European war criminals went through Spain to Argentina

The Stauffer network’s assistance to European collaborators fleeing through Spain to Argentina is a cross-border operation built from domestic hospitality, forged identities, political protection, and official reception. It begins in the rooms of Clara Stauffer’s Madrid home and extends to Buenos Aires, where Juan Perón receives fugitives and helps shape an institution to process their arrival. The route’s defining contradiction is that men sought by the justice systems of their own countries can travel under Spanish papers while the machinery helping them evade accountability operates in the open, shielded by powerful allies.

From household refuge to escape office

In the summer of 1945, Clara Stauffer renovated two rooms of her house to serve as an office, installed a new telephone line, hired two secretaries, and filled new cupboards with men’s clothes in every size and shoes in every number. The visitors changed along with the rooms. Men who appeared at all hours were thin, tired, and unfamiliar with Spanish; Sole Ruiz, who sometimes went to Porlier Prison to visit her brother, thought they looked like prisoners. They were fugitives who had escaped European prisons and crossed the Pyrenees themselves, or prisoners released from Nanclares.

The house did more than shelter them briefly. At Galileo 14, visitors received food and new clothes and were apparently directed to accommodation and, in some cases, work. They did not stay overnight, and often returned to the office on other errands looking markedly better. Their movement through the house formed a practical sequence of reception, replenishment, and onward arrangements: a private address served as a clearing point rather than a final refuge.

A Spanish replacement soldier regularly delivered sealed envelopes bearing the letterheads of Madrid parishes, especially the parish near the Iglesia roundabout. When one envelope was accidentally left unsealed, Sole opened it and found a baptismal certificate bearing German names and a date in 1907. The deliveries continued until she fled Spain. The certificate revealed how the network could turn church records into the basis for Spanish documentation, giving fugitives a route from informal assistance to identities usable for travel.

The office’s visitors also connected the Madrid operation to named collaborators. Sole heard a secretary identify Jean-Jules Lecomte, a name that stood out because it was not German. Meg Williams later established that Lecomte was a Nazi zealot who belonged both to the Rex Party and the SS, and that the occupation had made him burgomaster of Chimay. His presence linked Stauffer’s everyday office routine to a larger escape system serving figures whose political and wartime records made them wanted men.

Building a transatlantic route

The evidence gathered by Sole Ruiz persuaded Meg Williams that the Stauffer operation was an organized network, not merely a household distributing food and clothing. Congressman Sal Burnstein had spent months investigating Nazi escape routes without finding firm proof of a stable organization. The Madrid network offered a possible basis for public pressure: if its protection of war criminals and collaborators could be established, the Franco government’s role could be exposed internationally. Manuel Arroyo Benítez recognized that such a case required corroboration, not just a servant’s testimony. Investigators would have to establish the identities of Lecomte and Carlos Fuldner, verify that the Argentine visitors were connected to Perón, and demonstrate that Stauffer did more than look after German soldiers.

The Argentine destination appeared credible because the connections ran in both directions. Argentina, unlike other countries enforcing a blockade, sent Spain ships carrying grain and frozen meat. The investigators believed that the Stauffer network worked with the Perón government and that Argentina was the intended destination for fugitives whom Stauffer received and supplied with Spanish documentation. Friendly parish priests could provide baptismal records; contacts in the Spanish administration could help turn those records into papers. At this stage, the route was a well-supported hypothesis, not yet a proven chain. To establish it, Arroyo would have to infiltrate the network.

Once inside, Arroyo used the apparent idleness of life with Ingrid Weiss as cover for visiting Galileo 14 nearly every day. He cultivated Stauffer’s secretaries by bringing them the newspaper, drinking coffee with them, and offering to run errands. When his night work began, the same helpfulness made him, in practice, another office secretary. This access let him observe both the office’s ordinary routines and its more consequential transactions.

Arroyo eventually recorded what he learned in a small notebook that he could conceal in his jacket. A parish errand for a baptismal certificate in the name of José Pacheco Hernández gave him a further glimpse of the documentation process: he was not told that the certificate would be used to create his own identity. Meanwhile, a lock on the wooden-lined meter-room locker at his night job recalled his earlier ability to make a homemade pick from wire. During eight successive nights, he filled the notebook with information gathered under the identity of Adrián Gallardo, turning his concealed writing and the improvised locker access into part of the intelligence operation.

Perón’s reception and the creation of SARE

A decisive public glimpse of the destination comes on 4 December 1947, when Perón receives six visitors at the Casa Rosada. Five have entered Argentina during that year using legal Spanish passports, but those papers conceal false identities; all five are wanted in their respective countries for collaboration or crimes against humanity. The sixth visitor is the Spanish journalist Víctor de la Serna, whose identity matches his passport. Although the men have different nationalities and backgrounds, their Spanish documents and shared refuge in Buenos Aires expose the common route behind the apparently disparate group.

Among the visitors is Horst Alberto Carlos Fuldner, a member of the SS intelligence organization. When his superior Walter Schellenberg concluded that Germany would lose the war, he assigned Fuldner to find escape routes for Nazi Party leaders. Fuldner had moved from Madrid to his country of birth in February 1947 and was now in Perón’s company. His presence made the Argentine end of the route more than an inference based on parish certificates and private contacts: a figure tasked with finding escape paths for Nazi leaders was among the men received by the Argentine president.

The meeting was officially presented as an occasion for Perón to explain his Third Position, opposed to both Marxism and liberalism and claiming to transcend the division between left and right. The visitors applauded a political formula familiar to them, but the discussion turned to the reception of civilian and military technicians and scientists associated with the Third Reich. Perón wanted to make Argentina a power and believed that a future conflict between the West and the Soviet Union could turn the men regarded as villains after the war into useful allies. His anti-communist reading of the emerging Cold War supplied a political rationale for welcoming them.

