The Law Is Never a Given

Sumaiya Aftab Ahmed considers “38 Londres Street: On Impunity, Pinochet in England, and a Nazi in Patagonia,” the newest book from Philippe Sands.

By Sumaiya Aftab AhmedDecember 6, 2025

• Law

• History

“THE LAW has no single logic,” Philippe Sands writes in his riveting, understated, and illuminating new book, 38 Londres Street: On Impunity, Pinochet in England, and a Nazi in Patagonia. Whether carved in basalt, inked on parchment, or typed on a screen, legal codes depend on leaders to enforce them, and those leaders have biases. Law is less like math and more like dough.

Sands tells the story of how SS commander Walther Rauff and Chile’s past dictator Augusto Pinochet were able to dodge justice for decades. Despite charges of crimes against humanity and genocide, they died with impunity. For his part, Sands acted as a barrister for Human Rights Watch on the cases that followed Pinochet’s 1998 arrest in London. In 38 Londres Street, the author uncovers how the Nazi leader and dictator must have collaborated in Chile to torture, murder, and disappear dissidents.

Rauff, an unabashed antisemite, found friendship in Pinochet and refuge in Chile, where he ran a crab cannery. In Nazi Germany, he had designed and overseen gas vans that killed 97,000 people, likely including two of Sands’s relatives.

Pinochet, “a virulent anti-communist and Germanophile,” usurped Chile’s democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende in a 1973 coup d’état and presided over a secret police force, the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA), that targeted leftists. As Chile’s president until 1990, Pinochet authorized the torture of at least 31,000 people and the execution or disappearance of more than 3,200 people.

A feat of reporting and synthesis, 38 Londres Street elucidates remarkable parallels between the two men. Both underwent arrest at 11:00 p.m. (Pinochet in pajamas) on charges of mass murder according to extradition requests from one country to another, Chile to West Germany for Rauff in 1962 and Britain to Spain for Pinochet in 1998. After much wrangling, legal systems of their respective cases determined that neither man qualified for extradition. They remained remorseless to the end. “I am a monument,” Rauff told an old SS comrade in 1979 about his status in Chile; “I am an angel,” Pinochet said in a 2003 interview. Rauff and Pinochet never stood trial as criminals against humanity and genocidaires.

Their legacies, however, cannot evade Sands’s rigorous inquiry. Sands blends law, literature, and personal history to show how Pinochet’s and Rauff’s paths “were deeply intertwined.” Their trajectories converge as chapters switch between Rauff’s life on the run and Pinochet’s legal proceedings upon arrest.

At the outset, Sands weighed his legal and moral responsibilities when Pinochet’s lawyers sought to retain him. In keeping with the “cab-rank principle,” under which British barristers take every client just as a cab driver takes every fare, Sands was inclined to accept. Plus, Pinochet’s arrest posed the biggest international criminal case since Nuremberg. “Fine,” said his spouse, a daughter of a refugee from the Spanish Civil War, “but if you do it, I will divorce you.”

Sands served instead as counsel against Pinochet, and he relates his experience here as a perceptive guide to the litigation’s turns and twists. For the first time, a former head of state of one country faced arrest in another for committing an international crime, prompting other dignitaries “to reflect on their own immunities.” Former US president George W. Bush, for example, canceled a 2011 trip to Switzerland to avoid investigations about his authorization of waterboarding. When Britain’s House of Lords “pulled and stretched” texts to find that Pinochet could not claim immunity, “the global legal order shifted on its axis, away from the sovereign, towards the individual, away from the perpetrator, towards the victim.”

The book’s title refers to Londres 38, a building in Santiago that housed Chile’s Socialist Party before Pinochet’s dictatorship repurposed it as one of many interrogation and torture centers. A former detainee recalled arriving there blindfolded in a fishery’s refrigerated van. The detainee noted Rauff’s distinctive German-accented Spanish as he instructed the interrogator to turn up the electricity.

