When Heinz Luning posed as a Jewish refugee to spy for Hitler's Abwehr espionage agency, he thought he had discovered the perfect solution to his most pressing problem: how to avoid being drafted into Hitler's army. Luning was unsympathetic to Fascist ideology, but the Nazis' tight control over exit visas gave him no chance to escape Germany.
He could enter Hitler's army either as a soldier... or a spy. In 1941, he entered the Abwehr academy for spy training and was given the code name "Lumann." Soon after, Luning began the service in Cuba that led to his ultimate fate of being the only German spy executed in Latin America during World War II.
In chronicling Luning's unlikely trajectory from a troubled life in Germany to a Caribbean firing squad, Thomas D. Schoonover makes brilliant use of untapped documentary sources to reveal the workings of the famed Abwehr and the technical and social aspects of Luning's spycraft.
Luning's story, Hitler's Man in Havana, is available today for only $2.45.
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