Hitler’s Man in Havana: Heinz Lüning and Nazi Espionage in Latin America (review)

Thomas Schoonover has written a book about Heinz Lüning, a Nazi operative in the Caribbean, whose arrest and execution in 1942 created an international scandal because Lüning was believed to have been responsible for guiding the successful Nazi U-boat campaign against Allied cargo ships. This history of Hitler’s spy ring and the Allies’ intense search to break it up reveals the incredible frailty of Hitler’s underground network in the Caribbean and the tragicomedy of the life of a secret service official stationed in Havana.

For decades now, historians have portrayed Heinz Lüning as a member of a master spy ring in the Caribbean who radioed shipping schedules to German U-boats so that the Germans could destroy and debilitate the United States’ ability to produce war matériel. According to Cuban and U.S. intelligence, Lüning’s capture helped the Allies defeat the German submarine campaign in the Atlantic. Only by breaking the back of German attacks on trade between the United States and South America, a trade that was the lifeline of raw materials such as rubber, petroleum, nitrates, copper, and iron, could the United States supply its war effort in the European and Asian theaters.

Schoonover contests the prosecution’s charges and the historical record that Lüning was the kingpin in the Caribbean operation, that he and the spy ring dealt heavy blows to the nautical supply line of raw products to the U.S. war factory, and that the Caribbean operation failed when Lüning was captured. Indeed, the thesis of this book is that the U-boat attacks fell off because Adolf Hitler misunderstood the importance of the interruption of the South American production of strategic raw materials to the United States. At first, German U-boats patrolled off the Atlantic coast of the Western Hemisphere, and they occasionally devastated a merchant transport traveling from the south to the north. By 1943, however, Hitler reduced the number of U-boats in the Caribbean basin and the strategic commerce ran largely unhindered until the end of the war. This decision had little to do with the demise of the supposed spy ring.

To prove that Lüning, at least, was not the master spy he was accused of being in his trial, Schoonover sets out to discredit the man in order to exonerate him. Lüning, it turns out, was not the professional one would expect of a member of the German intelligence. He was a draft dodger and a hustler, and he was an unwilling spy. As war broke out in Europe, Lüning was broke, and he wanted to avoid going to a war front. Therefore, he joined the Abwehr, the German intelligence service, to get out of Europe. He was one of the worst graduates ever to emerge form the Abwehr, which raises the question of his assignment to the Caribbean. Schoonover argues that it was possible that Lüning was simply better than no coverage at all. Evidently, the man was so inept that he could not master the most elementary procedures. For example, he was unable to build an elementary radio set with which to transmit information to Germany. He sent written communications, but here, too, his failure to produce the proper invisible ink brought reprimands from the Abwehr. Finally, the information he did manage to send to the Axis powers was hardly confidential. He conveyed details found in newspapers, magazines, or rumors heard from his acquaintances whom he met at the Wonder Bar, the sole source of dark bock beer in Havana.

Yet Lüning was captured and executed with a great deal of fanfare because the case brought notoriety to Havana’s chief of police, Manuel Benítez, and it built confidence in the United States that the U-boat attacks had ended. Benítez’s lust for recognition is precisely what made Lüning’s end...