Nazis In South America

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A Chevrolet refrigerated van trundled along La Alameda, which connected the Moneda Palace to the University.

Near the ancient church of San Francisco, it turned right to enter the Barrio Paris Londres, constructed around the intersection of two streets, Calais Londres and Calais Paris.

The neighborhood, once the garden of an ancient hermitage, was home to poets, writers, and artists.

The van moved over the cobblestones before coming to a stop before a low-grained stone building, number 38, referred to simply as Laundres.

Elsewhere the street might have been Londonstrasse or Rue de Londres

or Laundres Street.

Dun-dun-da!

What an amazing opening that is.

Welcome everyone to We have Ways of Making You Talk with me, Armarian James Holland.

We are joined today by a very special guest who is in fact now nosing ahead into our most frequently returned guest.

Jim, who have we got?

Who are we talking to?

And what are we talking about?

Well, you know, he's definitely one of the greatest friends of the show.

It is, of course, Philippe Sands.

And that was the opening two paragraphs of 38 Laundra Street, his new book, which is sizzling and compelling and full of, well, a key character in it is one of the badassest of all badass Nazis.

Walter Ralph.

Welcome, Philippe.

It's so good to be back.

I can't tell you, there is no scale of happiness that is large enough.

The joy of being with you two again.

Literally my favorite podcast in history.

No, I'm not taking the piss.

This is not being a barrister.

This is from the heart.

Well, it's great to have you back on and fantastic.

We've been talking about this on and off

for a number of years.

We have because you knew Mr.

Ralph well, yes.

Yes.

I certainly went and interviewed his grandson in Santiago and visited his grave.

I mean, he just keeps cropping up in my research and obviously now has become this sort of central figure in your new book.

And wow, he's a scallywag.

I came across him by accident.

And

you and I then had discussions about him.

I was doing research on one of the previous books, The Rat Line, in the archive of Otto and Charlotte Wechter.

And I came across this letter written in 1949 in May, sent from Damascus, three pages, single space, typed, basically telling Wechter, don't come to the Arab world.

It's not a good place for Germans.

They don't know how to work here.

And suggesting that instead he go to South America.

Wechter.

Vechter, of course, died in Rome in mysterious circumstances.

But I got intrigued by the author of the letter, one Walter Ralph, googled him, checked him out, saw that he had...

run the operation for the mobile gas vans in 1941 and 1942, working directly for Reinhardt Heydrich under Himmler.

And those vans were responsible for the killing of hundreds of thousands of human beings.

He then flees after the war and ends up in Damascus.

And maybe you want to pick up the story from there, James.

Well, yes, except that he also, I mean, after his gas fan hiatus, he's also in Tunisia, where he robs all the Jews of Jerba.

And is, you know, that is the legend of Rommel's gold.

It's nothing to do with Rommel whatsoever.

It's Ralph's gold that he's nicked from various Tunisians and gone down presumably somewhere in the Mediterranean and has been the subject of novels and school books.

I remember reading a French school book, you know, when I was doing French at prep school.

There was a book called Le Trèseur de Romel, and it was all about this.

And Ralph was there.

Then he crops up as one of Karl Wolfe's men in Italy.

In the Hotel Regina.

Yes, exactly.

Next to the Milan Opera House.

Exactly.

And there's a moment in the kind of dying days of April 1945 where Wolfe has just come back from his latest foray into Switzerland and he finds himself in an SS safe house and is surrounded by partisans.

So he puts a call into Walter Ralph and says, Come and rescue me.

Ralph says, No,

you know, I mean, it's just amazing.

But yeah, you know, he's in the Middle East and then he heads off to after the war.

He manages to kind of escape and wiggle his way out of it.

I mean, he's the arch wiggler, isn't he?

Wiggler of so you sent me some materials.

That was really wonderful.

And I got completely immersed and I followed him.

Basically, he goes from Damascus, where he's head of the security service, running, apparently, it's the CIA reports, a Gestapo-like operation,

makes his way back to Italy, then takes a boat with his wife and darling children to South America and ends up in Quito, Ecuador, where the designer of the mobile gas fans becomes a motor mechanic.

in the local Mercedes-Benz car dealership.

I mean, you couldn't invent it.

No.

They make a new life for themselves.

and then lo and behold, they meet some marvelous Chileans, including a couple that he and Edith become very friendly with.

And the Chilean couple tell the Ralphs, you're in the wrong country.

You should be in Chile.

We like people like you.

So in 1958, they hop off to Chile.

They are unable to find gainful employment in Santiago.

So they go literally to the end of the world to Punta Arenas.

And there, Walter Ralph gets involved in the king king crab canning business and eventually becomes the manager of the Pesquera Camellio King Crab Cannery.

