Franz Eberhard August Krüger

Franz Eberhard August Krüger was born in Berlin and attended an elite Nazi Adolf Hitler School. Drafted into the SS Division Nibelungen at age sixteen in 1945, he refused an order to fire on an American patrol and was condemned to death for cowardice before an officer spared him; he later deserted. This experience made him an ardent lifelong anti-fascist campaigner.

In 1957, Krüger became a British sensation starring as Luftwaffe pilot Franz von Werra in The One That Got Away, the first post-war British film to depict a German combatant sympathetically. Fluent in German, English, and French, he starred in the Oscar-winning French drama Sundays and Cybèle (1962), Robert Aldrich's The Flight of the Phoenix (1965), Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon (1975), and Richard Attenborough's World War II epic A Bridge Too Far (1977). In later years, he wrote sixteen novels and travelogues.