38 Londres Street, page 20
That evening, we went to the restaurant of the Hotel Savoy, transported to another age. We ate centolla, the southern king crab that dominated Rauff’s later life. René the waiter, a man with very fine eyebrows, wore a white wing-collared jacket that bore his name and a black corbata de cordón, the bootlace tie that gave the evening a sense of history.
I visited the large cemetery, with its German, English and Cro-atian gravestones. A red plaque honoured the town’s German colony, a black memorial with the four shell casings that Rauff and his colleagues placed on each corner. ‘Dedication by the Cruiser Berlin, Punta Arenas, 25.12.1925.’
The building where Rauff was arrested is there, on Calle Bories, but the Grand Palace cinema is long gone. This was also where he was attacked by a Jew, Margarita Alegre told me. I wandered along Croacia Street (formerly Jugoslavia) to number 1395, once occupied by the Pesquera Camelio and Rauff’s prefabricated home, today an empty lot.
At Tres Puentes, near the Navy and ASMAR facilities, where the fish were processed, I peered inside the home Rauff moved to in 1975. ‘Much better than the single-person hut’ on Jugoslavia, he would say. At Sotito’s, his preferred restaurant, I ate centolla. At the former Club de la Unión, where he dined, I admired the wood-panelling.
At the Museum of Punta Arenas, the ponytailed director spoke of efforts to gather testimony about Dawson Island. ‘No one wants to talk about the place,’ he said. ‘It’s a taboo subject because the tor-turers still occupy every corner of our town.’ Punta Arenas was ‘a silent community, a place of total impunity with a dark, hidden history’. There were few visible memorials to mark the crimes of the Pinochet years. The plaque that hung on the wall of the football stadium disappeared during a protest. The Pudeto Barracks had nothing. The Old Naval Hospital (the ‘Palace of Smiles’) was burned down before it could be transformed into a museum of human rights.
And Rauff?
‘He was one of ours, the subject of so many rumours,’ the mu-seum director said, ‘a man with a terrible past who lived openly and freely in our town.’ The sense of impunity goes back generations, he said. To make his point he showed me an old photograph, taken on Dawson Island in 1899. It showed hundreds of members of the Selk’nam and Kaneka indigenous communities being held, under the watchful eyes of Chile’s President and Germany’s consul in Punta Arenas.
Within a few years, the original inhabitants of these lands were gone.
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On the mythologies, there was no better guide than Chatwin. I walked the streets with a dog-eared and heavily annotated copy of In Patagonia, starting at the Palacio Sara Braun, on a corner of the Plaza de Armas. I hoped to see the bronze bust of José Menéndez, ‘bald as a bomb’, as Chatwin recorded, but it was gone, torn down during a recent protest, painted green and purple, then placed at the foot of the Selk’nam warrior statue with a sign: ‘Menéndez Braun, Asesinos’.
Known as the King of Patagonia, José Menéndez was born in Spain and came to Chile via Argentina. He played a key role in the extermination of the Selk’nam, assisted by his foreman Alexander McLennan, known as The Red Pig. McLennan appears in Chatwin’s book and is brutally portrayed in a recent film, Los Colonos (The Settlers).
I crossed the Plaza to the southern corner and the Braun-Menéndez Palace, constructed with stones from France. Here, in a dining room with velvet drapes and white damask, Chatwin admired the amorous geese painted by José Ruiz y Blasco, the father of Pablo Picasso, who was said to have done the feet. An Englishman with a history degree from Oxford told Chatwin that the talk of Indian killings was ‘a bit overstretched’, that the Indians of Tierra del Fuego were a ‘pretty low sort’, not like the Incas or Aztecs. ‘No civilization or anything,’ the Englishman opined.
On the Avenida Colón I stood before the ‘Palace of Smiles’. There, I read Sergio Reyes’ account of his treatment – beaten, immersed in human excrement, subjected to electricity. After that he was sent to the Pudeto barracks, then Dawson Island. Somehow he survived, and still hopes for a measure of justice. Destroyed by fire, the fading green frontage of the Old Naval Hospital was a monument to impunity and nothingness. Opposite stood pillars of sad concrete bearing the names of the sons and daughters of Punta Arenas who were executed.