He's arrested in 1962 in December to be extradited and sent back to West Germany for trial for genocide and crimes against humanity.

But that process fails because Chile has a 15-year statute of limitations and he can't be extradited because the crimes happened 21 years earlier.

So he heads back to Punta Arenas and resumes his work as the manager of the King Crab Cannery, does his work beautifully for 10 years, and then miracle of miracles.

Life, you really couldn't invent such a story.

On September the 11th, 1973, his mate from Ecuador, Quito, becomes president of Chile because it is none other than Augusto Pinochet.

See, Philippe, I can see the attraction of going to South America if you're a Nazi, but what's the attraction of Nazis to South America?

Why are they so simpatico and prepared to shield these people?

You know, you say it's the end of the earth.

Fair enough.

That's where I'd go if I were one of the world's wanted men.

But why are Chileans so attracted to these characters and prepared to accommodate them?

Well, that's a big and complicated question, and I want to be careful how I answer it.

But there is a big German community in Chile, and there has been since the late 18th, early 19th century.

And so lots of German names, lots of German restaurants, lots of German characters.

If you go there, I've been there a lot.

And there is also, one has to say, with a certain section of the community, but not all of the community, a sympathy, should we say, with the aims of the National Socialist Party.

And so he finds in that community, including in Santiago and Punta Reynas, some, you know, some comrades and some friends.

And he feels quite at home and quite protected until his cover is blown by these proceedings in Santiago in 1962.

And then he is all over the place.

He's in every single newspaper.

And the headlines in the local paper in Punta Arenas, in the Astral,

are, you know, Nazi mass murderer in our midst.

And the amazing thing is, most people couldn't care less.

They just get on with it.

It was a long time ago, they say.

It was, you know, different part of the world.

It wasn't us.

I've been down to Punta Arenas quite a lot.

In fact, what's it like?

Oh, it's an amazing place.

I used as my guidebook a fantastic book published in 1977 by one Bruce Chatwin.

Ah, of course.

Who went to Punta Arenaus and was there.

And unbelievably, in chapter 96 of his fabulous book, In Patagonia, it is devoted to Walter Ralph.

There is a man in Punta Arenas.

Yes, Ralph features in In Patagonia.

He was notorious.

Everybody knew him.

I went down there.

I went down there with Chatwin in hand.

Turns out, it's very interesting.

Chatwin mentions lots of people he met in Punta Arenaus.

Most of them never existed.

They were inventions.

Really?

And

yeah, I I know it's really incredible.

It's incredible.

But I also met many of the ladies who worked with Ralph in the King Crab Cannery.

They're now ladies in their 80s.

They're marvellous people.

And I'd say to them, How did you feel about having this Nazi in your midst after all the news came out?

And they said, To be honest, all we cared about was finding a boyfriend.

We were 16, we were 17.

We heard he'd done these terrible things.

The older people were appalled, but you know, he treated us well and respectfully.

He didn't have much of a sense of humor.

He was tough.

We knew what he had done.

One of the ladies showed me how he would come down the production line with the king crab, you know, putting them in the tins.

And if he found the legs of a king crab over the edge of the tin, he would show her how to delicately put them back in and pat them down.

And of course, she looked at me and said, of course, he had experience with such things.

God, she knew, she knew what he had done 30 years earlier in the 1940s.

They all knew.

They all knew.

How extraordinary.

But

weren't bothered?

I mean, it seems extraordinary, doesn't it?

There was a generational change.

She said, these ladies who are now all in their 80s, what wonderful folk.

I mean, really wonderful characters.

They all knew, but they said, you know, when you're 16, 17,

you care about your job, you care about finding a boyfriend.

You don't care about the old geezer.

The older ones were appalled.

And there were a lot of very dark jokes about throwing people into the oven that was used to heat the water to boil the crabs no it was black humor they all knew they all knew everybody knew and there were regular forays people would turn up in punta renas to try to find valter ralph and he would try to keep his identity secret but everyone knew everybody knew it's an amazing place it is the city in the world that is closest to the Antarctic.

It's as far from anywhere as you could imagine.

What I became interested in, and this is the sort of detective part of the story, is whether Ralph was involved in any of the crimes perpetrated by the Pinochet regime after September the 11th, 1973.

When I first started looking into it, there were many, many rumors.

A lot of people would say to me, oh, yes, you know, Ralph, he worked with Pinochet, but there was no hard evidence.

And one of the reasons there was no hard evidence was that the Pinochet secret intelligence services, the DINA, had sort of learnt from the Nazi experience, you do not.

Not to write everything down.

Right.

If you either write things down, or you don't write things down, or if you do write things down, you destroy the pieces of paper.

