Who Gets Away With Crimes Against Humanity?

Pinochet’s rise to power no doubt set Rauff’s mind at ease. The dictatorship repeatedly rebuffed fresh extradition requests from West Germany and Israel, even as Nazi hunters like Beate Klarsfeld and Simon Wiesenthal located war criminals. For Pinochet, harboring Rauff was neither accident nor oversight. As Sands makes clear, Pinochet’s regime was ideologically aligned with the arch-traditionalism of Francoist Spain and the repressive anti-communist order that Nazi veterans represented. Rauff, an unrepentant party man who celebrated the Führer’s birthday every year, embodied both the continuity of far-right authoritarianism from the 1930s to the Cold War and the conviction that leftist politics were an existential threat to be eradicated.

Sands examines these overlapping life histories and political narratives with sensitivity and clear eyes. He is not inflammatory or accusatory. Rather, through meticulous archival research, interviews, and vivid reporting in several countries, he allows readers to trace surprising—and damning—connections across time and place. Sands himself is often the vessel for these discoveries. He recounts walks in recent years through unassuming Santiago neighborhoods, retracing with torture survivors the footsteps of political detainees and observing the architecture of state violence, unchanged in a Chile that is otherwise vastly different. He visits the site of the former Socialist Party headquarters, turned after the coup into a notorious center of interrogation and torture, at the titular 38 Londres Street. The book includes photos that reflect Sands’s personal, memoiristic style: snapshots of rooms, buildings, and people, evidently taken by the author himself. The effect is to heighten the reader’s sense of accompanying Sands on a chilling journey into a human rights heart of darkness.

When Rauff died peacefully in Santiago in 1984, surrounded by his sons and grandchildren, the Pinochet government had shielded him for more than a decade. His funeral drew open displays of Nazi salutes, a final reminder that the ideological underpinnings of his crimes were far from extinct. In this light, Pinochet’s own confidence in his untouchability seems less like personal hubris and more like the logical conclusion of a system in which those who serve the right cause, in the eyes of powerful patrons, are protected no matter the enormity of their crimes. Just as Rauff eluded the hands of justice, so, too, did Pinochet hope to evade the authority of any court. That he was wrong, even briefly, is why his arrest in London still resonates: It was proof, however fleeting, that the walls built to shelter the powerful can be breached. Pinochet was eventually sent home to Chile rather than Spain, where he would have stood trial. Claiming concerns for his health, he left London in a wheelchair that he abandoned on the tarmac in Santiago. He died in 2006 at the age of 91.