philosophy student was bundled out of the building, put in the back of a refrigerated van, and driven away.
He was never seen again.
London, October 1998
Twenty-four years later.
Four police officers gathered outside Room 801, on the eighth floor of a medical clinic on a street in the centre of London. An interpreter was present, late on that Friday evening in October. They entered the room, where an eighty-two-year-old man lay in bed, recovering from an operation on his back. Augusto Pinochet.
The interpreter, a lady with bouffant hair, informed him in Spanish that he was under arrest and told him his rights. ‘You are charged with murder,’ she said, ‘by a Spanish judge who wishes to extradite you to Madrid to be put on trial for a genocide you perpetrated in Chile, for torturing people and making them disappear.’
Two weeks later, in Paris, I greeted my wife at the large wooden gates that marked the entrance to the Pantin cemetery, on the outskirts of the city. This was where my grandfather was buried. We embraced. ‘I’ve just received an approach from Augusto Pinochet’s lawyers,’ I told her. ‘They would like me to argue that he is immune from the jurisdiction of the English courts and could not be extradited to Spain, for genocide or any other crimes.’
‘Will you do it?’ she asked in a firm voice. I reminded her of the ‘cab-rank principle’, the rule that required barristers to act like taxi drivers, to take every fare, to turn down none because of politics or personality.
‘Will you do it?’ she asked again.
You know the rule, so yes, that was my inclination.
‘Fine,’ she said in a tone that was both irritated and sweet, ‘but if you do it, I will divorce you.’
Hagenberg, Austria, June 2015
Seventeen years later.
I was on the upper floor of an ancient and dilapidated castle in northern Austria, making my way through the family archive of a long-dead Austrian couple. I found an old letter, written after the war, sent to Otto Wächter, on the run in Rome. The writer was a man named Walther Rauff, dispensing advice from Damascus in Syria:
Maintain an unshakable toughness, don’t be shy about the work you do, and don’t spend time harking back to better times. Accept the current situation and you can achieve a lot and climb back up the ladder . . . The main thing is to get out of Europe . . . and focus on the ‘reassembling of good forces for a later operation’.
Go to South America, Rauff told Wächter, who had once overseen the extermination of hundreds of thousands of Jews and Poles in Lviv, and then added: ‘I will pursue things along these lines.’
I learned that the writer of the letter was also an SS man on the run. He was notorious for his role in overseeing the policy to use vans to gas Jews and others to their deaths, and then to kill hundreds of thousands of people across Europe, to make them disappear. Indicted for these acts of mass killing, Herr Rauff avoided capture and made his way onto the Ratline. Years later, he ended up at the end of the world, in Patagonia in southern Chile, the manager of a king-crab cannery.
Rumours about his past followed him. So did rumours about his connection to General Pinochet. ‘Everybody knows,’ said a taxi driver in downtown Santiago.
PART I
ARREST
The certainty that there is no place on earth where crimes will go unpunished may be an effective means of preventing them.
Cesare Beccaria, 1764
LONDON, OCTOBER 1998
1
It was 17 October 1998, a Saturday afternoon, when I heard the news on the radio, waiting for the football results. It was my thirty-eighth birthday. The former Chilean dictator, General Augusto Pinochet, has been arrested in London, the BBC reported, at the request of a Spanish judge. This was interesting, as it wasn’t every day that a former head of state was detained. The details were sketchy, but it was said that the extradition request alleged crimes of genocide, torture and disappearances committed during his years in power, from the day of the Coup that brought him to power on 11 September 1973 until he stepped down, in March 1990.
News of the arrest gave rise to anger, delight and disbelief. The Chilean government protested that Pinochet was a former President and Senator-for-Life with complete immunity. ‘A transgression of international norms,’ his son told a crowd throwing eggs at the British ambassador’s residence in Santiago. ‘An act of cowardice,’ claimed the Pinochet Foundation, guardian of his legacy. ‘He was sleeping when police arrived at his room in the clinic.’
Pinochet’s opponents, on the other hand, were thrilled. Finally, he can be questioned on the fate of our loved ones, said the president of the Families of the Disappeared. A ‘unique opportunity’ to answer for his regime’s human rights violations, said María Isabel Allende, daughter of President Salvador Allende, who died on the day of the Coup.
‘An earthquake,’ wrote Roberto Bolaño, a Chilean novelist living near Barcelona.
A matter for the courts, said the British government. ‘The idea that a brutal dictator should claim...
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