And some of your listeners may remember that in September 1976, the DINA, under the direction of Augusto Pinochet, ordered the assassination of the former Chilean president, Salvador Allende's Minister of Defense, Orlando Letellier, in Washington, D.C.

He was blown up in a car bomb in Washington, D.C.

in September 76.

That caused the Americans to finally turn against Pinochet in the sense that they ordered this kind of stuff to stop happening, certainly on U.S.

territory.

And the DINA was wound up, and Manuel Contreras, who was the head of the DINA and Pinochet's right-hand man, ordered the destruction of the entire DINA archive.

So there are, it is said, but this becomes significant later in the book, no documents identifying Pinochet's role or the role of others in what had happened.

And so there are no documents to search which explore Ralph's putative connection with Pinochet.

So all of the cases in Chile that relate to the Pinochet era are essentially done on witness testimony.

So I've had to spend 10 years tracking down witnesses.

And in fact, I'm very grateful to you, James, because you introduced me, in a sense, to Walter Ralph Jr.

Jr., the grandson.

And he's been terrific.

He's charming as well, isn't he?

Yeah, absolutely.

He hasn't inherited his grandfather's evil genes.

No.

But Philippe, can we just go back a bit?

Because

he gets arrested in 1962.

The Chilean government refused the extradition.

So suddenly...

The courts do.

The courts do.

The court does, yes, yes.

Good point.

So the court does.

And so he stays.

And I remember that letter, which I think must have wound up in the CIA archives, where he writes to a former SS friend.

And in it, he says, give me one good Waffen SS division and I'll soon lick this country into shape.

So he's obviously kind of sort of brooding around.

And, you know, what's the transition from crab canning to potentially 38 million?

It's more than brooding around.

I know.

Every April, he celebrates the Fuhrer's birthday with a bunch of friends.

Yeah.

He's very careful what he writes.

Let's just wind back a little bit.

Yeah, exactly.

The reason he has got into so much trouble and the reason he has hunted down is basically a single document received in 1942 from a colleague in Lodge, L-O-D-Z, Litzmundstadt, in occupied Poland, which basically describes the successful operation with the gas vans of killing 97,000 people in the space of just a few weeks.

This document is addressed to Ralph.

He receives it, he responds positively.

And it becomes evidence first in the Nuremberg trial in 1945, and then much more significantly in the trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem.

Which is also 1962.

Yeah, also 1962.

And that document basically catalyzes West German prosecutors into action.

And so he has learned to not put things in writing.

So I've got a lot of his correspondence now to his sister in West Germany and to his nephew, also in West Germany, who's in the West German Navy.

And the letters...

I've come to understand are very coded.

He's very careful what he says, but there are plenty of references to the glorious days and to the past and to hoping it might come back.

And he even says after Pinochet seizes power in a coup d'etat, he writes to his nephew and says, I am now like a protected monument.

And that form of words, of course, for us is a hint about what's really going on.

But he never goes into any detail about what has happened.

Isn't that amazing?

Extraordinary.

So

is it the Eichmann trial that sets the West German government into motion?

Yes.

You know,

in West Germany, it's in fits and starts, this kind of attempts at bringing people to book, isn't it?

Well, it's the Eichmontrol.

It's Fritz Bauer who gets it.

He realises that there's no stomach for it in Germany and so gets arranges for the trial to happen in Jerusalem.

Is that right?

Have I got that right?

No, I think that's not quite right in the sense that, I mean, he was Eichmann, as you remember, was kidnapped by Mossad by Israeli officers and transported to Israel for trial.

So there never was going to be a chance.

I mean, there was some discussion, should we send him back to West Germany?

And the answer was, no, we're going to put him on trial and then we're going to execute him.

But my understanding was that Fritz Bauer, who's this sort of, you know, amazing German lawyer, West German lawyer, has recognized that there's no stomach for it in Germany, that everyone's sort of brushing under the carpet, and so realizes that the way to get this to international attention is to actually put on a Nazi war criminal in Jerusalem rather than in Germany.

That is also correct.

I mean, the two stories are not inconsistent.

I think he was very supportive of the Jerusalem trial.

The arrest or the kidnapping of Eichmann in Argentina really freaks out Ralph.

I mean, he not a day passes after that that he does not worry that the same thing is going to happen to him.

And the evidence for that is fascinating.

Every time he leaves his house, he has these two huge Alsatian dogs, which become very important later on in the story.

I hope we can get to that.

His wife, in the meantime, has passed away and he has hooked up, although the relationship is of an indeterminate nature, with a lady called Nena Zuniga, his new girlfriend.

Every time he goes out, he leaves Nena a note and says, I have left the house at X time.

This is where I'm going.

And I will be back precisely at Y time.

