Hitler's Man in Havana: Heinz Luning and Nazi Espionage in Latin America

1. A Troubled Life

11  1  a troubled life In September 1942, the recently captured Nazi Abwehr agent in Havana Heinz August Lüning was considered a master spy and the most important spy captured in the Western Hemisphere. Initially, the FBISIS suspected that this Nazi headed a spy network that was instrumental in German U-boat successes in the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico. This perception made Lüning a serious threat to the Allied campaigns in Europe, North Africa, and the Pacific and to the Allied ability to draw on the foodstuff, refined petroleum, and minerals required to fight the war effectively. Over the next two years, the FBI-SIS undertook to investigate every person, not just in Cuba but also in the Americas, who had any relationship to Lüning. Since he had married his stepsister (from a prominent Chicago family), agents interviewed or conducted surveillance of relatives from his and his wife’s families as well as people around his extended family. This wide net included Fred Astaire and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Until mid-1945, agents interviewed people in Cuba, the United States, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Mexico, Argentina, and Chile and sought information from U.S. officials in other American nations in their pursuit of an espionage network with Lüning at the center. The FBI-SIS persisted because high-ranking U.S. officials had alleged his central role in Nazi intelligence. The FBI-SIS, British MI6, and Cuban espionage agencies never found any evidence to indicate that Lüning was doing 12 Hitler’s Man in Havana vital work. His life as a spy was routine and uninteresting (in terms of the work), with a touch of incompetence. Lüning’s youth and upbringing did not suggest a career as a spy. He was born in Bremen on March 28, 1911, to a German father (Stephan August Lüning, b. December 12, 1876, Bremen) and an Italian mother (Elise Adelheit Duncker, Stephan’s second wife). His life followed a restless path. Heinz was orphaned young. Although he had gained entrance to a gymnasium (the secondary education required to attend a university in Germany), he was not promoted in the spring of 1924 (possibly due in part to the serious illness of his mother). The next year shattered his life. His beloved mother died on December 21, 1924, and, at the same time, he was set to fail the class again. A second failure meant a permanent dismissal from the school. Instead, he withdrew. His father found him a place at the Pädagogium Pestalozzi, a private school, approximately equivalent to a midlevel secondary school—a Realschule. He would not be allowed to study at the university and would need to find a position in business.1 An additional shock struck Heinz five years later. His father committed suicide on November 10, 1929. His father and an uncle, Gustav Adolf Lüning (b. December 17, 1878, Bremen; d. November 28, 1945, Hamburg), had shared a tobacco-importation business. For a year and a half after his father died, Heinz visited his uncle and aunt in Hamburg , but he lived with his father’s third wife, Marie Ella (maiden name Stolte). In early 1931, he moved permanently to Hamburg. Gustav, a rather wealthy Hamburg import-export and tobacco merchant, and his wife, Olga Sophie Bartholomae (b. June 1884, Winnetka, Ill.; d. June 6, 1961, Hamburg), a German American from Chicago, who was in her second marriage (previously she was a Magdeburg), adopted Heinz. In Hamburg, he attended a commercial school for a year. Then he worked for two and a half years as a merchant apprentice for Albert Schilling, an American businessman and acquaintance of Gustav’s, at the import firm of Clasen Berger and Company.2 Five years after Heinz moved to Hamburg, the Lüning family confronted embarrassment. Heinz had impregnated his stepsister Helga. In April 1936, Heinz traveled to New York City with his fiancée (stepsister), Helga Barbara Magdeburg (b. 1909; d. Hamburg?), the daughter of his a troubled life 13 aunt Olga by her first marriage. The Hamburg elite family of Gustav and Olga Lüning had acted to shield the family name and reputation when it sent the young couple to distant New York City for a wedding. The couple married in Manhattan—five thousand miles from Hamburg— on May 8, 1936. Family relations became complicated. Olga became Heinz’s aunt...