Salamanca is the setting of the Women’s Section of the Falange’s first national congress, held on 6 January 1937, and a center of Nationalist political life during the Spanish Civil War. The city matters not simply as a venue: it is where Clara Stauffer gives up the organization’s most visible propaganda office to Marichu de la Mora while continuing to shape its public voice, and where Pilar Primo de Rivera is present as the Falange’s singular national leader. Salamanca also enters the story through the journeys and political entanglements of other characters, making it a place where personal loyalties are tested against the movement’s demands.

The Congress and the Women’s Section

The first national congress marks the Women’s Section’s emergence from a modest auxiliary role into a more prominent political organization. Founded in June 1934, the women’s branch had initially concentrated on visiting imprisoned Falangists and supporting their families. Its guiding principle, repeatedly stated by its founder Pilar Primo de Rivera, was that a woman’s function was to serve. The armed conflict changed the branch’s standing: the congress drew delegates from every province in the Nationalist zone, with the exception of the Madrid leadership, which remained in the besieged capital.

The meeting’s leadership was tightly concentrated. Pilar, the first, last, and only National Chief, headed the organization; Marichu de la Mora served as National Secretary; and Clara Stauffer held the third position in the hierarchy as Delegate for Press and Propaganda. Their backgrounds differed sharply. Pilar was the daughter of dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera and the sister of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, Falange’s founder, who had been executed in Alicante prison on 20 November 1936 and elevated into a martyr of the Nationalist crusade. Marichu was the granddaughter of conservative statesman Antonio Maura, who had headed five governments between 1903 and 1922. Clara’s bourgeois family origins seemed less illustrious beside those lineages, but her Spanish-German connections would prove especially useful to the party and to the Nationalist army.

Clara Stauffer’s position and influence

Although the congress is held in Salamanca, Clara’s career is shaped by her ability to connect Spanish Falangism with Germany. Known as Clarita despite being thirty-three in 1937, she was born in Madrid in 1904 to Konrad Stauffer, a Nuremberg master brewer hired by the Mahou family to run its modern brewery on Amaniel Street, and Julia Loewe, a Madrileña who retained her parents’ German nationality. Clara was educated in Germany and, on 6 January 1937, possessed no nationality other than German. Her foreign status did not prevent her from becoming a prominent athlete in women’s swimming and skiing, nor did it obstruct her political ascent. The book presents her as a Spanish Francoist at home and a Nazi in Germany, whose nationality made her a significant intermediary between the government at Burgos and the Third Reich.

At the congress, Clara relegates herself to the lesser title of Central Assistant for Press and Propaganda, leaving Marichu the post of National Delegate. The apparent demotion allows Marichu to appear the congress’s principal victor after Pilar, and can itself be read as a propaganda gesture. But the distribution of titles does not describe the distribution of influence. Clara remains the effective force behind the organization’s messaging: she writes the unsigned texts and edits the signed contributions in the official Women’s Section book, first published without an imprint in 1938 because Madrid remains in Republican hands. The book is reissued frequently in the early 1940s. From January 1937 she also writes for the Salamanca newspaper El Adelanto as a spokesperson for Falangist women. Her withdrawal from the top title thus becomes a way of exercising influence without occupying the most conspicuous office.

Political journeys through Salamanca

The city also appears as a point of encounter in the story of María Eugenia León and Fernando Villa. In the spring of 1937, María Eugenia accompanies Fernando to Salamanca to meet Manuel Hedilla, the Falangist leader. Her presence there is part of a larger change in her relationship to politics: previously uninterested in Falangism and alienated by the movement’s women’s circles, she has come to share Fernando’s fervor and to take part in the clandestine meetings where he explains events and asks for her judgment. When he is arrested, she tries to be arrested with him, but the police do not take her seriously. She then devotes herself to seeking his release, going from prison to prison and asking acquaintances, friends, and powerful contacts for help.

Later, María Eugenia invokes this journey when she appeals to Pilar on Fernando’s behalf. She has prepared and memorized a speech defending him as an early, sincere Falangist who opposed the Unification Decree because he feared that Falange would lose its political purity in a merger with monarchists and Carlists. She argues that he acted in good faith, out of loyalty to José Antonio’s memory and doctrine. Pilar already knows of the controversy, which had been widely discussed in Pamplona even while she was in Salamanca. The city therefore links the organization’s national leadership to the rival understandings of Falangist loyalty that shape Fernando’s fate.

A center of wartime power and political violence

Salamanca’s importance is also conveyed through the wider wartime structures surrounding the city. At the congress, the absence of the Madrid leadership is explained by the capital’s continued control by the Republicans; the official Women’s Section book will likewise appear without an imprint because Madrid has not yet fallen to the Nationalists. These details make the city a platform for an organization claiming national reach from territory held by the Francoist side, while the contested capital remains both a practical obstacle and a political symbol.

The novel places this political world beside the concealed violence of the war. In a separate account, a wounded man found by guards is mistaken for a corpse and taken to an infirmary. His wallet contains a credential from the Public Order Council of the Madrid Defense Council. A police commissioner, Basilio Rodríguez, orders that if the man is dead he must be buried as unidentified, with no registration; if alive, he must be kept alive at any cost and admitted to no hospital under his name, because someone may try to kill him again. The commander receives no explanation beyond the assurance that the man is vital to the Republic. This episode is not set in Salamanca, but it clarifies the divided wartime landscape against which Salamanca’s Nationalist political center is understood: both sides operate amid secrecy, factional danger, and the effort to control identities and information.

Significance

The congress in Salamanca gives institutional form to a contradiction at the heart of the Women’s Section. Its stated ideal makes women’s service the governing principle, yet the organization’s expansion during war gives its leaders political reach, propaganda authority, and influence over relations with Germany. Clara’s career dramatizes that tension especially clearly: she accepts a lower formal office while retaining the practical command of public messaging, and her German background turns a personal history into political leverage. Salamanca is the stage for that maneuver, but also a broader wartime center from which the novel traces the entanglement of ideology, ambition, loyalty, and violence.