Trivia

In March 1942, Kruger was , like many other German spies, arrested thanks to clues and instructions of the United States . Probably due to her good relations in politics she was released soon afterwards. She married Nacho de la Torre , the grandson of former President Porfirio Díaz to prevent their expulsion . After all she left her husband and went with to the tycoon Julio Lobo , known as " Sugar King of Havana " , [6 to Spain . Later on she married Lobo , but the marriage was divorced after a year.

Although the Mexican government was apparently warned that she might be a German agent (which, of course, was a correct assumption), Krüger started at the bottom... working her way up from insignificant boyfriends like Ramon Betata, who was a mere undersecretary of foreign relations to Miguel Aleman Valdes, then Secretaría de Gobernacion (and later President) who paid for her apartment in Colonia Roma (the accounting department back at Abwehr headquarters must have loved her expense reports!) where she also, "entertained" General Juan Andrew Almazán (then the presumptive future president) and the jilted Ramon Betata's boss, Foreign Minister, Ezekial Padilla.

With a degree in history (she wrote her thesis on La Malache, the Aztec femme fatale who slept with the enemy, and reinvented herself ) she became an expert on documents of the Napoleonic era... sorting the true from the false.

Krüger is suspected of working as a spy for the Abwehr, the German intelligence department during the Second World War, cultivating leading figures in Mexican society.

She had originally intended to settle in Hollywood, but she struggled to find work and had to leave for Mexico.

She dreamed of a career in the film , but her signature role played Hilde Krüger in real life : Femme fatale . The attractive spy wrapped the richest man in America around the finger , several politicians went deaf - and thus became Hitler's top agent overseas.

In the second part of the 30's followed her last cinematical appearances in Germany. Afterwards she went to Mexico where she acted in front of the camera again for "Adulterio" and "El que murio de amor" (1945).

Some records say she was born in Berlin in 1912, while others say only that she was born in Germany on 11 September 1914. Katerina Matilde Krüger was a -er - demonstrative child. From what little is available about her early life, she appears to have demanded to be the center of attention from the time she was three.

Her most famous role being as the German military intelligence agent who managed to infiltrate first the inner circles of the oil industry in the United States and then the Mexican government may have been stereotypical "dumb blond" bad movie actress Hilde Krüger's best performance.

The actress Hilde Krüger was a busy actress in the 30's who often was engaged for support roles.

From January 1940, she lived in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Her admirer J. Paul Getty allegedly paid the rent.

Goebbels tried to pass Krüger along to the Gestapo, which would only make sense, given that Hide couldn't speak any foreign languages and had no experience outside Germany. But, somehow, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris - who was no horn-dog, but had an eye for talent - personally recruited the unpromising young starlet for the Abwehr, the military intelligence service.

Juan Alberto Cedillo's "Nazis en Mexico" (Quo, Octubre 2009) suggests Krüger was protected by her boy-friends. However, most of the agents in Mexico were not working for the Abwehr, but for the Gestapo, and Von Schleebrugge and Nicolaus were Nazis. Admiral Canaris was passing along information to the Allies at the time, and had already been involved in several attempted anti-Nazi coups.

Hilde Krüger, who was known to both the United States and Mexican secret services as a foreign agent was allowed to simply fade away. While most presume her enrollment at UNAM was simply to avoid the restrictions on the movement of German nationals, and to stay out of the slammer, there's another mystery there. She dumped the boy friends and really did become a scholar. She continued to act in Mexican films for a few years, and had a role in a 1958 German movie, but any mention of her after 1942 is as a scholar.

She may not have landed any parts in Hollywood, but someone was paying the bills for her luxury hotel suite she rented in Los Angeles in May 1940. The somebody, according to FBI records declassified in 1985, was oilman John Paul Getty. The F.B.I. and later the O.S.S. (forerunner to the C.I.A.) had become interested in Krüger not so much as arm-candy to Getty, but as a former protege of Goebbels, who was arm candy to a lot of business executives in strategic industrial sectors. Ostensively to divorce her American husband (and, just coincidentally, because the United States was overtly backing the British and already beginning to neutralize German agents), she crossed into Mexico in 1941.

Her first movie role (as a secretary to a psychiatric patient) was in 1934. That was a significant year for the German film industry. Josef Goebbels, as Minister of Propaganda (and Film) saw it as part of his official duties to "mentor" young, blond, big-breasted Aryan starlets. While it was other assets than her brains that first brought her to Goebbels attention, even he recognized that her real talents lay elsewhere than on the casting couch. Besides, Magda Goebbels, who was no slouch when it came to deviousness herself, told Joe (Goebbels) to get rid of the bimbo.

She died in 1991 on a visit trip to Germany ; by the death certificate she was residence an apartment in New York City.

Although Kruger made not much films in the United States , she gained a certain notoriety within the higher social circles of Los Angeles . There she met Gert von Gontard , the heirs of the Budweiser brewery , and started with him a romance . For one year she lived between Hollywood and St. Louis , where Gontard owned breweries .

Some biographies claim that Hilde had a German husband, but that he was insufficiently Aryan (in other words, Jewish) whom she had already divorced, others that her first marriage was in the United States, to a German-American businessman.