Allied entry into the German Embassy in Madrid, on June 5, 1945, ends not in the recovery of Nazi diplomatic records or treasures but in an encounter with Hans Lazar, the regime’s indispensable Madrid operative. Nearly a month after Berlin’s capitulation, Allied representatives reached an embassy emptied of its contents; Lazar greeted them in a silk dressing gown and said he lived there. The Allies’ only spoil, the narrative concludes, was his smile.

Background and Delay

Lazar’s importance to the Third Reich’s embassy in Madrid had extended through the war and beyond it. The book presents him not as a functionary whose influence ended with Germany’s defeat, but as the central, irreplaceable figure in the embassy’s operations. In that light, the Allied entry is the final act of a longer contest over what could be found, proven, and recovered from the German presence in Spain.

The representatives did not enter as soon as Berlin surrendered. Francoist authorities delayed access with a succession of bureaucratic obstacles, putting off the moment until the latest possible deadline. By the time the Allies crossed the threshold on June 5, almost a month had passed since the capitulation of Berlin. The delay matters because the embassy’s condition made the difference between an inspection that might yield evidence and one that confronted only absence.

An Embassy Stripped Bare

The building seemed to have been looted. No documents or records remained, and neither money nor gold could be found. The antiques and artworks that had decorated the rooms only days earlier had disappeared; the safes were empty, the walls bare, and even the furniture was gone. The inventory of missing things expands the scale of the absence: the Allies did not merely find an office whose papers had been removed, but a diplomatic residence stripped of its contents.

That emptiness gives the scene its stark reversal. An embassy is expected to preserve the instruments of its work—records, valuables, the material traces of official presence. Here, after the German defeat, the premises offer none of them. The narrative supplies no account of who removed each item or where it went, so the emptied rooms cannot by themselves establish the fate of every missing object. What they do establish is that the Allied representatives arrived too late to find the collection that had occupied the building just days before.

Lazar’s Encounter with the Allies

The sole figure the Allies found inside was Lazar. He came down a corridor wearing a silk dressing gown, an incongruously private appearance in the emptied seat of a defeated state’s embassy. When asked who he was and what he was doing there, he smiled, identified himself, and explained that there was nothing particular he was doing: the building was his private residence.

His answer makes domestic possession a shield against the political meaning of the visit. The embassy had been the setting of his work for Nazi Germany, yet he presented himself not as an official encountered at the end of a regime, but as a resident in his own home. The account does not describe an arrest or a confrontation. Instead, the scene closes on Lazar’s composure: for all the Allies’ effort to reach the building, his smile was their only booty.

Consequences and Narrative Significance

The entry joins two forms of evasion. Outside, Francoist officials had postponed Allied access through bureaucratic obstruction; inside, the missing documents and property left the visitors with no material record of what the embassy had held. Lazar’s presence then sharpened the paradox: the operative who had served the Third Reich remained at the scene, while the objects that might have testified to its activity were gone. The episode depicts the postwar transition not as a clean transfer of power or evidence, but as a moment in which access came only after the traces had vanished.

Its ending is deliberately concentrated in a single, almost weightless image. The Allies find no archive, treasure, or furniture—only Lazar, wrapped in silk, answering their question with a smile. That smile cannot replace the missing records or explain the removal of the embassy’s contents. Its force comes from the contrast between the scale of what is absent and the ease with which Lazar asserts his right to remain. The event thus gives the embassy’s disappearance a human face without pretending that the encounter resolves the unanswered questions it leaves behind.