← Dan Snow's History Hit
Dan Snow's History Hit
How the Nazis Escaped Germany
00:46:26
How were Nazi war criminals able to escape to South America?
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- [00:00]
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- [01:47]
Dan Snow
Hi everyone. Welcome down to Snow's History. As the war in Europe drew to a close in 1945 Europe, you will not be surprised to learn that many Nazis and fascist war criminals were pretty desperate to escape justice. They were desperate to get out of Europe. They did not want to stand trial or be summarily executed for the monstrous crimes they'd committed during the war. They and their supporters forged and trailblazed various routes out of Europe and help came from a very surprising quarter senior figures within the Catholic Church, particularly in Rome, in post war Italy, these clergymen helped get war criminals out of Europe to South America. These networks became known as ratlines because they were like rats leaving the sinking ship. In this episode, we're going to hit all about those ratlines and we're going to take a deeper look at the story of one of the particular escapees, a man called Walter Ralph. To really illustrate how they worked and also what people got up to in in their lives after the war. Ralph was an SS officer known for his brutality, known being ruthless. He's accused of being responsible for, well, it could be hundreds of thousands of deaths during the Second World War. In 1949, he made his way to South America on one of these Ratline networks. In fact, it was the same network that got many other high profile Nazis to South America. Those included Franz Stangl, the commanding officer of the Treblinka death camp, Gustav Wagner, commanding officer of Sobibor death camp, Alwar Brunner, who is in charge of all the deportations of Jews from Slovakia to Nazi concentration camps, and the infamous Adolf Eichmann. Ralph, amazingly ended up working in Chile for the brutal dictator Augusto Pinochet. And his particular gift for arresting, torturing, murdering opponents of the regiment led to years of service and terror for the citizens of Chile. He appears in an MI5 file. It says he never showed any remorse for his actions, which he described as those of a mere technical administrator. Well, you know what they say, the devil is in the detail. The devil's in the technical administration. On the podcast talking to me today, I'm very lucky to have Philippe Sands. He's a British and French writer and he's a lawyer at 11 Kings Bench Walk and professor of laws and director of the center on International Courts and Tribunals at University College London. He's written books about the ratlines, he's written books about justice after the war. He's just written a new book, in fact, about Walter Ralph, which we're going to talk about him a lot in this podcast. It's called 38 Laundress street on Impunity. Pinochet in England and a Nazi in Patagonia. You're not going to believe some of the revelations in this book and you're also not going to believe the tenacity and the attention to detail that Philippe sand shows when he's hunting down Nazi war criminals. If there's any of you out there, you better make sure Sands isn't on your case as well as doing all that. He's a specialist, international law, and he appears as council advocate for many international courts and tribunals. It's a real treat to have Philippe Sands back on the podcast.
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NASA Launch Commentator
T minus 10 atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
- [05:03]
Philippe Sands
God save the King. No black white unity till there is first some black unity. Never to go to war with one another again.
- [05:12]
NASA Launch Commentator
And liftoff. And the shuttle has cleared the hour.
- [05:19]
Dan Snow
Philippe, great to have you back on the podcast. Good to see you.
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Philippe Sands
Wonderful. Wonderful to be with you again.
- [05:24]
Dan Snow
Tell me, what did the world look like at the end of the war and what, I guess, what's the world look like to these unrepentant Nazis, or certainly Nazis who felt they needed to get out of there fast.
- [05:33]
Philippe Sands
They were like mice. I Think hiding and wondering, what on earth is going to happen? Ryan sense as the characters were desperate, wondering what was going to happen to them? Could they be arrested? Where could they go? Making contact with their spouses by telephone, furtively. I've got a wonderful account of Otto Veter, the Austrian former governor of Lviv, tracking down his wife, who's far away in Zelamsee. I mean, it was sort of, I think, for the first weeks, absolute mayhem. And then it began to calm down a bit and a direction emerged.
- [06:09]
Dan Snow
And what is that direction? I mean, what were they expecting? Were they expecting to be put against a wall and shot? Did they know there would be some kind of justice?
- [06:17]
Philippe Sands
They knew something was happening. I mean, one of the main characters was Himmler's number two, Carl Wolf, who very early in 1945, actually supported by Walter Ralph, who was part of that process. Woolf reaches out to Allen Dulles, who will later become the head of the CIA, to basically work out a capitulation in Italy to bring the thing to an end sooner rather than later. And it's clear that Wolf is also doing it in order to save his own skin. He has heard rumours that there's going to be some big show trial or trial of some sort, and he believes that by cutting a deal, he'd get himself off the list of men perpetrators. And he did. That is what happened.