Up the hill I went, along Avenida España, to number 959. It was green in Chatwin’s day and still is, the iron gate that marked the entrance to the ‘solid Anglican gloom’ of a double-gabled house with two towers, one square, the other octagonal. Here lived Charles Milward, or ‘Cousin Charley’, who sent Chatwin’s grandmother the slice of sloth skin that opened a small boy’s imagination. Milward spent hours in the octagonal tower, armed with a telescope, spying on the warehouses of Tres Puentes and the island across the Strait, where Allende’s ministers would later be corralled.
In Punta Arenas, Cousin Charlie Milward was a most generous man. He offered a gift to the British School and the Anglican Church of St James, a plot of land behind his house. Here, on a Sunday morning in February 1975, an American Baptist minister took the Matins service. ‘He asked us to pray for Pinochet,’ Chatwin wrote, ‘but we were uncertain of the spirit in which our prayers were offered.’
Further along the street, down the hill, I stopped at the offices of the Prensa Austral, in whose archives Rauff featured. ‘The Co-Director of Eichmann’s Office Arrested in Our City’, a headline reported on 6 December 1962. He worked for an ‘important’ local business, not named, Rauff said. ‘I am innocent and have no idea what I am accused of.’ Yes he was a Nazi, he said, yes he served in a secret intelligence unit, but he was ‘just another victim of the war’.
From the archives it was apparent that the local newspaper followed every step of the extradition proceedings, from arrest to release. When Rauff returned to Punta Arenas, everyone knew of his work with gas vans. His demeanour was ‘even more reserved and silent than usual’, the paper reported.
Over time, interest in Rauff diminished. In March 1974, a decade after he returned, the paper reported General Mendoza’s visit to the Pesquera Camelio. It didn’t mention that Pinochet’s colleague was welcomed by the cannery’s general manager, a former Nazi who disappeared tens of thousands of people.
Mendoza visited not long before Chatwin was in Punta Arenas. This I learned from a letter the writer sent from the Hotel Cabo de Hornos, on the Plaza de Armas, in February 1975. These were active days for the Pinochet regime, the ‘Palace of Smiles’ operating at full capacity, with rumours about Rauff in the air and the pages of foreign newspapers.
From Chatwin’s correspondence I learned that after Punta Are-nas he returned to Europe, renting a small house in a village in southern France. This was where he wrote In Patagonia. ‘Our terrace marked with a pretty indistinct arrow,’ he scribbled on a postcard to his father, in December 1975, with an address: 12 Rue Droite, Bonnieux.
I read the postcard in Bonnieux, where I spend a part of each year writing. I left our house, wandered up the hill to the Rue Droite, and sat on the steps of number 12, thinking about the meaning of coincidence. Francis, a local mason, ambled by.
Do you know who owns this house? I asked.
‘Madame Maillet,’ he said, ‘the owner of our local bookshop in Apt, the lovely Librairie Fontaine.’
I called her. She had no inkling that In Patagonia was written in her family’s house and our village. She was thrilled, and so was I. We had dinner in the room in which Chatwin wrote of Rauff, and later she invited locals to an evening there, to pay homage to a writer who had walked from the village of Bonnieux to Le Baumanière at Les Baux, a restaurant sixty kilometres away (‘a solitary and enormous lunch,’ he told a friend, ‘Paté des anguilles aux pistaches, Noisettes aux Chevreuil etc’, explaining that he’d ‘conceived a plan of walking to all the best restaurants in France’).
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Far from Bonnieux, in Punta Arenas and other parts of Chile, I hoped to meet descendants of the families involved in this story.
The Camelios were still prominent in the city, but seemed less than keen to be in touch. A friend in Santiago reached out to Silvana Camelio, the daughter of José, Rauff’s employer. ‘He was like a second grandpa to us,’ she recalled. ‘He managed the fishery like a Swiss clock. He controlled the personnel, knew all about tides and logistics, that was pretty much all I heard over dinner. In my family you had to be a boy to be more involved.’
