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Actor and globetrotter:
As one of the first film actors in Germany after 1945, he also acted in international productions.
He became known with films such as "One Came Through", "The Flight of the Phoenix" or "Hatari!".
On January 19, 2022, actor and writer Hardy Krüger died in Palm Springs, California.
Photo: Daniel Reinhardt / picture alliance / dpa
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Nazi offspring:
Eberhard Krüger in the uniform of Adolf Hitler's student.
Born on April 12, 1928 in Berlin-Wedding, Krüger was admitted to the Ordensburg Sonthofen in 1941: one of three cadre schools where the National Socialists wanted to train management personnel.
Initially, Krüger was proud of his admission, but quickly realized that everything military there was particularly repugnant to him.
Photo: Private
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Home clothes:
Beautiful postwoman loves underpaid detective assistants - Hardy Krüger alongside Gardy Granass in "Die Christel von der Post" from 1956 (director: Karl Anton).
Although Krüger enjoyed great success in Germany after the war, he went abroad to try his luck in the 1950s.
Photo: ddp images
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International breakthrough:
Hardy Krüger as Oberleutnant Franz von Werra in the 1956 English film The One That Got Away.
Director Roy Ward Baker had the chutzpah to dare to make a film about a good German a few years after the end of the war – lucky for Krüger: the film made him an international star overnight.
Photo: imago/United Archives
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Battle painting:
Hardy Krüger as SS-Gruppenfuhrer Ludwig (left) with Maximilian Schell in the English war film »The Bridge at Arnhem« (1977, directed by Richard Attenborough).
An army of 1,500 extras and international film stars such as Sean Connery, Laurence Olivier and Gene Hackmann were involved in this lavish, almost 50 million D-Mark production about "Operation Market Garden": the daring failed attempt by the Allies in September 1944 to launch an airborne operation into the Ruhr area in order to end the war.
Photo: ddp images
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German-French farce:
the good German soldier wears a spiked helmet and is called Fritz Brösicke – Hardy Krüger in the war comedy »Die Gans von Sedan« from 1959 (director: Helmut Käutner).
Photo: ddp images
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"The Red Tent":
For a change, Krüger doesn't play a likeable German soldier here, but a dashing Swedish aviator named Einar Lundborg;
Sean Connery embodies the polar explorer Roald Amundsen.
The Soviet-Italian adventure film »The Red Tent« from 1969 (directed by Mikhail Kalatosow) is based on a true story: In May 1928, the Italian inventor Umberto Nobile crashed his airship »Italia« in the Arctic.
A team led by Amundsen set out to save the Italians.
Photo: ddp images
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Guilty or not?
"Confess, Dr.
Corda!« is the name of this German thriller from 1958 (director: Josef von Báky).
Krüger embodies a doctor named Fred Corda, who enters into an affair with the nurse Gabriele.
She is found murdered in the park – Corda is immediately suspected.
Wrongly so: villains are not part of actor Krüger's repertoire.
Photo: ddp images
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Nice catch:
The lady that Hardy Krüger caught here is called Liane, is played by Marion Michael and only wears a loincloth.
A little scandal in 1956, when the film »Liane, the girl from the jungle« came to German cinemas (director: Eduard von Borsody).
The Germans liked the beautiful, half-naked savage: it became one of the biggest box-office hits of the 1950s.
Despite the commercial success, Krüger then declined to take part in any further »Liane« films.
Photo:
ddp images
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Flirt in the city of love:
In the spy thriller »Der Fuchs von Paris« from 1957 (director: Paul May), Hardy Krüger plays the German tank captain Fürstenwerth, who meets the beautiful Frenchwoman Yvonne in Paris in 1944, played by Marianne Koch.
Photo: ddp images
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Raise the cups!
Actors Hardy Krüger, Red Buttons and John Wayne in a bar scene in the 1962 US film »Hatari!« (directed by Howard Hawks).
During filming, Krüger and Wayne got into a drinking duel.
The American drank triple cognac, his German colleague single whisky.
Krüger won thanks to a trick: he had swallowed five spoonfuls of cooking oil before going to the bar.
Photo: Paramount/Getty Images
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Tatort Wanne:
Why can this man still splash around carefree, even though his first wife was found dead in a bathtub in the film?
Hardy Krüger as writer Paul with his new love Elise (Britt Ekland) in the 1972 thriller »Diabolisch« (directed by Andrea Bianchi, James Kelley).
The Hamburger Abendblatt newspaper criticized the film as "superficial and unbelievable".
Photo: ddp images
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A Prussian for Kubrick:
Hardy Krüger played the Prussian Captain Potzdorf in the 1975 English-American film »Barry Lyndon«.
The four Oscar-winning film was directed by Stanley Kubrick.
In 2001, the actor was made an officer in the French Legion of Honor, and in 2009 he was awarded the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit by the Federal President.
Photo: ddp images
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"I was raised to be a Nazi by nature":
Five or six-year-old Eberhard Krüger with his father Max (left), his older sister Ilse and his maternal grandparents.