And if I'm not back, send out the search parties.

So he was constantly worried.

The cannery had guards there to protect him.

And the Eichmann thing had a had a very big impact on him.

Very, very big impact.

Wow.

I mean, well,

good.

I mean,

I like the idea of this, of Ralph being terrified of his own shadow, really.

I mean, I

go quite comfortable with that.

Well,

let's park the question of what Ralph did or did not do with Pinochet between 73 and 77.

And let's just jump a little bit forward because I want to jump to 1979.

Okay.

Go ahead.

After all, there is a book for people to read rather than simply a podcast to listen to.

Am I right?

There is.

What we're skirting around is the main story actually which is what exactly did walter rouf do between 1973 and 1977 when he retired did he or did he not have a relationship with augusto pinochet did he or did he not get involved in the disappearance of hundreds if not thousands of chileans did he or did he not have a relationship with the chevrolet c10 van that trundled along laundre street i'm just leaving these things out there.

But let's go to 77.

He retires in 77.

Okay.

And then, and this

you may not have been aware of, in 1979, in June, he gets a phone call.

An old friend is passing through Santiago.

Yeah.

And that old friend is none other, you've mentioned his name already, than Carl Wolff.

Yes, absolutely extraordinary.

Carl Wolff, who was his boss in Italy and who pinned two Nazi-era medals on his beaming chest,

says, I'm in Santiago.

Shall we get together?

How about it?

Oh, says Walter, wonderful.

Even though I stitched you up when those partisans surrounded your house.

Yes.

Wolf then says, actually, I'm with an old friend, a writer, who's writing

a biography of me, but he doesn't really reveal who the old friend is.

Shall we talk about the old friend now?

Because I think your listeners will be very familiar with the name.

The old friend is a journalist with the German magazine Stern by the name of Gerd Heidemann.

Yes.

Yeah.

What's he most notorious for, Gerd Heidemann, in 1982, three years later?

The Hitler Diaries.

The Hitler Diaries.

How extreme.

He ends up doing time for his role in the forging and sale of the Hitler Diaries.

And he also gets all Wolf's papers.

Well, so let's take it slowly.

Wolf and Heidemann turn up in Santiago.

They spend four days with Wolter Rauf.

I approach Heidemann to ask to be able to listen to the recordings or read the transcripts of those meetings, and Heidemann declines.

He just does say, if you want to pay me for access, but he's talking about tens of thousands, so I just politely decline.

He has subsequently sold the entire archive to Stanford University.

And I have just been to see the archive in Stanford University.

It is beyond unbelievable.

I remember, sorry, just to interrupt, but I remember when that was up for sale.

I was just thinking, I just don't have that money.

I mean, right.

So it's available now.

It's not yet fully digitized.

You can't yet go online, but it is, it includes the entirety of the visit by Wolf and Heidemann to visit Ralph, to visit Klaus Barbie in Bolivia, and to look for for borman and mengele

they spend four days with ralph they record the conversations they transcribe the conversations but it is i mean you guys could do a whole session just on the transcript of that meeting wow and then they carry on to see barbie in bolivia i've got the photographs i mean it's a well you've got a photo in the book of Wolf and Ralph in the Bavarian restaurant in Santiago.

Yeah, but you should see the photographs of Wolf with Barbie.

Those are incredible.

Anyway, what happens next?

Heidemann ends up going back to West Germany.

I carry on with my research and I end up in a library archive in Jerusalem, Israel, where I come across a book in Hebrew with 50 pages about Walter Ralph and the visit of Wolf to Santiago in 1979.

So I get the 50 pages translated and you could knock me over with a feather as to what I discover.

Now, this is breaking news, guys, okay?

Breaking news on the We Have Ways history podcast.

The first time I have ever talked about this, okay, but it is in the book, all the detail.

What do I discover in these 50 pages?

I discover that when Gerd Heidemann returned to Hamburg from his visit to Walter Rauf, he then contacted his minder.

And his minder was a senior agent at an agency called Mossad, because it turned out that Gerd Heidemann was a secret agent for Mossad.

What?

And

he was charged with identifying the location of Ralph's whereabouts and reporting back the details, which he does, photographs, maps, accounts.

And six months later, Mossad sent out a hit squad to assassinate Falter Ralph.

It's all in this book in Yeh Yed Vashem in the library in Jerusalem, not only in Hebrew.

And let's just say again, minor spoiler alert, the matter is resolved by the arrival of a very nasty Alsatian dog.

Alsatian dogs play

a key part in Walter Rouse's life.

A part in Walter Rouse's life.

If you go backwards a little bit to 1975,

Walter Ralph is distraught when one of his dogs dies and the Camelio family, and I've spoken to a member who remembers the incident, who was a young boy at the time, the Camelio family bought Ralph a new dog,

an Alsatian puppy.

