a home vacuum cleaner. He asked that instead of compensating him in cash, he would receive company stock based on the sales of the vacuum cleaner. The Electrolux cleaner was so successful that by the early 1930s, Wenner-Gren had become the majority owner of Electrolux, and the firm was a leading brand in both vacuum cleaner and refrigerator technology. Wenner-Gren also diversified his interests into the ownership of newspapers, banks and arms manufacturers, and acquired many of the holdings of the disgraced safety-match tycoon Ivar Kreuger. In Mexico in the 1930s, he was in economic alliance with Maximino Ávila Camacho, strongman of the Mexican state of Puebla, whose brother Manuel Ávila Camacho became President of Mexico in 1940. World War II blacklisting Wenner-Gren was reported to be a friend of Hermann Göring, whose first wife was a Swede, and in the late 1930s convinced himself that he could avert the coming world war by acting as a conduit between Göring and the British and American governments. His efforts proved unsuccessful, with all parties regarding him as a self-promoting nuisance without much influence on the plans of the Nazi regime. However, others are suspicious of his role in the war, citing how (his) original Bank of the Bahamas was used to fund the Nazis and his friendship with Göring as potential proof of his private support for the Nazis. A disconsolate Wenner-Gren retired to his estate in The Bahamas, in Hog Island (now Paradise Island), where he resumed his friendship with the islands' governor, the Duke of Windsor, and former King of the United Kingdom, Edward VIII. Early in the war his rumored friendship with Göring and the suspected German sympathies of the Duke led first the Americans and, following their lead, the British, to place him on an economic blacklist, enabling them to freeze his assets in Nassau. There proved to be little or no foundation to their suspicions that Wenner-Gren was a Nazi agent, notwithstanding the appearance of his steam yacht Southern Cross (the world's largest at the time) along with ships from the Allied Navies at the site of the sinking of the liner on the first day of the war. Wenner-Gren's yacht Southern Cross rescued over three hundred survivors of the sinking and transferred some to nearby Allied ships and others continued to the U.S. Other ventures In the 1950s, Wenner-Gren also got involved in the early