Kraut Pleasers

There's been a lot of media attention paid to Nazism rearing its ugly head in the quagmire of American politics these days, but frankly, we're not at all interested in the current crucible. Rather, our attention in the Moviehouse is diverted to the classic portrayals of the World War II German Soldats, ramrod-rigid and smart in their crisp, stiff-collared uniforms, adorned with Iron Crosses, Knights Crosses, German Crosses, Eastern Front Medals, West Wall Medals, Wound Badges, Crimea Shields, Luftwaffe Flying Clasps, and Afrika Cuffbands.

Karl-Otto Alberty

Without wasting any time, our favorite German was a Berlin-born boxer-turned-actor named Karl-Otto Alberty, sometimes billed minus the hyphen. With an instantly recognizable face, his best known role was as the blond-haired Tiger tank commander with the hooded eyes guarding a bank vault filled with $16 million worth of gold ingots in 1970's "Kelly's Heroes," starring Clint Eastwood, Telly Savalas, Don Rickles, and Donald Sutherland.

"You ze American Army." "No, babe, we ain't." Karl-Otto Alberty's
ominous scar in "Kelly's Heroes" was created by the makeup crew.

Karl-Otto Alberty worked as an apprentice in the fashion business before boxing as a middleweight. He became enthusiastic about acting and took to the stage for the first time in August 1959 at the Stadttheater Konstanz in Badden-Württemberg, Germany.  In 1961, he appeared in his first film, "Und sowas nennt sich Leben" (which translates as "And So What Is Named Life"), featuring a young Elke Sommer.

Alberty is the young man seated in trunks and boxing gloves.

After appearing in a half dozen German-language movies, Karl-Otto Alberty was cast in his first English-speaking role as an SS officer in 1963's "The Great Escape," starring Steve McQueen, James Garner, and Richard Attenborough as POWs who lead a massive escape from a German stalag. It was Alberty as Untersturmführer Steinach who catches up with and apprehends Attenborough as the escape ringleader, Bartlett (pictured below).

Alberty makes a second appearance as the SS officer later when
the stalag Kommandant is arrested for allowing the escape.

Alberty's role in "The Great Escape" effectively set the stage for the better part of his screen career, portraying a variety of uniformed German officers and soldiers.

In 1965, Alberty played a German major in the wannabe epic "Battle of the Bulge," a complete mess of botched history and painfully inaccurate geography that was so farfetched, none of the all-star cast - which included Henry Fonda, Robert Shaw, Robert Ryan, Dana Andrews, Charles Bronson, and Telly Savalas - were allowed to use the real names of the historical participants.

A lobby card for "Battle of the Bulge" (bearing the German title
"The Last Battle") shows Robert Shaw as the fictitious Col. Hessler
and Karl-Otto Alberty as the equally fictional Maj. Von Diepel.

At least 1966's "Is Paris Burning?" got the names right in another sweeping wannabe epic with another all-star cast, featuring Kirk Douglas as Gen. Patton and Glenn Ford as Gen. Omar Bradley, with Anthony Perkins, Orson Welles, and Robert Stack, as well as a number of prominent French actors. Karl-Otto Alberty had a small role as a nameless SS officer (pictured below).

"The Devil's Brigade" (1968), United Artists' attempt to cash in on the success of MGM's blockbuster "The Dirty Dozen," was based on an actual elite American-Canadian commando unit in World War II but historically inaccurate nonetheless. One veteran of the actual force, The Black Devils, acknowledged the film as "entertaining" but added that "as a piece of accurate history, it's sheer nonsense. There never was an aspect of the Dirty Dozen."

Karl-Otto Alberty smiles in his role as a German
soldier in "The Devil's Brigade."

Overall, the lead actors in "The Devil's Brigade" - William Holden, Cliff Robertson, Vince Edwards, Claude Akins, and Richard Jaeckel - were too old to be playing combat commandos. On a minor note, a map in a colonel's office clearly shows Germany divided into post-war East and West Germany. Incidentally, the supporting cast included "Hogan's Heroes" costar and "Family Feud's" osculating host Richard Dawson, who, as a teenager, joined the Merchant Marines at the close of World War II.

