Arnold Krumm-Heller

Heinrich Arnold Krumm-Heller (15 April 1876 – 19 April 1949) was a German doctor, occultist, Rosicrucian, and founder of Fraternitas Rosicruciana Antiqua (FRA), a Hermetic order in Brazil. He also was a German naval intelligence agent during the Mexican Revolution and World War I. A prolific writer, he published more than 30 esoteric books, novellas, history books, biographies, as well as countless articles in his magazine Rosa Cruz and similar publications. Arnold Krumm-Heller was born in Salchendorf, Germany in April 1876. He left Germany "with permission of the military authority" at age eighteen and worked in Chile, Peru, and Mexico mostly as a scientist. In Mexico he began to methodically study occultism, gnosis and spiritualism, becoming familiar with the works of Helena Blavatsky, Louis Claude de Saint-Martin, Papus and Eliphas Lévi. Between 1907 and 1909 he studied medicine in Paris and returned to Mexico in 1910. Krumm-Heller became the private doctor of the future Mexican president Francisco Madero in the beginning of 1911. According to the American Military Intelligence Division MID, Krumm-Heller worked for Felix A. Sommerfeld in the Mexican Secret Service in January 1912. In 1913, again reporting to the German naval intelligence agent Sommerfeld, Krumm-Heller became a secret agent for Venustiano Carranza who sent him on diplomatic missions to Texas. Then-Governor James E. Ferguson, with the prodding from the German secret service agent, was the first U.S. state executive to formally recognize the Constitutionalists in the Mexican Revolution as the legitimate government of Mexico. Carranza also dispatched Krumm-Heller on diplomatic missions to Argentina and Chile. In June 1913 the government of Victoriano Huerta arrested Krumm-Heller, ostensibly for hosting a "meeting of socialists and anarchists." Germany intervened on his behalf and effected his release. Documents in the German National Archives show that the German government thought Krumm-Heller to be weird at best, maybe even mentally deranged, but loyal and fanatically committed to the Fatherland.