- [07:01]
Dan Snow
Interesting. So they are, as you say, they're charging off the sinking ship, actually, before VE day. What are their options? Tell me, what are they thinking? Where is their thoughts turning?
- [07:12]
Philippe Sands
Well, a number committed suicide, quite a large number. I mean, I'm thinking of Adilo Globocnik, who was the man who designed a lot of the extermination camps. He commits suicide after he's caught. And of course, famously, Herman Goering and Robert Lay, in the Nuremberg Trial, do the same thing. Others assume they're just going to be lined up and shot, but word soon emerges that that is not happening. And so then, really, there are a number of options. Disappearance is one. Taking on a new identity and disappearing in your own country or disappearing abroad. Keeping your identity and disappearing abroad, or just waiting for them to catch you and hoping that you will be caught and tried before an international procedure because the death penalty is, should we say, less prevalent. What you sort of want to avoid is. Is one of the trials in Poland or in France or elsewhere, whether trials are likely to be more expedited and the penalties very harsh and immediate.
- [08:12]
Dan Snow
Yeah. One of the darkest bits of the work you've done is the involvement of the Catholic Church, did they find willing collaborators amongst the clergy?
- [08:22]
Philippe Sands
I think one has to understand that the Catholic Church is not a homogenous collective in which it acted in a single direction. It was divided. There were some people who abhorred the Nazis, there were others who were in bed with the Nazis. There were decent acts and there were indecent acts. What begins to happen by the autumn of 1945 is contact is made between fellow travelers on the Nazi side and those they feel may help them elsewhere. And that's essentially anti Communists, those who are really opposed to the Soviet bloc, the Red army. And that will include elements in the Catholic Church, both locally, you know, bishops in a local community or Rome itself. But I don't think it's certainly what I've seen doesn't indicate that there was a single autonomous position by the Catholic Church. It was basically down to individuals, what they would do. And one who emerges, who will become very significant is Alois Hudal, who is at the Teutonic Institute in Rome, an Austrian bishop, and he begins to organize what will come to be known as the ratlines. Escape out of Europe to South America, to Syria, to various other places. There were many, many people involved. I got a snapshot into one person's life because I was given access to the personal archive of Otto Wachter, who I've already mentioned during his time in Rome, and it included his address book. And so I was able to go through that and work out and see what the networks were. And there were quite a few high up Catholics related to the Vatican, but nobody right up at the top figured in those address books.
- [10:07]
Dan Snow
Did all roads lead through Rome? I mean, when we talk about ratlines, it's not like the Silk Roads, which just actually extend right across Eurasia. These were quite delineated. Were they? Were there only a couple of particular routes with presumably safe houses along the way that people could take? Did they all lead through Rome, for example?
- [10:23]
Philippe Sands
I think the material that we know largely points to Rome. I mean, of course we don't have a complete picture. Things are still only emerging now. But in terms of all of the characters that I've come across and dealt with, all roads lead to Italy, that's absolutely clear because the transportation, the boats they took were usually from Genoa and often there would be a connection with a leading individual in the Vatican. So in terms of the big names that we know of, Barbie, Eichmann, Mengele, Ralph, all roads lead through Italy. And that inevitably touches on some individual high up Catholic officials.
- [11:05]
Dan Snow
And what are the nuts and bolts are they taking advantage of? I mean, look, Europe is on the move here, right? So it's not unusual, presumably, to find people who've lost everything and who, seeking a new life, lost family, deeply traumatised, choking the roads of Europe. Are they taking advantage of, Are they swimming in that sea?
- [11:23]
Philippe Sands
So you need a number of things. You need, in some cases a new identity. Otto Wachter becomes Alfredo Reinhardt. You need a means of transport out, so that is both a boat trip plus a visa from a particular country. And then in relation to the last point, the visa, you sort of need a Red Cross passport. And what Hudal had was a stash of Red Cross passports. He had access to those passports which were absolutely invaluable. And that was your ticket out of Europe. I mean, the belief was that within Europe there was a much greater chance of you being apprehended, put on trial, and if you were a serious player, executed or some other form of punishment. So the bottom line is you wanted to head out of Europe.
- [12:11]
Dan Snow
You mentioned Syria, but I mean, South America is the go to destination.
