Hermann Erben
Hermann Erben was an Austrian physician who served in the German military intelligence. He is also known as a friend of Errol Flynn.
Biography
Hermann Erben was born in Vienna as the son of a Jewish family. He served from 1916–1918 as a soldier of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy in World War I. He then studied medicine at the University of Vienna, and got a scholarship in the USA, where he immediately applied for, and was granted citizenship of the United States as late as 1930.Due to US citizenship requirements, he had to return to Austria, where he finished his medical studies in 1926 and was awarded the degree of Dr. Med. in 1929. He then returned to the US.
He had an interesting career as a physician between 1930 and 1933, based at the Pacific Institute for Tropical Medicine in San Francisco, including a research visit to South America, work as a ship's doctor and research in Papua New Guinea.
He returned to Vienna at the beginning of 1934. In 1935, he accompanied Max Reisch during Reisch's famous first circumnavigation of the earth by car, but left the expedition after its first leg, due to severe quarrels with Max Reisch and the other participant, Helmuth Hahmann.
On returning from Papua New Guinea in 1933, he met Errol Flynn, with whom he established a close friendship, and with whom he later witnessed the 1937 Spanish Civil War as a physician. There he started his Nazi connections, by pretending to be a member of the Spanish Republicans, but transferring all information obtained there to the German Gestapo.
Nazi connections
He joined the Nazi Party in 1938, immediately after the Anschluss of Austria. In 1946, he confessed to a US Military Committee in Shanghai that he had worked for the Ehrhardt Bureau of the Abwehr from 1941 to 1945, and that he had been a spy inside an internment camp in the Far East for over two years.At one time, the American security service regarded him as one of the three most dangerous operatives in Mexico.