Augusto Pinochet expected London to be a hospitable city when he arrived there in October 1998. The 82-year-old former Chilean dictator had backed Margaret Thatcher in the Falklands war and, while the Conservatives were no longer in power, a former prime minister counted as a friend in high places.British police were not interested in kidnap, murder and torture in South America under a junta that had seized power in a coup in 1973. Besides, a former head of state had diplomatic immunity. Or so Pinochet thought, until officers from Scotland Yard, acting on an extradition request from a Spanish judge, turned up at the private clinic where he had undergone a minor back operation.
The ensuing legal battle to determine which crimes might be pinned on the old man, under what statute and in which jurisdiction, is one thread of 38 Londres Street by lawyer and author Philippe Sands. It is woven around a second story: Walther Rauff was an SS officer who had overseen the development of gas lorries in Nazi-occupied eastern Europe – vehicles customised to murder their mostly Jewish passengers with diverted exhaust fumes. Rauff evaded prosecution at Nuremberg and eventually settled in Patagonia. He was arrested in 1962 and almost extradited to West Germany, but spared by a Chilean supreme court ruling that a 15-year statute of limitations on his crimes had expired.
Two unrepentant murderers; two extradition bids; a Chilean connection – the thematic likenesses alone would justify bringing these stories together. But Sands’s achievement is to excavate a deeper intimacy between the cases of Rauff and Pinochet.
The book’s title refers to an address in Santiago, a former headquarters of the Socialist party. After Pinochet’s coup, the building was repurposed as a secret detention and torture centre run by the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (Dina). This agency orchestrated repression on an industrial scale, including at a purpose-built concentration camp on an island in the Tierra del Fuego archipelago.
To commit mass murder with a minimum of witnesses was a logistically complex task requiring the discreet transportation of living prisoners and disposal of corpses. Experience in that field is not the kind of thing people boast about. But such knowledge, and the ideological inclination to use it, might be found in the ranks of a particular type of mid-20th century German émigré to South America.
In the late 1950s, before Rauff settled in Chile, he lived in Ecuador. Pinochet was at a military academy in Quito. The two men became friends. After the 1973 coup, Rauff boasted in correspondence of high-level contacts in the new military regime. There were persistent rumours that he was working for the Dina, but nothing was proved before his death in 1984.
Pinochet died in 2006, in Chile. His lawyers had failed to assert his immunity but, thanks to some political machination between the UK and Chilean governments, the apparently decrepit dictator avoided extradition to Spain on grounds of medical incapacity. (His health bounced back as soon as he landed on home soil.)
Sands follows each twist in the double narrative with an impressive combination of moral clarity and judicious detachment. As in his previous books dealing with related themes – the Nuremberg trials in East West Street; a Nazi fugitive in The Ratline – there is personal investment in the story. The author counts members of his own extended family among the victims of the Third Reich and the Pinochet regime.
But it is Sands’s expertise in international law, coupled with a natural storyteller’s intuition for structure, that gives his latest book its understated power. A less skilful narrator might have lost the reader in a thicket of legal arguments, or glossed over nuance in pursuit of polemical urgency. That isn’t Sands’s style. His stories have all the more impact for their subtlety. It would be reassuring to think that monstrous criminals can always be known by their conspicuous monstrosity. That isn’t what history shows. It is by doggedly sticking to the trail of evidence that Sands arrives at the unnerving truth of 38 Londres Street, and what that address tells us about atrocity, impunity and justice eroded by the tide of time.
• 38 Londres Street: On Impunity, Pinochet in England and a Nazi in Patagonia by Philippe Sands is published by W&N (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
