38 Londres Street by Philippe Sands charts the parallel stories of mass murderers Augusto Pinochet and Walther Rauff.
Following the US-backed coup that overthrew Salvador Allende on September 11th, 1973, Pinochet’s regime set about “removing Marxism from Chile”. Pinochet’s newly established secret police, the DINA, established a network of detention and torture centres throughout the country, including the building at 38 Londres Street in Santiago, from which the book takes its title. The Chilean National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation would later find that more than 40,000 people were illegally detained or tortured and more than 3,000 people were murdered or disappeared during Pinochet’s rule.
The parallel life that Sands narrates is that of Nazi SS Commander Walther Rauff who worked under Reinhard Heydrich, one of the principal architects of the Holocaust, to devise effective means to mass murder the Jewish populations of Belarus and Ukraine. Rauff’s team included chemist August Becker who had previously been involved in perfecting the use of carbon monoxide for the mass killings of mentally and physically disabled people. Rauff oversaw the construction of hundreds of vans with gas chambers built into the back which were used to murder 97,000 people. Among Rauff’s tasks was to optimise the rate at which gas should be introduced in order to minimise victims’ excretions, thus requiring less time to clean up.
In 38 Londres Street, Sands uses death vans as a narrative link between Rauff, who fled to Chile after the war, and Pinochet. He recounts that while Pinochet was a keen supporter of privatisation, he kept the Pesquera Arauco fishing company under public control. The reason for the regime’s interest in this company was that it owned a large fleet of refrigerated vans. These vans were used by the regime to shuttle prisoners and corpses across the network of detention, torture and execution centres that ran the length of Chile.
These centres included 38 Londres Street, Dawson Island, Colonia Dignidad, and the Regional Stadium of Concepción, to name just a few of the 1,200 centres of detention and torture that have been identified. Of all of these horrific places, Sands’s description of Colonia Dignidad stands out. “The Colony” was a religious, agricultural community established by Paul Schafer, a former Wehrmacht medical orderly. The Colony had close links with extreme right-wing groups and senior figures in the Chilean military and was used to torture, kill, and disappear Pinochet’s opponents. It was also a place that took in local children under the guise of charity and subjected them to systemic sexual abuse.
Much of 38 Londres Street is taken up by a narration of the trials to try to secure the extradition of Rauff from Chile to Germany in 1963 and of Pinochet to Chile following his arrest in London in 1998.
With regard to Rauff, in February 1963, a court in Chile ruled that the evidence presented established his direct role in the construction and enhancement of the gas vans but that he could not be extradited to Germany on genocide charges because the crime was not part of Chile’s criminal code when the crimes occurred. However, it ruled he could be extradited for the murder of 97,000 Jews. Rauff’s appeal to the Chilean Supreme Court, however, overturned this ruling because Chile’s 15-year statute-of-limitations meant he could not be held accountable for the crimes committed during the war.
Detailed first-hand descriptions of the extradition proceedings against Pinochet take up a much larger part of the book. These proceedings too ultimately failed. This outcome pleased both Margaret Thatcher, who described his detention as outrageous, unlawful and inhumane, and the Vatican, which urged the British government to allow Pinochet to return to Chile in the interests of national reconciliation.
Sands recounts how Rauff was eventually buried in May 1984 following a heart attack at the age of 77. The pastor gave a eulogy that reminisced about Rauff’s love of the sea but made no mention of his role in mass murder. At his graveside, admirers raised their right arms in Nazi salute and shouted: “Heil Walther Ruaff. Heil Hitler.”
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Although the Chilean government refused to give Pinochet a state funeral following his death in 2006, aged 91, thousands of supporters queued to pay their respects as his body lay on public display. Tens of thousands attended his funeral.
Given these gross failures of law, the only modicum of justice that Sands records being meted out to either Pinochet or Rauff is in the action of Francisco Cuadrado Prats, whose grandfather was assassinated by Pinochet’s regime. Quoting a contemporary report of the incident, Sands retells how Prats “walked up to Pinochet’s coffin and deliberately, calmly spat on the dictator’s face ... His was the tiniest of revolts, barely two or three seconds long, but it spoke for his murdered grandparents and for all the mutilated and missing bodies of his land.”
Ian Hughes is author of Disordered Minds: How Dangerous Personalities are Destroying Democracy and a Senior Research Fellow at the MaREI Centre at UCC.
