Dan Snow's History Hit - How the Nazis Escaped Germany

Episode Date: June 8, 2025

Following the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945 some of its most egregious war criminals sought to escape justice by fleeing Europe, most famously to South America. The escape routes they used, established by Nazi sympathisers, came to be known as 'ratlines'. The escaping Nazis had helped from an unexpected source; senior figures within the Catholic Church.The story of SS officer Walter Rauff exemplifies how these networks operated and the subsequent lives of the escapees. Rauff was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people during the Second World War and was a key perpetrator of the Holocaust. After escaping to Chile, he would eventually come to work for the brutal Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. There he would go on to inflict further miseries on the Chilean people. Rauff was never put on trial, but is it possible to obtain a different kind of justice for his numerous crimes?Philippe Sands, a renowned British-French lawyer and author, joins Dan to provide insights from his book '38 Londres Street: On Impunity, Pinochet in England and a Nazi in Patagonia', which explores Rauff's life and actions and the involvement of the Catholic Church.Produced & edited by Dougal Patmore.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.We'd love to hear your feedback - you can take part in our podcast survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on.You can also email the podcast directly at [e-mail].

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. As the war in Europe drew to a close in 1945, 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 rat lines because they were like rats leaving the sinking ship. In this episode, we're going to hear all about those rat lines. 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 their lives after the war. Ralph was an SS officer known for his brutality, known for 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, Alwa Brunner, who is in charge of all the deportations of Jews from Slovakia to Nazi concentration camps, and the infamous Adolf Eichmann. 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 regime 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.

He's a lawyer at 11 Kings Bench Walk and professor of laws and director of the Centre on International Courts and Tribunals at University College London he's written books about the rat lines he's written books about justice after the war he's just written a new book in fact about Walter Ruff which we're going to talk about him a lot in this podcast. It's called 38 Londra 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 Sands 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 in international law,

and he appears as council advocate before many international courts and tribunals. It's a real treat to have Philippe Sands back on the podcast. T-minus 10. Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower.

Philippe, great to have you back on the podcast. Good to see you. Wonderful, wonderful to be with you again. Tell me, what did the world look like at the end of the war? I guess, what did the world look like to these unrepentant Nazis, or certainly Nazis who felt they needed to get out of there fast? They were like mice, I think, hiding and wondering what on earth is going to happen. My own sense is 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 Wächter, the Austrian former governor of Lviv, tracking down his wife who's far away in Zell am See. 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. mayhem. And then it began to calm down a bit and a direction emerged.

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? They knew something was happening. I mean, one of the main characters was Himmler's number two, Carl Wolfe, who very early in 1945, actually supported by Walter Rauf, who was part of that process. Wolfe reaches out to Alan 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 Wolfe 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 main perpetrators. And he did. That is what happened.

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's their thoughts turning? Well, a number committed suicide, quite a large number. I mean, I'm thinking of Adilo Globocznik, 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, shall we say, less prevalent. What you sort of want to avoid is one of the trials in Poland or in France or elsewhere, where the trials are likely to be more expedited and the penalties very harsh and immediate. 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? I think one has to understand that the Catholic Church was 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. 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. Rome, an Austrian bishop, and he begins to organize what will come to be known as the rat lines, 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 Wächter, 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. Did all roads lead through Rome? I mean, when we talk about rat lines, 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? 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, Ralf, all roads lead through Italy. And that inevitably touches on some individual higher Catholic officials. 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 are seeking a new life, lost family, deeply traumatized,

choking the roads of Europe. Are they taking advantage of... Are they swimming in that sea? So you need a number of things. You need, in some cases, a new identity. Otto Wester 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 Houdal 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. You mentioned Syria, but I mean, South America is the go-to destination. Well, the letter that I came across that caused me to write 38 Londres Street is really a fascinating letter sent by Walter Ralf, who has managed to escape from Italy, from Rome. He's

been hiding in the Vignapier Monastery, protected by Alois Judal. 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 Wächter 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. 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. 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 Wächter, the Austrian, the governor of Krakow, then Lviv, highly trained lawyer, cultured. Ralf 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, Punta Arenas, 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 he's 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 Sicherheitsdienst, the main security office of the SS, in the same building working under Reinhard Heydrich and with

