An Efficient Man

Close to the end​ of Bruce Chatwin’s celebrated, cryptic, not completely reliable book In Patagonia, published in 1977, there is a short passage about a resident of what was then the remotest city in Chile, near South America’s cold and windy tip. In a book made up of terse, sometimes haunted fragments, this passage is the most unsettling by some distance. ‘There is a man in Punta Arenas,’ it begins, who

dreams pine forests, hums Lieder, wakes each morning and sees the black strait. He drives to a factory that smells of the sea. All about him are scarlet crabs, crawling, then steaming. He hears the shells crack and the claws breaking, sees the sweet white flesh packed firm in metal cans. He is an efficient man, with some previous experience of the production line … Walther Rauff is the inventor of the Gas Truck.

Chatwin doesn’t explain what any of these details mean. That was his style, but he probably expected at least some of his readers to understand. Rauff, a German expat who had lived in Chile for nearly twenty years, was already established as one of South America’s most infamous Nazi fugitives. In 1974 the Harvard Crimson had published a substantial article about him, noting that ‘former Nazi SS colonel Walther Rauff’ had ‘reputedly authorised and dispatched moving gas vans in which nearly one hundred thousand Eastern European Jews were murdered’. It went on to report that, in the aftermath of the military coup in 1973 which overthrew Chile’s left-wing president Salvador Allende, Rauff had ‘been made chief adviser to Colonel Hector [in fact, Manuel] Sepulveda’, the head of the National Intelligence Directorate, or DINA, ‘which was recently established as an all-powerful state security network by the Pinochet government’. Three decades after organising atrocities for one regime, Rauff was, with apparent impunity, doing it for another, all the while keeping up his grisly but respectable day job as the manager of the Punta Arenas crab cannery.

West Germany had tried to extradite Rauff in the early 1960s, but the Chilean Supreme Court ruled that his crimes had been committed too long ago. In the early 1980s, after lobbying from the European Parliament and the British and American governments, then led by Thatcher and Reagan, West Germany tried again, this time calling for Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship to expel Rauff – a less legally sensitive process than extradition – to Germany. Yet despite the fact that Thatcher in particular was close to Pinochet, the Chileans refused to give Rauff up. He died of natural causes in 1984, shortly before his 78th birthday.

His notoriety survived him. In 2000 a lightly fictionalised ‘Mr Raef’ appeared in By Night in Chile, one of Roberto Bolaño’s eerie novellas about the Pinochet era. In 2011 the West German intelligence service, the BND, released its file on Rauff, which revealed that he had worked as a West German spy during his early years in Chile. A biography was published in 2013 by a German historian, Martin Cüppers. Last year Chilean newspapers and television stations marked the fortieth anniversary of Rauff’s death. ‘Interest in Walther Rauff persists,’ Philippe Sands writes, a little wearily, towards the end of his own lengthy contribution to this international obsession, which grew from the moment when, at the end of the Second World War, Rauff escaped from an American internment camp in Italy using wire-cutters.

Now that the war is so long ago, the subject of Nazi exiles in South America – how they escaped there, how they established new lives, how close they were to the continent’s own authoritarian governments, and how they often evaded retribution for their crimes in Europe – can seem a stale, even dubious preoccupation. The fact that fiercely anti-communist South American dictatorships allowed Germans with a similar worldview to settle in their countries, and sometimes hired them as assistants for their own projects of repression, is disturbing but not that surprising. Exploring this territory yet again doesn’t necessarily tell us anything new about the Nazis or South American fascism and semi-fascism; it does risk adding to the endless output of what Don DeLillo was already satirising as Hitler Studies in White Noise forty years ago. It also risks downplaying the much bigger role played by South American social divisions and tensions, and traditions of political violence, in creating and maintaining its dictatorships. ‘Why do you come here looking for a German Nazi when you could write about the crimes committed by Chileans?’ someone asks Sands in Punta Arenas. ‘It was a decent question,’ he admits.

One answer is that Sands has personal connections to victims of both the Pinochet dictatorship and the Holocaust. His wife and father-in-law knew Orlando Letelier, a left-wing Chilean politician and diplomat assassinated by the DINA in Washington in 1976. One of Sands’s distant relations, Carmelo Soria, a Spanish and Chilean citizen and another leftist diplomat, was kidnapped, tortured and murdered by the DINA in Chile that same year. These connections are, however, dwarfed by the revelation, delayed until the third chapter of the book, that in 1941 Sands’s great-aunt and her daughter ‘were likely to have been among the 97,000 people whose lives ended in one of Walther Rauff’s dark-grey vans’.

Rauff’s central role in the design and operation of the gassing vans is laid out by Sands in almost unbearable detail. Sometimes painted to look like ambulances, the vehicles had their exhaust pipes rerouted into large sealed loading compartments, into which their victims were led. Sands quotes Rauff, reflecting on the murders more than thirty years later: ‘Whether at that time I had doubts against the use of the gas vans I cannot say … The main issue for me was that the shootings’ – the previous method of mass killing – ‘were a considerable burden for the men [carrying them out] … and this burden was removed through the use of the gas vans.’ Sands presents this material calmly. (He has written previous books about the Nazis.) But a few paragraphs later, he can’t hold back.

