Gallardo kills Alfonso Navarro and assumes his identity in the last days of the Battle of Berlin, an act that lets him surrender under another man’s name while concealing his own part in wartime atrocities. The killing emerges at the intersection of love, survival, and fear of accountability: Gallardo wants a future with Agneta Müller, but also knows that witnesses to Klooga could identify him and denounce him to the Soviets.

Background and Breaking Point

After eating in the Berlin position, Jan Schmitt takes Gallardo aside and tells him that he and Agneta intend to leave together. Their arrival had once been bound to a different purpose: they had come prepared to die defending the Reich. Now, Jan says, everything has changed. He recognizes that Gallardo saw Agneta first and loves her too, but insists that she can choose for herself. As Jan trails off and begins to retreat, Gallardo cuts him short and tells him that he loves him as well, calling him a bastard but also the best friend he has ever had.

The scene turns abruptly from confession to physical violence. Jan collapses after a right-handed blow from Gallardo, whom the narration identifies as the Tiger of Treviño. Agneta rushes to Jan and pounds Gallardo’s chest with her small fists as she tries to get to Schmitt. Gallardo pushes her aside without hurting her; when she bends over Jan to revive him, he leaves and wanders for hours until he is lost. When he returns to the position, only Alfonso Navarro remains to call him a lout. Gallardo does not care. This is the emotional rupture immediately preceding his decision to take Navarro’s identity.

The Killing and Assumed Identity

On 1 May 1945, Berlin’s defenders prolong their resistance for another twenty-four hours, preventing the Soviets from celebrating the conquest of the city on May Day. The following day, with a tank’s barrel trained directly on him, Gallardo emerges from the Wilhelmstrasse position with his arms raised. He is not alone in the surrender: he carries Alfonso Navarro López’s papers. He does not show the occupying forces Navarro’s corpse.

The concealed body makes the surrender more than a simple effort to pass under a new name. Gallardo has killed the man whose documents can support his new identity, and the story states plainly that this is why he did it. The deception allows him to present himself to the Soviets as Navarro even as he hides the evidence of the crime that made the impersonation possible. After six weeks in an overcrowded cell, the other prisoners show no surprise at hearing his new name. The first interrogating officer instead asks why he speaks German so badly, a detail that exposes a practical weakness in the identity he has assumed without revealing the truth to those around him.

Motives: Love, Survival, and Fear

The narration distinguishes Gallardo’s murder of Navarro from a simple act of revenge. Gallardo knows Navarro was wrong about Agneta: she did not choose Jan because of race, skin, or surname, but because Jan possessed a love that Gallardo lacked. Gallardo had been competing at a disadvantage, but the text says that neither this grievance nor Navarro’s role in his nightmares explains the killing. In the moment he pulls the trigger, Gallardo is not thinking of the port of Bilbao, the fear that cost him the Spanish championship in 1941, or Christmas Eve 1942. Resentment, guilt, and fear are all explicitly set aside as his immediate motive; the narration instead describes a love so immense that it fills his entire inner life.

That love gives the assumed identity its forward-looking purpose. Gallardo no longer wants to die without having kissed Agneta or been close to her. He imagines that, after defeat has reduced the old hymns and their fervor to ashes, the world may forget the beliefs that once defined him. For that future to be possible, however, he believes he must cease to be himself. Without another identity, his hope of being with Agneta would have little chance.

The prospect of accountability supplies a separate, equally concrete reason to disappear. Gallardo had been at Klooga, and he expects that sooner or later he will have to answer for it. Kleiber, his men, and the camp guards could all point toward the III Panzerkorps; the soldiers left at Narva were numerous enough that Gallardo fears some may survive and remember him. He needs a different person’s documents so that no one can identify and denounce him to the Russians. The narration therefore places his romantic hope alongside his effort to evade the consequences of his actions: both depend on becoming someone else.

Consequence and Significance

Gallardo’s new identity does not represent a clean break with his past. It is secured by another killing, and that crime barely disturbs his conscience as he gives himself up without resistance. The contrast is sharp: the surrender looks like an end to combat, but the papers concealed on his person carry the violence forward into a postwar life built on impersonation. His willingness to preserve himself is also bound to his past participation in Klooga, which remains a debt rather than a danger he has morally resolved.

The sequence makes identity a practical instrument and a moral evasion at once. Navarro’s documents may enable Gallardo to survive the collapse of Berlin and imagine a life with Agneta, but they cannot undo the death of Navarro or the history Gallardo is trying to outrun. His first interrogation underscores the fragility of the disguise, while the prisoners’ untroubled acceptance of his new name shows how readily a name can pass as a person when no one suspects the substitution. The episode’s decisive reversal is thus not merely that Gallardo survives the fall of Berlin: he leaves his own identity behind at the precise moment when the possibility of answering for his actions should become unavoidable.