The Neutralization of Fritz Mandl: Notes on Wartime Journalism, the Arms Trade, and Anglo-American Rivalry in Argentina during World War II
Tp o followers of the North American tabloid press toward the end of World War II, Fritz Mandl of Buenos Aires was one of the era's best-known mystery men. An inveterate pursuer of glamor and show girls, Mandl, a multimillionaire, had bought into a small Hollywood company, Gloria Pictures, and was an investor in the fledgling Argentine film industry. His notoriety owed much to the fact that his second wife had been the film actress Hedy Kiesling, then approaching the height of her Hollywood career as Hedy Lamarr. A frisson rippled through caf6 society when it learned that Mandl's entourage in Buenos Aires included, among other moonlit ruins of the old Middle European nobility, Count Riidiger von Starhemberg and Rudy's wife Nora Gregor, formerly of the Burgtheatre in Vienna. But Mandl's prominence owed even more to the accusation, endlessly embroidered in the columns and radio broadcasts of Winchell, Heatter, Pearson, and their like, that he had brought his trade with him to Argentina: that of "Merchant of Death." The opening of British and American archives in the 1970S nlow makes it possible to reconstruct Mandl's world; perhaps even to do him modest justice. Further, a biographical essay offers glimpses of as-yet poorly mapped historiographical terrain: European and American participation in Latin America's new industrialization of the 1930s; emergence of the Argentine steel and arms industries; Nazi Germany's intentions and connections in Latin America; contention during wartime between Great