Philippe Sands Interviewed by Richard Ovenden

Leading international lawyer Philippe Sands discusses his search for Walter Rauff, a Nazi criminal who escaped to Chile, using the Bruce Chatwin archive at the Bodleian.

Rauff was a bit character in Sands’ book, Ratline, an account of the life of SS Brigadeführer Otto Freiherr von Wächter, governor of Galicia, who presided over the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews and Poles, including Sands’s grandfather. Rauff was another SS officer. He turned up in Rome before escaping along the ratline to Syria and then to South America where he worked for Pinochet as an interrogator. During the event, he will be joined by Chilean poet Mariana Camelio via a video link.

Sands is professor of Law at UCL and a practising barrister. He has been involved in many of the most important international cases of recent years, including Pinochet, Congo, Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Iraq, Guantanamo and the Rohingya. He is author of Lawless, Torture Team, and East West Street, winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-fiction. Camelio is bachelor in hispanic literature and author of Isla Riesco, nominated for the 2020-2021 Santiago Municipal Literature Award. She is part of the general coordination of the Ronald Kay Archive and the Frank Ocean writing and translation collective. Here they talk to Bodley’s Librarian Richard Ovenden.

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