In quick succession in 1969 alone, Karl-Otto Alberty played uniformed Germans in three movies back-to-back. "Battle of Britain," a cinematic salute to the valiant defense of England by the RAF against superior Luftwaffe aircraft directed by Guy Hamilton (best known for directing four James Bond pictures, two with Sean Connery, two with Roger Moore), boasted a stellar cast of English luminaries, among them Laurence Olivier, Michael Caine, Ralph Richardson, Robert Shaw, Michael Redgrave, Ian McShane, and (OK, a Canadian) Christopher Plummer. "The Damned," an Italian-German co-production written and directed by Italian neo-realism filmmaker Luchino Visconti, depicted the collapse of a wealthy industrialist German family under the thumb of the Third Reich, a not so subtle reference to the Essen-based Krupp family of steel industrialists. "The Secret of Santa Vittoria," produced and directed by Stanley Kramer (best known for "Judgment at Nuremberg," "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World," and "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner"), was a seriocomic lark about an Italian wine village hiding a million bottles of wine from occupying German troops, starring Anthony Quinn as the community's accidental mayor.

"The Desert Fox" (1951) presented a fanciful, sympathetic portrait of German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel as an apolitical, brilliant commander who supposedly opposed Nazi doctrines and found himself a victim of the Third Reich after his participation in a failed attempt to assassinate Hitler. It didn't hurt Rommel's screen image that the picture was directed by Henry Hathaway, a Hollywood pro who worked with Gary Cooper, Randolph Scott, and John Wayne, or that he was portrayed by charismatic British actor James Mason (pictured below).

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In 1953, Mason reprised the role of Rommel but as a decidedly less likable individual in the quasi-sequel "The Desert Rats" (pictured below), after criticism that the previous movie had treated the German too kindly. Richard Burton got top billing in the film as a British field officer in command of untried Australian troops responsible for halting Rommel's advance at Tobruk on Libya's coast.

In 1971, "The Desert Fox" director Henry Hathaway directed a much older Richard Burton as a British Army intelligence officer who gets captured by a German Afrika Korps convoy in a ploy to free the prisoners and destroy enemy gun positions at Tobruk in "Raid on Rommel." The movie shamelessly borrowed its action scenes from the 1967 war picture "Tobruk," with Rock Hudson and George Peppard; Burton had his hair dyed blond to match long shots of Peppard.

It looks like Karl-Otto Alberty could use some sunscreen in the
Libyan desert - er, make that Arizona desert - on  location for
"Raid on Rommel."

Karl-Otto Alberty portrayed Captain Heinz Schroeder in "Raid on Rommel" (pictured above). On the set, Alberty taught Richard Burton German.

The following year, Alberty was cast as Richard Burton's friend in 1972's "Bluebeard," a darkly comedic version of the 17th century French folktale about a wealthy man who murders his wives and keeps the corpses hanging on hooks in a locked chamber, ultimately undone by his newest bride. Burton, who reportedly said he was imitating Vincent Price, plays Baron Von Sepper, a former World War I German ace pilot and a member of the fledgling Nazi party in the story transported to Austria between the wars. Joey Heatherton steals the picture in a disarming, ingenuous performance as an American cabaret singer (think of a blonde Liza Minnelli in "Cabaret") who uncovers the baron's deadly secret and forces him to confront his own impotence.

Baron Von Sepper (Richard Burton) is joined at a party by friends,
including fellow Nazi Karl Otto Alberty, behind Burton's left
shoulder, in "Bluebeard."

Unable to find a picture of Karl-Otto Alberty in uniform from "Bluebeard," here, instead, is a picture of Joey Heatherton in wardrobe as Anne.

Also in 1972, Karl-Otto Alberty played a German guard in director George Roy Hill's "Slaughterhouse-Five," based on author Kurt Vonnegut's episodic tale about Billy Pilgrim, a Candide-like man who has become "unstuck in time," repeatedly reliving moments of his life, from his internment as a young POW in Germany during World War II to his abduction by aliens to their planet Tralfamadore to his own death and back again. Again, in lieu of a picture of Alberty in uniform, this is a picture of "Slaughterhouse-Five" costar Valerie Perrine as adult movie star Montana Wildhack.

Karl-Otto Alberty portrayed a Gestapo agent in the 1983 seven-part miniseries "The Winds of War," a sprawling saga about the early years of World War II, based on the historical novel by Herman Wouk and featuring Robert Mitchum, Ali MacGraw, Jan-Michael Vincent, and John Houseman.

Out of uniform but a Gestapo man nonetheless, Karl Otto Alberty
gets his clock cleaned by Jan-Michael Vincent in "The Winds of War."