And young Camelio, Eduardo, who's now sort of in his 60s, remembers seeing Walter Ralph cry as he was given this new dog.

And this dog, five years later, will

have a huge role in saving his life.

It's an incredible story.

We need to take a quick break right now.

We'll be back in a second.

Welcome back to We of Ways of AQ Talk.

Jim and I are talking to Philippe Sands.

I mean, the simple point here is we thought that the Nazi era in a set where you guys know it wasn't, was dead and buried.

It was all over.

But of course, it wasn't these characters got out and about and the central story in this book is on the question of what ralph did or did not do with pinochet and of course up until now we have no hard evidence that any of the nazis who escaped to south america had any involvement in the work of the generals in the dictatorships that emerged from the mid-1970s in that part of the world.

And without going into too much detail, what I can say is we now have hard evidence,

eyewitnesses, witness testimony of a senior Nazis' very direct role in crimes committed after 1973.

And that's, I think, very significant at a historical level.

But I think it's also very significant for your podcast because it basically is a way of saying these are not only matters of historical interest.

They had continuing consequences 30 years after the end of the war in a very real way.

Yeah.

Yes, Nazism

and its methods don't simply come to a full stop in the summer of 1945.

I mean, it's so fascinating, Philippe, and that the sort of tentacles of Nazi legacy should find themselves in a crab canning factory at the end of the earth, but nevertheless, then be drawn back to the centre of power, I think, is extraordinary.

Well, the tentacles spretch everywhere.

You'll have read about the crab cannery in Punta Arenaus, but I wonder whether you had previously come across, I think Jim probably has, a place called Colonia Dignitad, Colony Digniti.

This is about three hours south of Santiago by car.

It's an estate, an agricultural estate that was purchased by a former Wehrmacht nurse, I think he was, called Paul Schaefer, an old Nazi, but of a very low-grade kind of level.

He fled West Germany and then the Arab world with allegations of paedophilia surging all around him and ends up in Chile where he sets up an estate for Germans of a certain view in South America.

And they bring in a lot of orphaned Chilean children.

And it becomes a center for two nasty things.

It becomes a center for paedophilia and it becomes a center for, if you like, neo-Nazism and support for the Pinochet regime in the mid-1970s.

Now, this is a place where people were taken to be disappeared during the Pinochet era.

I've been there.

It's one of the nastiest places I've ever visited, and I've seen a lot of nasty places.

And you meet some of the folk who are living there who were kids in the time of Paul Schaefer.

They remember Pinochet visiting.

They remember Manuel Contreras.

visiting.

They show me around to the torture centers, to the places where bodies were disposed.

but what is most shocking of all is that this place is now a hotel and a restaurant i i mean it's literally well you just can't believe it can you checking government has just passed legislation to close this place down but the boys who are now older men will explain yeah there were loads of nazis around we met lots of people who were old nazis and uh this was a center for them and it's it's really a shocking place there is a six-part netflix series i think it's called the colony yes If you're interested in this, it's really worth watching.

It's shocking.

It's absolutely shocking.

This brings us to the question of,

you know, as you say, legislation's been passed to shut this place down.

How is Chile

grappling with this part of its past?

Because sort of Pinochet is,

in a way, one thing, but Nazi involvement is sort of another, you know,

although, as you've made it quite clear, they're completely entwined.

How can you, how do you address this in your...

This is a more recent past.

This isn't the German problem of how do you digest what your great-grandparents did.

This is sort of alive, isn't it?

It's very interesting.

Jim introduced me to Wolter Ralph Jr.

Jr., the very lovely grandson.

And he is very clear.

He sort of recognizes what his grandfather did in the 1940s.

He says, I accept it.

What he won't accept is the idea that his grandfather may have had a role in the crimes perpetrated in the 1970s.

And this is still a subject that is incredibly touchy in Chilean society.

In fact, the book comes out on the 2nd of April in Chile.

I will be there for the launch in Santiago, in Punta Reynas, in Valparaiso.

And I'm very curious to know what the reaction will be because society is very divided.

It's very interesting.

You'd be amazed if you go and you're driven around by a taxi driver of a certain age, he will tell you, yeah, I know all about Walter Ralph.

I've had many taxi journeys.

My test is always talking to taxi drivers.

They all know the name.

I had one moment where I was being driven to the former headquarters of the DINA, now a university building, and we were talking about Walter Ralph, I and a former DINA agent who had something to tell me about Walter Ralph.

And the taxi driver at a certain point interrupted and said, may I be...

permitted to join this conversation and we said of course and he said yes i remember valter ralph very well i i know all about him.

