Sefton Delmer interviews Clarita Stauffer

Sefton Delmer interviews Clarita Stauffer is a pivotal encounter in which a journalist’s disguise opens a window onto a protected escape network. In late February 1948, Delmer entered Stauffer’s Madrid home under a Nazi German identity, dropped the pretense in front of her associate, Herr Vost, and questioned Stauffer about her work. Her unusually candid answers exposed the reach of the organization and the political shelter it enjoyed; the resulting Daily Express exclusive stirred public attention and, briefly, renewed hope among Republican exiles, but did not bring action.

Background and Entry

The scene is dated to the last days of February 1948, after Delmer’s wartime work for Britain’s Special Operations Executive. He had become known for black propaganda: posing as a German Nazi broadcaster, he sent false reports to German occupation forces in Europe, including through the clandestine Soldatensender Calais. In Madrid, the same practiced capacity for impersonation serves a different purpose. Rather than broadcast under a fabricated identity, he uses one to gain access to the person at the center of a real network.

At number 14 Calle Galileo, Delmer presents himself as a German Nazi. The building’s porter recognizes the type of visitor and directs him without hesitation to Stauffer’s residence. A very blond young German tells him that Clarita is ill and cannot receive him, but leads him through an office where several secretaries are working to a room occupied by Herr Vost. The routine, almost frictionless passage from street to office suggests that visitors of this kind are familiar in the household.

The Interview and the Network

Vost, described as Stauffer’s close associate, initially explains her absence as the consequence of overwork. She is constantly travelling, he says, visiting people who need help, assisting those who can help others, getting prisoners out of Spanish concentration camps, finding work for released inmates, and helping people leave the country. He adds, with unmistakable pride, that the organization serves more than eight hundred people. Delmer then abandons his disguise and identifies himself as a Daily Express journalist from London. He has come to interview Stauffer because the Allied Control Council has described her activities and she is the only woman it has demanded.

Vost leaves without a word. When he returns, still visibly shaken, he takes Delmer through a dark-wood dining room that strikes the journalist as German in style and into a bedroom dominated by a large oak crucifix. Stauffer lies propped on pillows, dressed and presentable despite her illness. Delmer’s account describes her blue eyes, centrally parted brown hair, and prominent, forceful chin, while noting that he cannot judge her age from her face. The two were both born in 1904. The crucifix and the orderly domestic setting frame a meeting about an organization engaged in moving fugitives across borders.

Stauffer is pale and sweating, but does not lose her composure. She apologizes for receiving him while suffering from pleurisy, which she expects will take time to recover from, and explains that her bedside telephone keeps ringing. She neither reproaches Delmer for the deception that brought him into the house nor refuses his questions. Her illness limits the circumstances of the interview but does not interrupt the steady assurance with which she speaks.

Asked directly whether she runs an escape network for war criminals and Nazi leaders, Stauffer answers that she helps many people. She says that most Germans and collaborators held in Spain want to return to their homeland, while others prefer to emigrate to a third country. For those emigrants, she is in contact with a reception network in Buenos Aires led by a German woman, Cissy von Schiller, who had lived in Madrid until 1947. She also acknowledges contacts with the Vatican, explaining that some of those she helps cross the Atlantic from Genoa. The routes she describes connect Spanish detention and transit to destinations beyond Europe, through both South American and Vatican-linked channels.

Protection, Evasion, and Publication

When Delmer asks whether the Spanish government knows about her work, Stauffer’s confidence becomes more conspicuous. She says the government is fully aware, understands her work, and protects her through the Generalissimo. She invokes her close friendship with Pilar Primo de Rivera and her brotherly camaraderie with the architects of the new Spain, and insists that she has no reason to fear anyone. In her account, the network is not merely operating in spite of the regime: its organizer claims the regime’s knowledge and protection.

That assurance is not wholly credible even within the scene. The narrator observes that Stauffer is not entirely secure and points to her lie as evidence: she tells Delmer that she has also helped several members of the Spanish Communist Party escape the country. The narrative explicitly identifies this claim as false, adding that no Spaniard would have believed it, though Delmer, who is not Spanish, records the statement in his notebook. Her invention complicates the interview’s apparent openness. Stauffer has admitted extensive assistance to German and collaborationist fugitives, but she also supplies a claim calculated to shape what her foreign interviewer can report.

A few days later, the Daily Express puts the interview on its front page as a major exclusive. The publication causes considerable agitation in public opinion both within and outside the United Kingdom. For Republican exiles scattered across the world, the account appears to offer grounds for hope once more. Yet the hope proves brief: nothing follows. The interview makes the escape operation publicly visible, but exposure does not turn into intervention or bring an end to the protection Stauffer has described.

Significance

The encounter is built around successive acts of disclosure and concealment. Delmer crosses the threshold by impersonating a Nazi German, while Stauffer’s associate first withholds access by saying she is ill. Once Delmer reveals his real profession, Stauffer answers with striking directness about the routes, contacts, and political backing of her organization; at the same time, the false claim about Communist fugitives shows that frankness has limits. The interview offers an unusually clear account of the network without making the network itself vulnerable to immediate consequences.

Its ending sets the limits of publicity against the persistence of power. A front-page report produces a substantial stir and briefly rekindles the exiles’ expectation that disclosure might change their situation. The return to inaction is therefore not an incidental coda: it is the event’s defining reversal. The story moves from a private bedroom and a journalist’s notebook to international public attention, then back to the same political impasse. What is revealed is consequential; what changes is not.