She suggested a conversation with her brother, Eduardo, but he was not keen. His daughter, however, a schoolteacher and a poet, was more open. ‘My father was a kid when Rauff worked for the fishery,’ Mariana Camelio wrote to my friend Rodrigo Rojas, a poet. From the family she recalled a story from the mid-1970s, when Rauff’s dog was killed. The Camelios gave him a puppy, a German shepherd that he called Rex. Her father, a young boy at the time, didn’t forget Rauff’s reaction. ‘It was the first time the little boy saw a grown man cry.’
I obtained a copy of Mariana Camelio’s recently published book. One poem, ‘Laguna Grande’, about a ‘grandmother I do not know’, struck a chord, chiming with Chatwin’s language and Rauff’s work. She allowed a translation in English to be read during a lecture I gave in Liverpool, in honour of the Irish poet Seamus Heaney:
one day we found king crab skeletons
from the main house we saw
red spots on the peat
We exchanged messages, and participated together at an event at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, on Chatwin’s book In Patagonia and the archive. Mariana’s presence, by video from Patagonia, enriched the conversation, a direct connection with place and the person.
The night before the event she sent a photograph of Rauff, with her grandfather and great-grandfather José, taken in the late 1970s, in Punta Arenas. It could have been his leaving party, and it was the first time I saw Rauff in colour. He stood awkwardly, between father and son, one hand in his pocket, the other holding a Lucky Strike cigarette. He wore a light-coloured Pepita suit, the tie pushed under the jumper, a handkerchief folded into the breast pocket. The glasses were familiar, the posture awkward, the face troubled. He looked uncomfortable in the presence of a camera.
A few months later I met Mariana and her boyfriend in Germany, where they were travelling. She drew a family tree, spoke of Italian origins and family silences. ‘I only recently became interested in Rauff,’ she said, ‘and started to speak with my father, who remembered him from the 1970s.’ She offered to show me around Punta Arenas, which a few months later she did.
I saw the school where she taught, and the wooden house she shared with her boyfriend and cats, a garden flush with plump raspberries. We visited her mother’s art gallery, Rauff’s house at Tres Puentes, and the natural-history museum run by friends, with artworks and the skeletons of whales and penguins.
‘Let me take you to Rauff’s house at 1395 Jugoslavia.’
‘It’s gone,’ I said.
‘It is elsewhere,’ she replied. We drove to the Club Andino, a few minutes away, the local ski resort established by her family. ‘They moved the house here, it’s used to store ski boots and other things.’ We walked past the Club house, up the hill, a ski slope, until we reached a clump of trees, their trunks covered in a fine moss. Here was the house in which Walther Rauff lived with Nena.
Mariana persuaded her father to join us for a meal that evening. ‘He’ll say very little,’ she warned. He joined us at a small restaurant, where we ate ceviche rather than centolla, but the conversation did not flow so easily. Eduardo Camelio didn’t really want to talk about Rauff, but he opened up a little.
‘As a boy, when I was six or seven years old, I was scared of him,’ he said.
Yes, the family knew about his past when they hired him. ‘My father knew the details.’ Eduardo plainly wished to minimise Rauff’s role. ‘In Nazi Germany he was a minor character, not like Himmler or Hitler. He told us he only signed documents about the gas vans, to get his young assistant off his back. At the fishery he was just an employee, my father was in control.’
Rauff was strongly anti-communist, like the family. ‘He said fascism was better than communism.’
Rauff refused to give interviews, he despised journalists. ‘ “The evils of the twentieth century are journalists and cancer,” he’d say.’
‘He never spoke of himself,’ said Eduardo, ‘except when he was drunk, after a whisky or two.’
Eduardo Camelio remembered General Mendoza’s visit. ‘He didn’t come to see Rauff,’ he insisted, although how he could know was not clear. ‘Pinochet visited too, in 1976, or maybe 1978.’
Eduardo recalled the dog his father gave Rauff. ‘ “This creature gives me back the will to live,” Rauff said, then wept. Rex slept with him and Nena.’
Eduardo also remembered Miguel Schweitzer. ‘There was a holding company, called Distribudora Graham, or something like that. My father and the Camelio family had an interest, together with Miguel Schweitzer.’
‘Everything is connected,’ said Mariana.
Do you want to know about the rumours of Rauff’s connection with the DINA? I asked Eduardo.