In the 1988 sequel to "The Winds of War," the 12-part miniseries "War and Remembrance," which covered World War II from post-Pearl Harbor bombing to the suicide of Hitler and surrender of Germany, Alberty played a Scharführer ("squad leader") in the SS. Robert Mitchum returned in the sequel, with Jane Seymour replacing Ali MacGraw in a cast that included John Gielgud, E.G. Marshall, and Ralph Bellamy, as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a role he played 28 years earlier in "Sunrise at Campobello."

Both "The Winds of War" and "War and Rembrance" were co-produced and directed by Dan Curtis, best known as the creator of the late 1960s gothic horror daytime drama "Dark Shadows." One of the producers of both miniseries was Barbara Steele, an early scream queen noted for her roles in "Black Sunday," "The Pit and the Pendulum," "Castle of Blood," and "Nightmare Castle." She and Curtis shared the Emmy Award for Best Miniseries for "War and Remembrance."

To date, 1988's "War and Remembrance" was Karl-Otto Alberty's last appearance on film or television.


Anton Diffring

If there is one actor who bests Karl-Otto Alberty in performances as a Nazi it would have to be Anton Diffring, who appeared in "The Winds of War" as real-life Joachim von Ribbentropp, Foreign Minister of Nazi Germany and Hitler's close confidant. The role capped off at least 20 portrayals of World War II German officers and soldiers for Diffring. Born in historic Koblenz, Germany, where the Rhine river meets the Moselle, Diffring fled Nazi Germany in 1939, according to some accounts to avoid persecution for his homosexuality. His father was a Jewish shopkeeper who successfully avoided internment by Nazi authorities.

Diffring made his screen debut in an uncredited role as a U-boat officer in the 1940 British war movie "Convoy." His chiseled, aristocratic features, blond hair, piercing blue eyes, and clipped, cool diction led to his being cast as a Nazi in at least 10 British films about World War II from 1951 to 1956, including 1955's "The Colditz Story." Based on a true story, the movie depicted how Allied prisoners planned a number of escapes from Germany's escape-proof POW camp in a Renaissance era castle in the state of Saxony. The aforementioned Guy Hamilton directed, and John Mills starred.

Anton Diffring (far left) plays a captain in "The Colditz Story."

In 1965, "The Heroes of Telemark" dramatized the historical sabotage by the Norwegian resistance of the hydro plant in the town of Rjukan in German-occupied Norway. The Nazis used the factory to produce heavy water, which they planned to use in the manufacture of an atomic bomb. The incredulous casting found Kirk Douglas as a Norwegian physics professor and Richard Harris as the leader of the Norwegian resistance, based on real-life saboteur Knut Haukelid, who wrote a memoir of his exploits titled Skis Against the Atom. During filming, Haukelid drolly remarked, "I hear they are spending five million dollars, so it's got to be spectacular, and that means more fiction and less fact." At least the producers cast a German as a German, in Anton Diffring's portrayal of Major Frick (pictured below, with Kirk Douglas).

One of Diffring's most memorable roles was as a Nazi colonel headquartered in the fictional Schloss Adler ("Castle of the Eagle") in the Bavarian Alps in 1968's "Where Eagles Dare," a slam-bang Saturday-matinee cliffhanger (sometimes literally) featuring Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood as an Allied "odd couple" of commandos-on-a-mission. Alistair MacLean, original author of The Guns of Navarone and Ice Station Zebra, wrote the novel and the screenplay at the same time.

Richard Burton (far right) holds a captive audience, including Nazis
Ferdy Mayne, Anton Diffring, and Olga Lowe, along with traitors
William Squire, Peter Barkworth, and Donald Houston, a confused
Clint Eastwood, and Robert Beatty as a cabaret actor masquerading
as an Army brigadier general in "Where Eagles Dare."

In a dizzyingly choreographed dialogue scene, Richard Burton interrogates a tableful of Gestapo officers and British double-agents, with Clint Eastwood as a clueless bystander, until Clint brandishes a silenced Walther PPK and handily dispenses with the Nazis.

On a more cerebral level, Charlton Heston, as a captive symphony orchestra conductor, played a deadly game of cat-and-mouse with Nazi general Maximilian Schell and SS colonel Anton Diffring in the offbeat 1968 World War II drama "Counterpoint" (pictured below).

Anton Diffring (right) holds a gun on Charlton Heston's cape.
Roger Ebert noted, "The whole movie seems to take place at night
and in winter, and there are great candlelit shots of Heston swooping
across the icy courtyard with his cape billowing out behind him as
only a Heston cape can billow."

