Lista de los 104

The List of 104, also called the Black List, is an eleven-page Allied demand for the surrender of people connected to Nazi activity who were living in Spain. Delivered in October 1947 to a government already practiced in frustrating extradition, it names fugitives and gives particulars about their roles and locations. Its significance lies in the collision it records: the Allies’ attempt to make responsibility actionable through names and addresses, and the Franco regime’s ability to make those same people untouchable through nationality, influence, delay, and denial.

Origins and diplomatic setting

The list reached Alberto Martín-Artajo, Spain’s foreign minister, in a period when Allied demands for cooperation had been pressing for more than two years. The United States, Britain, and other victors had repeatedly sought the location and surrender of hundreds of people tied to Nazi activity in Spain, alongside prominent collaborators from occupied countries, many accused of crimes against humanity. Their efforts had yielded little. The October submission was the most developed expression of those demands, but its arrival did not mean that the Spanish government had become more willing to comply.

The political circumstances had shifted since the defeat of the Third Reich. By late 1947, Cold War hostility toward the Soviet Union and fear of another conflict with Stalin had substantially altered the international setting in which the Franco regime had emerged from the war. The novel presents this change as central to the Allies’ dwindling leverage: anti-communism made Spain’s diplomatic posture more defensible to the victorious powers, while the Spanish authorities could answer requests for cooperation with carefully staged justifications. Martín-Artajo knew how slowly his predecessor had acted even when circumstances were more difficult. The new list therefore arrived not in a vacuum, but within a pattern of demands met with evasion.

The list also belongs to a longer policy of protecting Nazi fugitives in Spain. After an emergency landing at San Sebastián in May 1945, Léon Degrelle remained in Spain despite Belgium’s repeated demands for his return. In 1954, the regime secured his position by recognizing him under the official Spanish identity José León Ramírez Reina, enabling him to establish a construction company and benefit from public contracts. The book describes this retroactive grant of nationality, supported by authentic papers for a false identity, as a method subsequently used for other Nazis seeking permanent refuge or a stage on the way to another country. The 1947 document confronted a system whose evasions were already becoming policy.

The document and the regime’s response

The List of 104, or Black List, identified people described as Germans whose active contribution to Hitler’s project could not be excused as mere obedience to superiors. They were citizens of the Third Reich, had outstanding claims to answer before German courts, and were considered important to the Franco regime’s relations with the Allied victors. The document thus joined identification to accusation: it supplied names and circumstances, but also stated why the listed people mattered to postwar justice and diplomacy.

Martín-Artajo did not respond promptly. He let time pass until the Allied Control Council’s patience was nearly exhausted, then met its representatives with a collection of papers, letters, and certificates they had not previously seen. The explanations varied according to the person involved. Some, the Spanish government said, could not be surrendered because they had been Spanish citizens for years; another had supposedly received nationality from Franco for helping the Nationalist Army when the Condor Legion intervened in the war. Officials claimed that a person could not be found, that another was unknown to them, or that a fugitive held a strategic position in a company important to the national economy. In one case, the regime invoked the protection of the cardinal and primate of Toledo, the man’s Austrian origin, his Catholicism, and the risk of creating a problem with the Vatican.

The answers reveal an administrative repertoire rather than a single excuse. Nationality converted a foreign fugitive into a purported domestic matter; state service and economic importance made protection sound like national interest; religious standing and diplomatic sensitivities provided another shield; and simple nonrecognition or claims of ignorance could make a name disappear from official view. The paperwork was not incidental to the obstruction. It furnished a documentary appearance of legality with which the government could resist the Allied demand while avoiding an open admission that it was sheltering the people in question.

The named network and Clarita Stauffer

Only one woman appears among the 104 names: Clarita Stauffer. The list gives her address accurately as number 14 Calle Galileo in Madrid and describes her as one of the principal organizers of a secret aid association. It specifically accuses her of helping supply false documents and find employment for Germans, as well as undertaking other activities. According to the allegation, she had received special permission from the German embassy at the end of the war to obtain Spanish nationality expressly so that she could continue working after Germany’s defeat. Her inclusion makes visible the support infrastructure behind individual fugitives: identity papers and jobs were among the means by which escape could become a new life.