- [12:15]
Philippe Sands
Well, the letter that I came across that caused me to write 38 Laundress street is really a fascinating letter sent by Walter Ralph, who has managed to escape from Italy, from Rome. He's been hiding in the Vinya Pia monastery, protected by Alois Hudal, and he makes his way to Syria, where he basically becomes a senior security officer in the new government in Syria. The CIA has reports of him describing him as having created a sort of mini Gestapo in Damascus. He writes to Wachter in May 1949. Three pages, typewritten letter, very finely tuned, carefully written. And basically what he's saying is, don't come to the Arab world. It's not a good place for us Germans and Austrians. You should head to South America or South Africa. Actually, I think very few people went to South Africa. And so the advice was within the networks is that in South America you will find refuge and that becomes the go to place exactly as you've identified. And that's articulated in the correspondence.
- [13:19]
Dan Snow
And we should say Ralph, who you've written about, he was one of the key architects, I suppose, of the Holocaust, of the mass extermination of Jews and disabled people, Communists and others.
- [13:31]
Philippe Sands
I mean, in many ways he's not an interesting character like Hans Frank, who's highly cultured, highly educated, brilliant pianist, brilliant chess player. Otto Wachter, the Austrian, the governor of Krakalden, Lviv, highly trained lawyer, cultured Ralph is a very different figure he sort of enters the German Navy in the 1920s as a cadet. He sails around the world. He actually visits Chile, Valparaiso, Puntarenas. Comes back in the mid-1930s. He slowly made his way up. I think he's the commander of a small flotilla. Then he has an affair and that causes him to be thrown out of the navy. In fact he resigns before his formally thrown out. And he's had a bit of a loss what to do. But he's got a couple of high end Nazi colleagues. So he joins the Nazi party and then joins the SS and ends up in Berlin at the Sicherheinsdienst, the main security office of the ss. In the same building working under Reinhard Heydrich and with Himmler and in the same building as Wachter and Ralph. We're now 1938, 1939. In 1940, Heydrich gives him a particular task, which is to organize and operate a new system of mass killing. Up until now they've been killing by bullets, individual shooting of individuals. And it turns out this is highly stressful. The killers are a bit freaked out by what's going on. Can you find a more efficient way to get rid of people? And so they developed this program using gas. They tested initially on Soviet prisoners of war and then they manufacture a whole series of gas vans which basically go around Central and Eastern Europe gassing Jews and other opponents, political opponents, in groups of about 50. I mean, probably nigh on a million people are killed in this way. It's hundreds of thousands of people that lasts until early 42. And at that point they decide to go sort of even more industrial scale by building Belzech and Sobibor and Treblinka and these kinds of places. And he's out of a job, so he's sent to Tunisia. His job there is really to exterminate the Jews. But the British army takes over within six months, so that really doesn't lead very far. And he's then posted to Italy and he is to this day, I think, as you know, really he's still a hated figure in Milan. He becomes the head of the Gestapo in Milan. And here they're not really deporting Jews. I mean, a number of Jews, I think of about 1200 are deported to Auschwitz. And then actually the Pope intervenes and says this has to stop. And Ralph is then leading the charge against partisans and communists. I mean, he's a sort of double header. He hates Jews and he hates communists. And so he turns his attention and there's ample evidence of him simply wiping out entire villages, the men of entire villages, across various parts of Italy, near Florence, Siena, various other places. And then in 45, he's caught in the Hotel Alberti in Milan and he's interrogated and so on and so forth. We've got those records and. And he then manages to escape and he makes his way to Syria, leaving behind a wife and two kids. So we are able to track his path very, very carefully, of course. He then advises Ralph in 49 to head to South America. And then he follows his own advice and he decides he's going to go with his wife and two kids to South America.
- [16:48]
Dan Snow
I'm just astonished the work you've done. There's something so banal about the kind of jobs these men got in South America. Having worked at the heart of the Nazi empire and been responsible for the death of millions in some cases of people, what's he doing through the 1950s?
- [17:04]
Philippe Sands
So we have immense detail on what he's doing in the 1950s, because a lot of it is documented and tracked and I've spoken to people who got to know him. It's pretty amazing. So he heads with his wife Edith, and his two boys, Alf and Walter Jr. To South America. They stop off in Quito, Ecuador. That's where they intend to make a new life, ironically, for the guy who organized and managed the mobile gas vans. His first gig is motor mechanic for the Mercedes Benz concession in Quito, Ecuador, where, ironically, one of the cars they supply is the car for the local cardinal. He stays there and they intend to make a new life there. But then in late 55, early 56, they meet an absolutely charming couple, Chileans, who say, you're in the wrong country. You should be in Chile. Lots of wonderful Germans in Chile. We like people like you. And so in 1958, two boys are sent off to the Army Training School and the Navy Training school in Chile. And the Ralphs head to Chile and they set up shop in Punta Arenas in southern Chile, in Patagonia, where he becomes the manager of a king crab cannery. You couldn't really invent it. He faces difficulties. In end of 62, he's tracked down by the West Germans who send a request for his extradition to West Germany to face charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. And he has proceedings in Santiago in the Supreme Court. He gets off and cannot be extradited to West Germany to stand trial because Chile has a 15 year statute of limitations period, and the crimes have happened 20 years earlier. Incidentally, by this point one added levels of complexity. Ralph has also been recruited as an agent for the bnd, checking out on communists and other subversives in Chile, Cuba, Venezuela. You couldn't invent it.
