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This week, my guest is Philippe Sands, the human rights lawyer and writer, whose new book is called The Ratline, Love, Lies and Justice on the Trail of a Nazi fugitive.

Philippe, welcome.

Hi, Sam. It's great to be back with you again.

Really, really pleased.

Well, it's a delight.

Though the story you tell is one that isn't all sunshine.

The ratline in some sense, I mean, it tells the story of Otto Wachter, very, very senior Nazi who ran a department of Poland during the war. And it proceeds in some ways from your previous book, East West Street. Can you talk about kind of the germ of this book?

Because it does seem to have, you know, at least in your personal story, come out of your

previous book. Sure. Sure. It is indeed. It's part of a, I suppose part of a bigger and longer project.

In fact, there will be a third book in due course in probably about five years time. And it does

relate to the East West Street project, although I'm not allowed to call it a sequel, because

I'm told that if you call it a sequel, people feel they've got to read the first one, and this one

stands alone. But in the context of the research on the previous book, I was introduced to a man

called Horst Wechter, who was the son of Otto Wechter, the governor of Krakow and the governor of the

District of Galicia based in Lemberg, which happened to be where my grandfather came from. And I was

introduced to him by Nicholas Frank, the son of Hans Frank, Hitler's leader in occupied Poland,

as being different from Nicholas, who hates his father,

Nicholas said to me, you should meet Horst because he loves his father, although you will like him.

We did meet, and I did like him.

He's a gentleman and he's a very open man, which I appreciate hugely.

But unlike Nicholas, he thinks his dad was

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