Himmler and in the same building as Wächter and Rauf. We're now in 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 1942. And at that point, they decide to go sort of even more industrial scale by building Belzerch 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 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 about 1,200 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 doubleheader. 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 Albergi in Milan and he's interrogated and so on and so forth. We've got those records and he then manages to escape and he makes his way to Syria, leaving behind a wife and so forth. We've got those records. 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. 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? 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 spoke 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 absolute 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 the end of 1962, 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, on 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. And the BND is what? The BND is the German Secret Service. No way. 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 named Zuniga. And he spends the next 10 years of his life running a highly successful king crab cannery, the Peschera Camellia. By now, of course, everyone in Punta Arenas 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 knew exactly what he'd done, but it was long ago and far away, and all we cared about was 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 happens. On the 11th of 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 Ralf's friend from Quito, Ecuador. It is Augusto Pinochet. And soon after, Ralf 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'd 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 rat line and who had befriended or been befriended by Augusto Pinochet could have worked for Augusto Pinochet and his feared intelligence service, the DINA, the Dirección de Inteligencia 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.

This is Dan Snow's History. We talk about escaped Nazi war criminals more coming up The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder,

rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. And he was a name, he was a face because of the failed extradition 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 him, presumably, at the time, like 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. Well, I mean, this is my problem in life. You know, I have the misfortune of having to appear in courts. 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 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 firsthand accounts. Now, one of the things that is very interesting with the Dino and the Pinochet regime is that, again, a little bit of history. In September 1976, Pinochet orders the assassination of Orlando Lutely'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 dean is wound up. The head of the dean, Emmanuel Contreras, loses his position. Note the name Emmanuel 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 if 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 discharge 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. claimed he had been personally interrogated by Walter Ralf. 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 very careful in what he said.

He said he recognized Ralf. 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 Londres Street, in June 74. And he told me he'd been in the same place, 38 Londres 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 Londres Street would describe being transported to and from 38 Londres Street in a refrigerated van of a particular fishery, the Pesquera 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 in 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, known in Spanish as El Mosito, the junior waiter or the junior butler. This man's name is Jorgelino 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. 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 Morecambe, the comedian. I just got to have a bit of fun in this stuff. It's so heavy.

He did not recognize Eric Morecambe. He was interested in who Eric Morecambe was. And so I then played him the Morecambe and Wise Breakfast special, you know, the one where they're 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 Pesquera 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, you know, 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 Shackal, 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. It's the man whose photograph you've identified. And he said, oh, 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 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 disciplining those same socialists and Marxists? Or do you think he was just, accepts that his job had become, he knew what he was good at after decades of practice? 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 Kupers, who'd written a lengthy biography of Walter Ralf that I was able to rely on. And frankly, much of the work that I'd 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 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, and 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 in intelligence gathering and dealing with oppositions and in disappearing people. And so he was a useful advisor. people. And so he was a useful advisor. If you listen to Dan Snow's history, we're talking about a Nazi in Patagonia. More after this. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes.

Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. 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 only authoritarians. When does Ralph finally meet his end? 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 and 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. Gentleman has turned up in Santiago. He 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 Wolf. Wolf was his boss in Italy. And they speak on the telephone and Wolf 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. 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 Wolf 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 is certainly 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, 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 Ralf six months later when Mossad, 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 Pesquera Camellia in the mid-1970s, when his previous dog had died. Rouse Pratt,

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. Forty 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 Xi is Gerd Heinemann, the journalist for Stern Magazine and the author of the Hitler Diaries forgery. And the Mossad guy just chuckles and says, 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 Heidemann, 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 the 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, Ralf 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 Ralf, 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 Ralf or his past, but I'm not sure that I completely believe him. Felix 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 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? 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 Punta Arenas in 1975. There is a man in Punta Arenas, sings German Lieder and hums songs. It's really a beautiful short chapter. And then 20 years later, a very famous Chilean novelist called Roberto Bolaña writes a novel called Nights in Chile, Nocturne in Chile. lab 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 a disgrace of our courts. But he then goes on and he says some memorable line. One thing we can say with certainty about Walter Ralf 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 sort of 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,

Ratline, 38 Lundra Street. They are, in a sense, the judgments of certain individuals that no court ever gave, but in a more literary form. 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 taxi driver wouldn't know. So you're right. It's an interesting way to think about it. There are many, many forms of... He died in 1984. And 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 you haven't got off scot-free. And 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. The book is called 38 Londres Street on Impunity. Pinisher in England and a Nazi in Patagonia.

It's been a 10-year project and it's been fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. 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 thanks a lot thanks very much for listening everyone before you go i'll 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. you