- [18:56]
Dan Snow
And the BND is what?
- [18:58]
Philippe Sands
The BND is the German Secret Service.
- [19:01]
Dan Snow
No way.
- [19:02]
Philippe Sands
Yes. No. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. He is recruited. One part of the German government is hunting him for mass murder. Another part of the German government has recruited him. And he does about 18 months. When he's arrested, the BND, West German secret Service, panics and decides he's got to be terminated, not only with immediate effect, but backdated six months so that it cannot be said that an agent of the bnd, the West German Secret Service, has been arrested. So he loses his monthly income, but he gets off. He doesn't get sent to West Germany. He goes back to Punta Arenas. By now his wife has died and he's got himself a new lady, a Chilean lady, Nemesuniga. And he spends the next 10 years of his life running a highly successful king crab cannery, the Peschera Camellio. By now, of course, everyone in Punta Renas knows what he's done, because having been arrested, it's been all over the papers. And I've met many of the ladies who worked for him in Peschera. And they all said, yes, yes, we, we knew exactly what he'd done, but it was long ago and far away and all we cared about was our. Our job and finding a husband. But yes, we knew and we found him a little bit scary. And then, in September 1973, a miracle happened. On 11 September 1973, there is a coup d' etat in Chile. Salvador Allende is deposed. He commits suicide and a military junta takes over. And the head of the military junta is none other than Walter, Ralph's friend from Quito, Ecuador. It is Augusto Pinochet. And soon after, Ralph writes to his sister in West Germany and says, I'm now like a protected monument. Now, when I learn all of this, of course, the first thing that comes to my mind, I'd been involved in the. For the listeners, many will know that Auguste Pinochet, many years later, 25 years later, will be arrested in London whilst receiving medical treatment and on an extraditional request that he be sent to Spain for trial for the crimes committed during his dictatorship. Murder, disappearance, torture, and so on and so forth. And I was involved in those proceedings before the House of Lords and in the English courts. And the thought that immediately came to my mind was this. Could it be possible that a Nazi who made his way to Chile on the Ratline, and who had befriended or been befriended by Augusto Pinochet, could have worked for Augusto Pinochet and his feared intelligence service, the dina, the Direction d' Intelligentsia Nacional. You will know and your listeners will know because of your programs and from other means, that many, many Nazis, I mean, tens of thousands made their way to South America. Some of them are very famous. Eichmann, Mengele, maybe Bormann, Klaus Barbie. But there's never been any evidence that any of them got involved in the crimes of the dictatorships in that part of the world. And so I was curious as to whether he might have and encountered many, many rumors to begin with. You know, you take a taxi ride in Santiago and you'd be talking to someone in the back, and the taxi driver would say, excuse me, may I be permitted to make a comment? And we'd say, yes, of course. And he'd say, of course, Ralph worked for Pinochet. Everybody knows that. And you'd say, how do you know? And he said, well, we lived through those years. So everybody knew. But there was no evidence.
- [22:27]
Dan Snow
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- [25:44]
Dan Snow
And he was a name, he was a face because of the failed extration proceedings. So he was a well known Nazi. So people knew of him, presumably at the time, like this, your taxi driver there, everybody knew. And were you able to substantiate any of it? Because, you know, gossip's not good enough for you.
