Sefton Delmer interviews Clara Stauffer in Madrid in February 1948, turning a clandestine visit to the organizer’s home into a public revelation of her escape network and its political protection. The encounter exposes the machinery of assistance—food, clothing, documents, connections abroad—and, through the interview’s striking mixture of candor and evasion, the impunity that allowed it to operate.

The visit to Galileo 14

By late February 1948, Sefton Delmer had already made a career of adopting a false identity to get close to his targets. He had returned to England in 1940 and joined the newly founded Special Operations Executive, then spent the war making black propaganda: posing as a German Nazi broadcaster to spread disinformation among German forces. At Galileo 14, the Madrid residence of Clara Stauffer, that practiced impersonation again opened a door. The building’s porter recognized the kind of visitor arriving and directed him without hesitation to Stauffer’s home.

A very blond young German told Delmer that Stauffer was ill and could not receive him, then guided him through an office staffed by secretaries to a man who introduced himself as Herr Vost. Vost was Stauffer’s close associate. With paternal concern, he explained that she was exhausted by constant travel: visiting people in need, helping prisoners leave Spanish camps, finding work for those released, and assisting others to get out of the country. He added, with evident pride, that the organization served more than eight hundred people. Delmer then dropped his assumed identity, identified himself as a Daily Express journalist, and said that he had come specifically to interview Stauffer about the Allied Control Council’s description of her activity and the fact that she was the only woman it had requested.

Vost left without a word. When he returned a few minutes later, he led Delmer past a dark wooden dining room and into a bedroom dominated by a large oak crucifix. Stauffer was resting on pillows, presentable despite a pleurisy that would take time to recover from. Her bedside telephone kept ringing. She apologized for receiving him while ill, did not reproach him for the deception that had brought him there, and asked what he wanted to know.

A network made visible

The interview brought together a system Delmer had partly encountered at the house and an account Stauffer gave of its wider reach. She said she helped many people. Most of the Germans and collaborationists held in Spain, she explained, wanted to return to their own country; some preferred to emigrate elsewhere. For those seeking a third country, she was in contact with a reception network in Buenos Aires run by Cissy von Schiller, a German woman and friend of hers who had lived in Madrid until 1947. Stauffer also acknowledged contacts with the Vatican, since some of the people she helped crossed the Atlantic from Genoa.

Her disclosures made the network’s routes and intermediaries more legible. The assistance was not simply a matter of offering a fugitive temporary shelter: it could extend to release from Spanish camps, employment, a destination abroad, and onward passage through different networks. The Buenos Aires connection and the Vatican contacts placed Stauffer’s work within a transnational system, while her account of travel and personal assistance echoed Vost’s description of her constant journeys on behalf of people who needed help.

That account had an earlier counterpart in the house’s everyday traffic. In the summer of 1945, Stauffer renovated two rooms for an office, installed a new telephone line, hired two secretaries, and filled newly made cupboards with men’s clothes in many sizes and shoes to fit every number. Thin, exhausted men began arriving at all hours alongside her customary dinner and coffee guests. Sole Ruiz recognized them as fugitives: some had escaped European prisons and crossed the Pyrenees, while others had been released from Nanclares. At Galileo 14 they were welcomed, fed, and given clothes; they did not stay overnight, and many returned to the office to conduct further business before or after receiving help.

Sole also noticed that none of the men spoke Spanish. A replacement soldier visited nearly every week with sealed envelopes, often bearing the letterheads of Madrid parishes. When one envelope was left open, Sole found a German baptismal certificate dated 1907. The traffic continued until she fled Spain. Shortly before then, she heard a secretary tell a visitor named Jean-Jules Lecomte that she had him in front of her. That clue was later identified as important: Meg Williams discovered that Lecomte was a Nazi fanatic and a member of both the Rex Party and the SS, appointed burgomaster of his hometown, Chimay, during the occupation. The household’s clothes, parish papers, and visitors thus formed separate visible pieces of a network whose operation depended on both personal hospitality and administrative documents.

Protection, candor, and a deliberate falsehood

Delmer asked directly whether Stauffer ran an escape network for war criminals and Nazi leaders. She did not accept that characterization in those terms, replying that she helped many people, and then described the Germans and collaborationists seeking repatriation or emigration. Her manner astonished him: she spoke with a calm bordering, in his view, on arrogance. When he asked whether the Spanish government knew what she was doing, she said that it did, that she had its understanding and the protection of Franco. She also invoked her close friendship with Pilar Primo de Rivera and her comradeship with the people who had built the new Spain, insisting that she had no reason to fear anyone.

Yet the interview’s apparent frankness had limits. Stauffer was not as secure as she claimed, and the narrative makes that insecurity visible in the lie she chose to tell. She said that she had also helped several members of the Spanish Communist Party leave the country. The account identifies this as a falsehood no Spaniard would have believed, but Delmer was not Spanish and wrote it down. Her willingness to speak openly about assistance to German and collaborationist fugitives therefore coexisted with an attempt to manage what her foreign interviewer would carry away. The lie was not a general confession of political neutrality; it was a calculated claim made when her assurance of official protection had already been put under pressure.

The contrast between her confidence and the practical effort surrounding her is sharp. If she felt wholly safe, the narrative suggests, she would have had no need to invent communist beneficiaries. Her repeated telephone calls, the delegation of access to Vost, and her claim of Francoist protection place the interview inside an operating network rather than outside it. Delmer’s arrival as an impostor briefly reverses the usual direction of concealment: the journalist conceals who he is to enter, then reveals himself, while Stauffer continues to control what she will and will not disclose.

Publication and the limits of exposure

A few days later, the Daily Express placed Delmer’s interview on its front page as a major exclusive. The story caused considerable commotion in public opinion, both inside and outside the United Kingdom. Its publication made Stauffer’s role and her own account of assistance harder to keep within the private world of Galileo 14. The interview therefore accomplished a form of exposure: an operation that had been visible to its beneficiaries, household staff, and intermediaries was now a public controversy.

For Republican exiles scattered across the world, the report may have seemed to offer grounds for hope. Public attention could be imagined as the first step toward scrutiny of the people protected in Spain and of the authorities who enabled them. But the account closes the gap between publicity and consequence with brutal brevity: nothing happened. The front-page story made the network known without producing the decisive intervention that hope might have promised.

The interview’s significance lies in that unresolved collision. Stauffer could acknowledge routes through Buenos Aires and Genoa, describe her organization’s hundreds of beneficiaries, and affirm Franco’s protection, while still attempting to shape the record with a false claim. Delmer could expose her account to a broad readership, but exposure alone could not compel action. In the novel’s larger picture of postwar impunity, the interview becomes both a rare moment when a protected network speaks about itself and a demonstration of how little public revelation necessarily changes.