German Embassy in Spain

The German Embassy in Spain serves as the operational center of Nazi influence in Madrid and, after Germany’s defeat, as the stage for a final act of concealment. Under press attaché Hans Lazar, its reach extended beyond official diplomacy into Spanish journalism and public opinion; when the Allies entered the building in June 1945, they found it emptied of records, valuables, and even furniture, with Lazar himself as the sole apparent remnant of the institution.

Wartime Operations

The embassy’s press operation was headed by Hans Lazar, who had represented the German news agency Transocean in Burgos from June 1938. After Franco’s victory, Lazar became press attaché at the embassy. In Madrid, he was said to wield more influence than the ambassador, Eberhard von Stohrer, and he remained an effective operator through the tenures of three successive ambassadors.

Lazar’s influence rested on more than the money he gave journalists. He and his wife, the baroness Petrino, cultivated selected members of the Madrid press through elegant dinners at their home, where journalists could eat well and mingle with senior officials of Franco’s government and Nazi diplomats. The social access and sense of proximity to power created loyalty alongside the financial inducements.

The resulting press coverage made the embassy an instrument of political deception. After the German Sixth Army surrendered at Stalingrad, Lazar’s task was to prevent Spanish readers from learning the scale of the defeat. ABC printed photographs of the ruined city but framed German resistance through heroic comparisons, omitted any mention of surrender or Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus, and then claimed that the Sixth Army was rapidly regrouping. The next day, its front page celebrated an Axis submarine campaign. The paper’s changing presentation of the news concealed military disaster while making Axis fortunes appear intact.

The embassy also supported influence operations beyond the established press. Lazar helped infiltrate the newly founded EFE news agency to circulate Berlin’s views in Latin America and used Spanish organizations without leaving proof that the embassy or the German government directed them. In this way, its political work could travel through local institutions while its official responsibility remained difficult to demonstrate.

Influence and Material Interests

The embassy’s public influence was entwined with Lazar’s personal advantage. The severe poverty of postwar Spain offered him opportunities to assemble a substantial art collection. The novel later suggests that the embassy’s wartime and postwar activity also intersected with the concealment and movement of Nazi assets, although the extent of Lazar’s role is presented through suspicion and inference rather than a fully recovered inventory.

In a later investigation, Manuel Arroyo Benítez reasons that shipments Guillermo has agreed to supervise may contain artworks looted from museums and Jewish owners in occupied territories, along with jewels, antiquities, and possibly precious metals or foreign currency from the vanished Nazi treasury. He connects this possibility to Lazar: at a 1947 gathering, Clara Stauffer had apparently wanted to introduce Rafael Cuesta Sánchez to a man called Bam, the nickname used by Lazar’s intimates. The connection directs attention back to the embassy’s unexplained disappearance of its contents.

The Embassy After Germany’s Defeat

On 5 June 1945, nearly a month after Berlin’s capitulation, Allied representatives finally entered the embassy. Francoist authorities had delayed their access through bureaucratic obstacles until almost the last possible moment. The building they found looked as though it had been ransacked: there were no documents or records, no money or gold, no antiquities or works of art, and not even the furniture remained. The empty safes and bare walls made absence itself the most conspicuous evidence in the building.

The only person the Allies encountered was Hans Lazar, very dark-skinned and wearing a silk dressing gown, emerging into a corridor. Asked who he was and what he was doing there, he identified himself and explained that he was doing nothing unusual because his private residence was in the building. His smile was all the Allies obtained as spoils from the embassy.

That empty headquarters later acquired the force of an unresolved clue. The Allied Control Council believed Lazar had secretly moved the embassy’s and ambassador’s residence’s treasures to a hiding place, which they searched for unsuccessfully for years; they also suspected that missing archive documents were among the concealed materials. In February 1946, the Spanish government authorized Lazar’s repatriation, but he entered the Clínica Ruber with acute appendicitis the day before he was due to board a plane to Germany. The operation took place, yet his pursuers suspected that the illness had also served to prevent his return. Afterward, he disappeared from their view. The embassy’s stripped rooms thus remain linked to the unanswered question of where its missing property and papers went.