Comparable to spaghetti westerns there was a briefly lived genre called macaroni combat, which featured Italian producers and directors and a multi-European cast usually led by a minor or fading Hollywood star. (For example, Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds" was inspired by a 1978 macaroni combat picture, "The Inglorious Bastards," starring Bo Svenson and Fred Williamson.) "Kill Rommel!" (1969) was directed by Al Bradley (born in Rome as Alfonso Brescia), a filmmaker known for a rapid succession of science fiction cheapies cranked out to capitalize on "Star Wars": "War of the Robots," "Battle of the Stars," "War of the Planets," and "Star Odyssey."

The two items worthy of note about "Kill Rommel!" are that there is no sign of Erwin Rommel and, for the first and only time in his career of portraying Nazis, Anton Diffring was cast as a British officer (pictured below).

In 1972, Diffring was back in form as a German captain in "The Day the Clown Cried," the notoriously unreleased movie written and directed by and starring Jerry Lewis as a circus clown sent to a Nazi concentration camp as a political prisoner.

Even Jerry Lewis (pictured above, directing) insisted the film would never be released because it was an embarrassingly "poor work" of which he was ashamed. He donated a copy of the film to the Library of Congress with the stipulation that it wouldn't be shown until June 2024.

The odd premise of 1981's "Victory" posits that Nazi officers plan a propaganda soccer game between an all-star German team and Allied POWs in Nazi-occupied Paris, unaware that the French Resistance and British military are making plans for the Allied team's escape. John Huston directed a cast that included Michael Caine, Sylvester Stallone, and Max von Sydow, along with a number of professional soccer players, including Brazilian forward Pelé, and members of England's Ipswich Town Football Club. Anton Diffring appeared in "Victory" as a German sports commentator (pictured below), kind of a Teutonic Brent Musburger.

Marking a decided slump in an otherwise spectacular career for director John Huston, "Victory" was sandwiched between "Phobia," a lackluster misstep into Hitchcock territory starring TV's Starsky, Paul Michael Glaser, and Huston's only musical, "Annie," with Albert Finney as Daddy Warbucks.

Anton Diffring's last role in uniform was as Hans De Flores in 1988 episodes of the seventh incarnation of "Doctor Who," featuring Sylvester McCoy as the Doctor. De Flores (pictured below) was depicted as a Neo-Nazi living in South America who hopes to lead the Fourth Reich.

One of Anton Diffring's most interesting roles out of a German uniform was in director François Truffaut's 1966 adaptation of Ray Bradbury's dystopian science fiction novel Fahrenheit 451, starring Oskar Werner and Julie Christie in a dual role as Werner's icy wife and as a sympathetic schoolteacher. Although his dialogue was dubbed by another actor, Diffring effectively portrays Werner's malevolent nemesis, Fabian (pictured below).

For whatever reason, director François Truffaut cast Anton Diffring
in a creepy, one-shot cameo as a peeping school headmistress. 

Curd Jürgens

Finally, we come to the elder Staatsmann of actors in a German uniform, Curd Jürgens. Jürgens' most visible role to international moviegoers was as Bond villain Karl Stromberg, a shipping tycoon and megalomaniacal industrialist plotting to initiate a devastating global nuclear war that would lead to his establishing a new underwater Atlantean civilization in 1977's "The Spy Who Loved Me," starring Roger Moore, Barbara Bach, and Richard Kiel as "Jaws." At the age of 62, Jürgens is the eldest of villains in two dozen screen missions for 007, from Sean Connery to Daniel Craig.

Jürgens escorts captives Soviet KGB agent Anya Amasova
(Barbara Bach) and British M16 agent James Bond (Roger
Moore) in "The Spy Who Loved Me."

Often billed in English language films as Curt, Curd Gustav Andreas Gottlieb Franz Jürgens was born in December 1915 in a southern borough of Munich, then a part of the Bavarian Kingdom. He worked as a journalist before venturing into acting at the urging of his actress wife, spending a good portion of his early career on the stage in Vienna. Jürgens was an outspoken critic of National Socialism in his native Germany, which led to his 1944 internment in Hungary as a "political unreliable." Jürgens became an Austrian citizen after the war.

Credited as Curt Jürgens, the German-Austrian actor's first Hollywood film was 1957's "The Enemy Below," a taut, sweat-stained battle of wits between an untried destroyer captain (Robert Mitchum) and a world-weary U-boat commander (Jürgens).

Capt. Murrell (Robert Mitchum) is flanked by Ensign Merry (Doug
McClure) and Lt. Ware (David Hedison) in "The Enemy Below."

