Dave Musgrove (30:00)
Well, I was very surprised. So the first book that I read was East West Street. It homed in on Hans Frank, Lauter, Pacht, Lemkin and my grandfather. The second book. I wrote the Ratline, because Nicholas Frank had introduced me to Horst Wachter, the son of Otto Wachter, the Governor of District Lyciat, the Governor of Krakow, the governor of Lviv. And I became fascinated with the story of Otto Wachter. And in particular when Horst gave me access to the private family archive, I found material about what had happened to him. After May 1945 he was never caught. He went into hiding. He hid in the Austrian alps for about three years and then in 1949 he made his way to to Italy, hoping to escape to South America. He never did. He dies in mysterious circumstances before he can get onto the rat lines to South America in a Vatican run hospital in Rome. And actually, curiously, I've just in relation to another one of my books and cases the Last Colonies had tended with the original residents of the Chagos Archipelago, the Chagossians, a private audience with Pope Leo XIV just a few weeks ago, which was fascinating and his aides had asked me to bring some of my books along and I wondered whether to bring a copy of the Ratline. But I included the Ratline in the pile of books that I gave to him and he seemed happy to receive it. So Otto Wachter is never judged. He goes into hiding for four years, then dies in mysterious circumstances. But in the papers of Otto Wachter I find a letter written in May 1949 to him sent from someone in Damascus, Syria, basically telling him, don't come to the Arab world. It's not a good place for Germans and Austrians to try to escape, to head instead to South America. As you know, Fechter doesn't make it to South America. But I got curious about the writer of the letter. And the writer of the letter was a man called Walter Ralph. Walter Ralph's name does come up in the Nuremberg trial. You will find him in the proceedings. Why? He is fingered as the man who operated the system of mobile gas vans which operated across central and eastern Nazi occupied Europe, gassing people to death in groups of about 50. The famous mobile gas vans, precursors to Auschwitz and Treblinka and Belzec, the mass extermination camps. So I got interested in this guy, Walter Ralph. What did I learn? I learned that he followed his own advice. He left Damascus soon after he wrote the letter to Wachter. He goes to Genoa and then with his wife and two boys he flees to South America and sets up shop in Ecuador and living in Quito and makes a new life for himself as a businessman. In 1956, he and his wife Edith meet a delightful Chilean couple who say, you're in the wrong country, you should head for Chile. And they do, in 1958, and they set up shop in Punta Arenas, the southernmost town in the whole world. And he becomes the manager, does Walter Ralph, of a king crab cannery, putting the flesh of crabs into little tins for export around the world. And he's doing fine until five years later, in 1963, he's arrested and sent up to Santiago with a view to being extradited to West Germany to face trial in one of the West German trials for crimes against humanity and genocide. He gets off because Chile has a 15 year statute of limitations and since the alleged crimes occurred in 1941 and 42, and it's 1963, 22 years have passed. He goes back to Punta Arenas, he resumes his work as the manager of the Pesquera camellio. And then 10 years later, on September 11, 1973, there is a coup d' etat in Chile and Augusto Pinochet, General Pinochet, takes charge as the head of a four man military junta. And Walter Rauff is thrilled. Why? Because the charming Chilean couple that he and Edith had met in Quito, Ecuador, are none other than Lucia and Augusto Pinochet. It is Pinochet who has brought the Ralphs to Chile. And the moment I Learnt that about 2014, 2015, a little sort of light went off in my brain. I'd been one of the lawyers, one of the barristers in the case involving Pinochet when he was arrested in London in October 1998 for torture, for crimes against humanity, for genocide, for disappearance. And it occurred to me, could it be that Walter Ralph worked with Pinochet during the dictatorship? Did Walter Ralph resume his work on disappearing people as he'd done in 41 and 42? And that's the subject of the third book in the trilogy, 38 Ondress Street. Did one of the Nazis assist one of the dictatorships? There's always been lots of speculation about it. We now have a clear answer and.