Rauff was short, close shaven, ice cold, of bilious complexion, and ‘imbued with an air of racial superiority’, [an] observer recorded. When calm, his voice was hoarse and guttural, words spoken brittlely and precisely. Excitement produced ‘an avalanche of inarticulate, harsh, rhythmic, brusque sounds’. When angered, he tapped his feet agitatedly and brandished a short stick.

After that the tone turns cool again, as evidence is steadily gathered, witness statements are collected, accomplices interviewed and crime scenes visited. The case against Rauff is assembled and presented without melodrama. Sands is a well-known barrister, academic and campaigner against excessive state power. As an author, one of his specialities is spending time with people who have done terrible things, or with their apologists or descendants, building an improbable rapport so that revelations and confessions are elicited. In one of the best chapters here, he spends a sunny day in and around San Antonio, a fishing port and beach resort west of Santiago, with ‘two men who knew a lot about the disappearance of people’ thanks to their work for the DINA in the 1970s. Sands and the men travel to the coast, then visit a few places – a shuttered hotel, the remains of some holiday cabins, the former site of a fishmeal factory – where torture, killings and their cover-up were planned and carried out.

‘As we drove, we talked about this and that,’ Sands writes, with the same studied casualness he must have deployed on the day itself. The visit ends at the hotel, where a caretaker lets them into a large function room overlooking the sea. It was here, in 1974, that Rauff met with the head of the DINA. Rauff and Sepulveda ‘spent an hour and a half together’, Sands is told by one of the men, who witnessed the encounter and overheard a little of the conversation. ‘They spoke of “packages”, to be eliminated, no trace. Rauff’s role was “to make them disappear for ever”.’

The chapter includes an amateurish but effective photo Sands took of the room, now empty except for a few tables and chairs, the evening sun flooding in, the sea glittering in the distance through closed windows. The feeling that the dictatorship is both long gone and still hauntingly present is well conveyed. Similar photos of infamous places and damaged or still menacing people punctuate the book, giving it an intimate, almost homespun quality.

This is deceptive. As well as a personal quest, the book is the product of a well-resourced investigative machine. Fourteen research assistants are named in the acknowledgments, and Sands’s many legal and political contacts around the world are put to good use, providing inside information and expert advice, as well as making introductions. Almost everyone of interest to Sands agrees to talk to him or his researchers, and he is unfailingly complimentary about these sources afterwards. Two significant British figures in the story turn out to be neighbours of his in Hampstead. Britain and Chile are both narrow countries, socially as well as physically, in which networks can be very useful.

Sands also draws heavily on the work of Cüppers, Rauff’s biographer, to explain Rauff’s relationship with Chile and Pinochet. Rauff and Pinochet first met in the 1950s, in Ecuador, where Pinochet was teaching at a military academy and Rauff was making his first attempt at a new life in South America. In a strangely expressed sentence suggestive of partially digested research, Sands says that the two men ‘became socially close, bonded by a virulent anti-communist sentiment, respect of matters German and a mutual interest in Nazidom’. Pinochet was among those who persuaded Rauff to move to Chile in 1958.

During the 1960s and early 1970s, the two men saw much less of each other. Rauff, managing the crab cannery and otherwise lying low in and around Punta Arenas, was more than a thousand miles from the central and northern Chilean cities Pinochet was posted to as he ascended the army hierarchy. Then, in 1974, a few months after the coup, the cannery received an official visit from two of Pinochet’s senior colleagues in the new military government. Sands admits that the object of the visit remains unclear, but this doesn’t stop him drawing a conclusion about Rauff’s relationship with the regime: he had ‘contacts at the very top table’. By 1976, Rauff was regularly travelling to Santiago on military planes, ‘sometimes spending weeks away from Punta Arenas’. In 1978, he moved to the capital. Writing to his nephew in 1980, he described his status in ostentatious but enigmatic terms: ‘I am protected like a cultural monument.’

After the dictatorship ended in 1990, Pinochet appeared to be enjoying a similar impunity. Then, suddenly, in October 1998 he was arrested in London for human rights abuses and detained in Britain until March 2000. The book retells this familiar saga, aiming to add new elements and interpretations. Again, Sands reveals a personal stake. The DINA’s murder of his relation Carmelo Soria was one of the grounds for Pinochet’s arrest. More improbably, he was then asked to act as a barrister for Pinochet. He managed to wriggle out of the job on the grounds that he had already said in a BBC interview that Pinochet should not have immunity from prosecution. Shortly afterwards, having been contacted by Human Rights Watch, he joined the anti-Pinochet side in the case.

