Hilde Krüger

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Katharina Mathilde Krüger was born either November 9, 1912 in Cologne-Kalk or, as other sources claim, September 11, 1914 in Berlin, and went on to become an actress. Her best-known pre-war German movie showed her starring in the anti-Semitic UFA film Don’t lose Heart, Suzanne!whereupon Joseph Goebbels, the “Buck of Babelsberg” (the studio town) became her patron and/or lover – Old Joe was not a believer in the accurate separation of business and personal affairs, as we know.

Although she acted in about a dozen other UFA productions, she went to Hollywood in 1940, living at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel , where, as the gossip had it, her first American lover, J. Paul Getty, the richest man in the world, paid the bills. Getty was married five times and known as a ladies’ man, and Nazi sympathizer, too.

But the acting bombed. Her English left a lot to be desired, her acting perhaps as well. She quickly substituted Getty with Gert von Gontard, who, as heir to the Budweiser brewery, was suitably rich, and lived with him for a year.

We do not know what exactly happened thereafter – maybe the pair was bothered too much by the clumsy plots of the American police or perhaps there were relationship problems – but at some point in 1940, Hilde was recruited by the German “Abwehr” (Military Intelligence) and sent to Mexico, which was an interesting target for the German war economy because of its oil. Since Mexico’s President Lazaro Cardenas had nationalized all foreign oil companies in 1938 and the former owners, England, the USA and the Netherlands had subsequently imposed an embargo on Mexican crude oil, two-thirds of its production went to Germany.

Immigration Form

So it came that Mrs. Krüger pulled up on February 9, 1941, at the border crossing Nuevo Laredo, in her luggage carrying a letter of recommendation from her good friend Mr. Getty. In no time she had settled in the high-society of Mexico-City and generals, business leaders and politicians in the country fell for the peroxide-blonde Nazi bombshell. Her first conquest was Ramón Beteta, Under-Secretary of the Treasury, but she became rather quickly the mistress of the Secretary of the Interior and subsequent Mexican President, Miguel Aleman. The besotted Mr. Alemán rented a love nest and visited her almost every night, as noted carefully by the FBI. Apparently, Hilde also snuggled with influential General Juán Almazán and Foreign Minister Ezekiel Padilla – the whole Mexican government had fallen hook, line, and sinker. As a quid pro quo, her patrons arranged a few roles for her in several Mexican films.

After being in business for a year, she was arrested at the instigation of the USA but soon was released by the intercession of her patrons. To avoid deportation, she quickly married a Mr. Nacho de la Torre, the grandson of former President Porfirio Díaz.

Lovers: Getty, Betana, Alemán, Padilla, Andreu Almazán

The spy business was great. The Secretary of the Interior issued about three hundred visas to German spies; mercury – important for the German war effort – was loaded on German submarines at the port of Veracruz and as much oil smuggled through Panama as the pumps could carry.

Julio Lobo Olavarría

Until 1946 she lived with her playboy husband in the lap of luxury, but soon after her old friend Alemán became president, she exchanged Mr. Torre for a heavier calibre, the Venezuelan Julio Lobo Olavarría, sugar king of Cuba, with whom she went to Spain. But the subsequent marriage lasted only a year. In 1958, she appeared once again in German cinemas, in the Swiss comedy “Eine Rheinfahrt, die ist lustig.”

UFA movie poster 1935

There is a documentation of Nazi espionage in Mexico on YouTube, “La red nazi en México” by Sebastián Gamba, Mexico in 2010, unfortunately only in the Spanish original (link).

She died in 1991 during a visit at home or 2008 in New York, no one knows for sure. Overall, she made fourteen films in Germany, four in Mexico and one in Switzerland.

(© John Vincent Palatine 2019)

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