By the time World War II started, Greg Bautzer was known around the globe as “Hollywood Bachelor Number One.” His picture had been in the papers as often as a movie star’s. Unbeknownst to him, his country was about to enlist his playboy talents for a matter of national security. Billy Wilkerson approached him one day in early 1940 and asked his help with a very unusual project. Billy was an informant for the FBI and friendly with bureau director J. Edgar Hoover. Wilkerson told Bautzer that the FBI needed information about a German actress named Hilda Kruger who had recently come to town, allegedly seeking acting work. Billy asked Bautzer to see if he could get a date with her and find out what she was up to.
Bautzer couldn’t resist performing favors. He knew that every good deed helped cement his relationships. Moreover, obtaining personal information about beautiful women was Bautzer’s specialty. He would be only too happy to do this small task for Wilkerson and his country. He didn’t imagine there could be any danger involved.
Kruger was a well-endowed blonde with a dozen supporting-role credits in German movies. To advance her career under the Nazi regime, she left her non-Aryan husband and offered her favors to Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda. As one US consul described it, “She was one of a bevy of gals that were called upon occasionally to furnish a little ‘joy thru strength’ to the Hitler-Goebbels combinations by night frolicking a la Nero.” An FBI report goes so far as to say that Hitler himself was known to fawn over her in public and pinch her thigh in the presence of others. In 1938, she attracted the attention of US oil tycoon J. Paul Getty, who was visiting Germany. They met at a party thrown by Nazi leaders at the Reich Chancellery. Getty was a Nazi sympathizer who may have suggested and even underwritten Kruger’s spy career. While Hollywood would seem an unlikely target for espionage, Los Angeles was a major industrial city with many war material factories. Plenty of residents had classified information that could be useful to the Germans should the United States join the British in the war. Upon her arrival in the States, the FBI labeled Kruger a security threat.
According to an FBI memorandum of June 29, 1940, Bautzer wasted no time in making contact with Kruger and retrieving important information for Wilkerson:
William R. (Billie) [sic] Wilkerson advised that Hilda Kruger was in Los Angeles, Beverly Hills, and Hollywood, California, for a period of about four months, during which time she represented herself as endeavoring to get into motion pictures, but so far as Mr. Wilkerson knows, she never even has registered with any booking agencies. Kruger told Gregson Bautzer that she was a special friend of Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Hitler. She associated with Donald Flam of New York City and James McKinley Bryant of New York City, and is a friend of Regina Crewe, motion picture columnist of the “New York American”. She attended a dance at Ciro’s Café [sic] with Fritz Wiedermann, German Consul at San Francisco, on May 18, 1940, and left the next day for New York City.
Additional details in the report provide further insight: “Mr. Wilkerson stated that Miss Kruger was or attempted to be quite mysterious in her actions and talk, that she appeared to have a lot of money and a good wardrobe of striking clothes, and that she was on every occasion announcing and declaring that she had come to Hollywood for the purpose of going into motion pictures.”
How Bautzer came to obtain information on Kruger becomes clear in Wilkerson’s final report about her to the FBI:
Mr. Wilkerson stated that while Miss Kruger was in Los Angeles, she associated quite a great deal with Gregson Bautzer, young attorney of the firm of Bautzer and Ryan with offices in the Taft Building [sic], Hollywood, California. He stated that during a portion of the time that Miss Kruger was in Hollywood, California, and while she was associating with Bautzer, that Bautzer had a broken leg which was caused by an automobile accident, and that Miss Kruger visited him at his apartment on many occasions, both day and night. Mr. Wilkerson requested that in case Bautzer is interviewed about this matter that he be not informed of the source of this information.
Wilkerson’s request that the FBI not mention his name to Bautzer suggests that Bautzer was simply sharing details of his personal life with a friend, with no knowledge that Wilkerson was passing along the information to the government. This was not the case, however. Bautzer knew full well that the information he was providing about Kruger was for the benefit of the FBI, as evidenced by the fact that he kept their relationship a secret from the press. It was unusual for Bautzer to date a woman without having it noted in gossip columns. In the period before and after his accident, he was reported as dating at least three other women. He was proud of them and he courted publicity. Although Bautzer was a playboy, he was also a gentleman, and he never discussed what went on with girlfriends behind closed doors. It was out of character for him to relate pillow talk to Wilkerson.
