While Mexico declared its neutrality in World War II, a network of Nazi spies operated in the streets of Mexico City, the factories of Monterrey, and the salons of the political elite. The government was slow to detect it, but the Americans tracked it obsessively. The main agent of the Abwehr, the German military intelligence service, was Georg Nicolaus, who entered the country disguised as a sales representative for a German appliance company. From Mexico, he organized sabotage, infiltration routes for agents into the United States, and intelligence networks regarding the oil wells that were of such interest to Berlin. But the most fascinating piece on this entire chessboard was a woman: Hilda Krüger, a German actress who had been Joseph Goebbels’s lover. She arrived in Mexico in the midst of the war with a very specific mission. Berlin needed Mexican oil to continue flowing to the Axis powers because Hitler’s air fleet was literally flying on fuel from Veracruz and Tamaulipas. And Hilda was the key: to seduce whomever was necessary within the Mexican government. She became the lover of the then Minister of the Interior, Miguel Alemán Valdés, who years later would become president. She also had an affair with Ramón Beteta, Undersecretary of Finance. And in her free time, she frequented the Faculty of Philosophy at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), where she met Edmundo O’Gorman and Cantinflas.
The magnitude of the problem was far greater than official Mexican history has been willing to acknowledge. In 1942, the United States government gave Mexico a list of 24 Nazi spies active within its borders, headed by Arthur Dietrich, the press officer at the German embassy. In Monterrey, businessman Guido Otto Moebius had a radio transmitter antenna at his factory on Pino Suárez Street that received direct orders from Berlin and coordinated the smuggling of Nazi agents into the United States. And when President Roosevelt visited Monterrey to meet with President Ávila Camacho, the official translator for the meeting was a Nazi agent named Roberto Trauwitz, whose sister led the Hitler Youth in Mexico. Roosevelt was revealing state secrets against the Third Reich, and the man translating for him would pass the report to Berlin that same night. The network was finally dismantled in 1942 after the sinking of the Mexican oil tankers Potrero del Llano and Faja de Oro by German submarines, which led Mexico to declare war on the Axis powers. But the documents of that story remain in the General Archive of the Nation, waiting for someone who wants to read them.
Source: donporfiriodiaz