The faintest of lines on grass from prisoner barracks, audio of a gravelly voice “with a slight tremolo,” someone’s recollection of typewriters, which Rauff had a penchant for—these are a few of the clues that Sands chases. As in his previous books, East West Street (2016) and The Ratline (2020), Sands goes beyond his discoveries to share his process. Proof of Rauff’s role in Pinochet’s regime has been elusive by dictatorial design. Rauff avoided photographs and paper trails. When Pinochet dissolved the DINA in 1977, the DINA director destroyed all incriminating documents. Sands had to overcome the gap by tracking down dozens of players: a judge in Chile’s Supreme Court, former DINA detainees and agents, a fisherman.

Sands turns to literature and considers the permeability between fact and fiction. In Galo Ghigliotto’s 2019 novel El Museo de la Bruma (“The Museum of the Mist”), a fictionalized Rauff had kept a gold tooth from an extermination camp as a lucky charm. “Why did these pages touch me?” Sands writes. “Because they seemed credible, emblematic of something more, of Pinochet and the DINA’s mythical relationship with Walther Rauff, the old Nazi.”

A horrifying literary artifact comes from Mariana Callejas, who lived with her DINA agent husband in an affluent suburb of Santiago. In this house, the DINA “detained, tortured, killed and disappeared” people; it was also here that Callejas wrote her 1981 collection La larga noche (“The Long Night”), featuring stories about torture, bombings, and a German in South America who carries memories of Hitler. Callejas hosted literary salons while chemists produced sarin gas in the basement.

Sands underlines the lack of hard evidence even though “Rauff’s shadow was tangible, delicate and persistent.” Nevertheless, his fact-finding points to a harrowing presumption: a Nazi escaped to ply his repressive trade elsewhere.

A former secretary demonstrated Rauff’s technique for filling every tin as tightly as possible with crabmeat, “fingers pincered, flipping imaginary legs that hung over the side back into the can, then patting the meat down firmly.” Rauff’s imprint on a DINA camp in Patagonia seems undeniable. “Tucked into a hollow near the sea, it was surrounded by watchtowers and two perimeters of barbed-wire fences, angled at the top,” Sands writes. “[L]ike Auschwitz,” a former detainee noted. The DINA acquired a fishery because it had an oven that could produce 30 tons of feed a day and a large fleet of refrigerated vans to transport prisoners and corpses. “There is no denying that this man understands vans,” wrote the poet Pablo Neruda.

A list of relevant treaties and conventions might have clarified arguments in Pinochet’s London proceedings. The complex narrative includes characters who can be hard to keep track of. Sands often uses wordy language, though his repetitions help provide orientation.

In contrast to the dark subject, Jean Pateras, the Metropolitan Police’s interpreter for Pinochet, buoys the book with candid humor and warmth. Judges first ruled against the dictator on his 83rd birthday. Amid “Burberry and Harrods bags,” Pinochet and his family “had all been happy, eating birthday cake,” Pateras said. Then came the judgment, and “they were crying.”

A conflict of interest in the first appellate hearing led to a second, exposing pretenses of law’s mechanical application to facts. “Change the judges, and everything changes,” Sands writes. Notwithstanding a second ruling against Pinochet, a diplomatic deal allowed his repatriation after more than a year under arrest, much of it in a well-appointed house near a golf club. To cover expenses, the British government wrote the Pinochet Foundation a check for nearly one million pounds. While the full story behind Britain’s refusal to extradite Pinochet sparks fury, Sands offers several views, including that Britain and Spain, along with Germany, have yet to acknowledge the genocide that their 19th-century colonizers committed against Chile’s Indigenous people. In Chile, under the diplomatic deal, Pinochet encountered numerous indictments. Subsequently, many DINA agents received convictions.

For all the atrocity, Sands focuses on how small but crucial acts contribute to justice. Pinochet’s arrest and confirmation of his involvement with Rauff hinged on a sequence of people taking risks. “The law is never a given,” Sands writes. Rules take shape from how people knead them. As ever, their resilience relies on civil courage.