‘That’s an interesting question,’ he said, but not one he wished to address. My question punctured the mood, introduced an element of discomfort. Our dinner was soon over.
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Eduardo Camelio did suggest we meet Marcelo Brossard, who invited the three of us to his neat bungalow on the outskirts of Punta Arenas.
‘I started at the Pesquera Camelio in August 1973, just before the Coup,’ he said. ‘I worked as Rauff’s secretary. He was strict, meticulous and punctual, and treated me like a lieutenant.’ He started at Jugoslavia Street, but a year or so later moved to Tres Puentes. He worked on production, statistics and the fishing boats. ‘Rauff had notebooks, wrote everything down.’
Almost immediately, unprompted, Brossard said that Rauff never left Punta Arenas. ‘He only travelled once, it was in 1973, two or three days in Santiago.’ He said this with certainty. Mariana and I had the impression it was intended to head off any suggestion that Rauff might have spent time elsewhere during the early Pinochet years.
In response, I showed him the photograph of Rauff and Nena at a restaurant in Valparaíso, in March 1976. Brossard looked at it. ‘They lived together, but I never did know if she was a wife or a domestic.’ The mere fact of the photograph – and its date – surprised him. He had no explanation. ‘Rauff stayed out of the picture, in the shadows, he didn’t want to be noticed, never allow-ed photos.’
Brossard had no memory of General Mendoza’s visit to the Pesquera Camelio, in March 1974. I showed him the photographs published in the Prensa Austral. He recognised the ladies. I mentioned what Eduardo Camelio said of Pinochet’s visit.
‘No,’ said Brossard, ‘Pinochet didn’t visit the factory, he sped past in a motorcade, as we waited outside the factory.’ Rauff swivelled his head from left to right, fast. ‘He was disappointed that Pinochet didn’t stop to greet him.’
Until I told him, Brossard said he wasn’t aware Pinochet and Rauff knew each other from Ecuador. ‘Occasionally he talked of the past, the German Navy, Rommel in North Africa, Italy, the voyage to South America. He never mentioned Quito or Ecuador. I knew he was a colonel in the Gestapo, and he told us that after the war Nazi officials prepared a travel schedule, and he was offered Punta Arenas.’
Brossard understood my smile. The many lies of Walther Rauff.
‘He was very anti-communist, and extremely anti-Semitic. Once, the grandfather arrived at the factory with two or three businessmen who were Jews. When Don Walther saw them coming, he disappeared, went off to his office, to hide.’
Because?
‘Fear and anger. He didn’t wish to see any Jews.’
Like Eduardo Camelio, Marcelo Brossard did not wish to hear anything about rumours of Rauff’s activities after the Coup. He said he knew nothing of Rauff’s connection with people at ASMAR, or the Navy, and wasn’t curious to know more.
Could Rauff have had a secret life of which you were not aware?
‘I don’t think so.’ He swatted away the question. ‘He was just too busy working.’
Brossard did not wish to talk about Pinochet or the DINA. He was happy talking about whisky and Lucky Strike cigarettes, Rauff’s ‘nice grey Ford Transit’, and Miguel Schweitzer, who also visited the Pesquera Camelio. ‘He was a friend of Humberto and José Camelio.’
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Miguel Schweitzer has a son who is also called Miguel Schweitzer, and he happens to live in Punta Arenas. A few years earlier, in 2016, President Piñera appointed him as the Governor of Magallanes, the same position held in 1974 by Rauff’s friend Admiral Weber.
He was happy to meet. Over dinner, he spoke of his father’s links to the Camelio family, which went beyond friendship. ‘My father did legal work for the Pesquera Camelio,’ he said. ‘The connection was through my mother, my father’s first wife, who was the cousin of Ema Camelio, who was Humberto’s wife.’
Later, Paula Polanco, the second wife of Miguel Schweitzer whom I knew in London, confirmed the connection. ‘Yes, my husband did some legal work for the Camelios in the 1980s. He settled the firm’s bankruptcy proceedings, although he didn’t really like that work.’
I did once ask Miguel Schweitzer, Pinochet’s lawyer in London, about Rauff, before others told me he knew the Camelios and did work for them.
