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

At the beginning of World War II, Heinz August Luning, posing as a Jewish refugee, was sent to Cuba to spy for the Third Reich. Luning’s assignment was to collect information about the United States and its allies and report back to Abwehr, the German foreign intelligence agency. The Caribbean waters Luning monitored were important to the Allies both for shipping and for deploying ships between the various fronts. Despite some early setbacks, Luning provided information on naval activities to the Germans. Ultimately, however, Luning was arrested and became the only Nazi spy executed in Latin America during World War II. For at least five months after Luning’s arrest, U.S. and Cuban leaders – J. Edgar Hoover, Fulgencio Batista, Nelson Rockefeller, General Manuel Benitez, Ambassador Spruille Braden, and others – treated Luning as the dangerous, key spy for a Nazi espionage network in the Gulf-Caribbean.British counterintelligence agent Graham Greene, who oversaw one group supervising Nazi communications areas, picked up Luning’s story and made it into a seminal spy novel. In Hitler’s Man in Havana, Thomas Schoonover investigates the true story of the life, career, and death of Heinz August Luning. In the sixty years since Luning worked in the Caribbean, very little has been written about Nazi espionage in Latin America because the U.S. government kept much of the material secret. Schoonover draws from extensive research to recreate Luning’s story and explore the significance of his life and capture.