38 Londres Street

This article was written by Anthony Lipmann. All views and opinions expressed are strictly his own.

A Review of 38 Londres Street

By Philippe Sands

Publ by Weidenfeld & Nicholson (2025)

It is the fate of most metal traders to know too much about Chile’s minerals and metals and her 5 mln plus mtpa of copper output. To know also about the rich harvest of by-product molybdenum, bismuth, tellurium and selenium, the credits for gold, silver, and platinum, the country’s importance to the supply of rhenium, lithium carbonate and iodine, and Chile’s 19th century pre-eminence in saltpetre.

Perhaps many are likewise aware of the Pinochet coup that deposed Salvador Allende’s socialist presidency in 1973, although fewer may know the full extent of his murderous regime.

After all, wasn’t Chile a rather good example of a country mining its natural resources for the common good? Did Pinochet not keep Codelco in state hands rather than privatise? And was he not Britain’s ally in the war to defend the Falkland Islands in 1982?

Coming to assist us a bit further in our learning is Philippe Sands (Professor of Public Understanding of Law at UCL, author, broadcaster, and International Human Rights Lawyer) with his latest book 38 Londres Street.

The street address of the title is a building in an elegant part of Santiago, its entrance sporting colonial black and white checkered floor tiles leading upstairs to rooms where genteel salons take place while at the same time dissidents are tortured with sarin gas and electric cattle prods in its basement; the tiles the last thing the hooded prisoners will ever see.

When I attended my first LME dinner, I was only dimly aware of all this, although I remember the demonstrators outside the Grosvenor House Hotel entrance on Park Lane.

Philippe Sands’ two previous books in a trilogy of literary exhumations are East West Street (2016) and The Ratline (2020) both of which made an art out of uncovering the post war histories of top Nazis. In the case of East West Street Sands examined how the laws of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity were conceived by two lawyers from Lviv (Lemberg) who happened to come from the same small shtetl – creating the laws without which Nuremberg justice could not have been administered. In that book, Sands examined the contrast between the happy family life of Hans Frank, Hitler’s Governor General of the region of Galicja, while carrying out mass torture and extermination on behalf of the Nazi regime.

In The Ratline Sands followed the trail of Nazis who escaped Europe to South America via Rome, aided and abetted by the Catholic Church (as well as the CIA who wanted to turn top Nazis into useful tools against the Soviet Union).

At the heart of 38 Londres Street is one Walther Rauff, former SS officer and engineer, who designed the vans used to murder Jews via the expedient of piping carbon monoxide back into the cargo space. Rauff, having escaped Europe via Syria, later flees to South America where he meets the young Pinochet in Ecuador. Pinochet introduces him to his home country of Chile where for a while in the 1950s and 60s Rauff goes undercover in the far south in Patagonia as head of a crab canning factory in Punta Arenas where locally over 40% of the citizens are German exiles with a past.

Anyone with an interest in the geopolitics of Chile will have heard of ‘the disappeared’; those rounded up following the Pinochet coup. But perhaps, while understanding from afar that Chile was being led with right wing efficiency in contrast to the chaos in its neighbours of Argentina, Peru and Bolivia, metal merchants mostly got on with their jobs; more interested in contangos and backwardations, than murder and torture.

For Lord Copper readers, some perhaps no longer in the thick of it, 38 Londres Street will fill in some of the blanks. At the heart of the book is Pinochet’s arrest in London in October 1998 by petition of a Spanish magistrate who sought to arrest the 83-year-old dictator while over for medical treatment at the London Clinic – a moment during Tony Blair’s premiership that many will remember.

Why he wasn’t finally removed to Spain hinges on the issue of immunity for heads of state, a legal picture now altered with the introduction of the Human Rights Act of 1998 – allowing that genocide and crimes against humanity be prosecuted at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. In the end Pinochet is returned to Chile to face his own people but died in 2006 before conviction.

The points of law are most interesting, especially the principle of universal jurisdiction for the crime of torture, and suggests that the present crop of dictators would be best advised not to travel for medical treatment in London any time soon or take holidays at nice European beaches for fear of the tap on the shoulder. 

As for Rauff, as Sands relates from the testimony of the few to survive, he put his canning skills at the service of Pinochet. Instead of refrigerated vans for king crabs, Rauff re-designs the imported Ford trucks for human cargo. Some of the chosen are to be taken to Nazi style concentration camps around Chile but others are to be disposed of via an incinerator used for crab remains and thence turned into pig and chicken feed.

Although the West Germans tried to have Rauff extradited from Chile in 1963, he died with the freedom he had obtained in Chile intact, still celebrating Hitler’s birthday and unrepentant of his life’s work.

At last, his story can be told and in doing so it is to honour the dead and disappeared; brave people who did no more than support the legitimate Presidency of Salvador Allende in 1973.

It is perhaps ironic for metal merchants to reflect on the fact that despite the 1970s fear of Cuban socialism sweeping South America, Chile retained Allende’s policy of state ownership of copper assets and so today these precious revenues remain in state hands.

Note: During Pinochet’s seventeen-year regime between 1973 and 1990, 2279 persons were conclusively murdered and 30,000 tortured for political reasons. The torture and mental anguish continues for the relatives of the disappeared.