"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.

When the police arrested Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in London in 1998, Philippe Sands, an international law expert and writer (London, 1960), received a call. Pinochet's lawyers offered him the opportunity to participate in the case and argue for his immunity as head of state. "My wife [the daughter of a Republican exile] threatened to divorce me if I did it, so I didn't accept," he explains with a smile. He followed the entire trial. Almost two decades later, in 2015, he came across the name Walther Rauff. It appeared in a letter from an SS leader, Otto Wächter, recommending a route he could take to escape justice. "At the time, I didn't recognize the name, but later I remembered that I had read it in Bruce Chatwin's books (In Patagonia) and Roberto Bolaño (Chilean Night). I eventually found out that he had ended up as the manager of a crab canning company in Patagonia," Sands recalls.