It’s still impossible for Horst Wächter to recognise his father as a Nazi war criminal

In 1926, while putting in place the repressive laws and decrees that would define his dictatorship, Mussolini appointed a new chief of police. Arturo Bocchini was 36, a lawyer and former prefect of Brescia, a cynical, vengeful, witty and corpulent Neapolitan. Under his 17-year tenure, fascist Italy became one of the most sinister and efficient police states of the years between the wars, with overlapping and rivalrous legal and illegal police bodies, fed by a vast army of informers and spies. Said to number around 10,000 at their peak, these men and women were to be found in every corner of Italian life, from the civil service to the Vatican, from industry to the Royal household, from the army to universities. And when the war ended, many of them deftly switched sides, and went to spy for the Allies and the new post-war Italian government.

This febrile world of secret deals, influence, favours cashed in and old scores paid off is the setting for part of Philippe Sands’s new book. While doing research into Lemberg (today’s Lviv) for his very successful East West Street, he got to know Niklas Frank, the son of Hans Frank, the governor general of Occupied Poland who was indicted for mass murder and hanged at Nuremberg. Niklas introduced him in turn to Horst Wächter, the son of Otto, the Nazi governor of Galicia, based in Lemberg between 1942 and 1944, who had also been indicted for mass murder, but had disappeared after the war.

Sands’s book opens with Otto Wächter’s death in 1949 in Rome, where he had been hiding out in a monastery, trying to join the Ratline, the organisation that helped many thousands of former Nazis reach safety in South America.