Sefton Delmer

Sefton Delmer is a British journalist whose career in disguise and black propaganda leads him to Clara Stauffer’s Madrid escape network. In February 1948, posing as a German Nazi, he gains entry to her home at Galileo 14, interviews her despite her illness, and brings her unusually candid account of the network into public view. His encounter turns the clandestine work of rescue, documentation, and flight into evidence of a larger political arrangement: Stauffer says that the Spanish government knows of her activities and protects her.

Identity and wartime work

Born in Berlin in 1904 to an Australian father, Delmer grew up with German language and customs. The First World War disrupted the family’s life there: his father, Frederick, was interned as an enemy citizen, and a prisoner exchange in 1917 allowed the family to move to England, where they remained rather than returning to Australia.

After studying German at Oxford, Delmer worked as a freelance journalist before becoming the Daily Express’s bureau chief in Germany. There he cultivated contact with Nazi leader Ernst Röhm and became the first British journalist to interview Hitler. Hitler invited him aboard his private plane during the 1932 election campaign; in February 1933, Delmer accompanied him to inspect the Reichstag ruins. The British government regarded Delmer as a possible paid Nazi sympathizer, and the Daily Express transferred him to France before 1933 ended.

When Delmer returned to England in September 1940, he joined the newly founded Special Operations Executive, established to conduct espionage, sabotage, and military reconnaissance against the Third Reich. Until the war’s end, he became a specialist in black propaganda: adopting the persona of a German Nazi living in Britain, he broadcast to German occupation forces through clandestine-seeming radio stations that shifted frequency and location. The broadcasts appeared to support the occupiers while feeding them false news intended to weaken morale, including fabricated accounts of food riots and epidemics.

His most elaborate operation used Soldatensender Calais, or Radio of the Troops in Calais. It supplied false information about British defenses that could have directed German ships into disaster in a hypothetical invasion, while its broadcasts also taught English phrases such as “My tailor is rich, I love my mom, My ship is on fire.” The mixture of operational deception and absurd instruction anticipates the method Delmer brings to Madrid: he gains access by performing an identity that his targets are prepared to recognize.

Entry into Clara Stauffer’s house

At the end of February 1948, Delmer again presented himself as a German Nazi, this time crossing the threshold of Clara Stauffer’s residence at Galileo 14. He did not need to offer elaborate explanations. The building’s porter, accustomed to this kind of visitor, heard his impeccable Berlin accent and directed him to Stauffer’s home. A very blond young German informed him that Stauffer was ill and could not receive him, then led him past an office staffed by several secretaries to meet an older associate, Herr Vost.

Vost explained that Stauffer was exhausted from constant travel: she visited people in need, helped prisoners leave Spanish camps, found jobs for those released, and assisted others in getting out of the country. With paternal concern and evident pride, he said that the organization served more than eight hundred people. At that point Delmer dropped his disguise. He identified himself as a Daily Express journalist from London and said that he had come specifically to interview Stauffer, whose activities interested him in part because the Allied Control Council had singled her out as the only woman it wanted.

Vost left the room without speaking. Minutes later, he returned and led Delmer through a dark wooden dining room into a bedroom dominated by a large oak crucifix. Stauffer was resting in bed, pale and sweating, but presentable despite the pleurisy from which she expected a difficult recovery. The telephone beside her kept ringing. She apologized for receiving him in that condition and asked what he wanted to know; she did not rebuke him for having entered her house under a false identity.

The interview and the network’s routes

Delmer asked directly whether Stauffer ran an escape network for war criminals and Nazi leaders. She answered that she helped many people. She explained that most Germans and collaborators held in Spain wanted to return to their homeland, while some preferred to emigrate elsewhere. For those seeking a third country, she said, she was in contact with an immigrant-reception network in Buenos Aires run by Cissy von Schiller, a German woman and close friend who had lived in Madrid until 1947. Stauffer also acknowledged contacts with the Vatican, since some of the people she assisted crossed the Atlantic from Genoa.

The interview connected the Madrid operation to more than one route out of Europe. In the novel’s preceding account, Clara’s house has acquired office rooms, a new telephone line, secretaries, and closets stocked with men’s clothes and shoes in many sizes. Exhausted visitors receive food, clothing, and practical assistance; some arrive without speaking Spanish. A soldier brings sealed envelopes bearing Madrid parish letterheads, and one accidentally opened envelope contains a baptismal record with German names and a date of birth in 1907. This earlier evidence helps explain why Delmer’s interview matters: the network’s assistance involves not only shelter and provisions but also the documents that can support a new identity.

Stauffer spoke without apparent hesitation about her contacts abroad. When Delmer asked whether the Spanish government knew what she was doing, she answered that it did, and that she had both its understanding and the protection of General Franco. She also invoked her close friendship with Pilar Primo de Rivera and her camaraderie with the architects of the new Spain, insisting that she had no reason to fear anyone. Her confidence makes the interview more than an account of private charity: it records her own assertion that the work could operate with the regime’s knowledge and protection.

Her assurance was not wholly reliable. Stauffer also claimed that she had helped several members of the Spanish Communist Party leave the country, a statement the narrative identifies as a lie. Delmer wrote the claim down. The episode shows both the reach and the limits of his interview: Stauffer was willing to acknowledge assistance to Germans and collaborators, but she also offered a false statement that might make her work appear politically impartial. The fact that Delmer was British rather than Spanish helped the claim pass into his notebook, even though a Spaniard would have recognized its implausibility.

Publication and narrative significance

A few days after the meeting, the Daily Express announced Delmer’s interview on its front page as a major exclusive. The report caused considerable commotion in British and international public opinion. For Republican exiles around the world, the article offered a renewed occasion for hope that public exposure might provoke a response to the Franco regime’s protection of Nazi fugitives. The novel does not treat publication as proof that such intervention will follow; it presents the report as an opening of public scrutiny, not a resolution of the political impasse.

Delmer’s Madrid visit also gives a public form to evidence assembled through a dispersed network of witnesses. Earlier, Meg Williams had learned from Sole Ruiz that Galileo 14 was receiving fugitive men and issuing or arranging papers; Manuel Arroyo Benítez and Pablo de Azcárate then considered how to verify the network and make its links to Argentina and the Franco government politically usable. Their aim was to establish that Stauffer’s organization was more than a charitable supply station and to document its international connections. Delmer, arriving separately as a journalist, secures Stauffer’s own admission of those connections and publishes it in a prominent British newspaper.

The choice of Delmer is pointed. His wartime work depended on a convincing false persona, shifting signals, and information designed to be believed for strategic reasons. At Galileo 14 he uses the same capacity for impersonation to enter a house built around concealment, but then abandons the disguise in front of Vost and identifies himself openly. Stauffer, in turn, tells him a great deal while also lying about Communist beneficiaries. The scene therefore frames the interview as a contest in which neither appearance nor candor can be taken at face value: the journalist’s access begins with a performance, and the subject’s frankness contains a deliberate fabrication.