Sands played a relatively minor role in the sixteen months of unprecedented legal argument that followed, but he was in court on most of the days that mattered. His account of the proceedings is pacy and clear, if a little breathless and commercially phrased (‘Expectation and anxiety hung in the air’), and it doesn’t add much to the known narrative. More usefully, he gets key participants in the affair, such as Jack Straw, then the home secretary, to open up. ‘I could have decided [Pinochet] was fit to travel and left it to the Spanish courts,’ Straw tells Sands. ‘I wish I had.’

The book also includes intriguing material about one of Pinochet’s lawyers, Miguel Schweitzer, whom Sands found himself sitting next to in court: ‘A middle-aged, well-perfumed man, elegantly attired, with a fleshy, friendly face and a decent head of well-tended white hair … He introduced himself with a handshake and a warm, heavily accented English.’ As was the case with many of Pinochet’s enablers and supporters in the Chilean and British establishments, during his detention as well as his dictatorship, Schweitzer’s self-consciously civilised manner and superficially reasonable arguments about Chile’s right to govern itself were distractions from the electrocutions and ejections from helicopters in which the Pinochet regime specialised. Sands’s admission that he was a little seduced by Schweitzer – ‘The truth is I liked him’ – suggests that even those who probe the horrors of authoritarianism sometimes want to be distracted, and perhaps even to believe for a few moments that the horrors didn’t happen. Sands also reveals something more specific about Schweitzer: decades earlier, as a law student, he had helped Rauff frustrate the West German effort to extradite him. Like the opponents of dictatorships, the regimes’ defenders are often in it for the long haul.

The other fresh and memorable character in the book’s many sections on Pinochet’s time in Britain is Jean Pateras. A Daily Mail reader living on Sloane Square, of Chilean, Argentinian and British ancestry, she was hired by the Metropolitan Police to be Pinochet’s interpreter. She thought he was ‘an evil son of a bitch’, but did the job conscientiously. Her quiet revenge is to have seen him at his most undignified, and now to have told Sands all about it. On one occasion, mistakenly believing he was about to be released from his cramped house arrest in Surrey, Pinochet sat ‘surrounded by Burberry and Harrods bags’. The prospect of going back to Chile had encouraged his family to do ‘masses of shopping’.

Pinochet’s eventual escape from England comes sixty pages before the end of the book, and the focus shifts back to Rauff. Some of what he did for the DINA becomes clearer. As in the Holocaust, it involved a fleet of trucks, people being confined inside them and the disposal of bodies by industrial methods. The trucks served torture centres across the country: Londres 38, an address in a handsome part of central Santiago, was one of the most notorious. The scale of the operation and the speed with which it was set up – the trucks and fishmeal factory were taken over by the military on the day of the coup – suggest, as Sands points out, that it was planned and set in motion while Chile was still a democracy. When democratic politics becomes sufficiently acrimonious – as it did during Allende’s presidency, when his socialist policies threatened to end many long-established Chilean hierarchies – the boundary between standard conservatism and an authoritarian ‘emergency’ version can become so blurred that it disappears entirely.

Sands does not prove everything that Rauff is alleged to have done in Chile. When exactly he began working for the Pinochet regime, what his jobs were, how long they lasted: nothing is established with certainty. Sands spends a lot of time trying to firm up rumours that Rauff was involved in designing or running a concentration camp for political prisoners near Punta Arenas. The camp certainly existed, on nearby Dawson Island. In March 1974 the right-wing British journalist Peregrine Worsthorne was permitted to visit it for the Sunday Telegraph. In his creepily credulous account he described its ‘hard but not harsh’ conditions and commandant with ‘apple cheeks and a meltingly sweet and humorous smile’. Sands doesn’t mention this episode, or the many other instances of enthusiasm for the regime among conservatives in democracies outside Chile – in some ways, a more disturbing and significant phenomenon than the regime’s close relations with old Nazis.

Despite Sands’s efforts, Rauff remains a hazy presence at the concentration camp, possibly a convenient fiction for some Chileans, a foreigner to blame for what happened there. His role at the torture centres is more solidly, if not definitively, established. In a powerful concluding passage, two survivors of the electrocution room at Londres 38, León Gómez and Miguel Ángel, visit the building with Sands. ‘Rauff watched and listened, sometimes his hands would point,’ Gómez remembers, ‘as if to say, “More electricity!” or “Cut the electricity!” Mainly he would listen, this German man, who spoke in German.’ Ángel isn’t so sure: ‘You are so tense as you prepare to be tortured, you can’t recall the details.’

Sands discovers that other buildings Rauff and the DINA used have been demolished. Much of the directorate’s paperwork has been destroyed. Many Chileans, whether victims or participants, are still too scared to talk about some of the things the dictatorship did, even thirty years after the return of democracy. And those dragged around Chile by Rauff’s truck network can’t reveal what they suffered. As a Chilean judge tells Sands, ‘There is no one who was transported and then set free.’