As a convinced National Socialist, Max Krüger put his son in the uniform of the Deutsches Jungvolk, a HJ youth organization for boys between the ages of 10 and 14, when he was still at preschool age.
Photo: Private
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On dad's motorbike:
Krüger as a little boy with his father Max and his sister Ilse.
In the course of the global economic crisis, the engineer Max Krüger lost his job - like millions of other Germans, he believed Adolf Hitler to be the savior of the nation.
After the war, NSDAP member Krüger was arrested by the Soviets.
It wasn't until the late 1960s that Hardy Krüger found out during a shoot in Moscow that his father had died in a Soviet camp.
Photo: Private
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Mentor and surrogate father:
The actor Hans Söhnker (1903-1981) - here in "The Four Journeymen," a comedy from 1938. Krüger met the Ufa star in 1943 while shooting the propaganda film "Young Eagles."
Photo: ddp images
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A new start in the Hanseatic city:
After the end of the war, Krüger went to Hamburg and was hired as an extra at the Hamburger Schauspielhaus.
He also got a job with the English youth radio (photo).
Photo: imago/United Archives
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Kiss, kiss:
»The Temptation is Jenny« was the name of this 1964 film, directed by the Spaniard Juan Antonio Bardem.
Krüger played the young Frenchman Vincent, who falls in love with the bar owner Jenny (Melina Mercouri) on a trip to Spain.
Photo: ddp images
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Hamlet out of the pot:
How did father die?
That is the central question of the German film »The Rest is Silence« from 1959 (director: Helmut Käutner).
Hardy Krüger played the sole heir of the Stahlhütten, John H. Claudius, who returns to the Ruhr area after a long stay in the US and is convinced that his father was murdered.
Photo: ddp images
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Western hero:
Hardy Krüger as »Potato Fritz« in the German western of the same name from 1975/76, directed by Peter Schamoni.
Incidentally, Krüger not only acted as the potato-planting main actor, but also as a co-producer.
Legendary in the supporting role, with wild curly hair and a full beard: soccer world champion Paul Breitner as Sergeant Stark.
Photo: ddp images
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The film star in private:
Hardy Krüger with his second wife Francesca Marazzi and their children Malaika and Hardy junior (photo from 1971).
From his first marriage to the actress Renate Densow comes the daughter Christiane Krüger, who also went into film.
In 1978, Krüger married the American Anita Park, with whom he lived until his death.
Photo: imago/ZUMA/Keystone
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Four Musketeers:
Hardy Krüger plays a South African mercenary trying to rescue a black man in the 1978 British war film The Wild Geese Are Coming (directed by Andrew V. McLaglen).
The photo shows Krueger with the (now deceased) film stars Richard Burton, Roger Moore and Richard Harris.
Photo: Silver Screen Collection/ Getty Images
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Childhood dream:
Hardy Krüger in the cockpit of an airplane after filming »Hatari!« (photographed in 1961 during a stopover in Hamburg).
Even as a child, Krüger dreamed of flying - which he learned in the 1940s as an Adolf Hitler student in the NS Ordensburg Sonthofen.
Photo: HILL/ AP
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Sky Striker:
Movie stars Richard Attenborough, James Stewart and Hardy Krüger in the 1965 cult adventure film Flight of the Phoenix (Director: Robert Aldrich).
Krüger played the German model aircraft designer Heinrich Dorfmann, who wants to build a new aircraft from the wreckage of a crashed transport plane.
Photo: ddp images
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Hardy Krüger (centre) said
goodbye to the big screen
as early as 1984. »The Inside Man« was the last feature film in which he took part (here with David Wilson and Kare Mölder).
After that, however, he appeared in numerous TV films, for example in the travel stories »Hardys Bordbuch« and the series »Globetrotter«.
Photo: ddp images
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"Globetrotter"
was the name of the series that has allowed Hardy Krüger to travel across the continents since 1987 and even get paid for it.
For eight years he kidnapped German TV viewers to foreign countries - only after 35 episodes was the end of the popular format.
A special love connected Krüger with the African continent.
He lived there for 13 years and wrote his first book there in 1970: »A Farm in Africa«.
Photo: Augstein/ picture-alliance/ dpa
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»See you again in the fall«:
Mario Adorf (left) and Hardy Krüger toured the theaters with this two-person play in 1985/86.
It's about Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn who meet again as old men.
The two actors (photo from 1986) were already in front of the camera when they were younger, for example in Alfred Weidenmann's "Boomerang" from 1960.
Photo: imago/teutopress
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Hardy junior:
Hardy Krüger's son (3rd from left) looks like his father, has the same name and has also become an actor.
Seen here in the ARD surfer series »Against the Wind« alongside Katrin Weisser and Katja Woywood (from left) as well as Ralf Bauer, Dennenesch Ninnig and Ivana Kamsy (photo from 1996).
Photo: Peter Bischoff/Getty Images
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Love of his life:
Hardy Krüger had been married to his third wife, Anita Park, since 1978.
He met her in Tel Aviv in 1976 while looking for international investors for a film project.
Krüger lived with the photographer and author alternately in Palm Springs, California and Hamburg.
Photo: Private
