In 1949 a man who had entered with a liver disease and a false name died in a hospital in Rome. Monks had brought him and a bishop, a doctor, and a Prussian lady visited him. It was Otto Wächter, Nazi hierarch, escaped war criminal and right-hand man of Hans Frank, the Krakow Butcher, tried and hanged in Nuremberg. “I never describe them as monsters but they did monstrous things. They were also capable of decency, love, generosity, and friendship. They are complex, like every human being. You have to understand how ordinary people cross the red line and end up killing thousands of people”, Reflects Philippe Sands (London, 1960), a renowned lawyer who has participated in trials of the Hague Court against Pinochet or the Rwandan genocide. As he already embroidered the masterful ‘East-West Street’ (2017) – linking Frank’s case with that of his own family, victim of the Holocaust – now he follows Wächter’s trail in the no less bizarre and documented investigation ‘Escape route’.
The Sala Lancisi, of the Hospital of the Holy Spirit in Rome, in 1950, where the Nazi Otto Wachter died, whom Sands tracks. / PHILIPPE SANDS / ANAGRAMA
It was Frank’s son, who hated his father, who brought Sands into contact with Wächter’s son, Horst. He assured her that her father was actually poisoned and, hoping he would prove her innocence, gave her access to 8,500 documents, including letters that his mother, Charlotte, an anti-Semitic Austrian artist, crossed with his father, in addition to newspapers and photos, which explain the history of the marriage, the elopement and his relationship with the Vatican. “Horst accepts that there were mass murders, but does not admit that his father was a criminal and a universe has been built in which he denies his responsibility for the murder of 500,000 human beings, ”said Sands by videoconference, who after his enormous work did not find any document exonerating him.
Open the book this sentence: “It is more important to understand the executioner than the victim”. “The writer told me Javier Cercas while visiting the Sistine Chapel. Cercas was invited to give a lecture at the Vatican and he told an amazing Irish bishop about me who knew me from the BBC’s ‘Escape Route’ podcast and facilitated my entry into the Vatican archives and the hospital where Wächter died ”.
In fact, the original title of the volume is ‘Ratline’, the line of rats, name of the route of flight of Nazis of the Vatican, that helped to arrive at South America to Eichmann, Mengele or Priebke. It was directed by Austrian obispo Alois Hudal. “I discovered that the Americans paid him to spy on the Russians within the Los Angeles project, which they created in 1947, with the cold war. Three of the spies they recruited were Nazis. ” Hudal wanted Wächter as a spy, who only thought of fleeing to Argentina and died before he could. Ten years later, Hudal contacted Charlotte and told her that she had been poisoned by a former comrade. ”
“I do not know what did Pius XII know, but I do know that the Pope gave Hudal money for that escape route and that in the upper echelons of the Vatican everything was known”. Sands, who relies on “Pope Francis’ commitment to transparency,” who has already opened the archives, even if they are not digitized, hopes to find new data in them.
Charlotte dedicated her life (died in 1985) to trying to clean up her husband’s reputation. “In the end I have told a love story to understand how a woman supports her husband,” he assumes. He wrote to her ‘it has been a terrible week, we had to kill many Jews’ … She knew everything and encouraged him! He encouraged him to choose the position that Hitler offered him instead of pursuing his law career in Vienna. Charlotte became an important woman within the regime and she loved it. In the first 15 years they were together, it was Otto who controlled the relationship. But in May 1945 that was tipping because he is a hunted man who hides for three years in the mountains of Austria and totally depends on her to survive, because she brought him food.
Close Sands the book with a phrase of a daughter of Horst: “My grandfather was a genocide”. Upon seeing her, her father disowned her, reveals the author. “The grandchildren are in ‘shock’, one of them told me. The hidden information that I provide means a drama for that family because they were told a very different version of their grandparents. It is a story of lies. They have created their own silences”, Says the author, recalling that he is married to a Spanish woman whose family, divided by the civil war, still does not speak of it today. “Dealing with the past through silence doesn’t work. The past always finds a way to return ”.
So keep diving into it. In 2024 wait close this trilogy of Nazi criminals with a title where he follows in the footsteps of the escaped SS Walter Rauff: became a friend and interrogator of Pinochet, in whose trial he participated as a lawyer. Because for Sands, seeing how those men crossed the red line can alert us to dangers like Trump. “You start with language, attacking people of a different race or color. He said it in a very interesting video Arnold Schwarzenegger before the events of the Capitol. ‘I am Austrian and I know it well’, remembering that his father was a Nazi and that it can happen again anywhere ”.
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