The discussion exceeded a single audience. Perón received the same group again the following day to settle further details and personally suggested a confidential official body to receive such immigrants. The institutional form followed. On 28 June 1948, the committee directing the Argentine European Reception Service, SARE, met at Radu Ghenea’s home to sign its statutes. Pierre Daye, who had designed the organization, attended for the Belgian exiles; Ghenea represented the Romanians, while other participants represented fugitives of several nationalities, including Germans, Austrians, French, Slovaks, Italians, and Croats. The director general of Migration soon formally recognized SARE’s authority to accept and manage applications for residence in Argentina. The archdiocese provided a building on Canning Street for its headquarters, a sign that the operation had moved beyond personal hospitality into an active administrative structure.

Lists, papers, and protected passage

The route was also sustained by requests for information and the sorting of potential emigrants. In a letter dated 25 February 1948, Daye told Víctor de la Serna that his group’s contacts with the presidency had continued steadily and regularly. He asked de la Serna to prepare lists by nationality of political refugees in Spain, marking those most urgently needing rescue. The refugees would not need to make individual applications; the group would handle the necessary arrangements. The request shows an operation that did not simply wait for fugitives to arrive at Stauffer’s door. It sought names, prioritized cases, and offered to carry applications through channels connected to the Argentine presidency.

Daye recommended three trusted people to carry out this work, including Clara Stauffer. Her position at the Madrid end was supported not only by a private circle but by ties to Spanish officials and influential political figures. When Manuel Arroyo, using the false identity of Adrián Gallardo, encountered her directly, Stauffer showed him the original Allied Control Council circular seeking his arrest. He had been beside her while she wrote it, yet had not known she possessed the original. The seal and signature authenticated the document and demonstrated, in the narrative’s assessment, complete collusion between the network based at Galileo 14 and the Francoist state, or at least some of its senior officials.

Stauffer used the circular not to frighten her supposed protégé away but to assure him that he was among comrades and should trust her instructions. She arranged for him to stay with Ingrid Weiss on the same street, promised that the network would obtain new papers and find him work, and raised emigration as a possible safer course because he was wanted for war crimes. The encounter makes the system’s method concrete: knowledge of an arrest request, access to official documentation, housing, employment, and replacement papers all converge in one personal intervention.

Arroyo’s subsequent intelligence notes supplied further evidence of the route’s reach. Stauffer cited Lecomte as proof that her network could deliver war criminals safely to Argentina. Lecomte had landed in Buenos Aires in mid-May using a Spanish passport under the name Jan Degraf, with the surname also possibly rendered De Graf, De Graaf, or Degraaf. Arroyo had not dared ask how it was spelled, but remembered that the second surname began with Ver, enough, he thought, to identify the passenger in a transatlantic ship’s records. The uncertainty of the spelling did not erase the evidentiary value: the alias, Spanish passport, arrival date, and ship-passenger trail offered a way to test the network’s claims.

Arroyo’s notes also traced the links around Fuldner and the Argentine embassy. He had not met Fuldner, who had returned to Buenos Aires in February, but recorded several pages about him. Eva Perón’s visit to Madrid featured both as a subject of conversation at Galileo 14 and as a turning point: after her departure, contacts with the Argentine embassy and correspondence Fuldner maintained from Argentina intensified. A separate intelligence lead suggested that Stauffer’s attention to Rafael Cuesta Sánchez might concern more than his personal situation. Arroyo suspected that shipments Guillermo had agreed to oversee would include art stolen from Jewish owners and museums in occupied territories, associated jewelry and antiquities, and perhaps gold, silver, or foreign currency from the vanished Nazi treasury. He also connected a name Stauffer had tried to introduce, Ban or Bam, to Josef Hans Lazar, known to intimates as Bam, and to the Allied search for treasures removed from Hitler’s embassy and the ambassador’s residence in Madrid. These suspicions widened the possible scope of the network from the movement of people and identity papers to the transfer of looted property and hidden records.

Admission, concealment, and historical significance

Years later, Sefton Delmer asked Stauffer directly whether she ran an escape network for war criminals and Nazi leaders. She said she helped many people. She explained that most Germans and collaborators held in Spain wanted to return home, while some preferred a third country; she was in contact with a reception network in Buenos Aires run by her friend Cissy von Schiller, a German woman who had lived in Madrid until 1947. She also acknowledged contacts with the Vatican, since some people she protected chose to cross the Atlantic from Genoa. Her account describes multiple routes and destinations rather than a single Argentine channel.

Asked whether the Spanish government knew of the work, Stauffer replied that it did and that it had the Generalissimo’s protection. She also invoked her close friendship with Pilar Primo de Rivera and her comradeship with those who had built the new Spain. Yet she was not entirely candid. She claimed to have helped several Communist Party members leave the country, a statement the narrative identifies as a lie. The false claim matters because it reveals a limit to her otherwise striking openness: she admitted the assistance to Nazis and collaborators but added a misleading assertion that could recast her operation as politically neutral humanitarian work.

The network’s significance lies in how it joins acts that might otherwise appear separate. A spare room, a change of clothes, a parish certificate, a false Spanish passport, a work placement, an intelligence list, a presidential audience, and an official residence service become successive links in one route. Its operators moved between private homes and public institutions, while the papers that concealed fugitives’ identities depended on access to local religious and state authorities. The narrative therefore presents escape not as an isolated act of evasion but as an organized system whose reach depended on brokers, documents, transportation, political sponsorship, and the deliberate protection of powerful governments.