09 Jun Estrellita
Rosita Serrano, WWII era singer and actress … the “Chilean Nightingale”
After his B-17 force-landed in Sweden on March 6, 1944, my father, bombardier Herman F. Allen, spent the rest of the year in Stockholm working in the office of the Military Air Attache. As an American internee in a neutral country, he was not allowed to leave Sweden, but his duties took him all over.
I am reading a report I found at the National Archives about a party he attended on May 10. One of the guests was the beautiful singer, Rosita Serrano. Herman was adept at working the crowd wherever he went, and I am sure that the first person he walked up to was Miss Serrano.
They discussed her music, and specifically a song she had recorded a few years earlier in Berlin, the Mexican ballad Estrellita. She probably did not mention to the American airman that this was a song she sang during a tour of the Wehrmacht, entertaining the German soldiers.
Yes, because Rosita socialized openly with known and suspected pro-Nazis in Sweden, she was high on the OSS Watch List and was even suspected of being an Abwehr (German military intelligence) agent.
I doubt that she was, but after all, in World War II Stockholm everyone was suspected of being a spy.
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