- [26:01]
Philippe Sands
Well, I mean, this is my problem in life. You know, I have the misfortune of having to appear in court. And if the judge in the international courts or whatever says to me, Mr. Sands, what's your evidence for your proposition? I can't say. Well, a taxi driver in Santiago told me that's what happened. I need something else. So what else exists? And you know, I have the mind of a lawyer, of a barrister. So what else exists? Well, there's two real sources. One is it's the stuff you work with, Dan. There's either documents or there's testimony. There's first hand accounts. Now, one of the things that is very interesting with the DINA and the Pinochet regime is that again, a little bit of history. In September 1976, Pinochet orders the assassination of Orlando Letellier's Minister of defense, who by now is living in the United States. And he is murdered in September 1976 on the streets of Washington, on Dupont Circle. They blow up his car. And the Americans say, okay, enough's enough. This is outrageous. It's one thing Killing people in Chile, it's another thing killing people in Washington D.C. it's got to stop. So the DINA is wound up. The head of the DINA, Manuel Contreras, loses his position. Note the name Manuel Contreras. It will become very important. He is Augusto Pinochet's right hand man, an army man, and the head of the Secret Intelligence Service. And he basically destroys all of the documents. The entire archive is destroyed. There is some evidence that parts of the archive were taken down to Punta Arenas, actually close to Ralph, and then sent on a boat to Hamburg so that Contreras could use that in leverage in any future negotiation with Pinochet, in case Pinochet tried to blame him for the horrors that happened. I mean, everyone's playing a big game on this. But the upshot is all the documents are destroyed. And interestingly, in the correspondence and in his writings, Ralph is very, very clear. His name is not to appear in any documents and he is never to be photographed. He's always behind the camera. He writes to his sister. So there were not going to be any documents. This was very clear to me, which meant that the only way you could go was witness testimony. And there are two types of witnesses. There are the victims and there are perpetrators. So on the victim side, I find one man called Leon Gomez, who in July 1974 is arrested for subversion. He's a leftist. And he is taken to the main torture center right in the heart of Santiago. And if any of your listeners are in Santiago, it's now a museum. It's very close to the Presidential Palace. It's on a street called Londres Street, London street. It's number 38. It was the headquarters of Salvador Allende's political party. And it was acquired very shortly after the coup and turned into a detention center, which then became a torture center, which then became a place where you disappeared people. And refrigerated vans would turn up on the cobbled streets, which you can walk down now, and discharged small groups of men and women, young people, and into that building. Leon Gomez was one of them. He had written a document in which he claimed he had been personally interrogated by Walter Ralph. And so I tracked him down. It took a long time to find him. And I interviewed him on, I think, about seven occasions, just to really push. And he was absolutely consistent with his story and, and very careful in what he said. He said he recognized Ralph. He had a very distinctive voice, strong German accent, but he recognized him because as a young boy in 1963, he loved reading the newspapers. And Ralph's photograph was all over the newspapers when he was arrested. And so he instantly recognized him. And his account of what Ralph did was itself very interesting. Ralph was in the room, but didn't actually touch him physically, didn't switch on the electricity buttons, didn't put rods up various orifices and things. He would sit at a small table and he would issue instructions and take notes and type them up on a typewriter. It was a very particular account and I thought he was credible actually. But the problem was I couldn't find anyone else who'd been in that building who had seen him. Although interestingly, the book came out a month ago and I launched it in Chile. And at one event in Valparaiso, the coastal city that actually Pinochet was from, a man came up to me, he'd not yet read the book. He was holding the book, he wanted me to sign it. He'd not heard the account of Leon Gomez, and he told me he'd been in the same place, 38 Laundress street in June 74, and he recognized Walter Ralph, who was in the room. And he gave me an identical account of him sitting behind a table. Yes, it was very interesting, very, very interesting. So vital corroborating evidence. But the other thing that I get is numerous accounts of people. And many of the people I spoke to who were detained at 38 Laundress street would describe being transported to and from 38 Laundreth street in a refrigerated van of a particular fishery, the Peschera Arauco, from the town of San Antonio. But it didn't mean anything to me until later. And so, having sort of exhausted what I could on the victim side, I'm then wondering, how can I speak to people on the other side, former DINA agents, actually individuals involved in acts of killing or complicity with killing. And that really is the dark side. And in the end, the story really comes to life. And the corroboration I get comes from two individuals. I'll just mention one of them. I had spoken of Manuel Contreras, who was the right hand man of Augusto Pinochet, ran the dina, the secret service. He had a house. And Santiago, he had a house in San Antonio. In early 1974, he hires a 14 year old kid to be what is known in Spanish as El Mosito, the junior waiter or the junior butler. This man's name is Jogelino Vergara