Waffen-SS

The Waffen-SS is the armed Nazi formation that links the novel’s account of wartime collaboration to its postwar story of fugitives, covert networks, and impunity. It appears in particular through Léon Degrelle, commander of the Walloon Legion, which was integrated into the Waffen-SS, and through the novel’s wider depiction of clandestine Nazi activity and state violence.

Wartime associations

The narrative identifies Degrelle as the creator and commander of the Walloon Legion, a formation integrated into the Waffen-SS. At the end of the war, his reputation as a favored figure of Hitler did not lead him to defend Berlin. Instead, as Allied forces advanced, he sought passage to South America through rumored submarines, was refused a place, and escaped by taking an aircraft associated with Albert Speer. On May 8, 1945, the day after the German surrender, that aircraft made an emergency landing off La Concha Beach in San Sebastián after running out of fuel. The Waffen-SS connection therefore enters the postwar narrative through a commander whose flight carries the history of collaboration into Francoist Spain.

The postwar network

The novel places the Waffen-SS reference within a broader investigation of Nazi personnel and clandestine activity in Spain. In October 1947, the Allied Control Council in Spain submitted a list of 104 names to the Madrid government, after more than two years of largely fruitless requests for cooperation in locating and surrendering people connected with Nazi activities and collaboration. The list described Horst Alberto Carlos Fuldner as an SD member sent from Germany to organize clandestine activities after the defeat. His residence was recorded as 33 Modesto Lafuente Street in Madrid, though he was in Tarrasa when the list was delivered. These details distinguish the wider postwar network from the Waffen-SS itself while showing how personnel and secret operations outlasted the military defeat.

The novel also shows how escape and concealment depended on personal assistance as well as organized networks. After the surrender, Agneta hid Jan Schmitt, believing him to be an ordinary soldier without criminal responsibility; she had never heard of the Klooga massacre. Her mother supported the decision as a last chance to serve the Reich she had loved. Jan stayed with the family, helped with household repairs, and concealed his identity while seeking work. This episode does not identify him as a Waffen-SS member, but it places the survival of former German personnel within the intimate, domestic arrangements that could shelter fugitives after the war.

From military defeat to impunity

The Waffen-SS’s significance is sharpened by the novel’s account of what followed Germany’s defeat: Allied efforts to secure cooperation, fugitives’ continued residence in Spain, and the limited consequences they faced. Degrelle’s landing made him the Allied Control Council’s most coveted fugitive during its early activities in Spain, yet the list’s final demand did not make the named men uneasy. The contrast between the Allies’ formal claims and the fugitives’ apparent security turns the military organization’s wartime history into part of a larger account of postwar impunity.

Elsewhere, the narrative connects the logic of military repression to later state violence without treating distinct regimes or organizations as interchangeable. In its account of Argentina, the novel describes the 1975 Operativo Independencia as a campaign that divided the country into five military zones and gave their commanders extensive power to repress people labeled subversive. After the 1976 coup, the regime’s clandestine machinery used specialized task groups for kidnapping, secret detention, torture, executions, disposal of bodies, and the theft and reassignment of children born to detained women. The so-called death flights were one particularly extreme method: prisoners, alive, bound, and drugged, were carried out over the sea and dropped from aircraft. This later history does not make the Waffen-SS responsible for those crimes; rather, it extends the novel’s examination of how military power, secret operations, and the erasure of victims can serve systems of political violence.