Investigating the parallel lives of a dictator and a Nazi

"Assassins of reasons, of lives, / may he never have rest in any of his days / and may our memories haunt him in death." These verses are part of Death bells, of Lluís Llach, a song commemorating the murder of five people in March 1976 in Vitoria following a workers' strike. In a country in transition from dictatorship to democracy, those responsible were never held accountable for their crimes, and only at the turn of the century was an official tribute paid to the victims. Later, faced with the impossibility of resorting to Spanish justice, an attempt was also unsuccessfully made to seek international redress through the so-called Argentine complaint.

It took decades to restore dignity to the murders, but it was too late to settle accounts with the executioners. As the Ampurdán singer-songwriter wrote, in the absence of a legal conviction, the only satisfaction left was injecting uncertainty into the final years of his life and revealing his true nature to future generations. It may be a meager consolation, but Philippe Sands (London, 1960) has been warning us for some time now that justice is unequal and, therefore, we should adjust our expectations.

In recent years, the British jurist turned bestselling author has constructed an essential trilogy on the hesitant and complex advance of universal jurisdiction, on the persistent and contagious nature of evil, and on the survival of hope in the triumph of good. He began in 2017 with East West Street reconstructing the origin and evolution of the concepts of genocide and crimes against humanity, continued with Escape route (2021, translation Ricard Vela Pàmies) to show the complicities of the Cold War and closes it now, in London Street, 38 stretching the thread of the parallel lives of the Nazi Walther Rauff (Köthen, 1906 – Santiago de Chile, 1984) and the dictator Augusto Pinochet (Valparaíso, 1915 – Santiago de Chile, 2006).

The world is a handkerchief

Sands has created a distinctive and recognizable style. On the one hand, there is the interweaving of the historical narrative—where different chronologies run parallel—the legal implications, and the diary of the quest itself. Despite some minor imperfections, this volume is undoubtedly the best possible conclusion to the trilogy.

From this reading, we also come away with two convictions, or perhaps better said, two doubts. The first concerns the profound interconnectedness of our world. Sands even points this out when he explains the motivation for his research: "I was interested in investigating the links and continuities between Europe in the 1940s and Chile in the 1970s, and also between Rauff's reception in the region and what I had heard about the extermination of the Selk'namBut in reality, it's the author himself who reveals himself to us as a kind of Leonard Zelig, capable of confirming that the world—at least his world—is a small place, and willing to put this inexhaustible network at the service of knowledge and justice. Is there anyone he doesn't know or who refuses to talk to?

And the second directly addresses us. Because, beyond the initiatives of the controversial Baltasar Garzón, we still have a shadow of a doubt: "We speak of the legitimacy that Spain had to address the crimes committed in Chile when it had been unable to address its own crimes committed during the Civil War and the Franco regime."