Actor’s career was interrupted by Nazi Germany

Published 10:55 pm Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Erwin Geschonneck, a German actor who spent years in Nazi concentration camps for his communist sympathies and went on to star in scores of East German films, died Wednesday in Berlin, the country’s Academy of Arts said. He was 101.

Geschonneck’s “engaging artistic and political efforts were recognized with the highest international acclaim for decades,” the organization said in a statement.

It said that the biography of Geschonneck, who died at his Berlin apartment, “is a window into a century of German history.”

Geschonneck, the son of a cobbler, was born in East Prussia on Dec. 27, 1906, and grew up in Berlin.

He joined the Communist party in 1919, and spent years with theater groups that performed agitprop, with workers’ choirs and in a young people’s theater.

He made his big-screen debut in 1931 as an extra in Slatan Dudows’ “Kuhle Wampe,” a film about unemployment in the Weimar Republic written by famed playwright and director Bertolt Brecht.

After the Nazis came to power in 1933, Geschonneck went into exile in the Soviet Union, settling in Odessa where he worked in a German-language collective theater until he was expelled in 1938.

He ended up in Prague, where he was arrested by the SS in 1939 after the Nazis took over, then thrown into the Sachsenhausen concentration camp outside Berlin.

Just days before the end of the war, he was being transported aboard the Cap Arcona — a prewar luxury liner that had been commandeered by the German navy — along with some 4,000 other concentration camp inmates when it was sunk by the Royal Air Force in the Baltic.

Geschonneck was one of 350 who survived.