38 LONDRES STREET: ON IMPUNITY, PINOCHET IN ENGLAND AND A NAZI IN PATAGONIA
By Philippe Sands
Published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 480 pages;
In the autumn of 1998, the former president of Chile Augusto Pinochet was awakened from his slumber by several British policemen as he lay in bed recovering from a back operation at the prestigious London Clinic in Marylebone.
Pinochet was informed that a Spanish investigating judge, Baltasar Garzón, had issued an international arrest warrant to detain him on the basis that his dictatorial regime had murdered Spanish citizens in Chile.
Pinochet was read his rights: “You do not have to say anything; it may harm your defense if you do so.”
The dictator had come to power in 1973 in a military coup when British-made jet fighters bombed the Moneda Palace in Santiago and ended the rule of Salvador Allende, the democratically elected president.
He was supported by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, but they did not anticipate the murderous path that the new regime would take. Pinochet was a great admirer of Francisco Franco and was “skeptical about the extent of Nazi crimes.”
On Chile’s return to democracy in 1990, the Rettig Report stated that 3,000 people had been murdered and 40,000 “illegally detained or tortured.” The title of the latest book by writer, academic, and international lawyer Philippe Sands, 38 Londres Street, refers to the location in Santiago where opponents were abused, tortured, and killed.
When Allende was elected in 1970, he appointed around 20 people of “Jewish origin” to his government. His program of nationalization included the Banco Israelita de Chile and the redistribution of lands to destitute tenant farmers – all of which did not endear him to the business sector of the Jewish community.
Allende did not fit the image of a left-wing leader. He had expressed his support for oppressed Jews in the Soviet Union and in Arab lands. and he contended that the Middle East conflict could only be resolved “within the parameters of the Jewish state’s right to exist and to survive.”
Allende had even accepted an invitation to visit Israel from former president Zalman Shazar, and then-prime minister Golda Meir subsequently condemned the coup.
Many in the communal leadership in Chile, however, were delighted and expressed enthusiastic support for Pinochet.
It put them at odds with the local Zionists of Hashomer Hatzair, who had campaigned for Allende.Some of its members were subsequently given refuge by the Israeli Embassy, then driven to Santiago Airport by its diplomats and flown to Israel.
Then-US secretary of state Henry Kissinger with Augusto Pinochet, 1976. Neither Kissinger nor then-US president Richard Nixon anticipated the murderous path the new regime would take.
Refusing to help
Several communal leaders refused to help fellow Jews – whether estranged or committed – to escape the military junta’s lethal embrace. In her book, Latent Memory, American-Chilean writer Maxine Lowy noted that community leaders told staff at the US Embassy shortly after the coup that 95% of Chilean Jews were “avidly pro-junta.”
Sands’s book, however, is about the intertwining of the lives of Pinochet and a Nazi on the run, Walther Rauff, who had designed a prototype of a van that fed its exhaust fumes straight into the vehicle.
Tested on prisoners at Sachsenhausen, it killed all the passengers in the van within eight minutes.
Rauff was described as “short, close-shaven, ice cold, of a bilious complexion” – and “imbued with an air of racial superiority.”
Posted to Tunisia in December 1942, he demanded that thousands of Jews work as slave labor. Later in Milan, he was involved in the first deportations of Italian Jews to Auschwitz.
Interrogated by a British officer in Florence after the war – “a good Englishman and not a Jew” in Rauff’s view – he was embraced by the infamous Bishop Alois Hudal and housed at the Vigna Pia monastery.
From there, he fled to Damascus, where he helped reorganize Syrian intelligence services. He then made his way to Ecuador, where he became very friendly with a lecturer at the War Academy in Quito – Augusto Pinochet.
Under Pinochet’s influence, Rauff immigrated to Chile in 1958.
A few years later, its Supreme Court refused to extradite him due to a 15-year statute of limitations. In Chile, Rauff managed a crab cannery, celebrated Hitler’s birthday each year, and generally felt safe.
He was incensed at Rudolf Hess’s imprisonment in Spandau prison and the refusal to give admiral Karl Dönitz a military funeral. He also thought that the American TV miniseries Holocaust was “very good business for the Jews” and intensely disliked “Heinrich Kissinger.”
Sands writes that Menachem Begin reactivated the search for Nazi war criminals in 1977.
Botched attempt
The Mossad was instructed to locate Rauff and either abduct him or kill him on the spot. It failed in a botched attempt, and Pinochet moved to protect Rauff from extradition.
Rauff died in May 1984, seemingly from natural causes. The Israelis were not too sure and asked the Chilean Foreign Affairs Ministry to identify the body.
Sanf tries his hardest to strongly link Pinochet and Rauff but concludes that in many instances the factual evidence was simply not there. The suspicion that the camp on Dawson Island resembled its Nazi predecessors or that the Colonia Dignidad outpost was a center of Nazi influence over the Pinochet regime was not substantiated.
In contrast, former prisoner León Gómez said that he had been interrogated by Rauff, who was at 38 Londres Street every day, and felt “comfortable” being there.
In London, Pinochet was moved to the comfort of the Grovelands Priory, situated in Southgate, a suburb with a large Jewish population. His presence in the UK, however, had become a moral thorn in the side of Tony Blair’s government.
Despite claims that Blair had struck a deal with former Chilean president Eduardo Frei Montalva to prevent Pinochet’s extradition, there is no hard evidence to prove this.
The octogenarian Pinochet was suddenly found to be unfit to stand trial in Spain and was sympathetically dispatched to his homeland, where he miraculously recovered as he stepped off the plane to Santiago.
As a strong supporter of Pinochet due to his support during the Falklands War in 1982, Margaret Thatcher was delighted at the outcome. She had presented Pinochet with a commemorative plate celebrating the English victory over the Spanish Armada in 1588.
Villa Grimaldi
Thatcher was probably oblivious to the fact that Chilean Jews such as Diana Aron and Juan Carlos Perelman were killed at the Villa Grimaldi, another torture center. Moreover, any visitor to 38 Londres Street today will see the many stolpersteine (memorial plaques) in the ground.
Each one commemorates the killing of the desaparecidos – those who entered Villa Grimaldi and disappeared.
Pinochet never stood trial. Finally stripped of all his immunities, he was felled by a heart attack in 2006. His funeral was attended by thousands of admirers. Thousands more wanted to dance on his grave.
Sands’s book is really a journey through his meticulous research and investigation. While the intertwining of the lives of Pinochet and Rauff is true in the broader ideological sense, Rauff’s involvement in the specific crimes of the dictatorship is left hanging in the mists of time.
The book also examines the intricacies of the cut and thrust of the legal profession with regard to Pinochet’s arrest and sojourn in London. For those familiar with this episode, Sands has filled in many of the gaps.
But perhaps the real contribution of Sands is that the rule of law cannot be ignored or marginalized – and that those who do so with impunity today will pay the price tomorrow.
Jerusalem Post 13 September 2025