Jardine was gravely ill—she had only a few months to live. But you wouldn’t have known it. She served coffee and pastries. She was sharp, funny, and clearly tantalized by the project Sands laid before her—as he suspected she would be. For the past several years she had been running the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters at University College London. Jardine sat on a couch in a loose gown, the laptop balanced on her knees, dipping into the Wächter trove while voicing asides about her experience reading the voluminous correspondence of Elizabeth of Bohemia (“a woman who should be much better known”). On one level, the correspondence embodied a love story—Charlotte and Otto were devoted to each other. It is filled with domestic details. But there was a bigger story locked in the Wächter letters, Sands believed, particularly as they related to the postwar years, when Nazi war criminals were fleeing to South America and elsewhere. Some of the so-called ratlines that helped them on their way ran through the Vatican, among other places. Intelligence services from many nations prowled Rome’s streets and palazzos. How did Otto von Wächter fit into all this?

Jardine did not need persuading. Sands left with her blessing (and support). The task of translation and analysis, together with interviews in Germany, Austria, and Italy, would occupy him for the better part of two years. He was assisted by a young scholar, James Everest, who had studied with Jardine—her last Ph.D. student. One result of this effort is a BBC podcast, The Ratline, which has just begun, with Stephen Fry and Laura Linney reading the letters between Otto and Charlotte. There will soon be a book. The series is dedicated to Lisa Jardine.

Philippe Sands had happened upon the cache of letters by chance. His book East West Street is centered on the city known variously (depending on decade and sovereignty) as Lemberg, Lwow, or Lviv. His grandparents had come from there; much of the rest of the family perished in the Holocaust. The city was also the home of two great theorists of atrocity and the law—Rafael Lemkin, who gave us the concept of “genocide” and found refuge in America, and Hersch Lauterpacht, who gave us “crimes against humanity” and found refuge in Britain. All of these strands are woven into a book that is part memoir, part biography, part history, part philosophy.

A Wächter family photo album (Courtesy Philippe Sands)

One man who figures prominently in the Lemberg story, and in the book, is Hans Frank, Adolf Hitler’s personal lawyer, who in 1939 became governor-general of the occupied Polish territories, living in Krakow’s Wawel Castle and aggressively rounding up, transporting, and killing the Jewish population in areas under his control. Frank would be convicted of war crimes at Nuremberg. He was hanged in 1946. His son Niklas bore him no love and published a devastating portrait, Der Vater, in Germany in 1987. (The book was published in English a few years later under the title In the Shadow of the Reich.) To this day, Niklas carries in his wallet a picture of his father taken after his execution.