The novel connects this allegation to the activity at Stauffer’s Madrid home. In the summer of 1945, she renovated rooms for an office, installed a new telephone line, hired two secretaries, and filled new cupboards with men’s clothes in many sizes and shoes in many sizes. Thin, exhausted visitors began arriving at all hours. They were men who had escaped from European prisons or been released from Nanclares; they were fed, given clothing, and apparently helped with lodging and work, though they did not sleep at the house. The domestic setting concealed a practical assistance operation: visitors arrived worn down and left looking better, while returning to the office to handle further arrangements.

Sole, who sometimes visited her brother in Porlier Prison, noticed that the men looked like prisoners and that none spoke Spanish. She became more suspicious when a Spanish conscript repeatedly delivered sealed envelopes bearing the letterheads of Madrid parishes. When one envelope was accidentally left open, she found a baptismal certificate with German names and a date in 1907. The traffic continued until she left Spain. These details illuminate the kind of service the list attributes to Stauffer: not merely hospitality, but the conversion of fugitives into people who could pass through Spanish institutions with usable papers, clothing, work, and shelter.

The list’s other entries connect the broad charge to particular figures in the book. Johannes Bernhardt is described as an SS general and president of Sofindus, a German state institution, and accused of responsibility for clandestinely sending supplies to German troops encircled on the western coast of France during and after its liberation; his whereabouts are said to be unknown. Hans Josef Lazar is identified as head of the German embassy’s press and propaganda department and reported to be living in Madrid. The list gives Albert Horst Fuldner’s name incorrectly, as Horst Alberto Carlos Fuldner, describes him as an SD member sent from Germany to organize clandestine postwar activity, and places him at 33 Calle Modesto Lafuente in Madrid, although he was in Tarrasa near Barcelona when the list was delivered.

Eberhard Messerschmidt is identified as a former assistant to the German embassy’s naval attaché who had worked for German naval intelligence. His listed address is on Calle Fuenfría in Cercedilla, in the province of Madrid. These entries show the document’s uneven but concrete reach: it names offices and wartime work, identifies suspected postwar functions, and in several cases supplies addresses or a report that a person’s whereabouts are unknown. A clerical error in Fuldner’s entry also underscores that the list is a humanly assembled record, not an infallible instrument; nonetheless, its allegations and location details are specific enough to make the Spanish government’s refusal to act consequential.

From identification to impunity

The 104 names were meant to turn Allied knowledge into a demand for action. Instead, the government’s slow response and improvised documentary defenses reveal how a regime could acknowledge international pressure without surrendering the people it protected. The list records a struggle over official identity as much as over location: the Allies identify suspects by name, role, and address, while Spanish authorities can counter that a person has become a citizen, cannot be found, is unknown, or deserves protection for reasons of state, economy, religion, or patriotism.

The book’s wider account sharpens the contrast between a person’s ability to become administratively invisible and the state’s power to identify, detain, and erase others. Earlier in the story, a Republican security credential brings orders that a wounded man must survive without entering a hospital under his name, or be buried as an unknown person without registration. Later, an abandoned Madrid home is ransacked for gold, while its family papers are left trampled on the floor. In the account of Francoist policing, an unidentified body from Casa de Campo is buried in a common grave under the routine fiction of cardiac arrest despite a bullet wound in the neck. These scenes are not all part of the list itself, but they establish the book’s recurring concern with records: documents can protect a fugitive, endanger a wounded man, be destroyed in a search, or disguise a killing.

The list’s later implications reach beyond postwar Spain. The book sets the protection of fugitives against the changing uses of authoritarian power during the Cold War, including Argentina’s state terror. Before the 1976 coup, the Operativo Independencia had already divided the country into five military zones and enabled a campaign against civilians in Tucumán; under the subsequent dictatorship, tens of thousands of people were estimated to have been forcibly disappeared. The regime used clandestine task groups for kidnapping, detention, torture, execution, disposal of bodies, and the theft and reassignment of children born to imprisoned women. This later material is not an action taken by the List of 104, but it extends the book’s examination of how political regimes control identity, evidence, and accountability. In that larger structure, the list stands as a record of a missed opportunity: names and allegations were put before the Spanish government, yet the international demand did not overcome the political arrangements that allowed fugitives to remain protected.