Kapitän-Leutenant von Stolberg proves himself a wily adversary.

In 1962, Curd Jürgens received his most significant role, with English subtitles under the German tongue, as real-life General der Infanterie Gunther Blumentritt in the international, star-studded World War II epic "The Longest Day," a painstakingly researched chronicle of the D-Day landings at France's Normandy beaches by the Allied armada on June 6, 1944.

Most telling in his portrait of the cynical Wehrmacht commander is his wry observation that "This is history. We are living an historical moment. We are going to lose the war because our glorious Führer has taken a sleeping pill and is not to be awakened."

"Sometimes I wonder which side God is on," Blumentritt utters.

The real-life Blumentritt (pictured below), after surrendering in early May 1945, cooperated with the British 2nd Army in demobilization of his command and, by December, was placed in a British POW camp. Interrogated by a military tribunal for the Nuremberg trials in 1946, he was eventually moved to a U.S. POW camp, where he remained until January 1, 1948, assisting the U.S. Historical Division in Germany. Along with a number of other former German officers, Blumentritt served as a military adviser on the 1962 film "The Longest Day." He wrote a number of military history books before his death in 1967 in Munich.

Curd Jürgens portrayed a fictional German general in Walt Disney's 1963 "Miracle of the White Stallions," based on the historical evacuation of the famed Lipizzaner horses from the Spanish Riding School in Vienna by General Patton, who feared that the advancing Russian forces and starving refugees might regard them as a source of meat. Fading Hollywood star Robert Taylor played Austrian colonel Alois Podhajsky, the real-life director of the school. Podhajsky, who died in 1973, has a cameo in the motion picture, directed by Arthur Hiller ("Love Story"). The supporting cast included Eddie Albert, James Franciscus, and, as Gen. George S. Patton, John Larch, who fans of early Clint Eastwood pictures may recognize as a police detective in "Play Misty for Me" and the chief of police in "Dirty Harry."

Curd Jürgens and Robert Taylor have a stare-down
in  Disney's "Miracle of the White Stallions."

In the late 1960s, Jürgens appeared as German generals in a pair of macaroni combat pictures, namely "Dirty Heroes," with John Ireland, and "Legion of the Damned" (also known as "Battle of the Commandos"), with Jack Palance.

Curd Jürgens joins Daniela Bianchi (best known as Bond girl
Tatiana Romanova in "From Russia with Love") on the set of
"Dirty Heroes."

In 1974's "Undercovers Hero," a bedroom farce set in a wartime brothel in Nazi-occupied Paris, Peter Sellers played a number of roles, including the President of France, an imperial Japanese prince, and Adolf Hitler. The British title for the comedy, which reunited Sellers with director Roy Boulting and his producer brother, John, who had worked with Peter in the late 1950s and early '60s on "I'm All  Right Jack," "Man in a Cocked Hat," and "Heavens Above!" was "Soft Beds, Hard Battles." Curd Jürgens played a general.

Jürgens (far right) appears to be enjoying himself on the set of
"Undercovers Hero," with Peter Sellers as Adolf Hitler.

Curd Jürgens' last role as a German general was in 1979's "Breakthrough," an unasked-for sequel to director Sam Peckinpah's far superior 1977 war film "Cross of Iron." Whereas Sam's picture boasted war-weary portraits grittily etched by James Coburn, Maximilian Schell, James Mason, and David Warner, "Breakthrough" merely offers up weary (and overage) Richard Burton, Robert Mitchum, and Rod Steiger. Even Jürgens, at 64, looked tired in uniform.

Afterword

Getting back to Karl-Otto Alberty, with his broad face, broken nose (a souvenir from his boxing days), and distinctive white-blond hair, he might have seemed a natural casting choice to portray various German officers, but he worked in Germany and Italy in a wide variety of dramas, comedies, even spaghetti westerns, as well as appearing on a number of international TV series.

One of his more interesting roles outside of a German uniform was as a villain called The Swede in the 1980 Italian crime comedy "Flatfoot in Egypt," the last of four "Flatfoot" comedies starring Bud Spencer, Terence Hill's hulking sidekick in assorted "Trinity" comedic adventures, as Inspector "Flatfoot" Rizzo.

The Swede appears to have the drop on Rizzo in "Flatfoot in Egypt."

On a final note, Karl-Otto Alberty stands out in our triad of Nazi enactors as the only one with his own action figure, as the Tiger Tank Commander in "Kelly's Heroes," complete with distinguishing scar.