and Jorgelino Vergara, El Mosito joins the household of Contreras and is there until Contreras leaves the Dina in 77, sees absolutely everyone coming in and out, attends meetings by serving drinks and various other things. He subsequently remains in the successor to the DINA and is involved in a lot of seriously nasty stuff. But in 2007, when the prosecutors track him down in Chile, he cuts a deal with the Chilean prosecutors. And he basically says, look, I'll give you everything I saw until I reach the age of majority in 1978, until I reach the age of 18 years. But the price for that is you don't prosecute me, you don't indict me, and the police buy that deal. The consequence of that is he has on his testimony just from 74 to 78, caused hundreds of people to be convicted, life imprisonment, and really top, top names I'm eventually introduced to him. And my technique, we've not mentioned any names at this point, is to give him three or four photographs of people. Now, Ralph had very distinctive glasses, you know, thick glass, but also those distinctive black frames like Henry Kissinger used to wear. And I gave him four photographs to see whether he recognized the men. One of them, in fact, was Eric Morcom, the comedian. I just gotta have a bit of fun in this stuff. It's so heavy. He did not recognize Eric Morcom. He was interested in who Eric Morcom was. And so I then played him the Morecambe and Wise breakfast special. You know, the one where in the kitchen doing the eggs and sausages and bacon. And he loved that, even in Chile. It was quite entertaining in a small restaurant in a tiny town in Chile. And then eventually he gets to the photograph and he says, this one I know. Oh, yeah. Where did you see him? I saw him in San Antonio. Who did you see him with? I saw him with Contreras. He was always with Contreras. What did he do? He worked for a fishery. What fishery? Well, there was a fishery in San Antonio called the Peschera Arauco, which had a fleet of Chevrolet C10 and C30 refrigerated vans. And they used the vans to transport people. And he was in charge of advising on the vans. And I said, do you know his name? He said, no, we never knew his name. We only knew him as El Shakal, the Jackal. And then he said to me, do you know his name? And I said, yeah. He said, will you tell me his name? I said, yeah, it's Walter. Ralph is the man whose photograph you've identified. And he said, ah, Ralph. Yeah, they'd all heard of Ralph, but they didn't realize this was Ralph. At that point it all became really clear what he had done. And it is a shocking story because effectively Ralph has resumed the work that he did. In 41 and 42, then it was gas vans and in 74, 75, it's refrigerated vans. But the task is the same. It's disappearing people. It's really shocking. It's a shocking story.
- [35:00]
Dan Snow
It is shocking. And part of me thinks that sometimes there's a temptation to bring a hard stop down on V Day or Nuremberg and not deal with the kind of the ripples of Nazism that endure across various continents for decades to come. But also, I wonder from the point of view of Ralph, do you think by this stage of his career he believed in anything he was doing? Was there a consistency? Did he think he was disappearing those same socialists and Marxists? Or do you think he was just accept that his job had become. He knew what he was good at after decades of practice?
- [35:33]
Philippe Sands
I don't think it, I know it. So I'd been in contact with a very generous and very collegial, very well known German historian called Martin Coopers who'd written a lengthy biography of Walter Ralph that I was able to rely on. And frankly, much of the work that I've done would not have been possible without the legwork that he did. It's extraordinarily detailed, but he never went and interviewed people. And so he gets up to a certain point and then no further. But he had managed to get hold of through the family in West Germany, letters that Ralph had sent home. And Ralph is very careful what he writes. He doesn't write about any of his activities that I've now uncovered, although there are hints. But what he does write is they're filled with sort of anti communist diatribes and anti Semitic stuff. I mean, he really hates, for example, Henry Kissinger. Kissinger comes to Santiago in June 1976 to meet with Pinochet and he refers to him as Heinrich Kissinger and is extremely rude about him and other Jews and others. But he's really got it in for communists. And so he's got a virulent, virulent detestation and he's a true believer. I mean, every year they celebrate Hitler's birthday. Literally that's in the correspondence. We had a great evening last night celebrating the Fuhrer's birthday type of stuff. So it absolutely was part of his being and it was part of his being right until the very end of his life. So yeah, he was a True believer. And the Ripple's point is important. A lot of people have asked me why would Pinochet have befriended him? I don't think Pinochet was an out and out Nazi, but he was very interested in military tactics, on dealing with large numbers of opposition and neutralizing them in different ways. And I think he probably thought, I don't have hard evidence of this, but he probably would have thought that Ralph had expertise and intelligence gathering in dealing with oppositions and in disappearing people. And so he was a useful advisor.
- [37:36]
Dan Snow
Listen to Dan Snow's history. We're talking about a Nazi in Patagonia. More after this.
- [37:47]
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- [38:17]
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- [38:57]
Dan Snow
And indeed, whether it was in space travel or in fighting communists on the German plains, former Nazis were being employed by all sorts of different people, not not only authoritarians. When does Ralph finally meet his end?
