Consejo de Control Aliado en España

The Consejo de Control Aliado en España is the Allied body that delivers the List of 104 to the Madrid government in October 1947. In the novel, the handover makes a document into a test of postwar justice: the Allies name people they want located and surrendered, while Francoist officials use delay, nationality, and selective claims of ignorance to frustrate the demand.

The list and its purpose

The list, also called the Black List, consists of eleven typed pages in English and is delivered to Foreign Minister Alberto Martín-Artajo. It is the most developed of the Allies’ repeated requests for Spanish cooperation in locating and transferring people connected with Nazi activity in Spain, as well as prominent collaborators from occupied countries suspected or known to be living there. Earlier requests had produced little result.

The 104 entries are not presented as a general register of Germans. They are described as “hateful Germans”: former citizens of the Third Reich who actively advanced Hitler’s project and could not evade responsibility simply by invoking discipline or obedience to superiors. The novel says they have pending cases before German courts and that their presence in Spain puts the Francoist government’s relations with the victorious powers at stake.

A diplomatic contest over responsibility

By late 1947, the international setting has shifted in Spain’s favor. The novel connects the government’s renewed room for manoeuvre to the emerging Cold War and to Western fear of another armed conflict with Stalin. Against this background, Martín-Artajo lets the Allied representatives wait until their patience is nearly exhausted before meeting them. He then produces documents, letters, and certificates the representatives had not previously seen.

His answers turn identity and citizenship into instruments of obstruction. Some people, he claims, have long been Spanish citizens; others received nationality for helping the Nationalist Army or for directing a strategically important company. One cannot be found, another is said to be unknown, and one Austrian is protected by the Cardinal of Toledo and Spain’s Catholic standing. The replies are not merely administrative explanations: together they show how the state can convert paperwork and political patronage into barriers against extradition.

Clara Stauffer’s entry

Only one woman appears among the 104: Clarita Stauffer. The list supplies her accurate Madrid address, 14 Galileo Street, and accuses her of being one of the principal organizers of a secret aid association. It identifies her role in procuring false documents and finding employment for German fugitives, and states that she received special permission from the German embassy to obtain Spanish nationality so she could continue such work after Germany’s defeat.

The Spanish response recasts her as a Madrid-born patriot and a tireless charitable worker, as well as Pilar Primo de Rivera’s right hand, and refuses to surrender her. The contrast between the Allied description and the official defence captures the central conflict surrounding the list: the same person can be classified as a wanted organizer by one authority and protected as a national benefactor by another. The address and the specific allegations make the dispute concrete, while the refusal shows the limits of the council’s ability to compel cooperation.

Significance in the novel

The handover belongs to a broader pattern in which official documents both expose and conceal. The list records names and alleged responsibilities, but the government’s counter-documents make nationality an obstacle to accountability. Elsewhere in the novel, false identity papers help fugitives secure work and disappear into ordinary life; here, the same politics of identification operates at the level of state diplomacy, where legal status can be invoked to shield people whom the Allies seek to prosecute.

The council’s delivery of the list therefore marks a confrontation rather than a resolution. Its detailed claims make the Allied demand legible, but the government’s practiced delays and refusals leave the listed people beyond the reach of the requested handover. The episode shows how the promise of postwar justice is weakened when a government treats cooperation as a bargaining matter amid changing international priorities.