And we said, how do you know all about him?

He said, well, I lived through that period.

Everybody knew about Walter Ralph.

And it really is very present.

It's quite shocking, actually.

It's quite shocking.

But people don't really want to talk about it.

And one of the things I'm interested in with the material that I've managed to uncover by talking to former agents and others who came across Valter Ralph is what the reaction will be.

Will it be silence or will there be a desire to really engage with these issues a country that remains very divided?

Yeah, amazing.

Gosh.

I mean, you're going to be on a visit again, Philippe.

That's

my next question.

You know,

you're not going to end up cancelled by the sort of right-wing side of things in Chile, are you?

Well, it's worth putting the rest of the story in context.

I mean, the book is about two men.

It's about Ralph in Chile in the 70s, but it's also about the arrest of Augusta Pinochet in London in October 1998.

And of course, the issue that I was interested in, I was involved in that case,

as you may know.

You got rung up by the dictator, didn't you?

I got rung up by his lawyers on the morning of the 30th of October 1998, two weeks after he had been arrested and charged with genocide and crimes against humanity.

And his claim was that he had immunity as a former head of state for any acts that were official acts while he was president.

I was in Paris when I got the call.

I was actually heading to the cemetery at Pontin for a ceremony at my grandfather's grave.

He had just died.

And I met my wife at the gates of the cemetery, very large, beautiful wooden doors.

And I said to her,

I have to be honest here, I said to her with some excitement, Pinochet's lawyers have been in touch.

They want me to argue that he's immune from the jurisdiction of the English courts.

And my wife said, will you do it?

And I said, well, you know, I'm a barrister.

We've got tough ethical rules of conduct.

We've got something called the cab Rank Principle.

We're like taxi drivers.

We're toddling along and someone wants to use our services.

We can't say we don't like the cut of his jib.

We don't like this person's politics.

You've got to act for them.

Well, she said, yes, I know all about the cab rank principle.

You need to understand that my wife, first, is American and thinks the cab rank principle is rubbish.

And secondly, she is the daughter of a refugee from the Spanish Civil War who ended up in Tottenham, England.

And so is not very keen on people like Franco and Pinochet.

And she expressed her views on the cab rank principle.

I said, yes, but I will do it.

And she said, well, you can do it if you want to do it, but I will divorce you tomorrow if you do it.

So that was that.

That was that.

We're still married.

Yeah, so it was obviously the right decision.

27 years later, was it the right decision?

No, it was.

Of course it was the right decision.

I remember talking to various people.

I remember going to the Ralph grave in that beautiful, beautiful cemetery, which was just, it was just gorgeous.

And lots of sort of bougainvillea everywhere and really colourful.

It was incredible kind of tombs all over the place i mean you know the other other place like it is like that extraordinary place in um calcutta but i also talked to that chap who was a german jew called rudy hyman oh my word carry on jim oh he was extraordinary and he he absolutely swore you know he was in his 90s and still a architect and he'd worked for the british in the in the second world war so he said and yeah he showed me the photographs i went to see him yeah so and he swore that he had been recruited to report, to watch, to basically spy on Ralph and report his movements.

Did you talk about politics with him?

Not really.

Well, you would have discovered that he was rather partial to Augusteo Pinochet.

Oh, God.

When I saw him, there was a presidential election underway between one Mr Borich

on the left and Mr Cast on the right.

Amazing.

Mr Cast's daddy was a member of the Nazi party in Germany.

No.

And was reputed to have carried forward his views until more recent times.

Amazing.

Rudy Hyman was going to vote for Mr.

Cast.

What?

I mean, when I met him, he was absolutely, you know, he was remarkable because he looked an incredible nick for his 92 years or however old he was when I met him.

You know, he was still working as an architect.

He had worked for

British intelligence, you know, in the field.

He was a field intelligence officer, he said.

Well, he was.

I saw the photographs.

He showed me all the photographs.

I spent a couple of hours with him, and the conversation was going quite a swimmingly excellent direction

until he revealed his rather positive feelings for Mr.

Pinochet and his even more positive feelings and intention to vote for a man whose father was a Nazi and who had recently called for the pardoning of all people convicted of crimes during the Pinochet era.

I have to say, I, in the end, as you will have noticed, left Mr.

Homan out of the picture.

Yes, because he doesn't feature in your book.

He doesn't feature, and he doesn't feature because I felt I could not write about him without revealing that aspect of the conversation.

In fact, he didn't have a direct role in relation to Ralph.

I quizzed him.

I used my best barristerial technology

to really tease out what had he done and not done.

And it turned out that he hadn't done very much and no but the main problem was he was voting for the son of a Nazi and the son of a Nazi who has views that are I mean it's not you know there's nothing as you know from my work with Nick Frank and and Horst Vechter I've got nothing against sons of Nazis they're decent folk but Mr.