- [39:12]
Philippe Sands
Well, I have to share with you one story because it's almost too wonderful to not talk about. And that is what happens in 1979. Just because it's your podcast, because this is what you deal with. In June 1979, Ralph is at home when his son, who lives down the street, calls and says, we have a visitor. You have a visitor. A gentleman has turned up in Santiago who says he knows you from the good old days and he would like to spend some time with you. Who is it? Says Ralph. His name is Carl Wolf and Ralph is ecstatic. He loves Woolf. Woolf was his boss in Italy. And they speak on the telephone. And Woolf says, yes, I'm here. I'm writing my memoirs. I'm going on a tour of South America to meet old comrades, just to remind myself of the good old days. And I'm in the company of a writer. So Ralph says, absolutely. They spend four days together. Now, the writer is told by Wolf to Ralph to be someone who's helping Woolf write his memoirs. And there isn't a full disclosure of who the writer really is. Part that thought, and we'll come back to it in a moment. They spend four days together. The writer records all of their conversations and transcribes all of the conversations and takes many photographs. All of this, incidentally, now available in the archives at Stanford University. It lasts four days. They then head off to see Klaus Barbie. I've seen the Barbie material, actually, also. It's unbelievable. And then they go off looking for Bormann and Mengele and others. And then after two months, they return to Germany, the writer returns to Hamburg, and the writer then prepares a report. And the report includes a very detailed account of Ralph's home. Photographs, measurements, the size of the doors, the distance of the door to the front gate, the size of the rooms, the number of rooms. And he passes all of the material across to a colleague in Hamburg who is the local representative of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence services. The material then becomes the basis for an attempt to assassinate Walter Ralph. Six months later, when Merced, on the basis of this material, sends a hit squad out to Ralph's house, and there are two attempts to assassinate him in his own house. He is saved by his dog Rex, who is a fearsome. And I've got video image of his dog, a fearsome Alsatian given to him by the owners of the Peschera camellia in the mid-1970s, when his previous dog had died. Ralph's practice. He was absolutely terrified that he was going to be abducted, Eichmann style. And so he never left the house without the company of his dogs. When he was in Punta Arenas, Santiago was a bit easier. Anyway, the hit attempt fails. This is 79, 40 years later. Mossad produces a history of its attempt to kill Nazis in South America. And 50 pages of the record, including the photographs, is made available in Hebrew. I obtain it through a very diligent researcher and get hold of all the material in the full account. The writer in the record is referred to only as G. The writer's full name is not used, but I am able to work out who the writer is, and I speak to the retired Mossad agent who has prepared the report of what happened 40 years earlier. And at a certain point, I say to him, may I ask you who G is? And he says, no, that is a state secret. I then say to him, I think I know who G is. And he chuckles and he says, well, I say, I think she is Gerd Heideman, the journalist for Stern magazine and the author of the Hitler diaries Forgery. And the Mossad guy just chuckles and said, yep, what a bastard. What a crook. And we have now uncovered through this effort, something that no one has known in Germany, is that Heideman, who worked with Trevor Roper on the hit, the diaries and everything, was an agent of Mossad. And that has caused a bit of a shock in Germany, as you can imagine. But it's another way of indicating how far the ripples go, the ripples that you referred to. So that's 79. I don't think Ralph ever knew how close he came to losing his life in that way. There's no indication anywhere I've come to know his grandson, he had no idea about this story, so I think it was unknown. He lasts another five years. We now get to 1984. By now, Margaret Thatcher has intervened and has called for his expulsion from Chile to West Germany or anywhere else in Europe to face charges. Pinochet refuses, although Pinochet is very close to Thatcher because, of course, Chile provided immense support to the United Kingdom in relation to the Falklands Malvinas War. But he refuses. And three or four weeks after that refusal comes, Ralph dies of cancer in a clinic in Santiago. He's then buried in a funeral which becomes notorious. If you just Google funeral of Walter Ralph, you will see a scene of a number of Nazis in black leather coats turning up on the moment of burial and making Nazi salutes and other things. I interviewed the pastor who buried him. He said he knew nothing about Walter Ralph or his past. But I'm not sure that I completely believed him.
- [45:22]
Dan Snow
Philippe Sands, I hope that you will never be on my case. I mean, the attention to detail is terrifying. While we've got you, we can't let you go. Could you just give me a succinct answer about why justice is important for people that have committed these monstrous crimes? Given that there is an argument given around reconciliation, around moving on, around burying the past, not ripping open with illegal proceedings, investigations, these raw wounds which have been patched up in some sort of peace process, why is it abomination that he died in that grave surrounded by those unrepentant Nazis when he could and should have faced justice. How did you come to think about that?