Bautzer kept his covert mission a secret until near the end of his life. In the 1980s, Bautzer met author Charles Higham for lunch and discussed the Kruger affair. Higham had written the controversial biography Errol Flynn: The Untold Story, in which he revealed the famous actor’s Nazi involvement. Higham came across Bautzer’s name many times in researching the book and regretted that he had not interviewed him. Higham had seen the FBI papers that identified Bautzer as the man who provided the agency with information on Kruger, and he wanted to know more. They met for lunch at the Bistro Gardens, and Bautzer confirmed that he had been asked by Wilkerson to find out what he could about Kruger for the FBI. He decided the best way was to seduce her. To Higham’s delight, Bautzer also told him that he admired the Flynn book and said he was interested in acquiring the motion picture rights for MGM. The lunch ended on a cordial note, and Higham had great hopes for a motion picture deal. However, the following day Bautzer contacted Higham’s lawyer and said that MGM was not interested in the book rights, and threatened to sue Higham if he mentioned the Kruger affair to anyone. Higham was shocked and thought that Bautzer had been influenced by a third party. Perhaps Bautzer feared reprisals from the FBI for disclosing his participation in such undercover work. More likely, he simply wanted to avoid a salacious story appearing in print about him.
After her fling with Bautzer, Kruger departed Hollywood for Mexico and began socializing with government officials. J. Paul Getty used his influence to get her a visa, telling the Mexican consul that she was an American citizen. Getty soon traveled to visit her in Mexico. Her activities were sufficiently suspicious to arouse the interest of J. Edgar Hoover. He wrote a personal letter to Adolf Berle Jr., assistant secretary of state, relating the information that Bautzer had provided. Kruger left luggage behind at the Beverly-Wilshire Hotel, which the FBI searched. They found no evidence that she was a spy—other than the humorous presence of a book titled Mata Hari, Courtesan and Spy with pertinent passages underlined. She seemed to be using it as an espionage textbook.
In Mexico, Kruger became the lover of Mario Ramón Beteta, undersecretary of finance. He paid for her luxury apartment in the fashionable Colonia Roma district of Mexico City and unwittingly introduced her to other government officials, whom she then proceeded to seduce. She resumed her film career in Mexico, securing more prominent roles than she had in Germany. Kruger was later involved with Beteta’s boss, General Juan Almazán, the major presidential contender, and Miguel Alemán Valdés, then secretary of state and the eventual president of Mexico. Perhaps because of these alliances, Kruger escaped arrest when several other prominent Nazis were taken into custody at the FBI’s request. J. Edgar Hoover was certainly surprised that she was not arrested and made note of it in another personal letter to Berle, which he also sent to the assistant chief of staff of the War Department and the director of Naval Intelligence.
While it has not been conclusively proven that Kruger was in fact a Nazi spy, all the circumstantial evidence indicates that she was. Not only have multiple sources confirmed that she was one of Hitler’s favorite party girls in Berlin, but in New York she was also frequently in the company of other well-known German operatives. In Los Angeles, the filmmaking community concluded she was a spy when she showed up at a party with the German consul Fritz Weidemann. The FBI interviewed many Germans working in the movie business about Kruger, including Marlene Dietrich, who said that she did not know her but had heard things about her. Hungarian-born producer Joe Pasternak told the FBI that he was certain she was a spy, and he offered to host a party so that agents could trap her. Unfortunately, Kruger fled to Mexico before the party could be arranged. In Mexico City, her romances with government officials attracted attention in the press, and she was labeled a spy in print. There can hardly be any other plausible reason for her multiple sexual relationships with Mexican politicians. It is difficult to imagine that she was simply some kind of governmental groupie.
The most damning fact is that no one could ever account for where she got all the money she spent on her wardrobe and other luxuries. Even friends who tried to defend her reputation confessed that they were befuddled by her unaccountable wealth. As one FBI analyst concluded, if she wasn’t being paid to be a spy, then she must have been one of the highest-priced prostitutes in history. The only missing piece of evidence necessary to complete the picture is an actual document showing the information that she passed on to the Nazi government. To this day, that has never been found.
While Kruger proclaimed her innocence, she never lifted a finger to try to clear her name. She even used her wartime notoriety to start another career as a scholar and author. Kruger first wrote a book about La Malinche, the legendary Aztec woman who slept with Hernán Cortés and reinvented herself. Her second book, titled Eliza Lynch or Tragic Destiny, was about a French mistress to a Paraguayan dictator. It was reviewed by Time magazine in 1946. The critic devoted more words to her activities as a suspected spy than to her writing.
Bautzer made the first report that inspired FBI director Hoover to dedicate manpower to following Kruger in both the United States and Mexico. If it weren’t for the information he passed on to Wilkerson about her association with Hitler and Goebbels, she might never have received such attention. The Kruger case also provides proof of Bautzer’s catnip effect on women. Seducing at will is the stuff of fiction, but for him it was reality. Throughout history, as far back as Samson and Delilah, female spies seduced men for information. By seducing the seducer, Bautzer turned the formula on its head.