Cast the candidate remained should we say sympathetic to daddy's ideals so why why on earth voting for him because he's a german jewel smack smack a firm government or something and the sort of arguments that would it's back to the Cold War period.

I mean Allende was a communist, Boric is on the left.

It's basically the old Cold War fears of the rise of communism, Marxism, socialism, call it what you will.

And that was what was motivating him.

And coming back to your questions, the country is divided.

And one of the reasons Walter Raoulf was able to have a relatively decent life in Chile was that he was embraced by a large number of people, including his employers at the Pesquera Camellio, who knew all about what he had done and basically didn't really have much of a problem with it.

That's the reality of the situation.

Anyone who wants to can go on YouTube and you can look at grainy footage of the funeral of Walter Ralph.

And there they all are, standing by the grave doing their hitless loots.

It's just astonishing.

Well, I went to visit the pastor who conducted the funeral.

You know, you know me, I leave no stone unturned.

No, of course.

Quite right, too.

Pastor Wagner from the German Lutheran church, who didn't know the Ralph family until the son turned up and said, father has died.

Will you bury him?

And Pastor Wagner told me he didn't know about Ralph's background and therefore was rather like a barrister and the Cabrank principal, perfectly happy to bury this fellow.

And of course, only as the processes were underway did he become aware.

he said, of Ralph's background and all the complexities.

But reading between the lines of my lengthy conversation with him, he was, that did not stop him.

In fact, I did question him about one aspect.

I was told an amazing story by a former foreign minister of Chile who told me how in 1984, after Ralph was reported to have died, he received, the foreign minister of Chile received a request from the Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs to inspect the corpse of Ralph to check.

that it was him and that he was well and truly dead.

And the Chilean government apparently gave permission for the said inspection to take place and confirmed the identity of the corpse as that of W.

Ralph.

Pastor Wagner told me he had no knowledge of that intervention and was not consulted on it.

But the individual stories,

as all stories on your wonderful podcast are, you couldn't really invent them.

I mean, they're really mad, aren't they?

They're mad.

I suppose the pastor had to take the funeral because he wasn't under the threat of divorce, was he?

I suppose.

As I interviewed Pastor Wagner, his lovely wife

sat next to him holding one hand, and with her eyes, I could sense

was imploring him to be very careful what he said.

Careful of the screen.

It was a very protective spouse, as is often the case.

What happens to Walter Ralph Jr.

to produce Walter Ralph Jr.

Jr., who's so genial?

Walter Ralph Jr.

is also said to have worked for the Dina.

He is identified, I mean, in order to get to the bottom of what happened between Ralph and Pinochet, in the absence of documents, I had to find people who may have seen or heard things.

And I did put a lot of time into that with great help from some remarkable Chilean journalists and writers who I really want to pay tribute to.

And I was introduced to two characters, Samuel Fuenza Lida, who was a Dina guard at Londres 38 where a lot of the torture happened.

Incidentally I had also met a man who claimed to have been personally interrogated and tortured by Walter Rauf at Londres 38 and then I met another man who was the young butler El Mosito at the home of Manuel Contreras and they described to me many things that they saw including the presence of Volter Rauf in some of these episodes.

And so, you know, it is possible now to work out what exactly his role was.

And the details are, as your readers will find out, pretty horrific.

Gosh.

Well, thanks, Philippe, for joining us today.

I think this is some, I mean, as you were saying a moment ago, this does show that the end of the Second World War.

James and I have just completed a volume about the end of the war.

You know, how it doesn't represent a full stop of any kind at all it's a dispersal and after all nazism is a is a is a faith as much as anything isn't it if you're if you're a true believer you take it with you wherever you go right i mean it goes on and on al uh we're speaking on the day that i've been uh reading an interview in various papers by the daughter of elon musk describing Elon Musk as having done a Nazi salute in that famous photo that we've all seen, in her opinion, I don't know whether she's right or not.

she describes that as a Nazi salute.

I mean, she doesn't get on with her dad, and so she may have reasons for wanting to so describe it.

But it does go on and on, and I think that's one of the aspects that's really interesting.

Incidentally, I'm very, very thrilled that I will this year be able to be with you at your

Ways with Words fest in person.

Yes, and it's going to be really exciting for me to meet your listeners.

Well, prepare to be mobbed.

You will be mobbed.

What I will say, though, is that the people who come to Weird Waste Fest are, to a man and woman and child, all absolutely delightful.

And there is a...

Despite we're kind of sort of commemorating and brought together by something so catastrophic and awful, which is the Second World War,

there is an extraordinary joyousness to the entire occasion where everyone is just so happy that they're there for this unadulterated weekend where they're going to be with mates and listen to things that they find interesting and see things that they believe are interesting.