- [46:02]
Philippe Sands
Thank you for that question, Dan. It's a really important question, and it's a question I interrogate myself on. Why do I bother doing what I do? I suppose I've come to the place where, for me, what's important, it's not so much the criminal justice system. And does someone get a trial and does someone get convicted? I sort of have come to the recognition that as human beings, in order to be able to live our daily lives, we need stories, we need tales, we need to have a sense of things that have happened in the past and how they inform us today. I've come to see also that a judgment of a court, I mean, if you take the famous Nuremberg trial, in a sense, it is a story, it's an act of storytelling, and it has a very, very important role in that way. And in fact, in this book, one of the things that I came across which surprised me a lot was that Ralph features in a lot of literature. So although he was never the subject of criminal proceedings in the sense of being tried and convicted, his name appears in a lot of literature. He is, for example, he features in Bruce Chatwin's wonderful book in Patagonia. Chapter 96 is about Ralph. Chatwin must have encountered Ralph in some form when he visited Puntarenas in 1975. There is a man in Puntarenas, sings German LEADER and hums songs. It's really a beautiful short chapter. And then 20 years later, a very famous Chilean novelist called Roberto Bolagna writes a novel called Nights in Chile, Nocturna in Chile. And Ralph is a character in this book, a king crab fishery guy whose role in life is to give lessons on Marxist theory to Augusto Pinochet. I mean, that's invented. In 1997, the book is published, and of course, it mirrors exactly what I would find later on. In a sense, it predicts what is going to happen. And then if you go actually even further back in time, I came across a wonderful newspaper article by the famous Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, who is outraged by the judgment of the Chilean courts in 63, which say he can't be extradited to West Germany. And he puts pen to paper and writes a piece in a big newspaper. It's the disgrace of our courts. But he then goes on and he says so. It's a memorable line. One thing we can say with certainty about Walter Ralph is this man knows all about Vans, effectively predicting what was going to happen less than a decade later. And so, to answer your question, I think we all need stories to help us understand what has happened and where we may be going. Those stories can be in the form of a court judgment. They can be in the form of a transitional justice report. They can be in the form of a poem or of a book or, frankly, of a podcast. I think all of these contributors make us understand why past acts of wrongdoing need to be addressed, why they're important, what we learn from them and how we move forward. And I've come to ask myself the question, actually, if I had to choose between the single judgment of a court case on some of these issues that I deal with, read by nine people, or a fabulous novel read by 100,000 people telling the same story, what would I choose? And I pause in asking that question because it's not immediately apparent to me what the answer is. And I think the same may be said for podcasts like yours, because what they do is they enable us to learn what has happened, to think about what has happened, and to try to derive from those stories, if you like, a better way forward. But that may be wishful thinking. It may just be that we love stories of horrible things having happened. But I think all of these things are interconnected. And I don't prioritize a court judgment over a fabulous novel, over a fabulous radio series, over a fabulous podcast. I think these all point in the same direction. And in a sense, you can look at the trilogy that I've written, East west street, The Rat Line, 38 Laundry St. They are, in a sense, the judgments of certain individuals that no court ever gave, but in a more literary form.
- [50:15]
Dan Snow
And actually, you're right, because he didn't die having not faced justice, because that taxi driver is sitting there in Santiago and he knows. And as you say, had there been a court case, the chances are that tax driver wouldn't know. So you're right that it's an interesting way to think about. There are many, many forms of he.
- [50:32]
Philippe Sands
Died in 1984, and he Every day of his life he worried that something terrible was going to happen to him. So, yeah, in a formal sense, there was no justice, there was no court case. But he was chased for his entire life by Simon Wiesenthal and by others. He feared the Eichmann moment, the tap on the shoulder. And living like that, you have paid some sort of a price. It's not the price that many people would want, but it's. You don't. You haven't got off scot free and.
- [51:00]
Dan Snow
The taxi driver knew. Philippe Sands knew and now the world knows. So thank you very much for bringing that story to everybody. Tell us what your book is called.
- [51:08]
Philippe Sands
The book is called 38 Laundress street on Impunity, Pinochet in England and a Nazi in Patagonia. It's been a 10 year project and it's been fascinating. Absolutely fascinating.
- [51:19]
Dan Snow
Go and get the book, folks. It's an extraordinary tale and as you say, Philippe, it should be seen as part of the trilogy. It's been great to have you on before talking about some of those other books. Thank you for coming on.
- [51:29]
Philippe Sands
Thanks a lot.
- [51:32]
Dan Snow
Thanks very much for listening everyone. Before you go, I have to tell you that ever at the cutting edge, the bleeding edge of what's new and exciting, after 10 years of the podcast, you can finally watch on YouTube. We are moving fast and breaking things here, folks. Our Friday episodes each week will be available to watch on YouTube and you can see me. You can see what we're talking about. I'd love it if you could subscribe to that channel over there. Just click the link in the show notes below and you can watch it on your phone, your tablet or even a TV or even a giant cinema movie screen if you have one in your underground lair. See you next time, folks.
- [52:18]
NASA Launch Commentator
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- [52:48]
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