And it's just a wonderful, wonderful gathering.

I mean, you'll absolutely love it.

I'm really looking forward to it.

And one thing I do want to do, actually, I've got some pretty amazing photographs and even a bit of video that I'd really like to play when we have the conversation because it's stunning video

of a journalist apprehending or coming across Walter Ralph

in 1980, which I think is not available broadly.

It's also a fabulous book, so I urge everyone to go and get it.

One thing, though, just

before we we call off Philippe you mentioned off air at the beginning that the Chevrolet band that I van that I read out to start the episode was inspired by a conversation with John LeCarre.

Do you sort of slightly left that dangling?

I'm wondering what writing tips I can garner from you via via you from John LeCarre for my own work.

Yeah, well you've you've re-dangled it.

I have had many wonderful things in my life and one of of the many wonderful things was that my neighbor for 20 or more years was a man called David Cornwall, aka John Le Carre.

I first met him in the early 2000s in our local pub.

I didn't know who he was.

And we became friends.

And over the years, I would increasingly have a role.

Every single one of his novels has a truly disgusting lawyer in it, in case you haven't noticed.

Literally, check every single book.

He hated lawyers.

And my role was to review the manuscript and check that the abominable lawyer was accurately portrayed.

So he would turn up at the front door, holding a manuscript printed out on his home computer, and would just say usual procedure.

And he had not put a little sticky in with, you know, page 293 where the five lines describing this appalling human being were laid out.

And so I'd have to read the whole thing to find the five lines of the disgusting lawyer.

Amazing.

But we would talk a lot then about how he wrote and how it was that he would take very dense material, complicated, dense, technical often material on the world of espionage, on the dark world as he or in my case, the Battle of the Bulge.

Yeah.

And make it accessible.

And he was very interesting.

He, I learnt to respect readers and listeners.

He said, Readers are really smart.

They come to know how you write and they come to understand that every word that you have put in your book is there for a reason.

And they think they're smarter than you.

And they want to work out in advance what it is that is going to be the big reveal before the author reveals it.

And he said, one of the techniques I use fully is I put in little clues in the early pages.

And the readers...

are trying to work out what the clue is there for and what it means.

And you'll have found it in the rat line where I very early on make a passing reference to Otto Wechter's desire to swim in the river Tiber.

Yes, basically.

And here, the clue, without giving too much away, is the refrigerated vans

that you read out right at the beginning, Jim.

And

that is plagiarized and stolen and taken from the wonderful, my wonderful former neighbor.

But I mean, there are too many coincidences.

Another of my neighbors signed the arrest warrant of Augusto Pinochet, literally

my next-door neighbor, our gardens, a butt.

And another neighbor was the judge whose relationship with Amnesty International caused such a problem in the Pinochet proceedings, Lord Hoffman.

You may remember there was a whole palava about that trial, and the House of Lords had to set aside its ruling that Pinochet did not have immunity when it turned out that one of the judges had a continuing relationship with Amnesty International, and therefore the...

judgment had to be set aside and they had to start again.

It is a bonker's story.

I mean, fact is stranger than fiction, there's no question.

You couldn't, you know,

you invent such a story and get away with it, probably.

No, no, no, no, it's extraordinary.

It's terrific stuff.

And,

you know, these Nazis, they are grotesque, but they are compelling.

You have to say that.

I mean, you know, for just their awfulness.

Karl Wolf ending up in the Bavarian restaurant in Santiago is just amazing.

Well, Karl Wolf in the company of the man who forged the Hitler diaries.

Yeah, well, in our new book, there are two chapters devoted to the final duel between Wolf and Kautenbrunner, who need us to say absolutely hated each other's guts.

And it's just, you know, I've been writing about Wolf on and off for years.

So

it's just fascinating to see him pop up again.

You need to do some research in Stanford.

Well, you know, you need to do a podcast from Stanford.

You need to go there and you need to do it from there.

I've got a lot of the stuff which I can share with you.

I happily give it all to you.

I took so many pages of photographs.

That'd be amazing.

But it's not yet digitised.

But you need to go there.

Okay.

And

you will find stuff that I'm not aware of its significance in the conversation.

Yeah, you will you need to do a whole thing from Stanford Archive.

Another thing on our

list of an enormous to-do list, Jim, with the with the second one.

What good is me?

Um, thank you so much, Philippe.

Thanks, everyone, for listening.

Uh, we will see you at We Have Ways Fest with Philippe indeed.

You will indeed

the 12th and 14th of September.

Thanks, everyone, for listening.

Uh, cheerio, cheerio, bye.